I can't remember the exact quote but Iris Murdoch says something rather like this: any philosophical theory that you can't live isn't worth reading. Whatever the exact words; I heartily endorse the idea.
Contemporary philosophy, particularly the Analytic Philosophy in which I am trained, has become remote from life. It has become a series of intellectual puzzles to challenge refined intellectual tastes. It was not always so. In ancient times, particularly in the Hellenistic period, philosophy was viewed as medicine for the soul. It was the use of argument and reasoning deployed for the express purpose of curing the suffering of human life.
My question to my fellow Quaker philosophers is this: to what extent do you, in your teaching or your research, seek to address the problem of how to live. Do you see this as a proper part of philosophy or as something arrogant or juvenile (or both)?
This semester I added a few lectures on Hellenistic philosophy to my Introduction to Philosophy lectures and found that students related quite well to the issue of how we should live. Have any of you had similar experiences?
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11 comments:
I hope you don't mind a lay person leaving a few words here, but I just wanted to applaud your efforts in motivating young minds to marry philosophical teachings with the "simple" act of living life. I am not the scholar you are, but I know about living the meaning of life (wrote a book about it :-)
Thanks again for teaching young minds to think for themselves!
Louise Lewis, Author
"No Experts Needed: The Meaning of Life According to You!"
www.noexpertsneeded.com
Alphonso Lingis, the Levinas translater (and philosopher in his own right), has glossed the Socratic/Platonic claim that the unexamined life is not worth living by claiming that the unlived life is not worth examining.
I have attempted, in the responses I made to the FAHE roundtable queries posted to this blog below, to suggest that philosophy and its truths should be responsible to life, that philosophy should answer to life, not life to philosophy. What "life" means, here, is no doubt complicated (I'm working on it!), but the "simplicity" of the claim (the same one Jesus made with respect to the relation of "man" [sic] and the "sabbath," I think) should not be lost by consequence. The Hellenistic philosophers perhaps gave to philosophy a role that some of us might want to assign to religion instead, but their taking philosophy as fully integrated with life is a reminder to us of this as a possibility, and might be an inspiration even for those of us who would not prefer to take them as a model. But with regard to Richard's principal point: this Friend speaks my mind.
I am hesitant to fully endorse Louise's rejection of experts (if that is a blanket claim, although I didn't look at the website to see what is really meant), even if the sentiment of her comments resonates with me. That "experts" are to be in the service of everyday life rather than being permitted to govern it (as happens too often in a culture of expertise/"discipline;" see Foucault's 'Discipline and Punish,' for example), I agree, but they often need to provide that service "as experts." The know-how of engineers should not govern the whys and wheres of bridgebuilding, but when we need a bridge, let us welcome with open arms their hows. Whether or not there can be an "expertise" of everyday life (which seems to me the attempt of the Hellenistic philosophers), and that this is what we mean by "philosophy," is a discussion we'd have to have.
Jeff Dudiak
Jeff,
Could you be a little more explicit about what you see as the weaknesses of the Hellenistic philosophers? As you know they were taken very seriously throughout the modern period and have only in the past century or so dimmed to relative obscurity. Do you think there is some deep flaw in the Stoic and Epicurean view of things that makes it appropriate for us to largely ignore them?
Two unrelated points: First, I would agree wholeheartedly with Iris Murdoch's point, whatever the exact wording. I bring up this question--"how, then, shall we live?"--repeatedly in my intro classes to keep us focused.
Second, we've started getting "spam" comments, and I have the ability to remove them if necessary. At the moment I don't find them too intrusive (and I appreciate the irony of anyone writing a book called "No Experts Needed"), but I want to be sensitive to the other readers (i.e., I can delete them).
I have more thoughts on the Hellenistic philosophers, but they'll have to wait a few more days.
Craig,
I might try using "How then shall we live?" in my own intro classes.
As for people wandering by who are not Quaker philosophers I'd be happy to trust your judgement. So far I don't see any problem but if you see something that looks like some blatant attempt to be offensive or to scam people I'd trust you to delete it.
Regarding Richard's question to me of Dec. 6:
I realize to some extent that the following depends on how we use our terms, and that the working context of the Hellenistic philosophers was different than our own (so this is not to point out a weakness or flaw in the Hellenistic philosophers, but only my hestitation to set them up uncritically as a model for philosophy in our own time), but very briefly: I am less inclined than the Hellenistic philosophers (as I understand them) to trust philosophy to provide instructions or a formula for the good life. I do believe that philosophy should be in the service of the good life (beatitude, Shalom), but I am myself more inclined to trust a broader community of those seeking to discern the leadings of the spirit than I am to trust my colleagues in philosophy (qua philosophers) to define the good/true life for me/us. This is no criticism of philosophy, for philosophy has a role in this process of discernment (and for me a crucial one), and the communities of philosophers and the community of discerners of the spirit overlap of course, but to leave the determination of the good life up to philosophy is to load it up with more of a burden than it can bear. It is, put crudely, to ask philosophy to serve at once its own role and that of religion. (What the roles of each of these discourses are, even what they are, is very much a matter for discussion, of course, but using them here even if only suggestively I hope helps me hint at what I'm attempting to get at.)
With respect to the "spam," my first impression was to agree with Richard that it has not been a big problem so far. I have tried to be trusting, and have preferred to put up with a little spam rather than discourage someone from participating who might be genuinely interested in doing so. I have even tried to respond to comments from those I don't know in an attempt to be welcoming. However, Craig, you seem wiser in the ways of the net than I (which wouldn't take much, by the way), and the comment of "anonymous" of Dec. 10 seems an unabashed attempt to do no more than advertise a series of web sites, so I'm willing to trust your judgement on these matters and encourage you to delete away as you deem right.
Jeffrey Dudiak
jeff,
Let me first try to restate your point about the Hellenistic philosophers to see if I've understood you properly.
You think that the Hellenistic philosophers err by taking an elitist attitude. They collected themselves into schools of philosophy and were pretty explicit about claiming that they possessed wisdom and common people and opposing philosophical schools did not. This is quite pronounced among the Stoics who hold that the wise man never makes a mistake or does anything wrong and that fools, that is to say everyone else, always make mistakes and never to anything right. Moreover, as in the analogy of the man drowning with his head two inches below the surface, there is no such thing as being partially wise. You are wise (and a true Stoic) or you are a fool. There is no in between.
I have to agree with you if that's your point. Such elitism is not just unattractive, it is plainly wrong. Philosophers have no monopoly on wisdom.
Yet I am attracted to the Hellenistic philosophers in that they do not lose sight of the fact that a philosophy is something to be lived. And that the purpose of trying to think clearly about values and human nature and our place in the universe is to help us live as we should. That part of Hellenistic philosophy resonates strongly with me and it is a part of philosophy that has been almost completely lost for the last 100 years. I'd like to bring it back if I could.
While the elitism you mention, Richard, is problematic, that is not quite my concern here. It is more the totalizing of philosophy that I resist. I think you are correct that the Hellenistic philosophers teach us that philosophy is something to be lived. But that is what (for myself, at least) I object to. Philosophies are not to be lived, on my view, life is to be lived - with the aid of our philosophizing (and a lot of other things, too). When our lives become beholden to our philosophies (or our sciences, or our theologies, etc.), rather than our philosophies being beholden to (i.e., in the service of) our lives, I think we are standing on our heads, which, while it is a neat trick, is, in the long run, conducive neither to a fullness of life nor to clear thinking.
jeff,
I'm struggling to catch your meaning. Let me try to paraphrase part of it. You object to the suggestion inherent in some Hellenistic philosophers that philosophy is all you need to live. I would agree with that criticism as well but I also think it calls for only a minor change in the teachings of the Hellenistic philosophers. Stoicism (or Epicureanism) without the totalizing claim would still be recognizably Stoicism (or Epicureanism) and as such still a viable position. My original question is about whether the near total neglect of the Hellenistic philosophers is justified. I'm thinking that such small problems as you mention would not justify ignoring them as totally as we do.
Or perhaps I am underestimating the significance of their tendency to claim to be everything a person needs to know? We agree that the claim is unwarranted; do we disagree about how central the claim is to their philosophical systems?
I will try once again to put what I'm trying to say tersely - while recognizing that my attempts to do so here, rather than engaging in actual exegetical work (something to which I'm not sure blogging is suited), perhaps exacerbates rather than eliminates confusion. I am by no means suggesting that we ignore the Hellenistic philosophers, and I applaud their attempts to take their philosophizing seriously as central to their lives. I am by no means an expert, but on my limited reading of them they tended to be less advocates of "philosophy" and more advocates of a particular philosophy. Put otherwise, they tended to take philosophy less as the love of (pursuit of) wisdom and more as a wisdom. Taking philosophy as a wisdom rather than its pursuit is, on my view, pretentious, insufficiently self-critical, and reductionistic with respect to other callings/demands of life. So, while I would want to encourage that we learn all that we can from these thinkers, and draw all of the inspiration from them we can, I would want to keep a my critical eye open at the same time.
I suspect, Richard, that we don't radically disagree on this, but we're still not quite in synch, either.
Jeff Dudiak
Because most of my students do not go on to graduate school in philosophy, I have always felt it important to connect philosophy with real life, including addressing the question of how to live. My colleagues in my department agree with me.
Ideas can and do shape and change the world. Even if some philosophers think that the intellectual puzzles they work with are remote from life, and that that is as it should be, I suspect that every intellectual puzzle that anyone would think is worth working on has implications that ripple back to real life in some way.
I also think that the very best philosophers are perceptive enough to be aware of such connections, however subtle. Maybe philosophy, at its best, trains exactly this kind of perceptiveness.
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