Friday, April 08, 2005
Why Philosophize?
I have already laid out a case for the impossibility of total knowledge, either in practice or in theory. This is no great thing, for any normal person could tell you that we'll never know everything. It is only those in the loftier perches - social scientists planning government programs and physicists exploring the Grand Unified Theory - who believe in such nonsense as the idea they could actually know all there was to know, even in a single domain. But the impossibility of total knowledge is still a thing that needs to be explored. If we don't, we risk losing our appreciation both for what we can know and for the implications of the limits on our knowledge.There has long been a divison between the elite and the general population. Elites are characterized as know-it-alls who somehow still know nothing about real life. Ordinary people are characterized as know-nothings who have no appreciation for the value of refinement or the possibilities of progress. Both characterizations reach that highest degree of unfairness that comes in being correct. Ordinary people are too quick to denounce the counterintuitive if it stirs unpleasant thoughts. And the hyperintelligent are too caught up in the elegance of their theories to notice when they aren't working.
The real purpose of this essay is to ask the question, Why philosophize? And how? My approach to these questions is practical, rather than theoretical. This is appropriate, for theory is in any case only of value if it imposes a useful framework on what practice reveals, while theory that fails to derive from practice is exact only to the degree that it is useless.
So, then, why philosophize? Because we need answers. But what if they're the wrong ones? That's a trickier proposition. It depends, in part, on what you mean by "wrong." I have already asserted that good theory imposes a useful framework on what practice has shown. In this regard, right and wrong answers lose their existential status as value judgments and become tools for assessing the "seaworthiness" of an idea. If you float it and it does not sink, you use it, however ungainly it appears. If it sinks, you discard it, however well it seemed to be designed.
In a pure intellectual system, the struggle between good ideas and bad ideas would be dispassionate but absolute. When a new good idea seemed to work better than the old one, the old one would be gone and that would be that. In this way, by the weighing of good ideas and bad ideas, we could ultimately determine the best ideas. One way of doing this would be with the Hegelian dialectic of thesis, antithesis, synthesis. But neither this nor any other mechanism will actually arise that successfully weeds out all the bad ideas and promotes all the good ideas.
The problem with the systems of Hegel, Kant and even those seeking the Grand Unified Theory is that their projects are fundamentally unsound. Ideas do not exist in a vacuum; they exist in people. Knowledge as an independent entity is a Platonic essence, wonderful to conceive of but wholly non-existent. We dream of knowledge, but in fact there is only knowing.
Whereas knowledge is a thing, freestanding but non-existent, knowing is a process, variable but ubiquitous. We all know something. Because of our natures, however, we know it not absolutely, but within a context, specifically the context of our experiences. When we know something, this does not mean that we know "a thing." It means that we experience impressions in relation to other impressions.
Etymologically, a "fact" is a thing which has been done. This "fact" captures the true essence of our knowledge perfectly, reminding that the world is not composed of free-standing ideas, but of processes that begin and end while time grinds on. A fact in our brain, likewise, does not exist as a freestanding idea, but as an ineffable process of summoning from within sense impressions first known from without. It is a replay if not of the fact then of our process of learning of it.
The points that I am making about knowledge may seem like much hairsplitting, but there is an important message in here. We cannot find absolute truths because the world doesn't exist in absolutes. We do not in fact know what things are, only how we experience them. This not only defeats the notion of absolute knowledge, but it magnificently reveals the value of our inexact knowledge and brings us back to my earlier question about pure truths and right and wrong.
I've already argued that we can't know everything because this would require that we know ourselves yet without being altered by that knowledge, a thing which is impossible for human beings. But can we know enough? And what is enough?
The validity of a theory rests on whether or not it conforms to existence evidence and succesfully predicts what happens in the future. A proper theory includes a warning about how accurate it is. Our lives are lived according to theories. If we smile, we can make people smile back - a lot of the time. If we hit a wall, it hurts - always. If we go to work on time, we get paid - usually. These things seem obvious, but they are learned either by observation or by personal experience. People in different countries will have differing theories about these matters, but they will have arrived at what they "know" about the world the same way a scientist knows that salt dissolves in water.
If we take theory to be a highfalutin thing for haughty intellectuals, we won't think much of it. And the haughty intellectuals, likewise, won't think much of us. But in truth the doctor who uses a chemotherapy drug effective 35% of the time and the person who runs to the bus stop even though he's late because the bus might be late too are in the same boat. They're using experiential knowledge - I should say "knowing" - in accordance with a framework that is imperfect but better than nothing.
If even doctors dealing with matters of life and death can rely on experiential knowledge with limited utility, this raises the question of just what it takes for knowledge to be useful.
Two thousand years ago, the Jews didn't consume pork because of warnings against eating animals with cloven hooves. The cloven hoof was associated with the devil. So, is pork Satanic? We know now that the cloven hoof is more susceptible to burrowing by the trichina worm. In a time and place with limited cooking technology, eating pork was potentially deadly, right or wrong in "moral" terms. So, what of now? Should Jews eat pork since we know now what made it deadly and how to make it not deadly?
In a pure intellectual system, the eating of pork would be okay now that we know how to do so safely. But we do not exist in a pure intellectual system. We exist as people in society. And our ideas exist not only in the context of where and how we learned of them, but also in context to one another. The not eating of pork exists in the context of a belief system rooted in an all-powerful and sometimes unpleasant deity who cast man out of paradise for the failure to follow His commands. In this context, we move from thesis - good, antithesis - bad to synthesis - indeterminate.
If a disease were ravaging mankind and the eating of pork cured it, Jews and Muslims would have to decide whether the greater value lay in dying for their faith or discarding the prohibition in order to live. With heaven and hell possibly at stake, it would be a rough call. But right now, the prohibition is not so restrictive that it would be "wrong" to abstain from eating pork, just because others have found a way to do so safely. To the contrary, if faith brought the benefits of self-confidence, attention to the greater good of mankind and devotion to hearth and home, it would still be right to abstain from eating pork if the believer felt it necessary to maintaining the complex of ideas that brought about the other goods.
Why philosophize, then, particularly with all our sticky and uncerain answers? Because we need to some way to decide how to live before we have all the answers. Philosophy, for all its imperfections, supplies us with a means to organize our impressions of the world into the sort of understanding that helps us with this process.
posted by gbarto at 10:07 PM