Post #187: Why Philosophy Today? (Why Not?)

14 June 2025

[Introductory comments at a panel discussion held at Mahidol University International College on Friday, 13 June 2025]

     I still remember how, a few years ago (before I came to MUIC), an unusually good student looked at me with a long face in class one day and announced in front of everyone: “I don’t like thinking. Thinking is hard.” She could see the humor in her sigh, and I so could I, but behind it was a more serious issue…

     Given how much energy mental effort consumes, even physiologically, how frustrating it can be and how futile it can seem (which nobody appreciates better than a real philosopher: think of David Hume’s epistemological despair), it is not very surprising that most human beings, most of the time, would rather do almost anything other than to do any hard thinking. (Lab experiments by psychologists have shown that they will often prefer receiving electric shocks to performing demanding mental tasks.) It is no wonder that AI, which promises at last to relieve us of the burden of thinking for ourselves altogether, must seem nothing short of a godsend to many, even at universities. (Whether the promise will ever get fully delivered on is another matter.)

     More indirect but equally telling evidence for how little we seem to value thinking these days has been accumulating for the past ten or fifteen years in the form of cartoonish stickmen with grotesquely small heads relative to their frames and muscles. Even The Economist in a recent cover on ageing depicted one of these despicable characters with a head about a fifth the size of his feet—this not in order to illustrate senescent brain shrinkage, but as an inadvertent and unacknowledged sign of the times. Most disturbing of all, when I point out this embarrassing phenomenon to others, they usually fail to see the involuntary self-indictment at all, or else they laugh it off as if it were funny rather than alarming.

     On the other hand, if there is any one bedrock commitment required of those would claim to be philosophical, then it is surely to the proposition that the reflective, self-examined life remains worthwhile (or perhaps even uniquely worth living) despite all that needs to be said about its annoyances and the fallibility of our rational faculties. At the same time, the rival modes of living by instinct, by group dynamics, or by sundry conventional wisdoms, in line with what others have done or are doing currently around us, have their own undeniable appeal, and are often highly successful by other measures, as we all know. What these rivals cannot do to the philosopher’s satisfaction is to give a proper account of themselves—of the subtle Whys and not just the evident Hows of life.

     Plato expressed the idea of the philosophical life as a program (or perhaps better, a discipline) of continuous self-education in his famous Allegory of the Cave. Without someone or something to shake us up from our complacency, he argued, we would never get going; but once on the way, the decision to keep moving towards a clearer, more ideational perspective on the world, less blindly reliant on how the senses happen to present things to us, is the individual’s alone, and not likely to be much supported by our neighbors and contemporaries.

     In view of the fate of his beloved teacher, Plato made much of the warning that a serious aspirant to philosophy had better lead a quiet, private life, lest he put his life in jeopardy. That may seem a little overheated, since there was a lot more to the trial of Socrates than his philosophical endeavors. Other schools, like that of Epictetus—who defined philosophy as “making good use of impressions,” meaning a similar self-education away from our naïve dependence on unquestioned sense-impressions—have not seen fit to issue quite such dire disclaimers. But all have emphasized the difficulties of the journey and the threats of estrangement. Enlightenment by way of philosophy is possible, but it requires courage and determination: “Sapere aude!” as Immanuel Kant famously proclaimed, “Dare to use your own reason: that is the motto of enlightenment.” (Such daring would hardly be necessary if it were an easy matter.)

     How far we may hope to get on the Path that leads up towards the mouth of the Cave and into the bright light of the Sun, where the true, the good, and the beautiful is supposedly revealed in all its splendor, remains an open question. The Socrates for whom we have most historical warrant, in the Apology (which had many witnesses) rather than the Republic (which is said to owe much to the Pythagoreans), was not so sanguine, and placed the emphasis more on recognizing the limitations of human wisdom than on rising to such heights. The more we pride ourselves on what we think we understand, he argued, the more enmeshed we commonly are in our own ignorance—a turn of thought familiar to all serious philosophers. After all it was the same Immanuel Kant who confessed that it had taken reading Hume to shake him from his “dogmatic slumbers,” and who cautioned that from the crooked timber of mankind, nothing perfectly straight can ever be made.

     Philosophers may not, accordingly, be able to arrive at any very definitive (or even reliably good) answers (consider also the skeptical schools, especially Pyrrho and Montaigne), but so long as they remain philosophical, they can hardly stop asking their questions. And it characterizes their lives since at least Socrates’ day that they will not always win friends with their inquisitive ways, because others don’t tend to enjoy being challenged, especially when the irritating “gadflies” have no ready answers to give after embarrassing others into public confessions of confusion.

     It is probably safe to say that philosophy has tended for centuries now towards a more narrowly academic, almost technical outlook that has often been deeply skeptical of leading us towards a better life. Nonetheless, the appeal of Socrates and the Stoics, in particular, has never gone away. In late Roman times, the consul Boethius imagined, while he was awaiting his death on trumped-up charges,  a peace-giving conversation with Lady Philosophy that he published under the title “The Consolations of Philosophy.” Epictetus too has inspired many students across the ages with such lofty sentiments, and one of his best-known recent admirers, James Stockdale, insisted that he owed to the Stoic teaching that inner resolve and fortitude whereby he made it through seven years of captivity and torture (four of them in solitary confinement) as the highest-profile American POW in Vietnam, at the infamous “Hanoi Hilton.”

     It is perhaps too much to ask that philosophy give us the right stuff to face quite such dramatic trials. The reminder, however, that ageing, sickness, and death are closing in on us from all sides like advancing mountain ranges that crush everything in their way (as the Buddhist scriptures put it) is not exclusive to any one spiritual tradition, but an inescapable feature (so far at least) of the human condition. Again, we may choose a strategy of not thinking about the looming menace ahead of time; but if the philosophers are right (and the Buddhists too), we would do better if we could bring ourselves to face the unwelcome truth more actively and ahead of time. Montaigne, for example, describes in an oddly cheerful chapter about death (“To Philosophize is to Learn to Die”) how he overcame his own initial aversion to anything death-related by breaking the habit of avoidance and doing just the opposite—developing an almost unsettling curiosity about dying in all its forms and varieties.

     The hippie mode that has, of late, turned resolutely towards shunning “overthinking” first and foremost (and has produced much under-thinking as a result), was not always quite so intellectually indolent. Henry David Thoreau, a grandfather of the movement much lionized in the Sixties, still offered a definition of the philosophical life that the ancients would have recognized quite well (in his chapter on “Economy,” no less, in Walden): “To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates—a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve the problems of life not only theoretically but practically.” In a very different style and setting, Nietzsche’s “untimely” meditations too harkened back to the old Greeks, though with a peculiar accent that the ancients might not have recognized.

     Plato make much of the (chastely) erotic dimension to philosophy. I’m not sure I would say that I have ever felt great pleasure, exactly, in trying to think things through; what I’ve gained is the modest satisfaction of getting just a little clearer about the world, even amidst the rife confusions of life. To me it has always looked as if perplexity (Plato’s aporia) stands not just at the gateway to the philosophical life, but that it is inscribed upon the road-marks every mile anew, as it were. “Who would lose,” Milton asks in Paradise Lost, “though full of pain, this intellectual being, those thoughts that wander through eternity?” Many would, apparently, because they expect a more pleasant life to be had along other avenues. But they too are often disappointed.

     Just how much progress can be made on the upward journey in this lifetime, assuming that one is willing to credit the idea at all? “Who knows?”—to echo the refrain of Montaigne’s reflections. Instead of demanding an answer upfront, I’m afraid we will all need to start walking and find out for ourselves.

     Chogyam Trungpa, the rogue Tibetan Rinpoche liked to rile his Western audiences by saying that there was every reason to avoid starting on the seeker’s path at all, because it was such a forbidding undertaking. Better collect your entrance fee at the door, he said to the admiring crowd at one particularly memorable talk in Berkeley in the Seventies: go home now, and forget all about it, because if you ever do get going, you won’t be able to stop until you’ve arrived at the end. Plato, too, warned that even under optimal circumstances it would take at least fifty years of relentless training to make a truly credible philosopher who could not only govern himself properly, but who could be entrusted with power over others. One needs time enough to make one’s ten thousand mistakes, as Michael Novak observed towards the end of his life, and that’s just counting the major ones.

     I wouldn’t feel comfortable making the kinds of grand claims and promises that the ancient philosophers could still pronounce without a blush. Darkness and death and all that is deplorable about our inner lives—what Carl Jung called The Shadow—can philosophy by any description really make them more tolerable? I have no idea how far I or anyone else can get in the direction of wisdom and deeper understanding—be it by way of intellectual inquiry, or of meditative discovery, or of the kinds of pious devotions to which many old philosophers (from Socrates to Plato, from the Stoics to Pyrrho and Montaigne) still paid their respects without reservations, from what I can tell.

     Guides and teachers can only point the way, as the Buddha too kept reminding his followers. We will all need to make our own effort at ascending (if we care to do so) by whatever maps may strike us as most trustworthy, and find whatever answers we can in the process. I would not make any promises to anyone, even to myself; but I remain hopeful, and if aspiration towards a more genuine truthfulness makes the philosopher, not accomplishment, then count me in.

     So why philosophy today, when the world appears so drastically different from even a decade or two ago, let alone centuries or millennia? Because, I would answer, while much has changed, the transformation is neither as complete nor as uniformly positive as we might like to believe. When it comes to the fundamentals of our human condition, and the life of the mind especially (to say nothing of the spirit or the soul), all is not well—it never is—and we have much to learn from earlier ages. If the case for philosophy was ever any good, it remains so today; and if not, well then I’ve been fooled…

     All of which is a very different thing from imagining that philosophy can give you all the answers. No serious philosopher would tell you so, but insist, on the contrary, that good questions are never to be scorned, and good answers to be cherished because they are so few.

     Thank you.