The Inescapability of Philosophy

Why philosophy matters and cannot truly be avoided

There is a common (mis)conception of philosophy, according to which it is the quintessentially “impractical” discipline, its concerns being of interest only to nerds, elites with too much time on their hands, and to eccentric misfits. According to this view, the perennial philosophical questions are as inconsequential to everyday life as they are unanswerable.

At times during my adult life, much of which has been devoted to studying, teaching, and “doing” philosophy, I have capitulated to this pessimistic narrative (by, for example, making self-deprecating quips about the irrelevance and semi-absurdity of pursuing the very questions which preoccupied my restless mind).

I now regret this. I think that, in fact, there is a sense in which philosophy is both inescapably and imminently practical. But, first, it will be necessary to say something about what philosophy is, at least by my own lights.

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1. What is philosophy?

The question “what is philosophy?” is itself a philosophical question, and just about every philosopher would answer it slightly differently. Giving anything approaching a complete answer would require a book-length treatment. However, it is possible to make some brief, general, and relatively uncontroversial remarks about what it is that distinguishes philosophy from the innumerable other fields of human inquiry, thereby revealing both its indispensability and significance.

We might begin by saying that philosophy is concerned with the most fundamental questions, and that each of these questions is associated with a particular subfield of the discipline: what is there? (metaphysics), how do we know? (epistemology), what should we do? (ethics), what is beautiful? (aesthetics), and how ought we to reason? (logic¹). These questions are interrelated in various ways, and each is associated with further questions inviting more fine-grained distinctions. But this way of setting things out does, I believe, get at something deep, and true: namely, that philosophy is, by definition, the discipline that concerns itself with the most fundamental questions that can be asked.

One of the aims of philosophy is simply to clarify and refine our concepts – and what, precisely, are the right questions to ask about ourselves and the world in which we reside. Often, when our concepts and questions are sorted out, we can simply outsource philosophical questions to one or other of the empirical sciences, which themselves, historically, developed out of philosophy (only a few centuries ago, no one would have recognized a distinction between philosophy and science at all, and what we now classify as “science” was then termed “natural philosophy”). A common feature of the questions that admit of outsourcing in this way is that they are empirical by nature and, as such, are answerable by way of observation, construed in the broadest sense.²

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2. The temptation of scientism

In the 20th century, many thinkers (including more than a few professional philosophers) fell under the spell of scientism: the view according to which the only legitimate, or meaningful, questions are those that are amenable to answering by recourse to the scientific method. This view still remains common among intellectuals — philosophers and non-philosophers, alike — and, therefore, is influential in the universities, journalism, entertainment, and politics. Scientism is, however, itself a philosophical position (after all, it cannot be either confirmed or disconfirmed by recourse to the scientific method!).

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3. Why philosophy is inescapable

Herein lies the lesson which is the point of this post: Philosophy is inescapable. All worldviews rest upon philosophical commitments and assumptions - and all people, wittingly or not, inhabit a worldview (insofar as they at least have implicit beliefs about the way things are, how knowledge is attained, what matters and what should be done, what is beautiful, and how we should reason.

Some questions are destined to remain within the purview of philosophy alone. Examples include those concerning value (i.e., what matters?; what is good, and what is bad?), normativity (i.e., evaluation of an act, policy, practice, or feature according to some sort of standard), and the fundamental nature, or essence, of things (e.g., what is consciousness?; what is time?; etc.). In setting out to answer such questions, the only tools we have available to us are reason (i.e., our capacity to use logic, respond to evidence, and to make sense of things in the broadest sense), reflection, introspection, imagination, and conversation.

One can choose not to do philosophy, and it’s not failure of character that a person generally lacks interest in philosophical inquiry. However, there is likely to be value for most of us in at least recognizing that we do in fact have philosophical commitments - commitments not universally held, which are subject to error and often to legitimate, reasonable contestation.

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Conclusion

While it is trivially true that philosophizing will not, in itself, result in the construction of a building, the harvesting of crops, or the paving of a road, it is also the case that philosophy has the power to shape all human endeavors. For philosophy is, after all - fundamentally - the study of ideas, and ideas are among the most potent forces in all of reality: they have the power to destroy and to create; to liberate and to enslave; to immiserate and to promote flourishing; to move mountains and cure diseases; to forge empires and to destroy them. In short, philosophy matters because ideas matter.

1. In the 20th century, it became common to understand logic much more narrowly, in terms merely of the study of the rules of inference. This development was, I believe, unfortunate, but I will not labor the point here.

2. It is a crude view of science which supposes that it consists only of people in white lab coats gazing into microscopes. Much of contemporary science is highly theoretical, and based more upon modeling than any kind of literal observation of the natural world. However, even the most theoretical scientific subfields are still empirical in the sense that they (a) are informed by observation and (b) are aimed at explaining the natural order.