0. Overview, motivations, and how to read this
TL;DR:
1. Philosophy’s methods yield mainly wrong or nonsensical conclusions.
Arguing about metaphysical abstractions is not useful.
2. Amateur enthusiasts’ conceptions of philosophy are often incoherent.
They not wrong because they disagree with a professional understanding. Rather, they are too broad, including things everyone would agree aren't philosophy.
3. Philosophical ideas do great harm after escaping into the general culture.
Our taken-for-granted everyday ways of talking, feeling, and acting embody wrong philosophical ideas, causing unnecessary misery.
4. I don’t do philosophy.
Although some topics philosophy claims to address are important, many are inherently nonsensical. Replacing the poorly-functioning methods, and dropping the nonsense topics, would yield something sufficiently different that calling it “philosophy” would be misleading.
5. We can, and do, relate to meaningness better without philosophy.
Non-professionals engage with philosophy mainly to better understand questions of meaningness: “problems of meaning and meaninglessness; self and society; ethics, purpose, and value.”
Reflection-in-action—awareness of what we are doing as we do it—yields more accurate insights. Non-conceptual noticing and conceptual reflection unconceal dysfunctional patterns. Often those stem from unthought, inaccurate assumptions, often originally from obsolete philosophy, that we can amend or drop.
Undoing “Undoing philosophy”
That, just above, is the opening section of a supposed work, provisionally titled “Undoing philosophy.” A month ago, my bad brain decided that “we” were going to finally explain what’s wrong with philosophy; and what I mean when I say I don’t do it; and what I do, and how, and why that is good; and how you already do that too, and could do it better if you got the toxic philosophical effluents out of your life.
As I wrote two weeks ago,
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. 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.
And now I’ve worked on this 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?)
It’s tempting, though, to salvage some bits.
So, the rest of this post is the current draft of the introduction to “Undoing philosophy”: its “Chapter 0.”
And I’ve uploaded the draft of Chapter 1, “Philosophy doesn’t work,” to appear on Wednesday. It’s in decent shape, and quite fun!
OK, enough meta-level agonizing. Let’s get back to the introduction to “Undoing philosophy”:
Motivations
It’s common to misunderstand the stuff I write as philosophy. It’s not. Its purposes, methods, and topics are non-philosophical.
This is a natural confusion, because there are superficial similarities. However, the misimpression matters. It is not just fussing about the definition of the word “philosophy,” nitpicking about what that does and does not include.
If you read Meaningness or Meta-rationality as philosophy, you are liable to miss most of what they offer. You might think they’re conceptual analyses and intellectual arguments concerning standard topics: epistemology, axiology, ethics, logic, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science. They aren’t.
Some phenomena the books discuss do fall under the broad categories treated by those fields. However, the particular phenomena the books address are mainly passed over by philosophy, as trivial: breakfast, for example; and similarly all the other concrete, meaningful details of real life. My work passes over the main topics of the philosophical subfields, as metaphysical delusions: propositional attitudes, for example; and similarly “the mind,” “utility,” “relativism,” and all its other standard conceptual apparatus.
And, the ways I treat the phenomena that I do find significant, and the types of conclusions I draw from them, are quite different.
Overview, and how to read this stuff
This work is in two parts. The first points out that philosophy is bad. Topics philosophy pretends to explain, such as caring and knowing, are tremendously important. However, its explanations are all wrong, and acting on them usually makes things go badly.
Many ways non-philosophers misunderstand caring and knowing originated in philosophy, and then spread throughout common culture, origins obscured. Philosophical ideas—about what it is to be human, how meaning works, how communication works—dominate our ways of talking and thinking and feeling and acting. We think and feel and act badly because philosophy is bad. Indirectly, it causes much misery. As a dramatic example, political philosophy, justified by metaphysical delusions, killed a hundred million people in the mid-twentieth century.
Less dramatic harms are insidious, pervasive, ongoing, and perhaps even worse. “Philosophy is bad” is not an intellectual pose, trying to score points by arguing about abstractions. Philosophy is bad because it is messing up your life.
Philosophy has been a disaster; but it’s one we can recover from. The second part sketches better, non-philosophical ways to approach understanding caring and knowing; thinking, feeling, and acting. These are the methods applied in Meaningness and Meta-rationality. Their motivation is pragmatic: not intellectual clarification, but to help you care and know better in your everyday life, and in your larger life-projects.
I hope that reading those books with this sketch of their motivations and methods in mind will better enable you to apply them in practice.
The same considerations apply to reading this work. If you misunderstand this as an attempt at a philosophical refutation of philosophy, using the methods of philosophy (argument and conceptual analysis), you will miss the point.
You may be tempted to counter it with philosophical arguments in favor of philosophy. That would waste your time and mine (and annoy both of us).
Read it instead as a guide to how to read my other stuff—if you want to do that.
One may encounter philosophy in many avatars. Typically, when we say "philosophy" the mind immediately turns to stuff like Plato and Aristotle and such. (Or, Nagarjuna or Shankara for Indians.) However, a much more widespread and insidious malaise I encountered was "political philosophy". (It is my contention that political philosophy afflicts more people today and causes more trouble than philosophy proper, which is, at most, a niche interest. I'm sure one is related to the other but I'm not smart enough to figure *that* out.) This was the discontent through which I arrived at Meaningness, and Buddhism in general.
I was/am a STEM major and STEM education in India didn't include much philosophy (STEM subjects are mostly taught as Eternalistic truths) nor was I personally interested in it outside of my formal studies. It's too dense and vast and obscure for me. What I became interested in instead was political philosophy - Marxism, Feminism and the many variants of post-modernism. These are more alluring because they claim to be about immediate, right-in-front-of-your-nose issues - life as it is being lived right now. However, these traditions are confused in exactly the same way philosophy proper is. And these made me miserable in exactly the same way. In these disciplines, the term used is "discourse" which is, ultimately, just philosophy in sheep's clothing. It makes many of the same mistakes. For instance, talking about big blobby things like "justice" and "equality" and "freedom" and "violence" and the various -isms (racism, sexism, casteism, colonialism etc.) As a young person I worried a lot about whether I was "complicit in perpetuating the unjust structures of power". Or, what does it mean to have an "equal" relationship with your romantic partner? How can I make sure I'm not being casteist/sexist in my daily interactions? Was I perpetuating oppression by working for a big multi-national corporation? Is silence on social issues equal to violence? If everything is ultimately a social construct and "arbitrary", what should I actually *believe* and which principles should guide my behavior in real life? How to I deal with all the "problematic" things I actually seemed to want but was denying that I wanted - money and power and sex and fame? How and why should I change my behavior in this regard? I agonized endlessly about such issues in my 20s. And I became severely depressed, nihilistic, cynical, confused and completely lost.
It took many hours of Zen meditation and many readings of meaningness (and other Buddhist literature written from similar view-point) to sort all of this out.
Whatever you end up choosing, I think it's worth seriously considering a longer section addressing "what David calls philosophy" — in the few cases I personally know of people being turned off your writing, it's because they find your characterization of philosophy frustratingly broad. There are a lot of thinkers (Rorty, Heidegger, Dreyfus, Nietzsche, Nishitani) whom many/most would call 'philosophers' and whom I see as operating in a very similar spirit that you are. Unconcealing foolishness of others' thoughts.
I continue to elaborate/defend your take in social company but thought I'd point out a recurring pattern. I think you can preserve the strength of the thesis while still acknowledging this point.