Ordinary critical intelligence.

Are there any readers of this blog who don't also read Language goes on holiday? Well, stop being in that category, and go check it out! In any case, this post is meant for you. I was thinking of writing a follow-up to my previous entry, but then gave away my good points commenting over at Duncan Richter’s. Rather than rewriting my arguments, I decided simply to post a gently edited version of the comments here.

 

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Richard Taylor has written:

Students of philosophy learn very early -- usually first day of their course -- that philosophy is the love of wisdom. This is often soon forgotten, however, and there are even some men who earn their livelihood at philosophy who have not simply forgotten it, but who seem positively to scorn the idea.

I was, when writing that previous post, hoping to make use of this quote but in the end deiced to drop it because I didn’t know what to do with it. I have myself never heard anyone profess such disdain, but have attended lectures where this wouldn’t have surprised me much. This attitude seems to me connected with the danger of dogmatism. One form of dogmatism which concerns Taylor is the idea that philosophy really is (or should become) like the sciences. When Peter Hacker presents philosophy as a set of techniques, this sounds too mechanical, as you [D.R.] write, but doesn’t it also, and not incidentally, suggest a model of philosophy rather too close to that of the sciences? (This is surprising because Hacker too, both previously and again in this essay, has been fighting this very model.)
 
Academic philosophers sometimes feel a need to defend their subject, which is easily understood given the worldwide trend of cut-backs in the ”unprofitable” humanities departments. However,  inflated rhetoric is hardly the best way to make non-philosophers see things differently. As Miranda Fricker once remarked: "I think it is a bit ludicrous when people defend philosophy on the grounds that it teaches you how to think. That is extraordinarily insulting to other subjects!" This is partly why I too react against such claims. But I also think philosophers, with such claims and claims about the expertise a philosopher acquires, give the wrong impression of what philosophical thinking actually is.

 

Historians of philosophy often regard the subject as to have been invented by the ancient Greeks. When one's objective is to trace the understanding of philosophy as a more or less academic discipline with theoretical ambitions back to its origin, this story seems about right. However, philosophy has other (and deeper, yet more mundane) roots too. I am inclined to see philosophizing as a natural feature of human language use. Questions like “What do you mean?” and “What are the grounds for that claim?” were after all not invented by Thales. Nor are they something we first encounter at university. Someone might question our words whenever we say anything. Thus can the most casual dinner table conversation suddenly transform into a discussion or a probing investigation into the structure of our consepts. (The tools needed to resolve such situations are not theories produced at philosophical institutes, but ever-present to all competent language users in the language we share.) Philosophy -- understood as the application of ordinary critical intelligence -- is as ancient and as evenly distributed as language itself -- though some do of course exercise their critical faculties more than others.

In short, philosophers don't really do anything that non-philosophers can't do, and they don't necessarily do it better, but they ought at least to do it better than they themselves did it before they started studying and practicing philosophy, and they ought to do it without some other mission. [D.R.]

Agreed. Still, philosophers are often asked to sit on expert panels. In Norway, Knut Erik Tranøy headed several committees on medical questions; Mary Warnock has done the same in England. As far as I am able to judge, both have done great jobs; but, frankly, I believe this is more thanks to who they were and their personal characters than to their educational background. This issue has been at the front of my mind lately because I currently am in the middle of the process of applying for a position as a researcher in bioethics at my old university. If I am qualified for this job, which I think I am, this is not because I possess any philosophical (or ethical) expertise (whatever, if anything, that is); but rather because I have an interest in that field, have read a fair amount of the literature, both good and bad, and because I care about finding out which is which.

Dirty dancing.

Reading J.M. Coetzee's novel Youth tonight I came across this striking passage:

Dancing makes sense only when it is interpreted as something else, something that people prefer not to admit. That something else is the real thing: the dance is merely a cover. Inviting a girl to dance stands for inviting her to have intercourse; accepting the invitation stands for agreeing to have intercourse; and dancing is a miming and a foreshadowing of intercourse. So obvious are the correspondences that he wonders why people bother with dancing at all. Why the dressing up; why the ritual motions; why the huge sham? (p. 89-90)

Which made me think of this:

According to [Alain] de Botton, people who think they are going to nightclubs just to dance, drink, and have fun are actually unconsciously driven by the will to live to seek opportunities for reproduction.... We are driven by forces that we rarely see clearly and that are themselves blind. So we don't know what is going on, what we are chasing, except in vague terms. The underlying, meaningless truth is veiled from us.

Richter is unquestionably right about the Schopenhauerian view on human existence. Gloomy though this view may be, de Botton, Schopenhauer and John (the main person in the novel) are certainly on to something. We often find our desires mystical and of unknown origin. But this may not be the whole story about what people find attractive about nightlife. John's cynical remarks on dancing comes in the wake of his struggle to understand why "people who were already married should go to the trouble of dressing up and going to a hotel to dance when they could have done it just as well in their living room, to music on the radio". To a Schopenhauerian this would seem puzzling. But perhaps there is something valuable in the experience of dancing among others that the Schopenhauerian view systematically overlooks. Married couples, possibly ageing and well beyond the reproductive stage of their lives, may go to nightclubs simply to dance, drink and have fun. But to Schopenhauer this phenomenon would surely seem even more absurd. Senior dance clubs are meaningless even from the perspective of the Will. Elderly dancers are not only moving to the beat of a blind impulse, but moving to the beat of a blind and utterly impotent impulse! Reproduction is still what dancing is all about, but for these dancers reproduction is a biological impossibility. -- Of course, one can always answer, as John's mother insists, that dancing is good exercise.

Hvorom man ikke bør tale, derom bør man tie.

I siste nummer av Journal of Medical Ethics forsøker et par filosofer ad filosofiske krokveier å bevise at postnatal abort i visse tilfeller vil være et gode både for familien og for storsamfunnet. Hvis omstendighetene etter fødselen er slik at de ville ha rettferdiggjort en avbrytelse av svangerskapet, mener forfatterne at after-birth-abortion (som de kaller det, men som vi andre vanligvis kaller mord og spedbarnsdrap) burde tillates.

En mister munn og mæle. Fortvilt forsøker en å finne gode filosofiske innvendinger. Pär Segerdahl forklarer hvorfor det er en dårlig idé å innlate seg på en slik diskusjon.

Det finns en frestelse, när man hör sådana här resonemang, att vilja vara ännu klyftigare och bevisa att logiken brister. Om någon vettlösing gör sig märkvärdig genom att bevisa absurditeter, så känner jag kanske att jag måste bevisa sunt förnuft.

Denne fristelsen bør vi altså ikke gi etter for, for da ender også vi opp med å behandle livet som begrepskalkyle. Men hvordan skal vi reagere? Å la slike uttalelser få stå helt uforstyrret er heller ikke tilfredsstillende. Skal jeg le eller gråte? Gråte kan jeg ikke, fordi jeg ikke greier å ta forslaget helt alvorlig. Altså prøver jeg å le, men latteren stopper i halsen fordi jeg jo vet at forslaget er ment alvorlig (i alle fall alvorlig nok til å filosofere over).

Kanskje jeg burde forsøke meg på noe à la Jonathan Swifts Modest Proposal? Duncan Richter har kalt dette "argument by ridicule": Da forsøker man ikke å ta til motmæle eller å påvise brister i logikken, men velger tvert imot å dra logikken enda lenger for på den måten å gjøre det absurde i tankerekken ekstra tydelig. Men kan det egentlig gjøres stort tydeligere i dette tilfellet? Jeg aner i alle fall ikke hvordan. Kanskje gidder jeg ikke å legge nok arbeid i forsøket. Men det kan også hende at min makabre fantasi ikke strekker til; at jeg rett og slett ikke evner å finne på noe mer absurd enn dette forslaget. Jeg mistenker litt av begge deler.

Av og til, tenker jeg, gjør filosofene en altfor god jobb selv.

Blogganbefalinger.

Advarsel: Dette innlegget består stort sett av skryt av bloggen min, ikke rent selvskryt vel å merke.

Jeg fant omtale, eller -- ehem -- anbefalinger, av bloggen min på et mildt sagt uventet sted. At folk bosatt i USA leser det jeg skriver er selvsagt svært overraskende; men at en filosofiprofessor Over There leser bloggen min, og dertil finner den så givende at han mener det er bryet verdt å lese innleggene mine, om nødvendig ved hjelp av Google Translate på tross av all språkvask, gjetting og ekstra tolkningsarbeid dette innebærer, er mer enn overraskende! Det samme må sies om det å bli nevnt i samme åndedrag som Lars Hertzberg, en av de nålevende filosofene jeg selv har lært aller mest av.

La meg bruke denne anledningen til varmt å anbefale Duncan Richters blogg language goes on holiday. Foruten tankevekkende innlegg fra Richter selv (opptil flere ganger i uken), har bloggen en rekke faste kommentatorer, noe som ofte avstedkommer svært interessante diskusjoner. Det var denne bloggen som gav meg lyst til å forsøke selv. Den tilhører mitt daglige lesestoff.

(For andre blogger jeg følger, se listen til høyre.)