For Beginners

Liv is sitting at the kitchen table trying to solve a puzzle. A logic game. A brain teaser.

There are nine tiles with colored edges. Each edge is either red, green, blue, or yellow. The goal is to make a 3×3 square such that each edge is touching a same-colored edge.

Liv lays down a piece and then connects two red edges. She connects blue edges, green, blue, red, red, then yellow. The last piece is in her hand, but it doesn’t fit in the last empty space. So she shuffles the deck and tries again. Lay a piece, connect connect connect connect and so on until the last piece doesn’t fit.

Shuffle again, lay the pieces out, wrong again.

She tries to solve the puzzle like this eight times. Then she’s bored.

“Let’s playing something other than this stupid game.”

So she pulls out a box and takes out a fake needle and says: “I’m the doctor. You look sick.”

The puzzle is still sitting on the table. With her all-or-nothing approach, Liv had exhausted 8 of more than 350,000 possible ways to lay 9 tiles in a 3×3 box.

---

Recently I came across one of David Kendal’s blog posts, which requests that someone start a blog for beginners in philosophy.

I’ve had a passing interest in areas of philosophy for a long time, but never really known what to do about making it a more serious pursuit. The realm of philosophy seems so big; where should one begin? With the Ancients? The Renaissance? The philosophers of the modern day?

So I would enjoy a blog offering regular reading recommendations for philosophy, and a guide to the perspectives of the philosophers whose work it recommends.

When I was was starting Yabot the Robot, I considered writing occasional articles that distilled the thought of philosophers I have read into simple, readable prose. I found myself with two major problems:

1. I am not knowledgeable enough for such an undertaking, and I think if the blog that David describes were to be created, it would need a team of authors – perhaps even a different author for each post.
2. It is very hard to simplify challenging ideas.

This second point I know well. I started my philosophy thesis presentation with the goal that my mother would understand it. I even looked right at her at the beginning and said: “I’m going to try to make this so that you can understand it.” And then I started talking about infinite substance and synecdochic properties and ethical edification.

But maybe philosophy ought not be simplified.

I think of struggling with a philosophical text very much like reading a difficult novel. Which is to say: it takes time, and the experience of being uncomfortable is essential. And just like reading the plot summary of Moby Dick will only give you a mere glimpse of what is actually in the novel, reading a blog post about A Critique of Pure Reason will not give you knowledge about the arguments and ideas it contains.

In fact, it is usually harmful to prepare to read a philosophical text by reading a summary because you rob yourself of the challenge of following an argument. And this is another way that reading philosophy is like reading a novel: it’s not the goal to just get to the end or figure it out; the real intellectual joy is being right in the middle of some harsh desert or tropical jungle. (1)

---

Kendal’s post led me to an essay by Paul Graham called “How To Do Philosophy”, which may have been more aptly titled “How To Do Something Fairly Unlike Philosophy”. In his essay, which is an attack on the way in which philosophy is a “sea of words”, Graham sets sail for distant shores with confused ideas and polemical cannons as cargo.

Graham’s main argument is that pretty much all the work done so far in philosophy is incoherent:

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 the reason that Graham is the first one to profess this truth is because the other people who noticed it just didn’t bother.

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 the ultimate truths. Surely all smart people would be interested in it, if it delivered on that promise.

Those people who went to find ultimate truth elsewhere also knew everything Wittgenstein knew, they just thought it’d be a waste of effort to say it.

Wittgenstein is popularly credited with the idea that most philosophical controversies are due to confusions over language. I’m not sure how much credit to give him. I suspect a lot of people realized this, but reacted simply by not studying philosophy, rather than becoming philosophy professors.

Look, there’s a lot of ways I could go about criticizing the flaws in Graham’s essay. But it wouldn’t be worthwhile, because he repeatedly demonstrates in the piece that he’s made of straw.

He’s uncertain about how arguments function.

I took several classes in logic. I don’t know if I learned anything from them.

He’s unaware of a thousand-year period in the history of philosophy.

In the intervening years an unfortunate idea took hold: that it was not only acceptable to produce works like the Metaphysics, but that it was a particularly prestigious line of work, done by a class of people called philosophers. No one thought to go back and debug Aristotle’s motivating argument.

And he holds kitschy philosophical stereotypes – the sort of things that one unlearns in the course of bceoming educated – as the very ideas that he somehow learned by studying philosophy.

There are things I know I learned from studying philosophy. The most dramatic I learned immediately, in the first semester of freshman year, in a class taught by Sydney Shoemaker. I learned that I don’t exist.

Alas, I can confirm that he does exist and has subsequently produced an essay filled with dubious claims.

But for me, what is more troubling than his misunderstandings is the conclusion that he makes from them: that philosophy needs to be more practical. If those silly ideas did something, maybe asking fundamental questions would be worthwhile.

The proof of how useless some of their answers turned out to be is how little effect they have. No one after reading Aristotle’s Metaphysics does anything differently as a result.

The reason Aristotle didn’t get anywhere in the Metaphysics was partly that he set off with contradictory aims: to explore the most abstract ideas, guided by the assumption that they were useless.

The test of utility I propose is whether we cause people who read what we’ve written to do anything differently afterward.

Graham thinks that Aristotle is acting out a contradiction by exploring abstract ideas and assuming abstract ideas are useless, but he’s wrong in two different, important ways:

• Aristotle is only performing a contradiction if we take it that the goal of human action is efficiency. It isn’t.

And more pertinent:

• It isn’t true that Aristotle thinks that abstract knowledge is useless, it’s just that usefulness isn’t the aim. And because Graham repeatedly assails Aristotle but never quotes him, I will:

Evidently they were pursuing science in order to know, and not for any utilitarian end… So we pursue this as the only free science, for it alone exists for its own sake. (Book 1, Metaphysics)

The last line is important: where Graham says useless, Aristotle says free. And why free? Because perfect knowledge is not bound by circumstance; it is not bound by anything at all.

Aristotle is after the truth. He’s not seeking it because it will help him build a better mousetrap – though it may very well be helpful in that endeavor – but because he is curious.

And I guess that how I feel about philosophy and its relationship to human beings is pretty simple: I’m curious. Aren’t you?

We need to eat and sleep, it’s useful that we have roads and gadgets, and it’s nice to have a collection of cardigans or shoes – but: What can we know? What ought we do? What can we hope for?(2) No one tells us to ask these questions. And when we consider them, it’s not because we’re thinking of some practical benefit. We’re responding to a need.

Which is why I’m so baffled that philosopher lecturer Lee McIntyre recently published an article declaring that we need to “make philosophy matter—or else”.

The profession of philosophy has had ages to make itself more relevant…We need to show our students that—when it is done right—philosophy can help them to be better, more critical thinkers and communicators in their jobs. It can teach them to be skeptical of political rhetoric and advertising. It can help them to consider what is worth caring about and so perhaps to begin to make the world a better place…But what seems problematic is the widespread philosopher’s prejudice that we are somehow sullying our discipline any time we try to make a real-world connection.

The individual statements McIntyre makes are not wrong: studying philosophy does foster critical thinking and those skills can be used to make the “real-world” a better place.

On the subject of relevance, however, I disagree with McIntyre. I don’t think philosophy needs to be made relevant. Just as you don’t need to list your hopes on an index card to remember them, you don’t need to be convinced that considering difficult questions about your existence is important. It just occurs to you.

Knowing that those questions are important doesn’t mean that you’ll devote your whole life to them – the real-world is shiny and fun and distracting, after all.

And this is why Graham’s test of utility – “whether we cause people who read what we’ve written to do anything differently afterward” – doesn’t make any sense. There are all sorts of reasons why someone could intensely study philosophy and still lead an awful life. Shiny ardent zeal helps us “follow the worse” though we “see the better”.(3) I don’t think that makes philosophy a worthless pursuit.

An action can be judged by its efficacy or by its worth, but Graham only considers the former.

I think of it this way: I spend fifteen hours a week teaching German kids how to speak English, and most of the stuff I teach they forget. It may turn out that my teaching is ineffective, but it’s undoubtedly worthwhile.

And when I break down on that big blue bridge and I think and I think about my thinking and I dance that meta-dance ad infinitum as my anxiety rattles sixteenth notes on the hihat to accompany my slow glance downward – it’s a long way down – and those Big Questions occur to me, then it’s easy to see: philosophy is undoubtedly necessary; it needs no justification.

---

After a while, Liv says I’m now healthy, no doubt thanks to her toy medicine kit filled with fake pills that look like wooden peas, which were originally made when eastern Germany was East Germany and were later sold at a flea market along banks of the Elbe at a price that only nostalgia could afford.

So I sit down with the puzzle and I set the nine pieces down and look at each one, and then look at them all.

The puzzle, I notice, is already almost finished. I turn one piece and swap two others and it’s done.

Liv comes back but doesn’t notice that the puzzle is solved. She just says, “Hey you little pimple, do you want to play Twister or are you going to read like you always do?”