What Is Philosophy For?

You'll need to know when the time comes to 'call the philosopher.'

Everyone loves Doctors of Philosophy, right? Flannery O’Connor captures that widespread enthusiasm with her usual verve in this snippet from her short story, Good Country People.

She had arrived at the age of thirty-two and she had a Ph.D. in philosophy and a wooden leg.

She was a large blonde girl who had an eye that went to the side, and she usually wore a green sweatshirt with a stretched-out neck and a pair of faded slacks. Her mother was always trying to tell her that if she would wear a dress, she would look like a different person, but Joy was not interested in looking like a different person.

...When Joy had gone to the university, she had changed her name legally to Hulga. Her mother had discovered it on the top of an envelope that had come from the university... Joy had chosen it being the ugliest name she could think of, but it had taken her the right length of time to think of it. She had a Ph.D. in philosophy and she knew how to choose a name.

...She considered the name her highest creative act. One of her major triumphs was that her mother had not been able to find the envelope again. Mrs. Hopewell had spent two hours looking for it. She said to Mrs. Freeman that night, ‘I can’t imagine why she chose that name unless it’s because she thought it sounded like a saw hitting a knot.’

‘She’s thirty-two,’ Mrs. Freeman said.

‘She has a Ph.D. in philosophy,’ Mrs. Hopewell said.

That’s a delicious passage, but if you prefer the more lowbrow send-up, here’s the Indigo Girls:

And I went to see the doctor of philosophy
With a poster of Rasputin and a beard down to his knee
He never did marry or see a B-grade movie
He graded my performance, he said he could see through me
I spent four years prostrate to the higher mind
Got my paper and I was free.

I think O’Connor and the Indigo Girls would ultimately diverge quite a bit in their views of philosophy. Hulga exemplifies the temptations of intellectual pride, which is not an indictment of philosophy as such, though it’s surely a warning worth heeding. The Indigo Girls are more sweeping in their condemnation of the pursuit of wisdom.

There’s more than one answer to these questions pointing me in a crooked line
And the less I seek my source for some definitive
Closer I am to fine.

The Girls don’t want life’s many experienced truths synthesized into a harmonious whole. “Just live!” seems to be their advice. Which might seem charming, if they were dancing through meadows, cuddling puppies, racing to bind the wounds of hapless beggars. It might even be wise, if their “crooked line” is understood in contrast to the “foolish consistency” of a tiny, zealous mind. G.K. Chesterton notes in Orthodoxy that it is reason, not poetry, that pushes people to insanity, and as often happens, he’s at least landed in the ballpark of an important truth. An obsession with consistency can be dangerous, especially when combined with an intense need to understand everything and always be right. That’s a recipe for dangerous fanaticism. By all means, dance through meadows instead of becoming Rasputin.

“Just living” carries its own perils, though. It doesn’t give you much to work with in moments of agonizing, life-or-death indecision. It can also leave you a little too comfortable when “going with the flow” might draw you into something morally monstrous or possibly suicidal. You’re a sitting duck for advertisers, demagogues, con men. People often feel deep remorse late in life for decisions that seemed good at the moment when “life” dangled them in their faces. Finally, modern people seem prone to reaching a point, perhaps in middle age when grief and disappointment start to weigh, where it’s hard to see much purpose in any of it. Does it even matter what we do? What’s the point of anything? “Just living” may lead us into those eddies, or make it hard to escape when we land in them.

Maybe we need “the doctor of philosophy” after all. (Not the Rasputin one.)

Mary Midgley wrote a book in 2018, which shared a title with this essay. She was 99 years old. She did in fact marry, raised three sons, and likely saw many B-grade movies. She was also a member of “philosophy’s first girls’ club,” a remarkable set of friends who met at Oxford in the 1930s, which also included Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, and Iris Murdoch. So she knew a bit about life, but also philosophy, and she doesn’t think it’s worthless.

Midgley argues that philosophy is not an esoteric, Ivory Tower pursuit. Instead, she compares it to something extremely practical and banal: plumbing. It’s intellectual plumbing, if you will. The point is something like this. In the day to day, most people don’t think much about their pipes. But if your pipes leak, burst, or get completely clogged with gook, you might suddenly be very interested in the Deep Wisdom of the plumber-man, and grateful for his help. Midgley thinks philosophy is a bit similar: not something normal people need to think about continually, but something that’s needed when things break. When a civilization has a crisis of meaning, civil tensions, grave injustices, or a constitutional crisis, it’s time to call the philosopher. Maybe he can help.

I don’t think that’s the whole story about philosophy, and this account does raise the question: When have human societies ever drifted along peacefully without any troubles, even for a short while? Nevertheless, I do find Midgley’s analogy to be a refreshing corrective, not only to the Indigo Girls’ insouciant carelessness about truth, but also to the Hulgas of the world, who want to own philosophy as something esoteric, detached, and far beyond the ken of the common man. Philosophy should not be like that. You can contemplate the wisdom of the spheres; I’m all for it! But if you can’t say anything helpful about the questions that genuinely trouble your own age, you’re probably not a very good philosopher. There have been quite a few bad philosophers across history, mostly forgotten now since they had nothing worthwhile to say.

It’s important to be clear here on what I’m not saying. I’m not restricting philosophy to things that are of universal interest. It’s okay to be fascinated by things that other people take for granted or just never consider. I’m not suggesting that philosophers can’t have their own esoteric lingo (plumbers do!), or that they’re failing if ordinary people can’t understand them all the time. Philosophy is hard, at least if one genuinely cares about the truth, and accessibility isn’t generally the highest priority for a philosophical tract.

Nevertheless, philosophy needs to retain points of contact with things that matter to real people living normal lives. When it does that, philosophers should be able to prove their value by speaking to the questions that are genuinely troubling in their own age. Their experience in applying human reason to hard questions should enable them, at the very least, to supply conceptual clarity, but hopefully also to fertilize the discussion with more timeless truths drawn from the wisdom of ages. That, you see, is one of the great virtues of philosophy: Because it is concerned with consistency and synthesis, it can potentially integrate truths from many different eras, cultures, and great thinkers, into a cohesive whole. That will probably be more helpful in a civilizational crisis than anything the Indigo Girls learned dancing through meadows.

That leads us to a further question, though. How do you tell when a philosopher is giving good advice? It’s easier in the plumber’s case; if the sink is working again, and the brown stain no longer spreading across the ceiling, that’s a good sign that he knew what he was doing. The philosopher’s success is harder to measure. It’s already been established that a fancy university degree is no guarantee of anything. You clearly don’t want to live your life by the compass of Hulga, or the Rasputin dude. An obsession with rarified reason often makes people crazy. How then do we identify the good philosophers, the ones who can season our conversations with real wisdom?

Another strategy is to look beyond particular philosophers and consider who is speaking on behalf of a philosophical tradition with a somewhat settled view of the world. If we see the matter that way, it’s more possible to consider where different convictions or commitments seem to be leading people. Who’s got it together? Understanding that weak and selfish humans can be found everywhere, where are the virtuous people thickest on the ground? Which ideas, by contrast, seem to have led people (or whole civilizations) off cliffs?

Beyond that, it’s worth considering the success of a particular view in extending itself both through time and across different cultures. Understanding that “foolish consistency” is a potential pitfall for philosophy, it stands to reason that the risks will at least be mitigated if a view has succeeded in surviving a long time and extending itself across a wide range of cultures. I’m not suggesting that this test is absolutely reliable, because bad ideas do sometimes hang around for a very long time. But it’s a plus. It’s harder to get traction with a worldview that’s just obviously bonkers.

Finally, the strongest philosophical “candidates” will be those that can speak to different kinds of questions. It can give insight into questions of right and wrong, but also muse on “why is there something rather than nothing?” Philosophy is about synthesis, after all. The most successful traditions will be the ones that can consistently synthesize a very wide range of truths. My Thursday essay will lay out a bit of a map, suggesting the big-picture “kinds of truths” that we may want philosophy to answer. For now, I’ll just note that a philosophy is far less likely to lead us into “rational insanity” if it’s broad as well as deep.

Because the philosopher, in the end, is quite different from the plumber. The plumber is a specialist; he’s interested in pipes. The philosopher is supposed to be interested in everything. Explaining the universe is his not-so-modest province (and he’s also supposed to have views on why the universe exists in the first place).

I sometimes humorously refer to philosophy PhDs as The True Doctors. It’s partly a self-mock, and partly reveling in the absurdity of universities now declaring people “Doctors of Philosophy” when they specialize in textiles or hotel management. But there’s also a small aspirational note. Philosophers should be “truth doctors.” If we’re not at least trying to be that, there’s no point in the discipline at all.

Christian philosophers have tried, though. With considerable success! I’ll turn to that subject next.