Anti-philosophy philosophy

Brief meditations on an old problem

Here’s an old paradox. The scientist declares that science is the only way to truth and that philosophy is bunk. “Over here in my department,” he proclaims, “we really learn things about reality. We poke and prod the universe and see what happens. We formulate hypotheses, design and conduct experiments to test them, analyze the data, and form justified conclusions about the way the world works on that basis. Over in the philosophy department, they don’t do any of that. They make shit up. What I’m doing is REAL and IMPORTANT and GENERATES KNOWLEDGE. Philosophers do none of those things!” And the philosopher, hearing this rant, has a ready reply: “What experiments did you do to establish the truth of that little speech? None at all! (And if you did run an experiment, I’d love to hear about the setup!) Turns out that you’re endorsing a bunch of philosophical claims. So you yourself have a philosophy all your own! Philosophy is inescapable for both of us. The only difference is that I’m honest about it.”

For those with training in philosophy, this quick back and forth is extremely well-known. (Those without philosophical training often find themselves playing the role of the scientist in that exchange; I see some version of it play out once a month or so on social media.) The lesson that follows is simple and devastatingly compelling: philosophy is not all bullshit. If philosophy is all bullshit, then the claim that philosophy is all bullshit, which is itself a philosophical claim, is therefore itself bullshit. If philosophy is bullshit, then it’s bullshit that philosophy is bullshit. Therefore, philosophy is not bullshit. Case closed, philosophy wins.

Or does it? For certainly some philosophy is bullshit. The idea that we can understand important facts about the nature and structure of reality just by sitting back in our armchair and thinking about it really hard has always had at least the slightest whiff of the incredible about it. And many of the theories that philosophers have come up with over the ages have the overwhelming odor of bullshit about them, clearly untrue and perhaps so confused and incoherent that they don’t even rise to the level of falsity.

But how can one prosecute the case? For in trying to spell out what makes the clearly bullshit philosophy count as clearly bullshit, you immediately run the risk of drawing a line that your own theories fall outside of. Anti-philosophy philosophy has an overwhelming tendency towards being self-contradictory and self-undermining. We’ve learned that lesson well. But yet we’ve learned it too well, for the sad state of affairs is that much of modern philosophy is clearly bullshit.

The solution to the problem, at least in outline, is to try to draw a distinction. There’s two kinds of philosophy: light, good philosophy and heavy, bad philosophy. Once we’ve drawn that distinction, we have the ability to attack philosophy without paradox. Heavy, bad philosophy is bullshit. Now, the claim that heavy, bad philosophy is bullshit is a philosophical claim, to be sure. But it’s a light, good philosophical claim. And light, good philosophy isn’t bullshit. Only the heavy, bad stuff is. This is not a self-contradictory position.

But then we face the problem of how to draw distinction between the good philosophy and the bad philosophy. How much philosophy counts as good, and how much philosophy counts as bad? Any way of trying to draw this distinction faces a version of the same problem all over again. If we are very generous about what counts as good philosophy and confine the label of “bad philosophy” to only a small region of the most esoteric metaphysics, then our thesis lacks bite and we risk allowing in much errant bullshit under the label of “good philosophy.” But if we are stingy about what counts as good philosophy and allow only a select few claims to enjoy that privileged label, we better be damn sure that our reasoning that supports our line-drawing exercise only involves those select few good philosophical claims that pass the test, or else the our anti-philosophy philosophy will fall into incoherence. So to be a coherent anti-philosophy philosopher means walking a rather fine line.

No attempt to walk it has met with much success. The last sustained attempt was logical positivism, which was a dominant approach in the early 20th century before it was pretty decisively refuted as incoherent and self-contradictory in the mid-late 20th century. (The seeds of its demise were planted as early as the 1940s but they didn’t fully sprout until the 70s.) Philosophy today is mostly divided between two camps. On one hand are those who follow (the later) Wittgenstein in embracing incoherence; if we’re all just screwing around with nonsense theories, it hardly matters if they’re logically incoherent. It’s not even clear that these nonsense theories could even be logically incoherent — applying logic to philosophy is a kind of category mistake — and so logical criticisms like worries about being self-contradictory always fall wide of the mark. On the other hand are those who think that incoherence is genuinely bad, yet anti-philosophy philosophy is always incoherent, so philosophy is basically fine; that’s not to say that all philosophical theories are true, of course, just as not all scientific theories are true. But there’s no “good philosophy” and “bad philosophy,” there’s just true philosophical claims and false philosophical claims, and we decide between the two by using the methods of philosophy.

I’m not in either camp. I hold out hope that we can draw the line between a narrow good philosophy and a broad bad philosophy, and that the resources we need to do so can all be found on the good side of the line. I won’t try to say how here - that’s a big project, and one that I can’t hope to begin to make clear or compelling in a short blog post. Hopefully this will be my next book. All I’m confident to say now is that the current state of affairs is unacceptable. Philosophers are (by and large) divided between those who are self-consciously incoherent and those who wrongly think that they are coherent. The right balance between confidence in the success of a philosophical project and skepticism about the prospects for philosophical success is extremely difficult to strike. But wrestling with this tension and trying to resolve it is in the only way to approach philosophy seriously.

…I hope I can prove that.