The Relevance of Philosophy

Robert Tracinski has written some wise words on the topic of the importance and relevance of philosophy in these times.

Whether we're consciously aware of it or not each of us adopts a particular philosophical view of life and the world. We do this as individuals and we do it corporately as a society. To study philosophy is to consciously examine the views we're adopting and to ask ourselves and others whether those views make sense.

Here's a portion of what Tracinski writes:

The primary purpose of philosophy is to offer guidance for one’s life. It asks questions like: How do we distinguish truth from falsehood? How do we know what is right or wrong? What is the moral purpose of our lives? Do we have a choice over our personality and control over our destiny? When we say philosophy talks about “the meaning of life,” that’s not an understatement. These are the kinds of questions that, depending on the answers, can give meaning and coherence to the course of our lives.

They also make a tangible difference in how we live it. If you don’t think you have control over your life — if you think everything is determined by your genes, upbringing, God or “the system, man” — then you’re not likely to take much action to improve your life. So the questions philosophy deals with are the kind of questions that really matter.

What philosophy does for a single person’s life, it also does for the political life of a nation. If we want to make America great again, for example, we need to know what “greatness” is and how to achieve it. We need to know what government can do, ought to do, and shouldn’t do. All of these questions have huge, life-and-death consequences.

Politics is about ideas and power. Philosophy asks us to follow our ideas to their logical conclusion to see whether those endpoints are really best for ourselves and our nation. It helps us to consider how power should be exercised in a society that aspires to justice.

Tracinski continues:

In that regard, there are whole schools of philosophy — including the ones dominant today — that undermine the role of philosophy itself. They are helping to turn us into an unphilosophical country with an unphilosophical political culture.

The dominant schools today are essentially subjectivist. They encourage you, Oprah-style, to assert “your truth,” which is valid because you feel it, so there’s no need to listen to anyone else. The subjectivists have cultivated a reputation for being “open-minded” and freewheeling, but this actually shuts down discussion. ... this is how we get the peculiar dogmatism of political correctness [according to which]...[t]here is no universal truth, just your ‘perspective,’ as a trans person of color or a left-handed lesbian tugboat worker, or whatever.

And no one else is entitled to question your perspective. It’s true because it’s true for you. If you are aggrieved, the very fact of your grievance validates itself.

If that’s the case, what’s the point of discussing any of it? It’s not for others to question or for you to explain. You just scream out your rage and frustration, and they have to cave.

In other words, so much of what passes for "dialogue" today is merely emotive venting (see the video here, for example). People often are unable or unwilling to give a rational defense of what they believe so they substitute yelling, name-calling, intimidation, censorship, and/or violence, all of which are tacit admissions that they have no good reasons for their beliefs and cannot persuade others to accept them but can only impose them on others by refusing others the opportunity to analyze, debate and promote an alternative point of view.

We see this often whenever matters of race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, evolution, climate change, or politics arise in the classroom or in informal discussions. As soon as an opinion is raised which clashes with conventional orthodoxy, especially the orthodoxy of the left, the dissenter is treated like a heretic or a social leper.

In some cases on university campuses where the heretics have been grad students they've been expelled from their degree programs, and when they've been faculty members they've sometimes been denied tenure or their classes have been disrupted. In cases where the dissenters from the approved opinion have been invited speakers they've often been disinvited or shouted down or even assaulted.

Tracinski concludes:

When we disregard philosophy, when we don’t used reasoned debate to examine our moral and political assumptions, then all that’s left is some kind of appeal to emotion. When you appeal to emotion, as most people do these days, then the only people you can gather to your side are those already inclined to feel the same emotions you do. You end up appealing only to people like you, to those with the same background and upbringing.

College-educated blue-staters will agree with college-educated blue-staters. Blue-collar red-staters agree with blue-collar red-staters.

Actually, in today’s politics, the responses are even narrower, because so much of the political debate is based on an appeal to our emotions about a particular person. Do you love or hate Hillary Clinton? Do you love or hate Donald Trump? That’s all you need to know to determine where you stand in a partisan fight, and even on public policy.

The end of the road for the appeal to emotion is the kind of tribalism and cult of personality we see in today’s politics.

The only cure for it is philosophy.

Well, maybe not the only cure but the ability to think philosophically is certainly an essential part of any cure.