What is true? How can we be “good” people and live “meaningful” lives?
I’m tired of philosophy pretending it can answer the first question, and even more tired of it ignoring the second two.
For the past ten years, I’ve accepted that philosophy is a viable but inferior way to report the truth either by building or tearing down an argument. It’s sad really, to watch philosophy try to be like science and destroy itself in the process.
After learning the syllabus for the history of western philosophy and playing around with some semantics and deconstruction for a few years, I had my fill and started thinking about other things. Mainly science and art.
How to countenance science and what to feel about it, I’m left to my own devices, needing answers. But I don’t turn to philosophy for answers, haven’t for a while. I should, but I can’t bring myself to do it, because last time I did that, it betrayed me by disappearing up its ass, specializing, becoming a game of infinitely regressive one-upmanship over ways to build and tear down sentences and definitions. It took me places where I couldn’t learn anything about how to live or what to do; it made it seem like those places were the truth, and that the truth was existentially empty.
I like to think philo gave me the synapse pathways to help me come to peace with the fact that I seem to be floating in the locus of phenomena; it helped me figure out what to do with the seconds as they tick by, without wanting to end it. But not much has changed since I first logged on to ILP 12 years ago, quickly, impulsively typing in the screen name Gamer. I figured life is just a stupid game, but that to play this game well is to be like Sisyphus, enjoying every step, per Camus. To this day, I haven’t come across a more useful idea than Camus’ Sisyphus, because I’m in the business of stepping forward and trying to enjoy it. The reasons to enjoy it are a collaboration between the Universe and me, and it takes practice, like anything else, to generate the byproduct I term meaning.
And that’s it really. Meaning creation. Philosophy remains a useful tool for this, alongside science and religion. But only insofar as philosophy resists the pull toward aping scientific discourse and experiment. This ruins philosophy. It doesn’t help us be like Camus. It doesn’t help us create meaning. It simply serves to make philosophers look insecure scrambling to look smart next to science by creating arguments that are hard to follow and lead to nothing except a point won that nobody cares about, or could possibly care about. I’m not putting down history or mastery of philosophical ideas and achievements. I’m mainly talking about the front lines, the modern debates – a game played in academia, where bright people get to pretend they are like the white bearded men, the immortal names, they get to feel holy and rare and noble. But it’s a very sad game, a spinning, a puddle.
Philosophy is best in the public square and when it aims to make us better, nobler people, when it helps us come up with a reason to go on. When it allows us to untangle the knots in the muscles of our souls, the common knots we all face and face again until we die.
It’s at its worse in the words of academic theses covering the tenth layer of a misconception atop a fallacy atop a metaphor.
Science is obligated to hunt down the microns of its own flesh; philosophy is not. In fact, philosophy is obligated to do the opposite; to narrow its attack against only those things existentially relevant, and to prioritize the more common challenges that never stop growing like weeds, holding us back.
Where do you stand on this?
