Why Philosophy Matters

Its true and final value: a rant

<rant>

I have been tasked many times to write justifications for why philosophy should continue to exist, always by panicked administrators who, when faced with any kind of difficulty, respond by crawling on their knees to grovel prostrate before the feet of Mammon. “Save us oh Lords of Business!” they whine, “Rain your blessed golden ducats upon our unworthy enterprise!” Yes, selling out even harder is always the right solution.

So I’m told to “write 2500 words on how important philosophy is, but the whole thing needs to be about LSAT scores and what kinds of jobs philosophy majors can get.” The last time I was instructed to do this, the Dean conceded that I could have one paragraph to explain the inherent value of philosophy. This is exactly the same as “tell me about the importance of The Bible in human history, but only in terms of how much money it has made in book sales and film adaptations.” After all, people join the clergy for the big bucks.

Philosophers have had to deal with these idiots since the beginning. In The Politics, Aristotle tells a famous story about Thales, whom he credits as being the first philosopher.

Thales, so the story goes, because of his poverty was taunted with the uselessness of philosophy; but from his knowledge of astronomy he had observed while it was still winter that there was going to be a large crop of olives, so he raised a small sum of money and paid round deposits for the whole of the olive-presses in Miletus and Chios, which he hired at a low rent as nobody was running him up; and when the season arrived, there was a sudden demand for a number of presses at the same time, and by letting them out on what terms he liked he realized a large sum of money, so proving that it is easy for philosophers to be rich if they choose, but this is not what they care about.

Never again am I writing one of those insulting, absurd justifications. Locke said that philosophy is the handmaiden of the sciences. Be that as it may, philosophy is not a handjob for businesses. What follows is the real apologia.

You want to know why philosophy matters? This is the true answer, and the one upon which we must plant our flag: philosophy is the most productive force ever discovered by human beings and we are responsible for modernity. Philosophy is the great gear deep in the heart of the world, and when that gear moves, the Earth trembles.

It is philosophers who created systematic ethics, interconnected principles defensible by reason, instead of mere lists of rules handed out by the gods. We are the ones who developed formal logic and the laws of deductive inference. We are the ones who criticized the divine right of kings and laid down the foundations of constitutional governments. We are the inventors and architects of the scientific method.

SMBC clearly knows about both Bacon’s Novum Organum and Karl Popper.

As Bertrand Russell pointed out over a century ago, philosophy is the first academic discipline, the first show from which all the others are spin-offs. Pythagoras is most famous now for his eponymous theorem, but he called himself a philosopher, not a mathematician. Mathematics hadn’t yet splintered away to become its own field; all scholarship was one. In the Renaissance and early modern period the natural sciences, formerly known as “natural philosophy,” became their own distinctive subject. In 1776 Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, thus becoming the father of economics. At the time Smith was the Chair of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, and was best known for The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759).

In the 19th century, psychology was founded by William Wundt (Professor of Philosophy at the University of Leipzig) and William James (Professor of Philosophy at Harvard). It’s the same story for sociology: established by Auguste Comte, who is also considered the first modern philosopher of science, Emile Durkheim, whose formal education concluded with an agrégation in philosophy, and Karl Marx, a political philosopher who wrote his doctoral dissertation on ancient philosophy. Finally, philosophy is one of the mother disciplines of the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science.

Philosophers have sacrificed everything to birth these things into the world. The Athenian state executed Socrates for questioning authority; Emperor Nero ordered the Stoic philosopher Seneca to commit suicide; a Christian mob tore the neoplatonist Hypatia to pieces and set her on fire; a century later King Theodoric imprisoned, tortured, and executed the neoplatonist Boethius; the Catholic Church burned Giordano Bruno at the stake for hypothesizing the existence of other worlds; monarchists forced John Locke into exile for his political philosophy; the Jewish community drove out Baruch Spinoza for his rationalist pantheism; and the British government twice imprisoned Bertrand Russell for opposing war.

As if we have not been hurt enough as individuals, our entire field is under attack by a managerial class convinced the only purpose of college is getting 22-year-olds their first job.¹ They are cynics who know the price of everything but the value of nothing.

Maybe you agree. Now that we have logic, science, psychology, economics, sociology, and all those fine things, who needs philosophy any more? That’s right, since we have a clutch of golden eggs, let’s kill the goose that laid them. There’s an old joke about why God couldn’t get tenure—he only wrote one book, it was a long time ago, and it was pretty controversial. Furthermore, while it may be true that he created the world and everything in it, what’s he done lately? That’s how I feel about philosophy. What more do you want?

Are you not entertained?

How many times have I heard, “but why should our tax money go to philosophers? What do you produce?” Answer: we produced the modern world. And if you want your money back, come and get it. Let’s see, my supposedly public university only gets about 20% of its budget from the state. 20% of my annual salary divided by the number of employed taxpayers is… hold on… a third of a penny. Enjoy.

It’s not just philosophy. Universities are gutting liberal and fine arts too. For some reason I cannot grasp, people seem to have lost sight of what they really care about. The liberal arts are about liberty, liberation, freeing one’s mind. Let’s take a page from the revealed preferences folks: if you want to know what truly matters to people, look at what they do. We don’t live to work; we work to live. What does that living consist in? Check out what you want when you go home at the end of the day.

You like playing video games? That’s artists designing the graphics, musicians composing the background music, writers creating a script, possibly voice actors adding their talents. The programmers are just there to bring that art into life. Want to chill and watch TV? Writers, composers, actors, cinematographers, artists all. Catch some sportsball? I’ll bet you love the beauty and elegance of the sport, the villains and heroes, the narratives about rivalry. Maybe you want to sit and read a book, the literature of wordsmiths, or the nonfiction of researchers and scholars. Have a glass of wine? Made by vintners wanting to create something delicious. Go to live theater? See a concert? It is all art. Maybe you like Renaissance Faires or Civil War reinactments. Where would you be without historians?

What we want, what we crave, is art, music, literature, learning. No one goes home eager to work on spreadsheets or wanting to send emails. In fact, that’s why we desire money beyond basic bill-paying: to get more of the liberal, creative, and fine arts. If Ferraris were as ugly as sin, I doubt even the shallowest status-seekers would buy them.

A truly civilized society can support citizens devoted to more than mere subsistence and provide more than panem et circenses. Civilization is graffiti artists under bridges, teenage poets, musicians playing in bars, craftspeople making furniture in their garages, punks making zines, brewers crafting ever more exotic beers, nail salons making miniature bespoke paintings, and yes, scholars laboring in obscurity and solitude over minutiae. Only the saddest, most impoverished calculus divides the world into just “work” and “hobbies.” Is religion a hobby? Is raising children? Beauty is everywhere, knowledge is everywhere, and human beings root for them like truffle pigs.

Who was the world’s richest person in 1851? You have no idea and neither do I. Wait, I just looked it up. Probably Cornelius Vanderbilt, the railroad baron. Who cares. How about the US president in 1851? Know that one? It was Millard Fillmore, clearly a mighty hinge upon which history turns. Who was the hottest babe or the studliest dude back then? No one knows and nothing could be less important.

But you know what else happened in 1851? The Great Exhibition opened in London, “a triumphant celebration of the most extraordinary achievements of the Victorian age, from industry, culture and engineering – gathered from all four corners of the world.” All were housed inside the architecturally revolutionary Crystal Palace, which became an inspired foil in Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground (1864).

The Crystal Palace

In 1851 Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Herman Melville published Moby-Dick, and Nathaniel Hawthorne published The House of the Seven Gables (following up on his The Scarlet Letter of the previous year). Having published David Copperfield the year before, Charles Dickens was preparing to write Bleak House, which came out in 1852. Also in 1851 Brahms, Liszt, Schumann, Verdi, and Wagner were all actively composing and premiering music. Those names you know. Music, literature, architecture, invention, achievement—that’s what survives, that’s what we remember. That’s what matters to us.

Stand tall, artists. You are the true creators of value. Stand tall, philosophers. You are part of the most ancient and powerful tribe. Illegitimis non carborundum.

</rant>

1. Yeah, I know higher education costs money: see my Resource Vampires and the Cost of College.