Philosophy Everything you've learned in school as “obvious” becomes
less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe.
Why Philosophy?
I get that question a lot. It’s always been difficult for me to explain adequately, so I’ve been known to just make up a simplistic scenario and say that I was forced to pick a major in my sophomore year of college and I had the most credit hours in philosophy. Hence, my declared major. That’s not entirely inaccurate. I was forced to declare a major at the start of the second semester of my sophomore year at Indiana University, and I did have the greatest number of credit hours in philosophy. That wasn’t just by happenstance, however. I knew from the time I was a sophomore in high school that I wanted to study philosophy. Moreover, I wanted to be a philosopher.
I discovered formal philosophy my second year in high school. That discovery was entirely accidental and happened one afternoon at the Central Library in Evansville, Indiana. Evansville was the closest thing to a large city anywhere near the farming community in which I lived as a child. The discovery was a result of my curiosity.
I suppose if one word could be used to describe my life, it would curiosity. I am now and for as long as I can remember, just terribly curious. Although that curiosity has generally more and more focused onto certain areas as I’ve grown older, there is still a general curiosity about everything. Along about the third or fourth grade of elementary school, I discovered books and reading as a pastime. History in particular held a great fascination for me, and by the fifth grade I was considered the school’s resident historian. The fifth grade teacher even asked my opinion on a selection of history books that the school board was considering to replace the books we were then using.
So that afternoon my curiosity and my penchant for books led me to pick up a copy of Walter Kaufmann’s Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. I read and reread Kaufmann’s analysis of Nietzsche, his writings, and his personality, and it is no wonder that this philosopher would dominate my thinking during the remainder of my high school years. Nietzsche had himself considered nothing sacred and had questioned everything. His questioning was a counterpart to my curiosity and my desire to go beyond what was being presented to me in school.
In Nietzsche I found another person, this one a famous — or infamous — philosopher who was accepted as a philosopher in academic circles whose ideas warranted serious consideration and who was concerned, as Kaufmann wrote in his book The Portable Nietzsche, “. . . primarily with the individual who is not satisfied with accepted formulas.”
As a junior in high school, I had my first exposure to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson’s statement in his essay Self Reliance to the effect of “I refuse to pay for that to which I have intrinsic right,” struck a very responsive chord in me. So, too, did his claims in the same essay that “. . . our arts, our occupations, our marriages, our religion, we have not chosen, but society has chosen for us.”
As much as I enjoyed the essays of Emerson, it was Henry David Thoreau who had the most effect upon me. My high school literature textbook included excerpts from Walden and Civil Disobedience. I could not for the life of me figure out why he had the reputation he had if he wrote material as trite as appeared in the textbook. I soon found out through my own reading that these excerpts were not at all representative of his writings.
The individualism which showed through in these two essays as well as that found in his essay Walking and the spirit embodied in his Slavery in Massachusetts and A Plea for Captain John Brown combined to strike such a sympathetic chord in me that I started questioning almost everything presented to me in my daily life at school and home. I questioned things so much that hardly a day would go by in which I did not engage some teacher in some argument over some issue that was so intense that word of the argument would spread all over the high school.
One such issue was the ancient Greek philosophers. Our history books in high school mentioned them merely to assert that they were great and intelligent men. These textbooks wrote of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and even Parmenides, Heraclitus, Anaximenes, and Anaximander. However, they never said exactly what it was these men had done to be ranked so highly. As a secondary school student, I was simply informed to equate these names with greatness: no reason given.
At the time I read of a high school school student in Westchester County, New York, who answered the question Who was Socrates? with the answer: Socrates was a man who taught people by asking questions. The student’s answer was marked wrong on the test. The correct answer: Socrates was a Greek philosopher.
It was not until I was a senior in high school and after I had done a fair amount of reading in existentialism that I understood why these philosophers had been singled out over others such as Augustine, Aquinas, Empedocles, Democratis, Epicurus, Marcus Aurelius, or Plotinus. The first group, the ones singled out by the history books, represent the existential moment of Western civilization. One claim of existentialism is that eventually there will come a time in every individual’s life when he will recognize his own consciousness. The individual will reflect upon this and come to realize all of the numbers of choices that are open to him.
Existential Moment
The greatness of the celebrated Greek philosophers lis in the fact that they embodied the existential moment of Western civilization. Up until their time, man’s entire consciousness was preoccupied with simple survival. With the establishment of Greek culture and the security and leisure with accompanied it, mankind now had the time to ask questions concerning metaphysics, ontology, social and political philosophy, ethics, and morality. Someone whose every moment is concerned only with survival has no time for or even interest in philosophical questions. The security of Greek civilization permitted time for philosophy.
One of the first problems encountered in the existential moment is the realization that “. . . maybe life is not self-evidently meaningful.” It was through interpretation, analysis, and discussion of this observation and its many implications that the pre-Socratics, Socrates himself, and the Socratic philosophers achieved their fame.
Suicide
There is danger in this realization. Suicide may be the greatest danger for if life is not meaningful, what is the point of living? Suicide is also the worst possible outcome of this realization.; it is a final, permanent, defeat. Serious consideration of suicide is the sharpest existential moment a person can have; if survived, this moment can spark profound personal growth. The trip to the edge of the deep black canyon of suicide is the darkest road any individual can travel in life. If a person gets to the edge, and then decides not to go over, he may return to the rest of us with brilliant new insight. A threat of suicide, or a failed attempt, may actually represent an opportunity for intense inward spiritual growth for the victim, family, and friends, even though the process may be extremely frightening and very unpleasant. Suicide becomes a tragedy only when it succeeds.
Why do people commit suicide? Why do they want to die? They don’t actually want to die. There have been many studies of this question. The clear answer that emerges is that people who commit suicide do not actually want to die; rather, they have reached a point where their present life is unendurable, and they see no way to change it. They are in pain, and they desperately seek to end the pain. Under these circumstances suicide is viewed as the lesser of two evils: a quick, clean, relatively painless death in the face of death by the slow, grim, grinding misery of everyday life.
They seek compassion and find it nowhere. We can, however, draw upon the riches of religious experience for this compassion. Quakers in their Meetings rely on compassion from other members of the Meeting and from God. They stand spiritually naked before God, whether they speak in the Meeting or not, and seek His compassionate understanding of their lives. We cannot do it alone: the best philosophy to adopt is one step at a time, holding God's hand.
Quakerism, based on direct experiential knowledge, both of our own spirituality and of God, is an excellent example. Another is Buddhism. The central idea of leading a life at all levels in a meditative state of uncritical acceptance of what is, is also very effective in bringing about the kinds of inner changes that can facilitate inward personal growth. Within Judaic and Christian tradition, there are the tremendously rich resources of Holy Scripture, the Bible. One need only read the first three verses of Isaiah 43, where God makes a promise of his deep and lasting guardianship of each us, to be comforted in a way that can open one to life with a totally new perspective.
What is Philosophy?
Philosophy, from the Greek for “love of wisdom,” is a special passion to understand. It involves a mode of inquiry that emphasizes questioning fundamental assumptions, considering things logically, and thinking things through as completely as possible. Philosophy inquires into the nature of knowledge, reasoning, and human values, both moral and aesthetic. Philosophy also considers what sorts of things might most reasonably be said to exist. Philosophy looks systematically at fundamental questions all of us have thought about at one time or another:
These questions result in a critical examination of our convictions, beliefs, and prejudices. Philosophy raises problems concerning the most familiar things in our lives, including authority, obligation, thinking, perception, physical objects, and religion. Where it fails to provide definitive solutions to these problems, it at least suggests unsuspected possibilities that enlarge our conception of the world and enrich our intellectual imagination.
- What should we do and how should we live? (ethics, social and political philosophy)
- What kinds of world do we live in? (metaphysics)
- How do we know things? (epistemology and logic)
- What answers have great thinkers of the past given to such questions? (history of philosophy)
Studying Philosophy
There was a lot of reading and a lot of writing. Each class typically required upward of a half dozen books to be read and at least that many papers to be written.
The kind of paper students are asked to write in most philosophy classes is generally different from those written for other college classes. Philosophy papers didn't contain as many references to outside sources. Certainly, quotes had to be sourced and the work of others acknowledged, but philosophy papers placed more emphasis on the ability to give good arguments for positions on philosophical questions than on finding good sources to quote or finding other peoples' work to summarize. Learning to give clear, sound arguments is a crucial part of learning to write good philosophy papers.
Another trait which distinquishes philosophy classes from other college classes is logic. I don't mean that other academic disciplines do not value logic, but here logic must be distinguished from the construction and presentation of clear and sound arguments. In philosophy, logic is an interesting object of study in its own right. At its most formal, logic involves studying the structure of arguments in the way in which a mathematician studies an abstract system of numbers, and in this sense logic can be a branch of mathematics. The study of logic is very formalized and reminded me of geometry or calculus.
Philosophy after College
What do you do with a degree in philosophy? I get that question a lot, too. The answer is that you do what everyone else with a degree does: you look for work and ways to support yourself.What I do for a living has nothing to do with my degree in philosophy. I do, however, like having a degree in philosophy and would not change that for a moment. The philosophy program at Indiana University was hard, and I take some well deserved pride in having successfully completed it.
I will readily admit that philosophy appears to be an obscure subject, albeit a profound one perhaps, but still of little practical value. One of the things philosophy demonstrates, however, is that there is a difference between appearance and reality: things sometimes appear to be a certain way, when in fact they are not that way at all.
Being able to give clear and valid arguments is not at all confined to philosophy or philosophy classes. Studying philosophy is one of the best ways to acquire that skill, however. On every job that I've ever held, at one point or another during an evaluation prepared by a supervisor, I have received compliments on my verbal and written communications. I express myself well. Studying philosophy developed that skill.
Employers do not hire specific academic majors even in technical fields. They hire people with a particular major and particular skills. Employers rank such factors as the ability to get things done, writing skills, initiative, and dependability significantly higher than the applicant’s academic major.
The instructors in my paralegal classes expected their students to be capable of careful analysis and deductive reasoning, precisely the skills emphasized in the study of philosophy. The Law School Admissions Test replaced sections on math problems and English grammar with sections on logic, reasoning, and analysis. While logic at Indiana University was itself a separate and distinct field of philosophy which dealt exclusively with these skills, in fact all the philosophy courses I took involved and allowed the student to improve these skills.
We live in a time when we must all deal with complex life situations that have the potential to overwhelm us. I believe that my study of philosophy has had direct practical value in coping with the complexity of modern life. Acquaintance with philosophical problems and acquisition of the skills required to deal with them have proven invaluable to me in virtually all my undertakings. These skills include the ability to ask intelligent questions, to define issues precisely, to construct and analyze arguments, to expose hidden assumptions, to develop an open mind toward ideas other than my own, and to write and speak with precision, coherence, and clarity.
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