How I Approach Philosophy to Make Sense of 3,000 Years of Critical Thought
A three-legged approach that makes sense to me
How can we think about and make sense of philosophy?
Even a better question: WHY should we learn and think about philosophy?
I’m not a professional philosopher. I’m not trained as one and I do not earn my living as one.
However, I still feel that thinking about the matters that philosophers of the past wracked their brains about is probably one of the most important things I can do with the time and energy I have left on this earth.
I adopt the three-legged approach that French philosopher Luc Ferry adapts in his book “Gençler İçin Batı Felsefesi” [in Turkish, translates as “Western Philosophy for the Youth”. Click here for the French original].
3 Questions of Luc Ferry
Philosophy consists of three answers to three different but related sets of questions:
What is the nature of existence? What exists?
What is ethics? What is good and bad?
What is liberation? How can we transcend our limitations and live happy and productive lives guided by wisdom?
The reason I feel philosophy is still indispensable in our day is that, as a professional technical communicator who worked for Fortune 100 software companies for decades, I don’t believe science and technology can answer any of these questions satisfactorily.
The problem is, these questions are important for me. If they weren’t, there would be no problem with hi-tech’s inability to show me how to live a life of wisdom.
I don’t care if someone invents a new algorithm to double the speed of data transfers. But I do care if there can be a new humanism to prevent wars and save the environment.
For me technology is instrumental; philosophy is vital.
Etymology is not Enough
If you take philosophy in its etymological definition as “love of wisdom (philo + sophia),” spending time reading philosophy books and watching YouTube videos comes across as yet another “hobby,” as another hedonistic exercise in pleasure.
That’s why the etymological definition is not very useful because it’s more than doing something pleasurable for me. God knows, I can easily think of a few other things more pleasurable than trying to understand what on earth a Nietzsche or a Kant is talking about. Examples: doing nothing and goofing off, watching Netflix, eating and drinking with my friends, playing chess or backgammon, traveling, playing my guitar, meditating, etc.
But without answering the above three questions, no matter what I do, I feel like I’m wasting my time.
A Better Definition via Cündioğlu
So a better definition might be: philosophy is the discipline of THINKING about the world by using CONCEPTS instead of BELIEVING in the world through SYMBOLS.
(I owe this formulation to what I came to understand while listening to the lectures of Turkish philosopher Dücane Cündioğlu even though I‘m not claiming that this is a correct summary of his position. But there is no doubt that I’m inspired and energized by his teachings in many ways.)
In this, philosophy (which was something akin to “science” in antiquity and was referred to as “natural philosophy” by Aristotle instead of “physics”) is set in opposition to religion. Thus we can say that philosophical thinking is non-religious thinking since religion is about believing and obeying and not about thinking.
Let’s dive in a little more…
Different Methods
By “thinking” I mean the kind of reasoning that can PROVE a proposition either true or false.
In religion, you have to believe in X, Y, or Z.
In philosophy, you have to “show it to me.”
If we don’t make that distinction, “thinking” loses its significance as a qualifier since all theologians are also thinkers in the generic sense of the term.
Different Goals
In terms of their final goals, philosophical and religious thinking differ as well.
Philosophical/scientific thinking’s goal is to explain the world in order to arrive at the truth, the kind of truth that can be proven universally correct.
That’s why philosophy is about universals, is about concepts, and not about particular myths, symbols, and individual entities. Newton’s laws guide all OBJECTS in the world, not only your six-year-old hair brush sitting on the walnut nightstand which you bought for $135 after visiting your cousin at his… etc.
Religion (or “revealed knowledge”) on the other hand is about particular subjects, it’s about you and me (which was such a revolutionary idea when Christianity came up with it). Its final goal is not explaining the truth but about securing a certain type of behavior (obedience) from its believers.
According to Spinoza
Here is how Jewish-Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) explains what the final goal of any religion is:
“ [T]he crucial point being that revealed knowledge tells us how to behave; so that if all goes well it is obeyed [my emphasis, U.A.], whereas natural knowledge says what is the case; so that if all goes well it, it is true [my emphasis, U.A].” [From the Preface to Tractatus Theologico-Politicus by Baruch Spinoza]
One pitfall here is the futility of trying to “explain” one (religion or philosophy) by reducing it to the other.
Pitfall of Reductionism
You must have seen quite a few books or articles trying to “explain” how quantum physics was actually “foreseen” by or “included” in this or that holy text, an attempt to subsume critical thinking into and under revealed knowledge. There have been those in the past trying to prove that science and yoga, physics and mysticism (see the best-seller The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism by Fritjof Capra), critical thinking and revelatory thinking, scientific method and faith, are all about the “same thing,” namely, different ways of approaching the “same truth” from different angles.
At this point, I agree with Spinoza and Cündioğlu that such reductionism is not necessary because it does not make sense when examined critically. We neither need to explain one in terms of the other nor reject one because of the other. They both have a place in our lives because they have different crucial functions (universal truth vs. sociopolitical obedience). We’ll return to this theme more than once during my other posts to come.
Going back to the three dimensions of philosophy that Luc Ferry outlined.
Three Interlinked Questions: The Logical Steps to Study Philosophy
The question of what exists (the subject of ontology), which inevitably bleeds into the question of how we know what exists (the subject of epistemology), is the most natural and fundamental level of inquiry.
I cannot imagine having lived and not asked this question (“Why there is something instead of nothing?”). Thus starting to dive into philosophy from this springboard feels very natural to me. It’s perhaps like learning arithmetic before learning calculus.
But behind that ontological/epistemological question, there is always the ethical question: how should I act in daily life? How to be a moral person since happiness (the supreme goal of life) is closely related to ethics. Justice, a major arch stone of all human thought (and especially that of Islam), is impossible without moral behavior (at this point I'm using morality and ethics interchangeably).
So it’s no wonder that ethical inquiry runs on the coattails of ontological and epistemological inquiries in philosophy. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that Kant first wrote the Critique of Pure Reason (about categories of thought — or, “how do we know what exists”) and then followed it with the Critique of Practical Reason where he discusses his moral philosophy. The two subjects are closely related, in that order.
But then even answers to these two questions (What’s real? What’s good?) are not enough due to Kant’s famous “categorical imperative” which is “a rule of conduct that is unconditional or absolute for all agents, the validity or claim of which does not depend on any desire or end.”
After finding the answer to how to act ethically, it is natural that one feels the need to live up to it for ethical rather than transactional reasons and adopt it not only for oneself but for everyone else (thus fulfilling both conditions of the categorical imperative).
Search for Liberation or Wisdom
This brings us to a third and transcendental level of inquiry which Luc Ferry calls the “search for liberation” or “wisdom.”
What good is it to know what exists (the first question) and how to behave ethically (the second question) unless one uses such knowledge to be happy not only individually but also as a community (the third question) since no person is an island?
We’ll look at some prerequisites of philosophical inquiry next and ask questions about how to be a good student of philosophy.
See you in the next post.