In Defense Of Philosophy


Preface

This essay came about as an approximate synthesis of my personal statement, and my notes on Gavin Leech’s “Why I'm not a philosopher,” after noticing they aligned surprisingly well. To avoid pre-requisites, the first sections are standalone, while the direct response to Gavin is restricted to the last section.

I. Ethics as Acceptance of Uncertainty

Why do ethics? Why do metaphysics? In pursuit of truth, you say? I envy your optimism. No perfect answers lie at the bottom of philosophy but solipsism and nihilism. Am I against philosophy, then, you ask? Of course not. In sophomore year of high school, I broke free from the excellence-centric ontology oozing from every orifice of my sheltered SF-private-school elite-college-track upbringing. But rejecting a worldview gives no intrinsic path. Rather, it leaves one lost. In those I looked up to, I saw what I now know is a common reaction: bolstered by their escape (and thus perceived cognisance), they fell deeply into the broader imposed worldview embedded subtly beneath the apparent ideologies now cast aside: intuition. They redefine success, and think they have broken free, but the orientation towards the lens of the self, the utilitarian value judgements engraved by immersion in a capitalist system, even the very orientation towards success, even redefined, as an ideal, remain.

There is nothing wrong with this. There is no value in the self-consistency of an ontology — rather, the value lies in apparent self consistency.1 One might claim an ontology also fails by inducing misery — on this I take no stand. I simply claim that one can not be a prisoner without awareness of one’s chains.2

But to those among us that think too much and do too little, a set I myself am a part of, this reaction to aimlessness provides no solace. Without philosophy, there is no satisfactory justification for any path chosen.3 It may seem that, even with philosophy, no progress can be made. There are, after all, no justifications to be found. But in forming belief systems, in invalidating, reforming, over and over, in exploring idea-space, though one eventually runs unavoidably into the absence of truth, there is value in fighting for certainty that there are no answers. Because at the end of the endless journey of “why” lies not an answer, but an end to pursuit. There may be no truth, but there is a difference between “I do not know,” and “I can not know.” For only from the latter can one form an ontology. Only from the latter can one move on with life, and find meaning which, substanceless though it may be, is genuine.

Philosophy does not answer. Rather, it absolves us of questions.

II. Philosophy as Interpretation; Life as Art

To defend philosophy is to find in it some use. Doing so requires a value to orient towards, which, of course, does not exist. The pedant may rejoice — philosophy has no purpose. But this seems a hollow victory — let us assume meaning has value. That is, were philosophy to substantially increase the meaning in my life, it would have use.4

Transcendent experiences are a difficult topic.5 Not only are they as yet purely qualitative, they are definitionally inexplicable. Everyone can label the best moments of their life transcendent, and there is no way to know, for others or for oneself, if this categorization is accurate. In some sense I am trivially correct in doing so — to me, transcendent is defined as such. But taking a wider perspective, even in eluding capture, accounts from centuries of philosophers (mainly the last ~two centuries) strongly evidence the presence of something. A black hole comes to mind as quite analogous. For reasons implied in my Art series, I will henceforth refer to it as “externality.”

Of course, due to its uncertain nature, I hesitate to make sweeping claims about the value of pursuing externality. But these experiences serve as by far the most meaningful moments of my life, and provide perspectives I can orient myself around. In reading the works of past philosophers, it has become clear to me that, though this approach to the transcendental is shared, the nature of the experiences themselves varies, suggesting that rather than a singular experience, it is a class. This, I believe, is known. In the recent centuries of existentialism can be found a new orientation in philosophy: a turn towards partial empirics — towards ideas that, though not rigorously justified, are in some sense useful. I claim this is a pursuit of externality. I will not, however, heavily defend this claim — it is unimportant, mentioned only in passing. More generally, this change in philosophy is a turn towards the pursuit of beauty, rather than of absolute truth. And progress has been made. Were one to seek out externality, there are works to read that would guide them towards it, nebulous though it may be. And I have found that doing so is worthwhile — that is, in its pursuit, I have accrued meaning.

It is at this point that I must note that the points I am making can be unflatteringly condensed into “philosophy is worthwhile because it provides meaning; I know this to be the case because it did so for me.” And were you to raise the objection that this is not the best way to pursue meaning, or, similarly, that the same meaning can be accessed more efficiently in ways other than philosophy,6 my (main) objection would be “I know this not to be the case because it isn’t for me.” These arguments are undoubtedly quite shallow. But in a very real sense, much to the annoyance of both sides of the discourse, this is the most that can be said about externality, and these arguments’ sole defense is that they align with the claims of those who have said similar things in the past.

This is the worst kind of argument, almost akin to cheating: that which can not be rebutted. Alas, it is the only possibility. But, stepping away from all desire for rigor, to respond to “does philosophy have a use” with “well, it does for me” is not wrong. And through it I have found things worth finding, many of which I could not have accessed otherwise.

A final criticism is that in describing the branch as “partial empirics” I fell into science rather than philosophy. I dismiss this as a linguistic trifle — the domains of science and philosophy are by no means disjoint, and this pursuit is far more accessible through philosophy than science, regardless of the methodology.

III. Gavin as Being Wrong

I’m kidding — I actually really liked most of Gavin’s essay. From this point onwards, I’ll assume you read it.

Broadly speaking, sections I and II fall into Gavin’s 2/4 and 13 respectively. It seems like in 2 and 4, his general issue is that philosophy isn’t a useful tool, or, at the very least, isn’t the best tool. I think this betrays a difference in our perspectives — maybe Gavin’s epistemology is bad, but, more likely, he just doesn’t care for the “don’t know” versus “can’t know” distinction. His protest in 13, while seemingly somewhat adjacent to my points in II, seem to face a similar mismatch: admittedly “philosophy as psychedelic, as sensory intervention” isn’t the most flattering categorization, but I do place a lot of value on the idea underlying this in a way Gavin does not.

Strictly speaking, in neither of these cases is he wrong — neither am I. I don’t particularly want to title this essay “Why I’m a philosopher,” but perhaps I should, the idea being that this is no way contradictory to Gavin’s “Why I'm not a philosopher.” As you read his essay, the writing gradually betrays Gavin to be someone with a non-rigorous belief system (he also says this directly at points, but I find the nuances of it slip out more unconsciously). He knows this, as he makes clear — rather than ignorance, this stems from a choice to be unfounded. Fundamentally, this is not something I can do. This is a good thing by Gavin. I wish I could do this. He is (at his current point in life) not someone who particularly needs philosophy. I am — such is the difference in our perspectives.

Afterthoughts

This essay doesn’t really have a thesis — I went into it with a few ideas I wanted to talk about, and it ended up being pretty winding — the fragments, when played out fully, didn’t cohere as much as I had hoped. Still, I think they belong in one essay, and hopefully the various ideas prove interesting.

1. I do recognize that I’m making an assumption here — to say “value lies in…” seems to assume a purpose to an ontology. Strictly speaking, there is no such thing. But on inspection, this statement is almost circular — say the purpose of an ontology is to allow its user to hold beliefs. Then for an ontology to succeed, its holder need only have an ontology they believe in. That is, I claim this is equivalent to saying the purpose of an ontology is to exist. This is still not quite true — again, there’s no reason a purpose exists at all, but I find it reasonable to claim, at the very least, that if its holder cannot hold beliefs, it has, in some sense, failed, by nature of inducing its own non-existence (which is a proper superset of being self-contradicting). ↩
2. One can, of course, be restricted without knowing it. But I would contend that this loses the core aspects of imprisonment. ↩
3. And technically, nothing is wrong with that. But the fact that this is less than ideal follows from almost any reasonable axiom, and so I will assume as much from here on. ↩
4. Two objections trivially arise. First, “meaning” is also not well defined. To this I say “whatever,” and even “I do not care.” Define it qualitatively. Treat it as a subset of “makes my life better.” Second, the utilitarian might argue that meaning in my life doesn’t really matter — I should go do science instead or something. My response is, again, “I do not care.” To make this objection, one must smuggle in an array of assumptions. Of course, I’m doing the same, but then the objection reduces to “my assumptions are better than yours,” which is rarely a fun conversation. I recognize that by nature of the absence of truth, in some sense all discourse can be similarly dismissed, but I claim the utilitarian’s objection is a particularly blatant offense. But even ignoring the assumptions, the rejection of meaning is somewhat uninteresting — using any framework capable of making this objection, an individual can mostly be treated as equivalent to a philosophical zombie, at which point the discussion of the utility of philosophy is reduced to “does it increase productivity.” Regardless of the answer (which I suspect is trivially “most of the time, no”), this is a far less interesting question. I’m not saying “your objection is boring and thus wrong,” I’m just saying “your objection is boring and undisprovable so I’m not going to address it.” ↩
5. I don’t love the term “transcendent experiences” — I’m unwilling to defend their absolute inexplicability, nor am I willing to rigorously demonstrate a difference in cardinality from everyday experiences. But I love the term “yet-unexplained experiences” even less, so I leave this slight inaccuracy. ↩
6. The most problematic version of this is a transhumanist argument, which my objection does not effectively rebut. As with most long-termist arguments, especially those currently unknowable, this is very hard to dismiss. I choose not to address it here, but I do recognize that this is a very valid point, and my choice not to be an accelerationist is decently arbitrary. ↩