On Studying Philosophy
© Tony Cearns, Berlin
On studying Philosophy
After a long career in Finance and Corporate leadership roles, I decided to study Philosophy. Why Philosophy? I was also attracted to History and to Anthropology, but I felt that Philosophy would enable me to develop some long-held ideas. But I have struggled with the subject. I see fellow students flying through courses, completing papers, moving into professional positions. I’m very pleased for them. But I can’t seem to progress beyond first base.
So what is it that I am struggling with? Is it my advanced age? Is it my ability? Perhaps I’m not cut out for this?
It’s said that Philosophy is a hard subject. Well, depending on how high you set the bar, anything can be difficult, even tiddlywinks, or ironing shirts. However, I do think there is something different about Philosophy that makes it especially challenging, particularly perhaps having come from a Science background. It might have been naive of me but I had not expected such a lack of secure anchor points or, to wring out more from the metaphor, visitable safe harbours.
There is a deep urge within me to find foundations for holding to a philosophical view. One expects ‘foundations’ to be battered by the incoming waves of contra-argument and to find, after the tide has gone out, some change in one’s view. One becomes more secure in one’s beliefs or one starts to doubt that one’s foundations were ever secure. A normal dialectical process.
The modern Hegelian conception of the dialectical process (thesis-antithesis-synthesis) has it that antagonistic forces can be overcome as a new synthesis. I never seem able to move onto that different platform. I’m always left with thesis-antithesis-thesis-antithesis-and .. so .. on.
An example (naive perhaps): I am drawn to an outlook that could loosely be called ‘naturalism’, although I realise that even saying that could be problematic. Still, bear with me. By naturalism I mean that there is nothing more to the world than that which nature produces through the to’s and fro’s of its constituents. There is no such thing as an entity outside of nature such as supernatural entities or forces.
Of course, I immediately bump into my first problem. The paragraph above says nothing. Defining a position in terms of a concept (‘nature’) with undrawn boundaries, defines nothing. Definitions entail boundaries between the included and the excluded. How are we to draw said boundary between ‘nature’ and ‘supernature’? From whence will the classifying criteria emerge? Of course, it’s well understood that the notion of ‘naturalism’ does not, in the words of Timothy Williamson, provide an adequate self-image for Philosophy.
One answer might be ‘physicalism’, that is, the view that the world is nothing more than the kinds of properties that subtend from physical entities. The world is just chunks of space-time. There are no non-physical substances, properties, or entities. But this doesn’t provide an answer since we have little idea about what kinds of properties physical things might project given te right circumstances, that is, what space-time could instantiate. Doesn’t quantum physics recognise (use?) all manner of esoteric entities with strange properties?
Even If I put that thought to one side, I’m still left floundering. (The metaphors are rolling in ‘thick and fast’ now). In my naturalist-physicalist world I would want to make room for abstract entities, such as logical propositions. Are they not indispensible to any notion of scientific enquiry, let alone thinking about metaphysics? But, once again where to draw a line between ‘abstract’ and non-abstract? Are not the properties of quarks (up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom) abstract? The physicist may say that the existence of quarks has been demonstrated through deep inelastic scattering experiments. That may be so, but an explanation of quarks, even their existence, would not be possible without some notion of the abstract (mathematics) - a point made by Quine. What one finds depends on the manner of looking. The usefulness of a distinction between abstract and non-abstract seems to dissolve when both are essential for something’s being the case. Either that, or we simultaneously hold to a metaphysical realism at one level, and a pragmatism at another level.
My worries inlude nominalism and relativism. I have an urge to resist an out-and-out nominalism, as the forgoing paragraph about abstract entities suggests. At the same time I am attracted to ontological economy. I resist a radical relativism as portrayed by Richard Rorty, but I struggle to find arguments against it.
I call the difficulties that I have (which I guess every philosopher must have, except they are better at dealing with it) ‘my uncertainty principle’. Just as Heisenberg formulated the principle as a limit to the precision with which complementary properties of a particle (such as position and momentum) can be simultaneously measured, so too in Philosophy, there is no starting ‘foundation’ from which to advance a view. All there is, is a painful never-ending Inquiry required to say anything substantive.
Time to scale back my ambitions. My uncertainty principle has had one consequence. It has pushed me in the direction of a non-anti-metaphysical pragmatic attitude, if that isn’t an oxymoronic position. It’s why I find Wittgenstein’s development from his Tractatus phase to ‘Philosophical Investigations’ so interesting.