The question ‘Is philosophy better now than it was in 1997?’ is not a good question, for it has a hidden premiss, that is, the state of philosophy can be better or worse. Is that true? It might be. Yet, I propound that we take it as a false postulate: philosophy cannot be better or worse, even if we take into account students qualities or general teachers abilities. People can only start proposing such productivity or creativity measures when philosophy is not taken as love of wisdom anymore, but just as a new profession or occupation. Imagine the reader that an European living in the very beginning of the nineteenth century makes a poll trying to acknowledge who was more productive, creative or just better: Rene Descartes or Immanuel Kant? Does such question even make sense? I can say that it does, if we take philosophers as unstoppable factories or as ingenious artists.
Taking philosophy less as a profession than as an ideal that can guide or misguide a man’s life, then we might be able to understand that creativity or productivity are not the points of proper good action. A better way of facing the question is to understand philosophy as an end in itself — and that would be a truly disinterested action, or just plain love. Conceiving philosophy as a kind of love, a contemplative one, is not what one could call wishful thinking. Philosophy is not said love of wisdom because saying so is cute, or because new-age minded people are keen to repeat it over and over. Love is disinterested not because it does not have an object or a point in view, but because love is both interested and not interested.
When one asserts that, it may seem like what is being said — the proposition P ^ -P — is an obvious paralogism. Actually, this is not the case. The sentence P is not univocal, it is equivocal. Or, in other words, we have the assertion of an ambiguity, but one that does not make the proposition P ^ -P false, because even if there is equivocality, both propositions have their own exact meaning, and each of them can be said and can be said clearly, or unequivocally.
Sentence P being ‘philosophy is an interested subject’ and -P being ‘philosophy is not an interested subject’, in the first case it means philosophy has a proper object and this is wisdom or knowledge; in the second case it means that the search for knowledge does not depend upon someone’s bias, but it relies only on knowledge itself. Thus, Philosophy can be said a reflexive discipline, meaning that it is an endless contemplation, but one that occurs on the base of love, love of knowledge per se.
3 Comments
Given what you say philosophy is (or should be), here are three ways in which it could be said to be worse:
(i) it sets itself different aims: if philosophers now think that philosophy is not an end in itself, nor a love of wisdom, then you would have to say that it is worse;
(ii) it doesn’t deliver wisdom: if philosophy is contemplation of wisdom, but a philosophy contemplates something else, wrongly assuming it is wisdom, then you would have to say it is worse;
(iii) it doesn’t deliver knowledge: if philosophy is contemplation of knowledge, then you can easily judge different philosophies by the number of truths it arrives at - thus, a philosophy which states only falsities would necessarily be worse.
These cases are instances of a single problem: the moment you say philosophy has a telos different from itself (wisdom, knowledge), you have introduced constraints that give you criteria by which to judge its success (or failure).
But maybe I’m missing something…
I gave a lot of thought to your objections, while I remade this blog’s layout. What I can now say is that, first of all, we need to define what we mean when we talk about “philosophy”. For instance, in your first objection, it seems like you’re talking of philosophy as a general discipline. In the second and third cases, you confuse philosophy as a subject-matter and philosophy as a particular doctrine.
You can reply that you are not confusing but comparing them. Despite of that possibility (or reality), I will try to precise the three ways in which we can talk about the term philosophy here. There is philosophy as a quest — in its original meaning, that is, love of wisdom, which I consider a quest, — there is philosophy as a profession, that can be said widespread, since philosophy is today mostly academic, and finally there is philosophy as a particular system of thought or doctrine.
In short, both philosophy as a profession and as the doctrine’s of a given intellectual can be said better or worse. But these were not the points of view that I took in my text. In it I tried to express the original breath by which philosophy was born, that is, as a kind of quest for knowledge and wisdom (maybe theory and practice).
Anyway, I must say I really enjoyed your reply and that I hope you can raise more questions, so disputatio can take its deserved place here.
Best regards!
OK - so let’s say philosophy is a quest. I think I like this view, anyway. But then I’d ask you two things:
(i) Can’t you be led astray in your quest? And can’t you realize that? More generally, can’t you judge your own progress in your quests, and say (e.g.) that philosophy (i.e., your own personal quest) is better (or worse) now than in 1997? I think - to continue with your metaphor of a quest - that a quest without progress looks more like wandering about, and I’m not sure philosophy is (or should be) like that.
(ii) Can’t you reach the goals of your quest? Again, in your reply to my comment, you say philosophy is a quest for knowledge and wisdom. I guess my doubt is this: do you think that, when one reaches (some piece of) knowledge and (some piece of) wisdom, one stops doing philosophy? In other words, is philosophy just a means for an end (wisdom, knowledge) - one we can do away with, after we’ve achieved those goals? In this case, maybe we have a small disagreement: even if I like to think of philosophy as a quest, I wouldn’t want to exclude the end-products of this quest from being philosophy. This is why, perhaps, I’m willing to say that yeah, even philosophy as a quest can be better or worse…
Anyway, thanks for the thoughtful response!
Best,
Y.