PREVIEW-Episode 73: Why Do Philosophy? (And What Is It?)

0:00 Mark: This is a Partially Examined Life episode preview. You can purchase the full episode individually or support the podcast. To get all of our episodes, review your options@priallyexaminedlife.com support. You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who are at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 73 is what is philosophy and why should you do it? And we read, well, nothing

0:36 Seth: or everything.

0:38 Mark: This is Mark Linzenmaier from Madison, Wisconsin.

0:40 Seth: This is Seth Paskin in Austin, Texas.

0:42 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Boston, Massachusetts.

0:45 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:49 Mark: All right, so before we dive in, let's just say why we're doing this kind of episode. It's been requested before. People want to sometimes want to hear what we think. Don't just interpret some philosophy, do some synthesis. And we've gotten this question in particular, what is philosophy for? But that's not why we did it. We actually did it because we're trying to write a book. And after trying to write chapters independently with some success, some not success, we thought we would try coming up with a chapter just by having a dialogue and transcribing it and then editing that heavily. So you may eventually read something that sounds very familiar. Should you listen to this episode?

1:26 Wes: That'll be quite a ways down the road.

1:29 Mark: All right, so the question is, why do philosophy?

1:32 Seth: Is that the question, isn't it?

1:34 Dylan: Well, what does it mean to do philosophy?

1:36 Mark: What does it mean to do philosophy? Why do it? Those are almost the same question. If you give a shitty answer to one of them, then you're not going to have a good answer to the other one.

1:46 Dylan: Well, I guess this isn't an answer, right? But one of the conceits that we have is that philosophy in doing philosophy isn't a profession, right?

1:56 Mark: It's why philosophize? Why ask philosophical questions? Why spend your time thinking about these questions, why read things, why talk to people about it, etc.

2:09 Seth: Well, I'll start by saying that it's not clear to me that I made a choice from early on in my life, not just in my so called academic career or philosophical career. I had this compulsion to explore, I guess you would call it, the foundations of arguments or the rational basis for things. I was always interested in understanding sort of the logic behind what somebody was, somebody's position or an argument or a point of view. And then also what that position committed them to. And sort of being agnostic as to the outcome. I was always Curious about understanding the assumptions, the logical rules, the argumentative statements, the positions, to get a sense of what somebody really stood for and then what that also committed them to.

And I don't think I understood when I was younger that that's what I was doing. But upon reflection, that seems to be what was of interest to me when I was, you know, a teenager, and even further than that, and certainly going into college. And philosophy just seemed to be the field of study where you could spend your time looking at the foundations of beliefs and opinions. And so, in a certain weird way, philosophy wasn't necessarily an avocation or a field of study that I chose, but it seemed to be most in line with what I was naturally drawn to.

3:42 Wes: Yeah, I like that. You said you were drawn to looking at opinions or beliefs. Is that what you just.

3:49 Seth: Yeah. So, you know, when I was in high school or college, somebody would say, like, oh, well, I have this political belief or whatever, and I'd want to query it. I'd ask, what about this? What about this? And I wanted to get to the point where I understood where I could make them commit to other things, I guess. So there was a little bit of rhetorical asshole ship in there, too.

4:10 Wes: Young Seth Krates.

4:12 Seth: Yes, exactly.

4:16 Wes: Yeah, I think that's. In describing your motivations there, you get it. One of the core things about what philosophy is and why it's important, and that is this notion that we run around in society with all these cherished opinions, right? There's a societal groupthink there are mores. There are things that are sacred and things that are taboo, and philosophy is one of those opportunities to subject those to actual scrutiny, because often they're quite irrational. The things that people take for granted and the things that people take to be morally sacred and especially what they take to be most important in life, is often just wrong.

So, for instance, we've seen this in our podcast a lot with Platonic dialogues. Socrates is really interested in the fact that the prevailing kind of wisdom of his day, as it is in our day, is that what's best in life is to pursue wealth and power and those sorts of typical materialistic things. And in a way, you know, it's hard to get away from that view. But even beyond those pressures, there's that natural worry about survival. So it feeds right into that. And to do philosophy is to ask this counterintuitive question, well, isn't there a better way to lead life than simply worrying about survival?

5:42 Mark: I feel like we get this idea, at least in my case of Something bigger from religion, that that's how I got into philosophy in the first place, is by having certain religious feelings and being exposed in church two things. And wanting to kind of get serious about it and question, you know, I want to make sure this thing makes sense. So from the start, philosophy, unlike what Seth was describing for me, was not something social. Religion is, of course, a social phenomenon. People are presenting beliefs that somebody else has come up with. But the way that I took it was I want to figure out, according to my own lights, what makes sense.

And one of the big things I think I got out of religion was a sense of mission, that there really is something that we're supposed to be doing. And I got the feeling, just looking at the adults that I came in contact with, what their jobs consisted in, what they did with their time, that whatever the meaning of life is, whatever we're supposed to be doing, certainly that can't be it. The fundamental starting point was probably we as a society are screwed up in how we should be living. But I didn't even interpret that as being academic philosophy.

It wasn't until one of my friends in high school just kind of characterized me, oh, yeah, you're very philosophical. I didn't really think of it that way. And I think that was part of what then got me reading in that area. And I think it was still a long time before I got beyond the model of the goal of philosophy is just trying to come up with a grand metaphysical system that. Not necessarily one that I could argue on somebody else, but that would fit together, that would cohere for me. That sort of came to fruition somewhere in early mid college.

And any studying I did beyond that made it much more difficult to hold on to that sense of mission. So I feel like my interest was sparked. And so why I do philosophy now is not the same as why I got into it in the first place.

7:42 Wes: Why is it you do it now?

7:44 Mark: It's fun. It's actually, I think, a very similar reason why I would find reading science fiction and fantasy enjoyable or, you know, surrealist art or. It's just there's a lot of crazy shit in there. And these philosophers monads and I enjoy that. And I also like the feeling of very incisively clearly expressing something or shutting down an argument or making some advance in insight. You know, those things do come.

8:22 Dylan: Is there anything at stake for you the way it used to be? It sounds like you don't feel like there's anything at stake right now.

8:28 Mark: I think of philosophy as Almost just thinking itself. So yes, of course, anytime I have an actual problem, I want to think about it. And in that case, yes, there is something at stake. But if I'm just reading and thinking about some abstract cosmological question or even ethical question, not necessarily that much at stake. You know, in particular, people who study ethics, you know, it doesn't necessarily make them better people. Trying to understand that doesn't necessarily have a direct effect on how you end up acting. And it's almost like you end up supporting your pre philosophical ethical intuitions.

I think that's one of the most common areas where we do that. You would be very suspicious of an ethical theory that, you know, I've investigated this and it looks like I should go ahead and kill my family and everyone I know. Like, no, you're not going to end up with that result. And that's sort of built into the.

9:26 Wes: Well, not just that I was suggesting that that philosophy might be important because it helps us figure out what the best way to live life is or what the best sort of life is. And I mean along the lines I think of what you've been saying, Mark. You know, if you look at philosophers, it doesn't seem to be the case that they are necessarily better people than others. Right. Or that they know how to live a better life. So there's immediately this important challenge to sort of philosophies, self proclaimed purpose, or at least as it was initially described by Plato and Socrates, which is to figure out what the good life is and to help us lead that life.

10:06 Mark: I don't mean to imply that if I characterize philosophy as really thinking itself, thinking systematically, that what I consider ethical in the way I act has not been affected by my doing philosophy. Yes, and hopefully it has been so affected. However, there are only a couple questions. Maybe vegetarianism is one of them. That's an active ethical question. For me that reading and thinking more about it philosophically really could push me one way or the other. I think those open ethical questions sort of have to already be open for you in some other way or just as a result of your past experience for philosophy to have an effect.

10:44 Seth: Wow, really? I mean, there's so few open ethical questions for you.

10:50 Mark: You feel like with your own life direction that you're thinking about philosophy actively now could influence which road you're going to take.

10:58 Seth: I just read a blog post on another website where I said that nobody uses ethical theories when they make decisions about moral choices. So it would be disingenuous for me to say that I have some sort of more ethical apparatus in place. But I mean, I think there are. There are real life ethical questions. It's not of the sort of like, should I A or should I be, but really about how should I do X or how do I face Y? I don't want to say that it's obviously clear when you should reroute the train to kill the one person instead of the 10, you know, which is the cliched limit test case for ethical theories, but just in things like how do you comport yourself and your attitude towards death and the kind of general sense of, for lack of a better word, compassion or distance that you place yourself at with respect to other people in your life on a daily basis.

I think those are things where these philosophical theories and where philosophy comes to bear for me in a very meaningful and real way.

12:08 Wes: Yeah. And Mark, if someone were to ask you, well, why aren't you an investment banker? Would you say that philosophy had nothing to do with that?

12:15 Mark: Yes, I think philosophy has played a role in the past. Just that very initial question of feeling like most people in regular jobs are wasting their time, really then limited my career choices in ways that since I have occasionally regretted.

12:32 Seth: So was career pathing like a live issue for you guys? When you were thinking about a choice? It never even occurred to me, like, for philosophy. Yeah. When you decided what to major in or what direction to go.

12:44 Dylan: I explicitly decided against philosophy for graduate school.

12:48 Mark: Yeah. Tell us more. Your origin story, Dylan.

12:51 Dylan: I went to undergrad thinking of being a journalist or a lawyer. And the school I went to was a sort of social science residential college at Michigan State. And within that social science school they had a. Essentially they had a political theory corps. It was called Justice, Morality and Constitutional Democracy. That's the name of my major. And they read Plato and Aristotle and Tocqueville and Nietzsche and stuff, but all from a political standpoint, political theory standpoint, essentially the relationship between the individual and the community.

And I was utterly taken by that. But during that study and thinking about my education itself, the role of science came up a lot. And part of it was in my education and the kind of general education requirements I had. And thinking about a liberal education, which I was trying to get, even though I was at a big university. So I decided that to have my education be complete, I would go and study calculus and get my natural science requirement by taking a year of introductory physics for engineers. The main reason being is that I didn't like chemistry and even more disliked biology.

When I did that, it Turns out that I was good at it. I did really well and I got a lot of encouragement. And it wasn't so strange to me. I hadn't been thinking about doing scientific work through most of high school, but had imagined when I was younger. And I'd always been a kind of tinkerer, experimentalist, building stuff and things like that. So it was like I sort of found an old friend when I started doing that work. So it was always in parallel then for my last three years of undergrad, political philosophy and physics in parallel. I never was able to, at that time, try to think through the various crossing points in any serious way, but they were always there for me.

And the main reason being is that if you, you know, especially when you're reading through more modern and political philosophies, the way in which science is always some kind of authority, either an anti authority or an authority, and people are always trying to say that science doesn't give you enough of the answers that are the right answers, or science is the right answer. And. And I felt like I ought to understand that a little bit better. So I knew I was going to go to grad school. I wanted to become a professor. I wanted to continue a life in academia.

But I had to choose. I was, you know, do I do political philosophy and go to grad school in that, or do I do physics? And I ultimately decided that I would go do physics for practical and philosophical reasons. I was going to get married just a week after I graduated. And I thought that at the end of the day, if I needed to support a family and it was becoming difficult, I would actually be able to get a job in a variety of different places outside of academia if I had a physics degree. And then the philosophical reason was that I wanted to understand experimental science from the inside.

What was it like to do? Did I really think that I knew more about the world when I did an experiment? And why did I think I knew more about it? And in what ways did I not know more about it? And what would it mean to have a foundational claim? And I did experimental particle physics, which part of the reason I did that was the whole claim of experimental particle physics is that you're getting down to what the world really is like at its whatever smallest level at what it really is. And I wanted to sort of see it for myself and understand what it was like.

And I thought that I could, if I wanted to go back and think about philosophy stuff later in my life, that would be easier than trying to go do Science seriously later in my life. That's the story.

16:40 Mark: So I'm trying to get at these two questions or two motivations, especially if we're just characterizing philosophy as inquiry without limits. You might say, whereas a given science already has a methodology more or less spelled out, and then you do the experiments to get you to the next step within that methodology. Or maybe you're doing very theoretical science and you back up and you question the assumptions and what you were describing. It's still a philosophical motivation to want to know, how did the world begin? What's at the farther reaches of space?

Is space infinite? Those kind of cosmological questions, is that fundamentally different, or is it just part of the same ball of wax from this ethical pseudo religious drive? I mean, for me, it was kind of the same thing that even though I described my motivations as religious, they were cosmological. It was, is there really a God? You know, and that leads very naturally into the scientific cosmological questions. And so I actually, like you, was very drawn to the sciences. And it was actually only in the course of my undergraduate education when I took a lot of psychology courses, I took some neuroscience courses.

I think the turning point was I did a summer of experimental work where I helped in a biopsychology lab, watching videotapes frame by frame as sugary liquids were dropped through the open head. These rats had been given an operation so that they would have a little funnel in the top of their head so. So you could drop things directly on their tongue. And they'd had some part of their brain removed, I believe. And then I would watch them on the videotape and sort of count how many times they made the various enjoyment motions. And this was a serious experiment that was directly in line with a question that I thought was fundamental, which is, why do people prefer one thing rather than another?

And part of answering that question was to just figure out what the question actually is and what kind of explanations are available to that. And. And I found that when I got to that sort of detail level, and especially the thought of doing that kind of work to figure out the next scientific step was way too tedious for me. I needed something more abstract.

18:58 Wes: That was my experience, too. I found all of the laboratory work that I did in high school tedious. Even though I was interested in sciences, I thought, well, I can approach it through the philosophy of science, science and the history of science, which I found really interesting. But to actually be doing lab work, this reminds me of something Stuart Umphrey actually once said. He's a tutor at St John's and he was saying basically he ended up in philosophy because was too lazy to do anything that involved more than a pencil and paper, something like that, standing up at a laboratory station or to be.

So I think what we're getting at here is this sort of generalist urge, right? This urge to look at these big picture relationships rather than to be stuck in some very specialized nitty gritty sort of work. To give another science example, I had a friend who's a biologist and I thought wow, just, you know, what a great. And a researcher here in Boston. I thought, wow, just what a great job and great life. You know, sort of one of these moments where I thought, yes, I should have gone into the sciences and I wanted to go visit the lab to see what she does.

And basically I found out that for years now she's been doing the same experiment over and over again on a new mouse every day, involving killing it, taking its heart out, putting some chemicals in to see what happens with the heart cells and blah blah, blah, but different concoctions. Basically that's the tedious kind of situation you can end up in. But of course you can end up with that in any, anything that's professionalized that applies to. And that was one of sort of my misconceptions in going to philosophy grad school thinking, you know, I'm going to continue on my big picture generalist path when the demand is that you specialize and you do things that, you know, resemble the same sort of nitty gritty laboratory situation where you're doing the same sort of experiment over and over again.

For instance, I think there's that generalist urge and then this. There's that professionalization which works against that because you. The real work of moving some discipline forward means focusing on the specific area and doing something, making some very, very incremental steps.

21:26 Dylan: There's lots of philosophy that you can go and look at. If you look at the papers in them, they have that tedious incremental activity that you're describing. And look, I stopped doing experimental particle physics about 10 years ago or so. And one of the reasons that I stopped that is and decided to go to teach at a weird liberal arts college, which for me was a kind of return to doing philosophical work, was the day to day life was just not going to work for me. You know, what I had before me was going on to become a junior professor at a big university, traveling to Geneva or to Chicago for a five day or six day weekend once a month for the next 10 or 15 years, which wasn't going to work very well for my family.

And it sounds really romantic to be going to Geneva, but that's not, you know, you're going there to go underground, three stories underground and work in a lab. And then, you know, the big motivating questions for getting into particle physics about, you know, how the world works are very far down the line. Particle physics is so hard to do experiments on now. The theory is way, way out ahead and it takes decades to build an experiment and to then many, many years to take that data and analyze it. Whereas I had sort of naively imagined, you know, life of a scientists and other scientists are like this, you know, there are other science that's like this where you have a problem in the, in the field or a question about the world and you conceive of an experiment and you go and do that experiment and make the measurements and analyze the data and then write a paper and then move on to another one.

People do that, but it's much further removed in particle physics. It's just really hard. So your day to day life is becoming a computer expert or a materials expert or stuff like that. And the baseline was too long.

23:29 Wes: Yeah, I actually, while I was at St. John's I interned at the Naval Research Laboratory because I had this strong interest in physics as well. And yeah, you know, I got an experience of what it's, you know, of. Basically I learned this computer language and I was trying to help with calibrating these instruments that were going to go up on board a satellite. Yeah, I got a sense of that sort of day to day existence and I thought, well, I'll go to grad school and do a philosophy of physics focus. And I actually wrote a kind of proposal or whatever it was that was required for these applications.

I basically said I wanted to study foundations of physics, which was a philosophical discipline. So of course I didn't end up doing that. I guess to give my origin story, I actually from a young age I wanted to be a writer and I wanted to say that this philosophical impulse is much broader than philosophy, which is what I think Mark was getting at with asking the question of whether even when you do science or some other profession, aren't you really philosophically motivated? And I think my philosophical motivations were actually more writerly.

I wanted to write essays and reflect in a way that I just didn't grasp at St. John's that that's not what a philosopher does, that that's not what a scholar does. Being a writer is being a writer and being an academic is being an academic. So I had that when I was younger and then in high school I knew that I was interested in everything, but the thing I was most interested in was the Lord of the Rings. I knew that Tolkien was basically a classicist of a sort of, or philologist as they called it, comparative linguist. And so I thought, okay, I want to be a classicist.

And I went to St. John's because I didn't. It was sort of a, something I knew of from my family and I didn't have any other direction. And coincidentally, the word classics was associated with St. John's and then at St. John's you know, I maintain this, that St. John's is place where you get to study everything in a sort of philosophical way. And so I maintain this interest in everything. And I thought, well, I'm screwed now. And the only way to sort of do everything, continue doing everything, is to go to philosophy grad school, you know, to get back to this point about this broader philosophical instinct that informs a lot of different disciplines.

That's important because you, in thinking about this Socratic demand that we live an examined life or that the unexamined life is not worth living. The concept of examination, what does that mean exactly? Does that mean sitting in a library and setting some very fine point of Nietzsche scholarship for the rest of your life can't mean that an examination can't simply mean being a professional philosopher or doing philosophy in the sense of doing academic philosophy. Examination means something much broader. And it's important to a lot of kinds of things that you would do in life that you would love to do, including, let's say, being a writer.

And it goes back to Seth's talk of subjecting these opinions to examination. In other words, to a mindset in which you don't assume you know everything or the things that you, that most of us sort of take for granted and assume all the time. You suspend your sense of surety about those things and allow your mind to roam in a sense. And you can do that as a writer and you can do that in lots of different places. So I'm relating this philosophical instinct to open mindedness and saying academic philosophy. It's not simply limited to the question of whether or not to become an academic philosophy philosopher.

27:36 Seth: It's interesting to hear, for me to hear, maybe this is a function of my background and maybe I grew up in an atmosphere of privilege or something, but the whole being academic or academic versus some other way of being in the same field never, never was an issue for me. I guess I was just kind of on a voyage of discovery without a clear end state in mind. You know, when I was in high school, I took English and history and physics and math, you know, all the standard courses. And in fact, my grandfather was a mathematician, got his degree in mathematics, his PhD, my father got his PhD in engineering.

And I thought that it was my destiny to get my PhD in physics because somehow I believed that that was sort of the evolution in our family chain. And what happened was they didn't tell you. They didn't tell me anyway in high school that physics was really math. Well, here's the thing. I was very good at math and I was very not good at doing experiments. So you know the one where you roll the BB down the sled and it hits the carbon copy piece of paper and you measure the dispersion of, you know, that kind of thing. I was very good at the math and not so good.

And I thought that physics was experimental and so I never pursued it. In college, I tested out of math, I tested out of science and all the got into these weird great books, broad humanities types programs, and was never pushed to go pursue the sciences. And I think if I had been, it might have been a direction that I ended up. But so for me, my philosophical bent was always informed by literature and logic in the form of, you know, mathematics, I should say, in the form of logic and I guess a little bit of politics, but not much. And when I was in college, you know, I was very excited to sort of extend that critical analytical approach that I had sort of mentioned earlier.

That came naturally to me and expressed it in terms of natural language theory and logic. So my undergraduate thesis was actually on quantificational treatment of modality in multivalued logic, which is a far cry from writing a master's thesis on Heidegger. So you can see that I had my own little turn once I got to graduate school. But I think I was always sympathetic to not necessarily a scientific worldview, but at least an analytic worldview that respected somehow rules of argument and logic. And I still feel that way. I've just very much broadened my appreciation or my tolerance for what constitutes, you know, a proposition or a logical statement and so forth.

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