INTERESTINGLY ENOUGH
“Early studiers of cults were surprised to discover that when cults receive a major shock – a prophecy fails to come true, a moral flaw of the founder is revealed – they often come back stronger than before, with increased belief and fanaticism. The Jehovah’s Witnesses placed Armageddon in 1975, based on Biblical calculations; 1975 has come and passed. The Unarian cult, still going strong today, survived the nonappearance of an intergalactic spacefleet on September 27, 1975. (The Wikipedia article on Unarianism mentions a failed prophecy in 2001, but makes no mention of earlier failure in 1975, interestingly enough.)
"Why would a group belief become stronger after encountering crushing counterevidence?”
-- Eliezer Yudkowsky, “Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs”
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TSR’S LINGUA FRANCA SERIES, ISSUE #7: PHILOSOPHY
I have some bad news and some good news for you.
The bad news: “philosophy” as it’s commonly understood is in a death spiral, having suffered from very clear and obvious evaporative cooling effects over the last 150 years. Philosophy – one of the most important fields of inquiry for human thriving – has lost the historical grounding that made it so useful and powerful in the West over its first 2,250 years.
Worse news: most people have failed to realize this. The word “philosophy” has a certain prestige and respectability to it, even now at one of its lowest water-mark periods in history. The word “philosophy” has very little in common with actual philosophy after largely becoming divorced from the traditions that served it so well for 23 centuries in the West.
I don’t want to exaggerate the point, but I think this is one the worst things that’s happened over the last 1.5 centuries that’s not commonly realized. Philosophy – actual philosophy – can be a great source of guidance on how to live, show insight into the nature of the world and the people who live in it, and can really be genuinely uplifting and lead to thriving. Mainstream philosophy being in such a sorry state is a very bad thing for humanity.
I think this is a somewhat serious matter, and well-worth some of our attention and thought.
The good news, though, is that actual philosophy is alive and well – if mainstream philosophy were a government, we might say it’s been taken over by a mix of hostile agents and incompetent bureaucrats – but both governance and philosophy are ever and always a thing, and we humans are remarkably adaptable at routing around chaos and corruption to continue thriving.
So, without further ado – what happened to philosophy? And how do we get it back?
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NATURAL PHILOSOPHY… MODERN SHAPE…
Wikipedia: Natural Philosophy –
“From the ancient world, starting with Aristotle, to the 19th century, the term "natural philosophy" was the common term used to describe the practice of studying nature. It was in the 19th century that the concept of "science" received its modern shape with new titles emerging such as "biology" and "biologist", "physics" and "physicist" among other technical fields and titles; institutions and communities were founded, and unprecedented applications to and interactions with other aspects of society and culture occurred. Isaac Newton's book Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), whose title translates to "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy", reflects the then-current use of the words "natural philosophy", akin to "systematic study of nature". Even in the 19th century, a treatise by Lord Kelvin and Peter Guthrie Tait, which helped define much of modern physics, was titled Treatise on Natural Philosophy (1867).”
Read the bolded part again.
For the first 2,250 some years of Western philosophy, science was a core component of philosophy. There was no separation and no cloistering away of studying thinking, governments, ethics, and morals from the natural world, astronomy, biology, and physics.
Then this remark –
“It was in the 19th century that the concept of “science” received its modern shape…”
Does that seem vaguely sinister? “Modern shape”? What is this? Are you concerned yet?
Perhaps you’ve already grasped what we’re driving at – or perhaps the vast significance of this hasn’t quite clicked yet. Let’s go deeper.
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PHILO SOPHIA
Philosophy comes from the Greek words “philo” (love) and “Sophia” (wisdom) – philosophy simply meant “love of wisdom.”
The Ancient Greeks had another similar-but-hated word – “sophist” – meaning just, “the wise” – these were people that didn’t love wisdom, but loved appearing to be wise and persuasive. They would use illogical arguments, make persuasive and prejudiced appeals, and wanted to be held in high regard without actually working to understand the world.
A “love of wisdom” – the original meaning of philosophy – was a mental orientation towards the world, not a formal field of study.
If you loved wisdom, you could look for it anywhere. Why are some horses faster than others? How come one army destroyed another army? How do turtles lay and hatch eggs? Why do some buildings stand for a long time, and others fall over?
There was no separation between what’s now called “philosophy” and what’s now called “science” – all of it was fertile ground for exploring and developing wisdom.
Wikipedia: Science –
“From classical antiquity [~2400 years ago] through the 19th century, science as a type of knowledge was more closed linked to philosophy than it is now, and in the Western world the term “natural philosophy” once encompassed fields of study that are today associated with science, such as astronomy, medicine, and physics.”
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THE ABILITY TO BE WRONG
A classical philosopher wasn’t primarily interested in raw, theoretical, and untestable ideas – the classical philosopher was interested in gaining useful knowledge and wisdom.
As such, you often see the most excellent philosophers of ages past being involved in difficult disciplines where you can very much be wrong.
Socrates, of course, was a soldier in the Peloponnesian War. He was noted as a distinguished and brave soldier, in fact. (You didn’t know? No one told you? It seems like an important detail to leave out…)
Xenophon, too, was a soldier; Thucydides, one of the fathers of modern history, was a military general; Wittgenstein, one of the few good philosophers of the modern era, likewise served with distinction in dangerous roles in World War I.
Note well –
Any craft or profession where your views can be shown to be mistaken is a fertile ground for cultivating wisdom.
If you had theorized about military command and the nature of soldiering and military discipline, and you were wrong, then the enemy would show you that you were wrong.
Science – what we now call science – has the same function. It’s not surprising, too, that so many good philosophers were also scientists, making observations and testing assumptions about the natural world.
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EVAPORATIVE COOLING
Wikipedia: Science –
“Over the course of the 19th century, the word “science” became increasingly associated with the scientific method itself as a disciplined way to study the natural world. It was during this time that scientific disciplines such as biology, chemistry, and physics reached their modern shapes. That same time period also included the origin of the terms “scientist” and “scientific community”, the founding of scientific institutions, and the increasing significance of their interactions with society and other aspects of culture.”
So, right when natural philosophy is hitting its greatest strides, leading to the greatest output of scientific knowledge of all time… it becomes divorced from philosophy.
So much the worse for philosophy, no?
“In Festinger’s classic, When Prophecy Fails”, one of the cult members walked out the door immediately after the flying saucer failed to land. Who gets fed up and leaves first? An average cult member? Or a relatively more skeptical member, who previously might have been acting as a voice of moderation, a brake on the more fanatic members?”
In his piece on Evaporative Cooling, Yudkowsky uses a science metaphor for what often happens to communities. When things go wrong like failed prophesies and scandals, it’s the highest-energy, brightest, most skeptical and savvy people who leave first.
What’s left behind are the dull, the slow, the fanatic, the unthinking.
I contend that when “natural philosophy” became “science,” it had a massive evaporative cooling effect on the field of philosophy as a whole.
You can see that scientists still do excellent philosophy in the old sense of the word – Richard Feynman’s memoir “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman” is certainly excellent philosophy; Richard Hamming’s “You and Your Research” is a must-read for more practical wisdom and guidance.
But who reads these works today?
Scientists!
These men didn’t consider themselves philosophers – as far as I’m aware – but they were clearly doing philosophy in the old meaning of the word. They loved wisdom. They searched for it. They looked to discuss it and share it with other people.
Meanwhile, they were making innovations and progress in physics, mathematics, computer science, industrial research, and so on – because, of course, that makes perfect sense. Sharpening one’s mind as to the nature of reality makes you a better thinker across the board. The ability to fail and be wrong at making a computer work, or making a fission reaction happen, or predicting the movement of atomic particles – these thoughts taught humility, constant work, diligence, curiosity, experimentation… all things that are also well-worthwhile for the study of human nature and for searching out patterns of how to live.
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SUSPECTING NONSENSE
“If you write in an unclear way about big ideas, you produce something that seems tantalizingly attractive to inexperienced but intellectually ambitious students. Till one knows better, it’s hard to distinguish something that’s hard to understand because the writer was unclear in his own mind from something like a mathematical proof that’s hard to understand because the ideas it represents are hard to understand. To someone that hasn’t learned the difference, traditional philosophy seems extremely attractive: as hard (and therefore impressive) as math, yet broader in scope. This is what lured me in as a high school student.
The singularity is even more singular in having its own defense built in. When things are hard to understand, people who suspect they’re nonsense generally keep quiet. There’s no way to prove a text is meaningless. The closest you can get is to show that the official judges of some class of texts can’t distinguish them from placebos.
And so instead of denouncing philosophy, most people who suspected it was a waste of time just studied other things. That alone is fairly damning evidence, considering philosophy’s claims. It’s supposed to be about ultimate truths. Surely all smart people would be interested in it, if it delivered on that promise.
Because philosophy’s flaws turned away the sort of people who might have corrected them, they tended to be self-perpetuating.”
-- Paul Graham, "How to Do Philosophy"
“When things are hard to understand, people who suspect they’re nonsense generally keep quiet” – is this not a near-perfect description of evaporative cooling?
***
RECLAIMING PHILOSOPHY
We’ll conclude with some more bad news, and then some very good news.
Graham continued –
“The singularity I’ve seen is not going away. There’s a market for writing that sounds impressive and can’t be disproven. There will always be both supply and demand. So if one group abandons this territory, there will always be others ready to occupy it.”
So, this bastardized divorced left-behind philosophy will be here to stay in some form or fashion. We can’t get rid of it… but it’s also not necessary to get rid of it.
Turning to better news, even in mainstream philosophy, there are still sane and sound branches doing good work, like logic (which is basically math) and philosophy of mind (which is rapidly becoming neuroscience but which hasn’t yet evaporatively cooled out of philosophy).
It wouldn’t take very many people reclaiming the word philosophy as a love of wisdom to begin to turn things around.
Genuinely good philosophy is happening all over the place – though it’s rarely people in fields that don’t fight back at all. Indeed, you see computer programming and financiers doing some of the best philosophy now – Paul Graham, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Ray Dalio, Charlie Munger, Nassim Taleb. When the computer scientist get something wrong, their code doesn’t work. When the financier gets something wrong, they lose a lot of money. Excellent philosophers still come of the military – John Boyd and Hyman Rickover to name two recent Americans – and they come out of industrial engineering, like Eli Goldratt.
That these people are currently not classified as philosophers is simply an error – let the people doing uselessness in the towers call themselves “theoretical screwaroundists” or whatever other more palatable name they might come up with for themselves; genuine philosophy is alive and well, even as the word points to decayed and failing institutions.
***
AND DOING PHILOSOPHY
In Lingua Franca, we’ve been exploring the nature of how change meanings or map to unclear topics – and using them to clarify our thinking and become more effective.
By all means, immediately reclaim philosophy as a love of wisdom – the imposters in so-called philosophy can’t be overthrown too soon. (Don’t worry – they won’t fight back very hard, by their very nature.)
But over and above that, reclaiming a word is useful, yes – but over and above that, reclaim the concept of philosophy for yourself.
Paul Graham wrote on doing philosophy,
“I propose we try again, but that we use that heretofore despised criterion, applicability, as a guide to keep us from wondering off into a swamp of abstractions. […] The test of utility I propose is whether we cause people who read what we’ve written to do anything differently afterward.”
And more importantly, Graham notes that anyone can do philosophy by searching out truths that are both general and useful. That’s not the only way to reclaim philosophy, but it’s certainly a good place to start.
Read Hamming.
Read Feynman.
Read Graham.
And most importantly, renounce the idea that the current works of “philosophy” are philosophy – the love of wisdom. Cultivate the love of wisdom in yourself, and search far and wide for it. Look to work hard in areas where you can be wrong. Look for fields that fight back. Study and love the world, and cultivate and share the wisdom you gain.
Philosophy is dead – long live philosophy.
Until next time, yours,
Sebastian Marshall
Editor, TheStrategicReview.net
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