Why Bother?

In March, I spoke about the value of philosophy at a benefit conference for Ukraine. I was invited to be more personal than I was: my talk was about the contrast between ameliorative and existential value, and how it relates to “activist” public philosophy.

I avoided the personal because my thoughts on that front are too navel-gazing and too negative. I’ve never felt less “sharp” as a philosopher, and the deficit prompts a measure of shame. I tell myself it’s a function of being too caught up in administrative work, and that the greater part of being “sharp” in philosophy, as in most things, is putting in the time. This is the fabled “growth mindset,” a therapy for “imposter syndrome.” When someone is “effortlessly brilliant,” their brilliance is, in almost every case, the visible 1% of an iceberg of hard work.

But hard work is hard work, and there are problems of motivation as well as time. In my case, they turn on the evidence for three psychosocial claims.

1. If I am curious about a question in philosophy, and I reflect on what philosophers have said about it, I’m likely to wind up with a definite view—let’s say, that p is true—though I’ll be unsure where the arguments against it go wrong.

2. If I then spend months or years working through the issues, I’ll find what I think is a defensible position, with credible responses to objections—but nothing close to a proof of p.

3. There will be philosophers who think that p is false but take themselves to have an equally defensible view.

I don’t think there’s anything irrational in my stance. Among the values of p for which I once did the work is the proposition that one needn’t defer to “epistemic peers”: one can be justified in holding a belief in the face of entrenched disagreement. (Those who take the opposing view are in an awkward spot: their belief is irrational by their own lights.)

What looms, then, is not scepticism, or relativism, or nihilism. It’s a relative deficiency of desire. I used to be afflicted by angst on the tightrope between (1) and (2). In thinking “p is true, but I don’t know how to defend it,” I would experience epistemic vertigo: what if its truth is not, in the end, defensible? Don’t look down!

After 30 years in philosophy, I have inductive evidence that I’m not going to fall. My doubts are unwarranted, and there is no cause for anxiety. Hence the title of this post: why bother? I don’t have to do the work to be convinced that the work can be done. And I don’t expect to win consensus.

Rembrandt van Rijn, Aristotle with a Bust of Homer, 1653

What I’m left with is curiosity, which is a good enough motive in itself. I see value in understanding how the truth of p can be maintained. But this sort of curiosity is a gentler voice than angst, not an imperious command but an alluring whisper. And there are other whispers, too.

“Working out how p is true means working out the minute details of a theory,” one voice cautions, “and you should never be as confident of the details as the outline.” To quote the aphorist Jim Richardson: “Past a certain point, more precision in argument becomes less, not more scientific, like measuring the diameter of a proton to six significant figures with a yardstick.” Why bother?

Another voice murmurs that there’s more to life than philosophical reflection: “Aren’t you curious about other things: art, baseball, comedy, H. P. Lovecraft?” A third protests: “What happened to professional obligation? You are paid to work out the details!”

I don’t know how to quiet this cacophony. So I live with it. I still love and admire philosophy, even in its esoteric forms. I still write and publish professional work. But my shift towards “public philosophy” in the last ten years has been a shift towards sources of desire that are unlike angst—they have more to do with the pleasures of prose, with solace and solidarity.

Even in my academic work, I recognize a shift in these years, from defending what I think is common sense—that we should care about people other than ourselves; that we know right from wrong—to a defence of views that might be thought indefensible.¹

This focus mutes the voices from above. It is less evident in advance that I'll be able to defend the initially implausible; and there's a better chance of persuading others that p is defensible than that it’s true. What’s more, I sometimes feel angst—or irritation—that others regard p as indefensible when I don’t; and my curiosity is more intense when the truth of p runs counter to common beliefs.

I could have talked about all this at the benefit conference, I suppose. But even apart from its narcissism, it strikes me as unfit for public consumption. It’s a delicate thing to share doubts about philosophy in a public forum. (One of my pet peeves is the aging philosopher who publishes an op-ed—or book—trashing the discipline that has been their home.) And while my counterintuitive convictions might serve as intellectual clickbait, I don’t think it’s responsible to use them in that way. (That’s why I put them in a footnote.)

It’s vital to the discipline that (some) perverse beliefs be given a fair hearing. It’s not vital for this to happen in public—or that others eavesdrop on debates in which hesitant conjectures are expressed with expedient certainty. The internal ecosystem of the discipline is one thing; speaking to a wider audience is another.

If there were a Socratic Oath, it should begin: “First, do no harm.”

1. Some examples: when I could save one stranger or more, I am not generally required to save the greater number; there is no special reason to care about myself just because I’m me; it can be rational to prefer what you know is worse; prohibitions on killing the innocent are not “agent-relative”; it makes sense for human beings to care about other human beings, just as such.