#doing philosophy

[scienceknowledge]

So you want to become a philosopher?

      I don’t like to define philosophy in simple rigid terms, or break down an art into a science, but here are some guiding principles of philosophy.

     Philosophy began with a need to know.  Philosophy stands for Philo - lover, and sophy - wisdom. A direct translation is “lover of wisdom”. Philosophers are in the pursuit of not just knowledge, but wisdom. Is there a difference? Yes. Think of it this way: A databank, library, or database is knowledgeable, but not wise. Wisdom takes more than just knowing.       Philosophers are lovers of wisdom and choose to pursue the mysteries in life with a thoughtful mind. Although philosophers pursue questions, they do not directly seek to implement answers. Pre-modern philosophy liked to link passions and logic, while modern philosophy chooses to weight logic over passion. 

The questions which philosophers choose to pursue are:

1. Permanent and 2. Universal

A question such as: 

“Is Donald Trump a good president?”

although viewed from a philosophical perspective, is  not a true philosophical question. Donald Trump is temporary. A more philosophical question would be:

 ”Does electing a sovereign of the people really make life better?”

Or

Do government systems work?

These questions are both permanent and universal.

Doing philosophy requires:

1. Open-mindedness 

One must acknowledge their ignorance and give credit where credit is due (generosity principle). A true philosopher believes any idea, no matter how far-fetched or far from your beliefs, has a chance of being true.

2. Devotedness to the truth

A philosopher seeks the truth, the whole truth, and only the truth, and acknowledges the truth when present, regardless of ego.

      Philosophy is a primarily rational analysis of things and ideas in the world. Things that exist and can be sensed, as well as all things in which can be idealized by the mind. The primary tool of the philosopher is the mind, and tools of the mind are things like logic principles, heuristics, and sometimes a bit of intuition.

      Although this is a broken down and defined explanation of (doing) philosophy, philosophy does not begin or end with this definition. Philosophy is an endless art, and art is undefinable, lest by subjective analysis. Doing these things does not make you a philosopher, and not all philosophers do these things. If I were to give one simple sentence defining philosophy it would be the following: 

“Collection of [fluid] knowledge through experiential learning from direct interaction with physical and mental entities.”

[wokestonecraft]

My professor is talking about the first book in the republic and he keeps using women in his examples. “So should you return to your friend her weapon? When she has gone insane? Is that just??” Honestly, king. Ps I want a crazy friend to lend me her weapons

[letters-of-a-romanticist]

Sapere Aude

When Kant woke up from his dogmatic slumber he wrote one of the most important and controversial books of Philosophy. He spent ten years writing it, and another three making a second, revised, edition of the Book. The Critique of Pure Reason (CPR from now on) gave us an insight into the revolution of epistemology, akin to Copernicus’s revolution in astronomy: Knowledge would not only come from the outside, but as a synthesis of both Reason and Experience. It would be made possible thanks to a priori categories which would determine all of the possible judgements and experiences we may have of the world. This work would wake and shake German philosophers for the next century, and keep philosophy students up at night for a few hundred years more.

This might sound like the beginning of an essay to most of you, and it is. It is not, however, an essay on the CPR, but rather a defense of Philosophy as a discipline, as a way of life, and as a source of valuable knowledge (not just fun facts). With this essay I hope to explain why I personally believe that we live in a society that has given us a double edged sword, or rather a barrel of them. These swords seemed like good solutions to the problems of yesterday, and they might be a bit rusty; they need polishing. When Kant famously proclaims “Sapere Aude!” in his essay on the Enlightenment, he unleashed a curse and a salvation. He told us to think for ourselves, and not to hold on to old dogmas. He begged us to stop being lazy, to stop being cowards. He begs us to dare to think for ourselves and to revoke the yoke of nonage (one’s inability to use one’s own understanding without another’s guidance). This is made evident through the myriads of people that just bleakly bleat the words of another’s book, essay, teachings, statements, opinions. Kant says that this is acceptable if you are able to later point out holes, contradictions or errors, or to build upon the other’s work. Bear with this bleating for now.

Kant’s message is misleading if misinterpreted. I could, for example, say that Kant is pleading for us to break free of education from others, to distinguish one’s opinion from that of others simply because it is another’s opinion, and not one’s own. A second interpretation, which is my own, is that Kant encourages us to study these old dogmas, but not to cling to them. To respect another’s opinion because it is not my own, but not cling to that other opinion. Simply put, Sapere Aude means that creating as well as receiving information and opinions are equally important. That we may learn from others’ mistakes, so that others may learn from ours. I am not a kantian scholar (evident by the means through which I publish this essay), and I am surely not hoping to proclaim my interpretations as absolute truths. 

So Dare to use your understanding, not your mere opinions. Here is where I draw a line in my interpretation. Kant does not seem to tell us to accept or examine every single opinion that is put before us, and we may expect the same; not every opinion is valuable knowledge. Why? Who decides what is valuable and what not? I dare to say that this criteria cannot be arbitrary, and that it somehow should tie in with Kant’s exposition of knowledge in the CPR. But isn’t this whole development of thought already arbitrary? Subjective? I can’t say for certain, because Kant does intend to set down the ground rules for a unified approach to knowledge through a universal (human) capacity to reason, but isn’t this also dogmatic? I can only make these questions because my opinions on this subject are rather determined by a later but similar approach to epistemology. This approach, however, I hope can help others see a little bit of meaning in what I am about to say below.

Yesterday I made a mistake. I judged a group of people because I knew a partial account of a story which I believed to be true. This mistake is an easy one to make, it is a mistake that I have made before, and vowed to never make it again. After I calmed down, I asked for a second interpretation of the story; I went to another source on a parallel, if not opposite, side of the story. I was told a very different version of the story which helped me realize that a series of misunderstandings were the whole source of the problem. It made me furious to realize that I did not look for a full version of the story before making judgements. I had placed my friend’s account above the search for truth, not because I believed her, but because I trusted that her account was a true account. I wanted to believe her, so I trusted her account. The difference might not be clear so let me make a brief explanation for it.

When I want to believe something, I look for reasons to believe that something. In this case, my reason for believing her was only that I trusted her. Descartes would have slapped me full across the cheek because trust is the one thing that makes believing so dangerous. We must be doubtful even when the information comes from a reliable source, until either enough information is accrued, or the source is found to be reliable. therefore I needed more reasons to trust my friend, and the only thing that made her trustworthy was that she hadn’t lied to me yet. 

So now I’ve decided to put myself before the situation, not so that I may benefit from others’ suffering, rather to learn as much as possible from this mistake, and hopefully help others to avoid making it. At the end of the day, this is the only thing that I can do to improve the situation that plagues Models of United Nations in Colombia; To prefer neutrality and better understanding of a situation before rash acting, to think before I act, as Mr. Covey would have put it, and Kant before him. To never forget that we are all humans, and to never forget that we all deserve to be seen, heard, and helped, no matter how radical we are, without this open mindedness being a necessary and sufficient condition for inconsistency (which I hope will be a theme for another day).

Philosophy, and specifically Kant, has helped me through some tight spots. However, I have not tied my opinions exclusively to him. Philosophy is a work in progress, and an expanding one at best. As a Student I am compelled to learn, and to keep my mind open, which is something that I have only been able to do through my studies, through reading and hearing philosophy. This, I hope is the one thing that I hope to pass on: keeping an open mind. So hard to do in this age where there are so many opinions and egos that superimpose themselves to achieve some sort of recognition (Even by posting this essay i am striving for that same goal) and yet we have inconclusively arrived at a point where everybody with access to the Internet and Facebook, tumblr, Twitter, etc. can be fed a myriad of disinformation, partial truths, sensationalistic imagery, etc. The Search for truth has become a scroll down a Facebook newsfeed, reposting articles without reading them, just because the title caught our attention. We have stopped daring to think, we have stopped our search for the truth, and settled for a half assed interpretation of Kant’s response to the question “What is Enlightenment?”. We no longer are enlightened, we are going through a wave of obscurantism which I hope can be solved through Philosophy. I hope in vain, with so many Humanities departments being closed, but alas, I am a Philosopher by heart: I can only dream of a better world.

[ninjaruski]

Something that pisses me off to no end about my field (philosophy) is that we have an entire area dedicated to investigating how we interpret texts. This area is called hermeneutics, and it makes me angry because most philosophers have some rudimentary training in it, if only to engage in the interpretation of the thinkers in their chosen sub-field.

Let me put it another way, to do philosophy in a chosen field, which includes creating original work, most philosophers move beyond understanding and interpreting a chosen thinker, and into reinterpreting that thinker. In order to demonstrate the continuity of their reinterpretation with the accepted reading of that thinker, a given philosopher must use hermeneutics to indicate how their reading aligns or expands upon the existing readings.

Now, it is not the presence of hermeneutics that pisses me off, but the complete and total way in which philosophy doesn’t bother to use it. As an example, we have a number of social conflicts in the United States that, while rooted in other structures of oppression, rely upon particular hermeneutical interpretations of texts in order to make their philosophical or social point.

More specifically, we can think of the interpretation of the second amendment by gun control advocates as something worthy of hermeneutic analysis. By teasing out the hermeneutics of the second amendment as deployed by gun control advocates, philosophers could indicate how this interpretation has emerged for the purposes of advancing a particular ideology, as opposed to being a “faithful” reading of the second amendment as these advocates claim.

Hell, philosophers should engage in a hermeneutical study of the Constitution itself, just to demonstrate the problematics of the interpretations that people are hanging their ideologies on.

I’m calling out the philosophers, and not any of the other fields that use modes of hermeneutics, because the philosophers are chiefly concerned with how certain hermeneutic readings generate different meanings of the text. A good philosopher doesn’t just do a hermeneutic reading of a text, they indicate how the hermeneutic changes those things that emerge from the text. In this light, a good philosopher could indicate how a hermeneutic strategy deployed by a pundit changes what emerges from the text they’re drawing upon.

This is not a new thing, as there are people who use philosophical hermeneutics all the time: they’re called layers, and they use it to interpret laws as text. The entire fucking movements of legal positivism and legal interpretivism are grounded in the major figures of philosophical hermeneutics, which is to say that lawyers receive some of the hermeneutical training of philosophers, but none of the philosophical training to anticipate the effect of their hermeneutics on the overall social situation. I mean, you only have to look at the supreme court for evidence.

My field makes me so angry some times.

[ninjaruski]

Marx once said “Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it," which I take to mean that interpreting the world in various ways is a -negative- attribute of philosophy.

I call bullshit: sometimes people need to be shown a new way of seeing (ironically, this is why I like the term "darshana," or "vision" in the Indian philosophical sense), or a new way of interpreting the world -before- they can set about changing it.

I would say Dewey is in agreement with it: if the imagination is the ability to see the actual in light of the possible, and the possible is only made actual when set as an end in view, then -seeing- is tantamount if we want to get around to -doing-.

Now, I might agree with marx if he said "philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways to -each other-," then we might be on to something, as vision and interpretation are useless if they can't be communicated outside of a specialized group. And this is something that Dewey could get on board with: in one of his pieces on education, he makes the unambiguous point that concepts are only valuable if they can direct action, or be deployed in action. By this, I take Dewey to mean that theory is only valuable if it can be used. 

Too often academics in any field, and not just philosophers, have a tendency to forget that the purpose of the academy was to generate the tools to enable people to live more fulfilling lives, not to trade in abstraction without relation to experience. No where is this more prevalent than philosophy, the so called life of the mind.

Thus, if philosophy is going to do anything, it must be public, in the Deweyan sense, where it is a collaborative effort that generates tools that can be used in action, whether that action be the resistance of oppression, or deeper self-knowledge. 

[ninjaruski]

Regarding the dissertation, is there a certain way that philosophers should write out their theory to make their positions stronger? IE ontologically? I like ontology and for some reason I'm just comfortable with it.. does this matter to the reviewers? Or is a deontological approach just as good? I just wanna know which approach would help me gain more respect within philosophy.

How you write your arguments, and the methods you choose, should correspond with the subject matter of your works. In general, though, if you are going to make a claim about something, then that claim should be fully supported, and each part should have a visible relation to the overall conclusion. Put simply, “good” philosophical writing is a matter of making explicit any of your implicit assumptions about your subject, thoroughly explaining the grounds for your claims, and ensuring that your argument is consistent through-out. One of the best pieces of advice I can give you is “when in doubt, assume that your reader doesn’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

As for ontology versus deontology? Deontology is a method and ontology is a set of assumptions about the essence or nature of a thing. Ontological arguments are those arguments that concern the nature or essence of a thing. For example, buddhist interdependence is often called an “ontology of relations,” because it predicates the nature of things as the result of interdependent relations between things that are always shifting and changing, such that nothing has any enduring essence to it. So, in “relational ontology,” relations are the essential nature of a thing.

Deontology, as a method, focuses on the rightness or wrongness of actions in conformity with a social norm. Thus, in deontology, “rightness” is more important than “goodness,” which has led some to argue that a deontological framework for ethics will likely lead to moral absolutism and often ignores the culturally grounded nature of “right” and “wrong,” in its attempts at universality. But another way, the result of an action might be generally positive, but how that action brings about the result, if it falls outside of social norms, determines if the action was right or wrong. Kantians are proponents of deontology, especially in the variations of the categorical imperative. Hobbes, Locke, and Aristotle are also deontologists to an extent.

As for which method would allow you to gain more “respect” in the field? I would say that this is a fundamentally wrong way to approach the practice of philosophy: if you ground the suitability of your arguments in their acceptance by the field in general, you’re likely going to be stuck repeating the party line and merely reinforcing the kinds of structures that many philosophers are actively working against. Put another way, your theory should be fully supported by its premises; you should be able to demonstrate the presence of your theory in lived experience, or in the work of the thinker you’re dealing with; and all elements should come together in a unified whole.

Other advice I might give you is to find a particular philosopher whose methodology is one that you find useful, read their work, and come to thoroughly understand it. One you’ve come to understand that philosopher’s theoretical system, and can articulate it in your own words, you should be able to craft theory like them. Basically, I’m repeating the advice of Motoori Norinaga where poetry is concerned: don’t look to imitate the style of the ancients (or philosophers in this case), as their style was appropriate to their situation. Rather, learn how their style expresses the conditions of their situation (or their philosophy), and then try to do the same in your own work.

[ninjaruski]

what movies do you feel are the most engaging philosophically speaking?

It depends entirely on what you mean by “philosophically engaging.” If you are concerned with what movies have the capacity for provoking philosophical discussion, I am inclined to say that there is no movie that does not have the capacity for philosophical discussion, if only in the mode of commentary on what kind of culture would create a work of art (and shitty movies are works of art) that expresses a particularly nasty kind of affective quality.

An example, you can have a philosophical discussion about the way in which American Pie articulates white male sexual self-discovery through an aesthetic mode, and presents sexual misadventure as something to be ridiculed rather than as a natural part of self-discovery. Extending this, you can offer commentary on the kind of culture that would choose to represent this affective quality in the form of a work of art and, further, to consider it successful as a work of art.

I do, however, get the feeling that you’re asking me something to the effect of “what movies do you feel are the most philosophically deep,” which is not the question you should be asking. Philosophical depth of a work of art is (if we’re going to listen to Dewey) limited only to the way in which one can engage with the meaning of the movie as articulated by the qualitative unity of the film. In less jargon, the philosophical depth of a movie is limited only by the way we engage with that movie.

Let me give you another example: I find Pacific Rim to be one of the most philosophically engaging pieces of film in decades, due to the way it does intersubjective embodiment and does it right. Del Toro’s emphasis on Jaeger piloting being an exercise in embodiment intersubjectively through a giant fucking robot has allowed me to break hardcore Cartesian dualists through simple analogy of our being embodied in our bodies the way that Rangers are embodied together in their Jaegers. All of this from the few lines of explication of how the Drift works in the film and the visual imagery that accompanies the piloting of the Jaegers across two different pilots.

Let me give another example, Ultron, from Age of Ultron, has a line: “you want to save the world, but you don’t want it to change.” If I’m going to spend time unpacking that one line of dialogue from an AI gone rogue, it pretty much articulates the majority of our approaches to conservation, environmental protection, sustainability. We want to save the world, but we have no intention of changing any of the behaviors that have pushed the world to this point. Hell, you could extend this to “progressives” and “liberals,” and a critique of the movement for Black Liberation. Hell yeah, we want to save all black lives, but we don’t want to change the misogyny, homophobia, colorism, or any of the other issues internal to our community.

I could keep this up all night, but that’s not the point. The point is that any text can be philosophically engaging, it is how you want to engage with the text that makes all the difference. Personally, I find philosophical engagement in almost every piece of media I consume, which makes me particularly annoying (or interesting) to go to movies with. If I’m entertained by something, if something offends me, if it makes me laugh, all of those are points for philosophical engagement by simply asking “why” or “how.”

To be honest, I might not be the best person to get a “serious” philosophical answer out of: I’m fighting the grand uphill battle to get the field of philosophy to take seriously the kind of in-depth work that I’ve done with race and comics, as well as pulling out the philosophical themes in the oft dismissed popular culture. Put another way, the field of philosophy considers itself above analyzing popular culture, as if it’s concerns should be restricted to “important things,” which is bullshit. As philosofly and wolvensnothere can attest, you can engage non-specialist audiences philosophically through popular culture and keep them interested. And this is something philosophy needs to learn.

As cultural texts, there is just so much there in movies that can be explored philosophically: it is only your perspective on the text at hand that limits you. And even then, you can explore why some things aren’t worth thinking seriously about.