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Philosophy: You Need It
By PRIB ·
“The fact is that abstract ideas are conceptual integrations which subsume an incalculable number of concretes—and that without abstract ideas you would not be able to deal with concrete, particular, real-life problems. You would be in the position of a newborn infant, to whom every object is a unique, unprecedented phenomenon. The difference between his mental state and yours lies in the number of conceptual integrations your mind has performed.”
– Ayn Rand
In philosophical discussion the key contrast is about a clashing of ideas, based around the same general system. However, since the destruction of philosophy by Kant, and the Kantians, philosophy shifted from a valued science, to a garbled mess. In this chaotic ash left behind by the corpse of a beautiful tradition, there was a new class of denialists. They saw the mess of philosophy, and threw the baby out with the bathwater. These people were the anti-philosophers. They rejected philosophy and its apparent “uselessness”. In the words of LiquidZulu, this is a “bust-era philosophy” mirroring the skeptics of ancient Greece after the original destruction (perpetrated by Plato). However, this movement of anti-philosophy, despite gaining a massive amount of online support, has always triggered the same question in my mind: Is the rejection of philosophy not—in itself—a philosophy?
Philosophy, especially in the western tradition, focuses on the answer to three fundamental problems (with politics and aesthetics as separate branches, but are naturally flowing from the more fundamental branches): What is there? (Metaphysics) How do I know? (Epistemology) and What do I do about it? (Ethics). Metaphysics is (essentially) the theory of what the universe is, and how it works, answering the question of “What is there?” Do not confuse that with facts of reality, however. Facts of reality would be something like gravity. A theory of metaphysics would be something like “there is a shadow world of forms that is actually perfect and dictates how this world works.” Epistemology is the theory of knowledge, truth, what man knows, and how that truth can be come to, answering the question of “How do I know?” An example of an epistemic claim is “Man is able to make sense of the things around him.” Ethics is–in short–the theory of morality, action, and law, answering the question of “What do I do about it?” For example, an ethical claim would be something like “Man ought to not kill eachother.” Let’s take—for example—Christianity, to demonstrate how a philosophy answers these questions. What is there? God is there. How do I know? Divine revelation/Reason. What do I do? What is written in the Bible/The laws derived from it.
This also serves to show how philosophy is intertwined, with every branch relying on the previous one. The claim “Do what is written in the bible” makes no sense if you have not established the Christian metaphysics prior to that claim. Similarly, you could not make the claim that the bible should be followed if you did not establish the prior claim that the bible is God’s word, and God’s word is trustworthy. If you were to make distant observations and claims without having a unified system naturally flowing from one branch to the next starting from metaphysics, you have a–frankly–poor philosophy. To take an example; Plato, despite using the system model, did not start from metaphysics, but rather from epistemology. He was focused on answering the epistemic issue of universals and particulars. Since he was primarily focused on answering this issue, he let his epistemology tyrannize his metaphysics. Thus, his politics also followed suit. Making him arrive at philosophical proto-communist dictators, and the “shadow world of forms” described above.
Now, to reject philosophy is to either A. Avoid the questions, or B. Just say “no”. To avoid these questions is to be in perpetual stasis. To do nothing. To do something you would need to think, as if you were not thinking at all, you could not reject philosophy as there is no concept of philosophy in your mind to reject, or the word ‘reject’ to describe your relation to philosophy. And to do something with a thought in mind, is to do an ethical action, which is a philosophical concept. This is because ethics deals with morality, which deals with value judgments. If you, say, put dog food in a dog bowl for your dog, you are operating under the belief that it is moral for your dog to be fed, and survive. So, to avoid these questions requires you to think, realize that to answer these questions and reject philosophy at the same time would put you in contradiction and make you look stupid, and then refuse to answer, well you just employed philosophy! To say “no” is also a demonstration of philosophy. To say What is there? I don't know. How do I know? You don’t. What do I do about it? Nothing. Is to accept philosophy, even if it is entirely idiotic to make these claims, by answering at all, you built a philosophy.
To accept “implicit philosophy” and reject “explicit philosophy” (as the anti-philosophers attempt to do as a work-around) is to simply be inconsistent. If you accept that there are metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical truths inherit in your actions, and then not attempt to know them, follow them, or care of them, is to essentially say “the sky is blue, but I don’t care that it is blue, because I want to say that it’s yellow”. It is to be in contradiction, and thus, is false.
There is then the pragmatist who says “When I reject philosophy, I do not reject the existence of reality, but rather the useless academic jargon that leads to nothing.” This is also an absurdity. This is an admission of them not actually rejecting philosophy, but just having a bad experience with what they consider philosophy. Or as Ayn Rand puts it “You might claim-as most people do—that you have never been influenced by philosophy. I will ask you to check that claim. Have you ever thought or said the following? ‘Don't be so sure—nobody can be certain of anything.’ You got that notion from David Hume (and many, many others), even though you might never have heard of him. Or: ‘This may be good in theory, but it doesn't work in practice.’ You got that from Plato. Or: ‘That was a rotten thing to do, but it's only human, nobody is perfect in this world.’ You got that from Augustine. Or: ‘It may be true for you, but it's not true for me.’ You got it from William James. Or: ‘I couldn't help it! Nobody can help anything he does.’ You got it from Hegel. Or: ‘I can't prove it, but I feel that it's true.’ You got it from Kant. Or: ‘It's logical, but logic has nothing to do with reality.’ You got it from Kant. Or: ‘It's evil, because it's selfish.’ You got it from Kant. Have you heard the modern activists say: ‘Act first, think afterward’? They got it from John Dewey. Some people might answer: ‘Sure, I've said those things at different times, but I don't have to believe that stuff all of the time. It may have been true yesterday, but it's not true today.’ They got it from Hegel. They might say: ‘Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.’ They got it from a very little mind, Emerson. They might say: ‘But can't one compromise and borrow different ideas from different philosophies according to the expediency of the moment?’ They got it from Richard Nixon-who got it from William James.” It is on the same intellectual level of me saying “I think mathematicians are useless and annoying, so I reject mathematics”. Except, this is even more convincing, as I am not using a mathematical formula to explain why I don’t like mathematics.
However, the pragmatist also claims that “Yes, I may use philosophy to reject philosophy, but that is irrelevant. Rather, I am using a far more practical system (science) to destroy philosophy”. Or, as John Dewey says; “Men, instead of being proud of accepting and asserting beliefs and ‘principles’ on the ground of loyalty, will be as ashamed of that procedure as they would now be to confess their assent to a scientific theory out of reverence for Newton or Helmholz or whomever, without regard to evidence. If one stops to consider the matter, is there not something strange in the fact that men should consider loyalty to ‘laws,’ principles, standards, ideals to be an inherent virtue, accounted unto them for righteousness? It is as if they were making up for some secret sense of weakness by rigidity and intensity of insistent attachment. A moral law, like a law in physics, is not something to swear by and stick to at all hazards [...].” Again, this is a contradiction. Beyond the simple: Using philosophy to destroy philosophy being a contradiction in the means. There is something more revealing: the pragmatist rejects principles, on principle. And in doing so, they also accept contradictions. The pragmatist might claim that they do not accept contradictions, but this is proven false by their own claims. To be principled, is to be consistent, and to be consistent is to be without contradiction. By claiming that they do not accept principle, but they accept the laws of logic (non-contradiction) the pragmatist is wishing to have his cake, and eat it too. This is all on top of the fact that science is itself an epistemological claim. How do I know? A peer reviewed academic study! It also has to [necessarily] be made sense of to function in any way. Empirical truths may be pre-existing, but they need to also be discovered. And when they are discovered, they do not implement a magical brain chip that informs scientists exactly what it is and/or does, scientists need to make sense of it. How do you make sense of things? Reason! It also makes the pragmatist claim of “what works is what should be done” even more flimsy. By rejecting philosophy in favor of what ‘works’ they need to have a pre-existing idea of what ‘working’ is. If what works is whatever gives you the most money, the pragmatist will rattle off verified ways of making money, but to do any of this, they need to accept that they value money. In that sense, all pragmatists do to “negate philosophy” requires some philosophical preconditions to make their system work at all.
I would also be remiss to not mention the most absurd, pseudo-intellectual critique of the bunch: quietism. Quietism posits that philosophy cannot properly answer questions, but instead, is meant to simply leave as is. For example, if the question is “How should we act?” Instead of giving an answer, the quietist would look into the lexicon surrounding the words “should” and “act” and simply derive conclusions from how society interprets them. If society says “One should not do X” or “One should do X” then that is the answer. It is then to be followed by several why’s until you hit the bedrock that language can no longer justify. This is because they believe that “justification” is a societal concept in and of itself. Demanding that society’s understanding of X be justified, misunderstands that for something to be justified, it needs to be societal.
The key fallacy here being that to value the lexiconal meaning of a word, you need to make an epistemic proposition. Say, I am asked “How should we act?” I–being a good quietst–immediately investigate the common usage of the word “should” and the word “act” and the word “we” and the word “how.” What does it mean to investigate something however? To make an epistemic drive towards discovering some fact. In this case, you are analyzing how these particular words are used in the common vernacular. That would require the basic principles of science, which are the laws of logic, as well as the need to make sense of data, which are philosophical concepts. Meaning that they are implicitly answering the question of “How do I know?” every time they do their word usage research.
This also, finally, brings us to the underlying flaw in all of these attacks against philosophy: the fallacy of the stolen concept, put more simply as the stolen concept fallacy. The stolen concept fallacy occurs when one tries to use a concept of the person they are trying to refute to prove them wrong. The most common example today (though it is admittedly getting less common) is modern skeptics using Christian morality to prove religion bad. They are accepting Christian values like life as having inherent value, to say “religion killed people, religion bad.”
The stolen concept fallacy is the “mindbreaker” for all of the opponents of philosophy. Any one of these critics; The abstentionist, the nihilist, the scientist (as in a believer of scientism), the pragmatist, and the quietist all rely on the concept of truth. They may very well deny this, they may even deny that truth exists, or that it is elastic. However, they all accept that for them to be saying literally anything, they would first need to believe it. For them to not believe what they are saying, then we have found agreement, denialism is wrong. If they believe what they say, they are inherently accepting that it is true. If they claim that it is not true then they fall back to the very first scenario of denialism (which necessitates rational value judgements), or they do not believe it, bringing us back into agreement.
In conclusion, it is an understatement to say that the denialist position is full of contradictions. Despite them claiming to reject philosophy, they have used it in every step of the way. Be it using value judgments, making epistemic claims about science, or the all-encompassing stolen concept fallacy, they all fail to stand under scrutiny. I will end with a (final) quote from Ayn Rand: “The men who are not interested in philosophy absorb its principles from the cultural atmosphere around them—from schools, colleges, books, magazines, newspapers, movies, television, etc. [...] Most of them have never heard of philosophy, but they sense that they need some fundamental answers to questions they dare not ask—and they hope that the tribe will tell them how to live. They are ready to be taken over by any witch doctor, guru, or dictator.”