>When I insult philosophy on social media, the response is often incredulous
Unsurprisingly? There's no other obvious bucket where people would put "insightful blogging about various abstract-conceptual stuff", so they are left confused when you deny them the bucket without offering a convenient alternative. Also, pretty much no non-philosopher knows what are primarily philosophical methods, concepts or values (I sure don't), so this argument probably isn't as convincing as it seems to you.
"they are left confused when you deny them the bucket without offering a convenient alternative"
Bingo!
David, Look how deep into the weeds of philosophy you have have already gone in your post in your attempt to distinguish your bucket from the philosophy bucket. And the distinction is still fuzzy.
Usually, bashing a long established but somewhat stodgy bucket is effective product marketing only if you have a shiny new alternative bucket for people to compare.
Well, I do understand his frustration, somewhat. Philosophy is basically squatting on all the valuable conceptual real estate, which is an unfortunate situation when the central example of philosophy is "blatantly wrong, absurd nonsense", because it tars everybody else in the vicinity by association. I'm not sure if there is a practical solution to this problem...
'the central example of philosophy is "blatantly wrong, absurd nonsense"'
I think this perception of ancient Greek philosophy as blatant error and nonsense may be at the heart of our disagreement. Neither Socrates, Plato, nor Aristotle were irrational people. So how could they espouse what seems to most non-philosophers to be nonsense?
The philosopher and historian of science, Thomas Kuhn, once asked himself a similar question regarding Aristotle's views on physics. He relates the epiphany he had, which later served as the foundation for his seminal work, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions":
"[A]ristotle appeared not only ignorant of mechanics, but a dreadfully bad physical scientist as well. About motion, in particular, his writings seemed to me full of egregious errors, both of logic and of observation.
...
Those questions troubled me. I could easily believe that Aristotle had stumbled, but not that, on entering physics, he had totally collapsed. Might not the fault be mine rather than Aristotle’s, I asked myself? Perhaps not all his words had meant to him and his contemporaries quite what they meant to me and mine.
Feeling that way, I continued to puzzle over the text, and my suspicions ultimately proved well-founded. I was sitting at my desk with the text of Aristotle’s Physics open in front of me and with a four-colored pencil in my hand. Looking up, I gazed abstractedly out of the window of my room— the visual image is one I can still recall. Suddenly the fragments in my head sorted themselves out in a new way, and fell into place together. My jaw dropped, for all at once Aristotle seemed a very good physicist indeed, but of a sort I’d never dreamed possible. Now I could see why he had said what he’d said, and why he had been believed. Statements that I had previously taken for egregious mistakes now seemed to me, at worst, near misses within a powerful and generally successful tradition.
That sort of experience—an increasing puzzlement and malaise suddenly resolved by a redescription, [a] resorting, and a reassembling of parts—often characterizes an early stage in the recovery of the past. Always it leaves much piecemeal mopping up to do, but the central change cannot be experienced piecemeal, one step at a time. Instead, it involves some relatively sudden and unstructured transformation in which some aspects of the ideas and behaviors under study sort themselves out differently and display patterns different from those visible before.
To make all this more concrete, let me now illustrate some of what was involved in my discovery of a way of reading Aristotelian physics, one that made the texts make sense..."
'The Last Writings of Thomas S. Kuhn'
"My jaw dropped, for all at once Aristotle seemed a very good physicist indeed." What a powerful and moving episode! Philosophers who've had the Kuhn-type epiphany are able to understand ancient conceptual frameworks well enough that statements that are "taken for egregious mistakes" by those who haven't, seem "at worst, near misses within a powerful and generally successful tradition".
Ask yourself these questions:
1. How can ancient Greek philosophers seem so rigorous in their thinking on some issues (eg logic), yet silly in others?
2. If ancient Greek philosophy was largely blatantly wrong, absurd nonsense, why hasn't it have been discarded already, as ancient Greek mythology has been?
3. Do you really think some of the world's most intelligent and wisest people wouldn't have exposed it as completely worthless centuries ago?
4. Isn't it more likely that you are misunderstanding them, as Kuhn suddenly realized he had been?
5. Do you really think that only in the past few decades has it become possible for someone like David to finally be able to undo philosophy?
6. Which is more likely: centuries of apparently well-respected thinkers were fools spouting nonsense, or those whose who read philosophy as nonsense are being foolish? (Given Kuhn's epiphany, I'd suggest the latter.)
contra the critics who have also posted comments, I support your effort to undo philosophy, for the reasons you state, and for some of my own which you haven't stated. at minimum it's a useful reflection for people like you and I who have had the experience you describe of reading something claimed to be profound and finding it to be delusive nonsense. grappling with the dissonance of that experience seems fruitful to me, whatever the outcome.
Ortega was a contemporary of Heidegger, a Spanish Republican (contrasted with Heidegger's Nazism), and a critic of Heidegger. He was a "public intellectual" and had all the baggage that goes along with that, especially the common interpretation of his most famous work - Revolt of the Masses - being framed as an anti-populist polemic, which it kinda is, but that's missing the real context and purpose of the essay. That's besides the point.
I want to point at History as a System because I think of it as Ortega's most central/foundational essay in his entire way of thinking and is the most explicit statement of his meaning-making framework out of all of his writing. It could broadly be counted as an entry in the "anti-philosophy" movement, but it has a different orientation entirely. Rather than trying to point out fatal flaws in formal systems (as Wittgenstein did), or trying to point out problematic metaphysical assumptions (as Heidegger did), Ortega is trying to bushwhack his way into a completely new (to Modernity, anyway) way of being and it's associated metarational framework.
A good one line summary of the work is "Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia" (I am myself and my circumstances). His view of self is that it's a co-creation with circumstances, which are inherently and necessarily historical. He positions the storytelling part of history as the underlying driver of meaning-making and examines the idea of a historical "project" as the vessel for the meaning-making efforts of humanity. Ortega wasn't any kind of Buddhist nor did he directly engage with it in the same way that Heidegger did. He seems to have independently converged on a view that is resonant with the view from Buddhism that emphasizes mutual interdependence and relationality (i.e. non-dualism).
He focuses in particular on two ideas, one that he labels "Vital Reason", that I would summarize as an early 20th century version of what we now know as Meta-Modernism or Post-Rationalism. The other important idea is a view of history as being driven by cycles of crisis and renewal, a macrocosm at the societal level of what individuals experience in their own lives and psyches.
I think you would enjoy his work quite a lot. It's far more accessible than Heidegger (that's a low bar to clear though) and to me feels much more humane and much more, well, prophetic. He was also attempting to undo philosophy, in his own way, without explicitly naming it such. I think his heartfelt desire was for people to be able to make sense of their own lives, and the world they're living in, such that they can determine for themselves what things are supposed to mean, liberating themselves from the oppression of the broken meaning-making of the old frameworks (Church and State) so that they might pursue the new historical project of building a humane society.
I love how commenters are warning you to stay away from the tar baby of philosophy. The more you strike it, the more it sticks to you!
But I am amazed how the progression of your studies mirrors my own. I spent my twenties obsessively reading Kaufmann’s Nietzsche translations, to the point where I could not only tell you from which books his more famous quotes came, but in some cases, even the numbered section it was in.
Then I tried reading Hegel, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, etc. I read a book explicating Hegel’s extremely long and verbose Phenomenology of the Spirit, that was longer than the Phenomenology itself. Husserl was as opaque as a brick wall, but I found some of Merleau-Ponty’s less philosophical musings about the world very interesting and worth reading.
Same reaction to A.N. Whitehead. Whitehead had a very interesting and intellectually wide-ranging career, and his popular books like Science in the Modern World were a very fruitful read, but his magnum opus, Process and Reality, was a huge head-scratcher. I read it twice, no comprehension either time.
Later I felt justified in my confusion when I read a comical anecdote in one of Richard Feynman’s books. During a scientific dry spell, Feynman attended a philosophy course where they were studying Whitehead. He asked question after question, but could never get the teacher to pin down exactly what Whitehead was trying to say. It was just confusion after confusion.
There are three distinctive, primary kinds of philosophy bc philosophy has three distinct aims.
Truth Wisdom is universal answers ( framework of understanding ) to the most universally meaningful questions. That means, roughly, metaphysics; what is the nature of..., which encompasses meta-philosophy ( this ), mereology, meta-epistemology, meta-ethics.
Practical Wisdom is about individual solutions ( action plan ) and is always contingent on priorities. It encompasses aesthetics, axiology, praxiology, and ethics.
Academic Philosophy <spit> is about social acceptance earned by compliance and signified by credentials. It is about people, history, and jargon, and may be safely ignored if what you're interested in is meaningful answers or solutions.
David, I'm here once again to beg you to step away from the intellectual fentanyl/cocaine of philosophy instead of risking deeper addiction by trying to undo philosophy:
"The *main antidote* [to philosophy] is to not do it when you are tempted to. Just walk away from the tabletop piles of intellectual fentanyl. Forget about it. There’s nothing good there. If you are addicted—as we all are, due to philosophy contaminating our ordinary everyday thinking—this may be difficult. Antiphilosophy does put a fence around the table and sets some of the fentanyl on fire. (Leave the premises immediately! Don’t inhale the fumes.) The *secondary antidote* is to uncover and undo the wrong philosophical assumptions and patterns of reasoning that pollute our cultural background understandings. This requires reading and understanding philosophy—taking care not to do any. It risks inhaling some accidentally. It’s a dirty, dangerous job, and I don’t see why I have to do it. *But someone has to*, and I took a vow to save all sentient beings, so here we are."
Why does someone have to take the secondary antidote—undoing philosophy? And even if someone has to do it, why you? About three months ago you acknowledged that you'd already spent a month working on undoing philosophy, and expressed the dawning realization that you should simply take the primary antidote (drop the project and return to your meaningness/meta-rationality project):
"And now [November 18, 2024] I’ve worked on ['Undoing Philosophy'] exclusively for a month, and written seventeen thousand words, which is fifty printed pages, and the end is nowhere near in sight. This is probably very bad. Is this the best thing to have spent a month on? Should I spend another month, six months, ten years on it? My sense now is that I need to undo “Undoing philosophy.” Step away from the tabletop pile of intellectual cocaine, try to remember what is actually important, and return to one of my other unfinished, and perhaps unfinishable, projects. (What do you think?)"
As you acknowledge, taking the secondary antidote runs the risk of inhaling the intellectual fentanyl that is philosophy and thereby becoming addicted to philosophy. Why do you feel the need to run this risk? Why can't you take the primary antidote by walking away? That way you can devote all your limited resources to your alternative to philosophy, which is arguably a better way of fulfilling your bodhisattva vow than undoing philosophy.
I know you've told me in a previous comment that you've received extremely diverse opinions about whether you should continue your project of undoing philosophy or simply walk away, and that such diversity makes these opinions unhelpful as guidance. But I've taken the bodhisattva vow as well, and I also have a bad brain. So even if my repeated attempts to get you to take the primary antidote by simply walking away from the imminent risk of philosophical addiction are ultimately in vain, I feel a duty to try to counteract what your bad brain got you into:
"This [Stack note] was an off-hand half-baked thought, due to my bad brain trying to convince me that I need to explain what is bad about philosophy, and how what I do is not that. It gets excited about this topic once every few months, and I’m unable to stop it from posting some brief cryptic note about it (previously, e.g., this and this and their reply chains). I really don’t want to write about philosophy and what makes it bad, because there’s an enormous amount to say, which could easily turn into another unfinishable incremental-giant-book project. Also, it gets amateur philosophy enthusiasts extremely upset, which is sort of funny, and helps me understand how they think, but is mostly tedious. However, the possibility is also extremely important, because philosophy has done so much damage to our ability to make sense of ourselves, each other, and our world. So, my bad brain may (once again!) win this fight."
>When I insult philosophy on social media, the response is often incredulous
Unsurprisingly? There's no other obvious bucket where people would put "insightful blogging about various abstract-conceptual stuff", so they are left confused when you deny them the bucket without offering a convenient alternative. Also, pretty much no non-philosopher knows what are primarily philosophical methods, concepts or values (I sure don't), so this argument probably isn't as convincing as it seems to you.
"they are left confused when you deny them the bucket without offering a convenient alternative"
Bingo!
David, Look how deep into the weeds of philosophy you have have already gone in your post in your attempt to distinguish your bucket from the philosophy bucket. And the distinction is still fuzzy.
Usually, bashing a long established but somewhat stodgy bucket is effective product marketing only if you have a shiny new alternative bucket for people to compare.
Well, I do understand his frustration, somewhat. Philosophy is basically squatting on all the valuable conceptual real estate, which is an unfortunate situation when the central example of philosophy is "blatantly wrong, absurd nonsense", because it tars everybody else in the vicinity by association. I'm not sure if there is a practical solution to this problem...
'the central example of philosophy is "blatantly wrong, absurd nonsense"'
I think this perception of ancient Greek philosophy as blatant error and nonsense may be at the heart of our disagreement. Neither Socrates, Plato, nor Aristotle were irrational people. So how could they espouse what seems to most non-philosophers to be nonsense?
The philosopher and historian of science, Thomas Kuhn, once asked himself a similar question regarding Aristotle's views on physics. He relates the epiphany he had, which later served as the foundation for his seminal work, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions":
"[A]ristotle appeared not only ignorant of mechanics, but a dreadfully bad physical scientist as well. About motion, in particular, his writings seemed to me full of egregious errors, both of logic and of observation.
...
Those questions troubled me. I could easily believe that Aristotle had stumbled, but not that, on entering physics, he had totally collapsed. Might not the fault be mine rather than Aristotle’s, I asked myself? Perhaps not all his words had meant to him and his contemporaries quite what they meant to me and mine.
Feeling that way, I continued to puzzle over the text, and my suspicions ultimately proved well-founded. I was sitting at my desk with the text of Aristotle’s Physics open in front of me and with a four-colored pencil in my hand. Looking up, I gazed abstractedly out of the window of my room— the visual image is one I can still recall. Suddenly the fragments in my head sorted themselves out in a new way, and fell into place together. My jaw dropped, for all at once Aristotle seemed a very good physicist indeed, but of a sort I’d never dreamed possible. Now I could see why he had said what he’d said, and why he had been believed. Statements that I had previously taken for egregious mistakes now seemed to me, at worst, near misses within a powerful and generally successful tradition.
That sort of experience—an increasing puzzlement and malaise suddenly resolved by a redescription, [a] resorting, and a reassembling of parts—often characterizes an early stage in the recovery of the past. Always it leaves much piecemeal mopping up to do, but the central change cannot be experienced piecemeal, one step at a time. Instead, it involves some relatively sudden and unstructured transformation in which some aspects of the ideas and behaviors under study sort themselves out differently and display patterns different from those visible before.
To make all this more concrete, let me now illustrate some of what was involved in my discovery of a way of reading Aristotelian physics, one that made the texts make sense..."
'The Last Writings of Thomas S. Kuhn'
"My jaw dropped, for all at once Aristotle seemed a very good physicist indeed." What a powerful and moving episode! Philosophers who've had the Kuhn-type epiphany are able to understand ancient conceptual frameworks well enough that statements that are "taken for egregious mistakes" by those who haven't, seem "at worst, near misses within a powerful and generally successful tradition".
Ask yourself these questions:
1. How can ancient Greek philosophers seem so rigorous in their thinking on some issues (eg logic), yet silly in others?
2. If ancient Greek philosophy was largely blatantly wrong, absurd nonsense, why hasn't it have been discarded already, as ancient Greek mythology has been?
3. Do you really think some of the world's most intelligent and wisest people wouldn't have exposed it as completely worthless centuries ago?
4. Isn't it more likely that you are misunderstanding them, as Kuhn suddenly realized he had been?
5. Do you really think that only in the past few decades has it become possible for someone like David to finally be able to undo philosophy?
6. Which is more likely: centuries of apparently well-respected thinkers were fools spouting nonsense, or those whose who read philosophy as nonsense are being foolish? (Given Kuhn's epiphany, I'd suggest the latter.)
When reading the ancients, it's especially important to apply the Principle of Charity as Kuhn realized with his epiphany: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity
(a concept refined by philosophers!).
contra the critics who have also posted comments, I support your effort to undo philosophy, for the reasons you state, and for some of my own which you haven't stated. at minimum it's a useful reflection for people like you and I who have had the experience you describe of reading something claimed to be profound and finding it to be delusive nonsense. grappling with the dissonance of that experience seems fruitful to me, whatever the outcome.
I think I've recommended this before, but once again I feel called to recommend History as a System by José Ortega y Gasset (https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/778458.History_as_a_System_and_other_Essays_Toward_a_Philosophy_of_History)
Ortega was a contemporary of Heidegger, a Spanish Republican (contrasted with Heidegger's Nazism), and a critic of Heidegger. He was a "public intellectual" and had all the baggage that goes along with that, especially the common interpretation of his most famous work - Revolt of the Masses - being framed as an anti-populist polemic, which it kinda is, but that's missing the real context and purpose of the essay. That's besides the point.
I want to point at History as a System because I think of it as Ortega's most central/foundational essay in his entire way of thinking and is the most explicit statement of his meaning-making framework out of all of his writing. It could broadly be counted as an entry in the "anti-philosophy" movement, but it has a different orientation entirely. Rather than trying to point out fatal flaws in formal systems (as Wittgenstein did), or trying to point out problematic metaphysical assumptions (as Heidegger did), Ortega is trying to bushwhack his way into a completely new (to Modernity, anyway) way of being and it's associated metarational framework.
A good one line summary of the work is "Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia" (I am myself and my circumstances). His view of self is that it's a co-creation with circumstances, which are inherently and necessarily historical. He positions the storytelling part of history as the underlying driver of meaning-making and examines the idea of a historical "project" as the vessel for the meaning-making efforts of humanity. Ortega wasn't any kind of Buddhist nor did he directly engage with it in the same way that Heidegger did. He seems to have independently converged on a view that is resonant with the view from Buddhism that emphasizes mutual interdependence and relationality (i.e. non-dualism).
He focuses in particular on two ideas, one that he labels "Vital Reason", that I would summarize as an early 20th century version of what we now know as Meta-Modernism or Post-Rationalism. The other important idea is a view of history as being driven by cycles of crisis and renewal, a macrocosm at the societal level of what individuals experience in their own lives and psyches.
I think you would enjoy his work quite a lot. It's far more accessible than Heidegger (that's a low bar to clear though) and to me feels much more humane and much more, well, prophetic. He was also attempting to undo philosophy, in his own way, without explicitly naming it such. I think his heartfelt desire was for people to be able to make sense of their own lives, and the world they're living in, such that they can determine for themselves what things are supposed to mean, liberating themselves from the oppression of the broken meaning-making of the old frameworks (Church and State) so that they might pursue the new historical project of building a humane society.
I love how commenters are warning you to stay away from the tar baby of philosophy. The more you strike it, the more it sticks to you!
But I am amazed how the progression of your studies mirrors my own. I spent my twenties obsessively reading Kaufmann’s Nietzsche translations, to the point where I could not only tell you from which books his more famous quotes came, but in some cases, even the numbered section it was in.
Then I tried reading Hegel, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, etc. I read a book explicating Hegel’s extremely long and verbose Phenomenology of the Spirit, that was longer than the Phenomenology itself. Husserl was as opaque as a brick wall, but I found some of Merleau-Ponty’s less philosophical musings about the world very interesting and worth reading.
Same reaction to A.N. Whitehead. Whitehead had a very interesting and intellectually wide-ranging career, and his popular books like Science in the Modern World were a very fruitful read, but his magnum opus, Process and Reality, was a huge head-scratcher. I read it twice, no comprehension either time.
Later I felt justified in my confusion when I read a comical anecdote in one of Richard Feynman’s books. During a scientific dry spell, Feynman attended a philosophy course where they were studying Whitehead. He asked question after question, but could never get the teacher to pin down exactly what Whitehead was trying to say. It was just confusion after confusion.
There are three distinctive, primary kinds of philosophy bc philosophy has three distinct aims.
Truth Wisdom is universal answers ( framework of understanding ) to the most universally meaningful questions. That means, roughly, metaphysics; what is the nature of..., which encompasses meta-philosophy ( this ), mereology, meta-epistemology, meta-ethics.
Practical Wisdom is about individual solutions ( action plan ) and is always contingent on priorities. It encompasses aesthetics, axiology, praxiology, and ethics.
Academic Philosophy <spit> is about social acceptance earned by compliance and signified by credentials. It is about people, history, and jargon, and may be safely ignored if what you're interested in is meaningful answers or solutions.
Wisdom clarifies, it does not obfuscate.
"Philosophy always buries its undertakers."
—Étienne Gilson
David, I'm here once again to beg you to step away from the intellectual fentanyl/cocaine of philosophy instead of risking deeper addiction by trying to undo philosophy:
"The *main antidote* [to philosophy] is to not do it when you are tempted to. Just walk away from the tabletop piles of intellectual fentanyl. Forget about it. There’s nothing good there. If you are addicted—as we all are, due to philosophy contaminating our ordinary everyday thinking—this may be difficult. Antiphilosophy does put a fence around the table and sets some of the fentanyl on fire. (Leave the premises immediately! Don’t inhale the fumes.) The *secondary antidote* is to uncover and undo the wrong philosophical assumptions and patterns of reasoning that pollute our cultural background understandings. This requires reading and understanding philosophy—taking care not to do any. It risks inhaling some accidentally. It’s a dirty, dangerous job, and I don’t see why I have to do it. *But someone has to*, and I took a vow to save all sentient beings, so here we are."
Why does someone have to take the secondary antidote—undoing philosophy? And even if someone has to do it, why you? About three months ago you acknowledged that you'd already spent a month working on undoing philosophy, and expressed the dawning realization that you should simply take the primary antidote (drop the project and return to your meaningness/meta-rationality project):
"And now [November 18, 2024] I’ve worked on ['Undoing Philosophy'] exclusively for a month, and written seventeen thousand words, which is fifty printed pages, and the end is nowhere near in sight. This is probably very bad. Is this the best thing to have spent a month on? Should I spend another month, six months, ten years on it? My sense now is that I need to undo “Undoing philosophy.” Step away from the tabletop pile of intellectual cocaine, try to remember what is actually important, and return to one of my other unfinished, and perhaps unfinishable, projects. (What do you think?)"
https://meaningness.substack.com/p/undoing-philosophy
As you acknowledge, taking the secondary antidote runs the risk of inhaling the intellectual fentanyl that is philosophy and thereby becoming addicted to philosophy. Why do you feel the need to run this risk? Why can't you take the primary antidote by walking away? That way you can devote all your limited resources to your alternative to philosophy, which is arguably a better way of fulfilling your bodhisattva vow than undoing philosophy.
I know you've told me in a previous comment that you've received extremely diverse opinions about whether you should continue your project of undoing philosophy or simply walk away, and that such diversity makes these opinions unhelpful as guidance. But I've taken the bodhisattva vow as well, and I also have a bad brain. So even if my repeated attempts to get you to take the primary antidote by simply walking away from the imminent risk of philosophical addiction are ultimately in vain, I feel a duty to try to counteract what your bad brain got you into:
"This [Stack note] was an off-hand half-baked thought, due to my bad brain trying to convince me that I need to explain what is bad about philosophy, and how what I do is not that. It gets excited about this topic once every few months, and I’m unable to stop it from posting some brief cryptic note about it (previously, e.g., this and this and their reply chains). I really don’t want to write about philosophy and what makes it bad, because there’s an enormous amount to say, which could easily turn into another unfinishable incremental-giant-book project. Also, it gets amateur philosophy enthusiasts extremely upset, which is sort of funny, and helps me understand how they think, but is mostly tedious. However, the possibility is also extremely important, because philosophy has done so much damage to our ability to make sense of ourselves, each other, and our world. So, my bad brain may (once again!) win this fight."
https://meaningness.substack.com/p/my-70-failure-rate?open=false#%C2%A7philosophy-is-bad
Please stop trying to undo philosophy before philosophy undoes you.