What is Philosophy For?
Essay by Interintellect host and philosopher Arkadiusz Synowczyk
All of your needs follow from one fundamental fact: you are alive, but you can stop being so. A stone or a galaxy does not have any needs, a plant or a dog has. Because you face this alternative, you need to act to achieve and/or keep certain things – you need to act to support your life (if you are to live). You are alive and mortal, therefore you need food and shelter. But do you need philosophy?
The Philosophical Breakfast Club tells the story of four men – Charles Babbage, John Herschel, William Whewell, and Richard Jones – who met on 19th-century Sunday mornings for “philosophical breakfasts.” At an upcoming Interintellect salon, philosopher, historian, and the author of the book – Dr. Laura J. Snyder – joins Arkadiusz Synowczyk to discuss how the four plotted, and to a remarkable extent, realized a new scientific revolution.
Every need of yours depends on your nature. You need to eat because you have organs which run on calories. You need oxygen because you have a brain which becomes damaged and dies without it. Therefore, to establish whether a human being needs philosophy, his nature should be established first.
Since what fundamentally distinguishes humans from other animals is a distinctive kind of consciousness, it is proper to begin by looking at it. You are a rational animal, but that does not mean you think automatically – you have free, volitional control over your consciousness. You can choose to be in a thoughtless, passive state of perceiving a screen, or you can choose to be in an active state of high focus directed at a new, exciting project. You are also neither infallible nor omniscient. You can think that a given fruit is edible when it is too long past its expiry date. But you need to act and you need knowledge to guide those actions (if you are to support your life). You need to choose this or that project and you need to know which one is a better option. Therefore, you need a guide for using your reason in the task of cognition. But what is devoted to providing such guidance? Epistemology – a branch of philosophy. (It is indispensable to note here that epistemology requires, as a foundation and point of reference, a branch of philosophy that deals with questions such as whether contradictions can exist, or whether reality is governed by causality, i.e., metaphysics. For example, if contradictions can exist and things do not have to act according to their natures, then we cannot establish that, on a pain of a contradiction, a given entity has to behave in such and such a way.)
Having rules for using your consciousness, you can establish another crucial science that offers you guidance. Every day, throughout your whole life, you are constantly confronted with choices to be made: you choose what to eat, where to work, whether to engage in certain relationships, etc. You have to make choices, even if you are on a desert island; evasion of making a given decision is also a choice. But your life is supported by some choices and not by others. A healthy diet supports your life, whereas eating only fast foods can kill you. An honest and supportive friend makes your life richer, whereas a dishonest acquaintance can significantly impair the quality of your life. Therefore, you need to know what to choose – you need a branch of philosophy called ethics.
However, the pursuit and achievement of a given value are not possible in every situation. When you try to buy supposedly healthy food, you can be knowingly deceived into buying a heavily cancerous one instead. When you try to earn a living by performing a given service, you can be left without payment. To be able to pursue and achieve proper values –– to be able to support your life –– you need certain social conditions that enable you to do so. In the above examples, you need at least the police and the court systems. However, to implement these conditions, you need to know what they are. Establishing this is the task of political philosophy.
For an organism of nature such as a human being, having a philosophy is a necessity of living. It is also a necessity in a different sense: everyone does and has to have philosophical views, at least in an implicit form. As a small indicator of that, note how many times have you heard and/or thought things like those: “I know this is right, but maybe ignoring that will not have undesirable consequences,” “I have no evidence that something bad might happen, but it is not excluded, so it is possible,” “reason and body are fundamentally opposites,” “I do not want to disappoint that person, I would be selfish.” All these thoughts represent philosophical views. Even holding that philosophy is useless and that you do not hold any is a philosophical view. Because you need philosophy, pursue it. Because you already have it, check it. You are, therefore, you shall philosophise.
Everyone is a philosopher just like everyone sings. Now most people just sing in their alone in the shower or with friends in their car. As it should be. But a skilled few among us get to sing at a sold-out stadiums with 90,000 people watching in awe. Same with philosophy.