Philosophy, despite not being composed of four letters, is a dirty word. Granted, most parents would not run to cover their children’s ears or write angry letters to NBC should a primetime television show mention the dreaded P-word; instead they choose to guard their children from much more dangerous things, like nudity, as the sight of a bared tit has been known to cause many a child to explode in rage and consequently stumble about with maddened histrionics like tiny Godzillas menacing Japanese cities. But if these parents knew any better—indeed, if they were not already among the corrupted masses foully abusing this word—they would instead protect their children from philosophy.

Philosophy as it is taught in academia, of course, is not quite so worrisome. While it does not quite possess the austere honor of the hard sciences, it can nevertheless be compared with a respectable poetry course. And like poetry, there is good and bad philosophy, and the inane is usually left in the rubbish heap. To continue the comparison with poetry, as a student you may find yourself forced to read dreadful, overly intellectualized tripe like Eliot’s “The Wasteland” or wonderful gems like Wallace Stevens’ “Sunday Morning”—but rarely will you be forced to sift through anything that begins, “There once was a man from Nantuckett…” Likewise, in the average philosophy course, a student will come across throught-provoking and intellectually stimulating arguments from the likes of Descartes, Hume, Wittgenstein, Quine, Popper, and countless others. But the same student will also be subject to dreadful metaphysicians like Spinoza, Leibniz, and Hegel, or the empty pretentions of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, or else the sheer insufferableness of Kant’s writing. And though some of the “philosophy” that manages to weasel its way into literary criticism comes close, none of it is tantamount to the inanity of a Mother Goose rhyme making its way into a poetry course.

Outside of the academy, however, philosophy is almost worse than a Mother Goose rhyme. Mother Goose poetry at least has the audacity to include the poetic device of rhyme. But what passes for philosophy among the masses does not seem to possess even the remotest vestige of proper academic philosophy.

To see my point, one need only look at the metamorphasis of the word metaphysics. Metaphysics used to signify the study of ultimate reality, the construction of vast, a priori theories-of-everything. Now, of course, metaphysics simply brings to mind a particular corner of the local chain bookstore, in which drivel about psychics, karma, astrology, ghosts, magic, and angels predominates. The metaphysics section of the bookstore is, in essence, little more than a collection of the silly things that political left-wingers tend to believe. (The political right has to remain content with the traditional, conservative religion section.)

The same sort of bastardization has occurred with the word philosophy among the masses, although this is a particularly greater loss than the loss of metaphysics. Though philosophical metaphysics is generally more substantive than your garden-variety astrology tome, it is difficult to lament the decline of the one branch of philosophy that produced the most monstrous and silly ideas. I stand with the pragmatist C. S. Peirce in my hatred for the a priori vagaries of the metaphysicians, producing the most elegant and profound theories of reality from thin air and resting them, ultimately, upon nothing but the wisps of their own breath, evidence be damned! Those fanciful constructions of metaphysics that disregard reality almost deserve their modern opprobrium and subsequent association with astrologers and voo-doo magic. But philosophy—that precursor to science, secular ethics, and modern government—deserves a better fate!

What has become of philosophy? Most are ignorant of its greatest thinkers, or at best can name only Plato and vaguely recall something he said about a cave with some dudes in it. To most, philosophy isn’t a matter of study. One need not read philosophy to be a philosopher, according to the person off the street. Philosophy, for all intents and purposes, has become the art of stating your opinion, frequently without any justification or argument at all. If you ask the average person to tell you their philosophy, they won’t try to recount the influence of the pragmatists on their epistemology or the positivists on their renunciation of metaphysics or the deontologists on their ethics. Instead, they will say something incredibly trite and silly, perhaps, “My life’s philosophy is to be happy!” while the real philosophers throughout the ages, long since dead, somehow manage to overhear this and subsequently muster the energy to spin within their graves. No longer is philosophy something that one studies. Philosophy is something you perform while sitting in an armchair while intoxicated or high, without a care for any sort of coherence or intelligibility, and can be boiled down to pulling ideas straight from one’s anus shortly after removing one’s head from there.

Even worse, what little authority real philosophers once had has been passed on to comedians, improbable religious figures, family members, and pop-culture figures. You’ll hear Jesus and “my mom” cited as the “greatest” philosophers by thousands of people before you’ll ever hear a name like Aristotle, Bacon, Descartes, Hume, Kant, or Russell. Imagine the analogue of this sort of tragedy in the sciences: people going about naming their mothers and God as the greatest scientists, people asserting that you don’t need to study science and can advance appropriate and sophisticated arguments concerning the subject matter from an armchair with no background familiarity, and so on. Granted, this is seen to some degree when people cite Kent Hovind as a “scientist” or produce endless conjectures about the existence of souls based on piss-poor understandings of quantum physics. But science is not yet a dirty word. When you do science, you are still doing respectable work. But philosophy is something anyone can do, without any effort at all. All it requires is a heap of bullshit and a mouth willing to spew it.

As a result of this state of affairs, the future for philosophy looks bleak. Perhaps this is a result of its unique niche among human endeavors. Though science is a form of philosophy (some of the earliest “philosophical” questions the early Greeks grappled with have been answered by the sciences, for instance), it has distinguished and separated itself and steals any credit philosophy could siphon away. As a result, philosophy is often seen as focused on those questions that science can’t currently address, or on explicating the process of science and knowledge-building. That is, philosophy is stuck addressing unanswerable questions, or else explicating an epistemic process of theory-testing we already find intuitively easy to perform (but for some reason perplexing to explain). This certainly explains why some of the most intriguing areas of philosophy are on the borderlands of legitimate science, be it the theory of mind and cognitive science or the philosophical implications of obscure theories in quantum physics.

Could this be the problem? Does good, tested philosphy simply become science, leaving only the leftovers with philosophy? We’ve already seen the hatchet-job the advent of science has performed on a priori metaphysics, maligning it as philosophy and leaving it abandoned and alone in far corners of bookstores, only to be overrun by magic and astrology. Maybe for that reason I am wrong to mourn the death of philosophy, for maybe it signals the birth of a more complete science. If that is truly the case, then the death of philosophy is more bittersweet than terrible, and I can take solace in whatever part of it remains, transformed into a science. But still, my primitive mind, with its fears of contamination and impurity, would not like to see philosophy become a parody of itself, bastardized like metaphysics by being inundated with nonsense bearing its name. O, though philosophy may have to die, I wish it could just fade away and be gone, rather than have its pristine corpse twisted and mutilated by religion and spiritualism and UFOs. Is it wrong for me to want philosophy—that queen of the sciences—to at least have a proper burial?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 17th, 2009 at 9:08 PM and is filed under Philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.