A man boasts about his successful marriage.
“What’s your secret?” ask a friend.
“Simple division of labor,” says the husband. “I make all the big decisions; my wife makes all the little ones.”
“I don’t understand,” says his friend. “For example?”
“For example, my wife decides where I work, where we live, where the children go to school. I decide whether the United States should withdraw from Iraq.”
Like the proud husband, I have gravitated to big decisions over the years. I am among the few whose profession involves thinking about big questions, even bigger than the husband’s. I can take a tax deduction for expenses related to the weighting of imponderables such as these:
What came first, intelligence or matter?
How are energy and information alike and how are they different?
What is the origin of life here or anywhere?
How are learning and evolution alike and how are they different?
Where does the purpose come from?
Does the universe have a purpose?
What is the difference between animal and human consciousness?
What is the natural history of ambiguity?
What is the ontology of epistemology?
But I get the joke. Practically speaking, these are not major decisions at all. Small decisions are the ones that matter the most. Whether intelligence or matter came first, it doesn’t make much difference in your daily life. Whether you’re in the right job, yes it does. Size is not everything, or rather, small is big.
People tend not to give cosmic questions the same focused attention that they give practices, and those who say they do often seem simply concerned with the practical results their cosmic answers can promote: fundraisers. from the fundamentalist church, the jihadists, the political ideologues, the bombastic public intellectuals, relentless bloggers (including me), self-satisfied true believers. Feigning an urgent cosmic concern is false, but it is natural. If you have two reasons for concentrating on something, and one of those reasons is much more practical and compelling than the other, the practice will tend to drive your focus. So even if you start out philosophical, you can easily drift towards its practical implications, while claiming you’re still doing philosophy (or theology, political theory, or any kind of general theory). People complain that philosophers think too much. They are too much in their heads and not enough in their hearts. But often the real problem is that their hearts are driving and they are only using their heads for cover. That’s what I tend to think of republican philosophers, for example. They may claim to believe in something out of principle, but seem to believe more for the practical benefit of small decisions. And the same about us leftists.
Great thinkers get a bad rap, and it’s well deserved. Our focus on the broader issues is suspect. It’s so impractical to worry about those important things that it’s reasonable to suspect that we probably don’t. People care about practical matters, like making money, not making much sense; fixing things, not fixing theories; gaining things, not gaining abstract wisdom. A practical answer is where the rubber touches the road. A cosmic answer is where the rubber spins freely in lala land.
Spinning the rubber can be fun because where there is no traction there is also no resistance. Big decisions are hardly verifiable. If someone tells him that he is wrong, he can simply say “well, maybe yes, but maybe not…” with a knowing smile, and then keep spinning his wheels.
The smaller the decision, the more testable it is. Small decisions meet the resistance of immediate evidence. Accountants, neurosurgeons, restorers, car mechanics – when they make a mistake, they catch it right away. Philosophers cannot be wrong, or rather they can make a lot of mistakes and get away with it because with grand schemes, everything is speculative and everything is at least marginally possible. Since there is no abundant flow of reliable and unequivocal evidence about cosmic events in the furthest reaches of time and space, even the most absurd theory could theoretically be correct. As long as a theory is even slightly plausible, it can survive and thrive for millennia. And every grand theory is at least a tiny bit plausible.
Philosophy is a terrible profession. And not just because the pay is bad and the jobs are few. By its nature it attracts and breeds riffraff, careless thinkers who promote stupid ideas.
And you can never be sure that you are not one of them.
You can never be sure because, as I said, nothing abstract is absolutely verifiable or unprovable, but also because it is not possible, in a systematic way, to earn the respect of your peers or lay people. Since millennial schools of hardworking self-proclaimed experts on the big questions can, in retrospect, look like fools following ridiculously dead leads, there’s no guarantee that the years you’ve spent following an idea will bring you any closer to reality. answers When it comes to practical matters, you can’t be big and dumb for long. But philosophically you can think big and fool for a long time.
And the fans know it. They know that when it comes to being proven right, their chances aren’t much worse than yours. If you’re a geologist with a Ph.D., people prefer your experience. But everyone is an expert in philosophy. Try talking over dinner about the way causation works or the natural history of purpose. You will be interrupted and corrected by people who have spent little time studying but who feel as expert as you. Geologists don’t have that problem. When they talk about igneous rock formations, people listen respectfully.
William James defined philosophy as “a peculiarly obstinate attempt to think clearly.” I really like that definition, but he would add “on the most perplexing problems imaginable.” In fact, once a problem is no longer puzzling, science snatches it away. Philosophers cannot play with simple problems.
Doing philosophy is like wrestling in the mud. It’s an inherently complicated job and you very rarely dominate the opposition (“yeah, well, maybe, maybe not,” they’ll smile).
And worst of all, many philosophers, both professional and amateur, don’t realize it. They act as if the challenge is to find a plausible answer. When they find one, they are so impressed by the magnitude of its implications that they feel bright and determined. Proposing a plausible answer is never the problem. In fact, you can find hundreds of them. And we have. We have ended up with hundreds of complacent philosophical factions settling too quickly on a set of plausible hypotheses, knowingly laughing at the implausibility of opposing theories but clinging to the modest plausibility of their own theory as proof that everyone You can stop thinking about knowing why the problem is solved.
If you want to see humanity at its silliest, watch us do philosophical mud wrestling in the dark in padded suits covered in grease so we never get hurt. many of us Entire teams of mud wrestlers in opposing but ultimately unsuccessful jihads.
Participating in such madness would be shameful if the madness were our fault. However, it is not. It is the nature of highly speculative research with little evidence. And I love it. I imagine that for someone like me, who is lucky enough to have options, trying to take careful notes in a persistently stubborn attempt to think straight about major events in history is a decent way to spend life. And I exaggerate here. There are standards. They are not as hard and fast as the empirical standards, but some arguments fit the existing evidence better than others. Ultimately, someone has to decide if we should withdraw from Iraq, and by thinking carefully without being able to achieve anything more than an informed guess about the important things, we can reduce the chances of wrong guessing.
The ship of my life, well am I sailing it? If wealth were the test, yes, am I failing it? If the object is sunk? A deeper wisdom? .
