Philosophical Autobiography I

Note: Our topic for the year in senior seminar (PHIL 401 & 402) is Philosophical Autobiography. As I've been thinking over the course, I've thought back on my own story. The following thoughts are my initial contribution.

-sdl

Note #2: This post was revised at 10:30AM, Tuesday, 21 August.

* * *

I've always been fascinated by modern philosophy. Not that I don't love the entire history of philosophy. Not that I am hostile to ancient and medieval thought like many moderns.

No, something just resonated in me when I first read Descartes. I felt a stunning sense of recognition--I get it!--when I first delved into the works of the rationalists. Descartes. Spinoza. And then Leibniz. Wow, Leibniz: I almost thought myself a convert to the crystalline musings of the great German metaphysician. His Monadology showed the kind of intellectual ingenuity you would expect from the creative mind who, along with Newton, jointly discovered the calculus--and I've always loved math. The demand for systematicity with a foundation in self-consciousness resonated with my own early musings. As a young man on a romantic quest for Socratic self-knowledge--yes: what an audacious self-estimate!--the rationalist approach based in self-consciousness gave words to my ineffable sense that there was a truth deep within us and philosophy might give voice to it.

Thankfully, I have grown beyond this youthful romance, full of ego-centrism and an incipient idolatry of philosophy. (And that there were such vices at work in me, sadly, I can assure you.) I am glad that by God's grace He has led me in my philosophical career beyond the bewitchments of such visions. And that in itself is a story, too, I suppose I should explore sometime--a story of how I have struggled to submit my philosophizing to my Lord as he breaks my spirit of intellectual autonomy. Nevertheless, I remain deeply intrigued by the psychology of the rationalists. We can learn from our failures, and even in spite of them--especially if the failure is one of motivation. So, for me, Spinoza has always held a wealth of observations about human nature that no philosophical psychologist can afford to ignore.

But beyond the rationalists, the empiricists impressed me, too, with their realism about human nature. There is an inquisitiveness about their theorizing. An attempt to delve deeply into human thinking and action, just as it is, and explore its inner potentials. The concreteness of Locke and Hume had a logic and analytical elegance all its own. Like mechanics tinkering with a car, they sought to break down into composite parts everything complex in human thought and action--and put it all back together again. Even the phenomenalism of Berkeley--which intrigued me as much as Leibniz--seemed driven by the rigors of the real, pushed to their logical consequences. In general, the empiricist tradition unearthed concreteness open to analysis immanent within our conscious awareness of ourselves and our world. It is no mistake that Husserl found inspiration in the empiricists for his phenomenological methodology: To the things themselves!

But here it is again. It is psychology: that is one of the great riches of modern philosophy. Before there was Freud, there was the whole early modern project of unearthing the deep structures of human nature. The great political thought of the modern era was also erected upon investigations of human nature, continuing the Renaissance rediscovery of the humanist ideals of ancient Greece. Even though its extremes have desecrated the image of God in human nature and made it a thoroughly 'secular' thing, I still think there is something worth holding onto in this tradition of thought.

One such thing is the quest for the philosophical "how-to." What do I mean? Well, one of the most common kinds of investigations you find in thinkers as diverse as Spinoza and Locke is an account of 'how to think,' or judge. How to use our minds. Descartes is a perfect example of this--perhaps a tragic and absurd example, given his craven faith in method, but exemplary nonetheless. In his Discourse on the Method, Descartes professes (with all modesty of course!) that:

I will not hesitate, however, to avow my belief that it has been my singular good fortune to have very early in life fallen in with certain tracks which have conducted me to considerations and maxims, of which I have formed a method that gives me the means, as I think, of gradually augmenting my knowledge, and of raising it by little and little to the highest point which the mediocrity of my talents and the brief duration of my life will permit me to reach. For I have already reaped from it such fruits that, although I have been accustomed to think lowly enough of myself, and although when I look with the eye of a philosopher at the varied courses and pursuits of mankind at large, I find scarcely one which does not appear in vain and useless, I nevertheless derive the highest satisfaction from the progress I conceive myself to have already made in the search after truth, and cannot help entertaining such expectations of the future as to believe that if, among the occupations of men as men, there is any one really excellent and important, it is that which I have chosen.

Now, I find the pretensions of Descartes untenable. It is impossible to create a perfect method, but there is, it seems to me, much value in studying how with think, how we learn, how we make judgments of all kinds--and how it might be done well. More about that in a second.

Still, I am reminded that for some philosophers, particularly today, such wisdom belongs in the Book of Proverbs or the wisdom of Lao-Tze, not in the writings of a properly 'scientific' philosopher. Philosophy needs more rigorous methods than the psychological insights into how we actually think, judge, feel. In part, they claim, it is because we ought to focus on how we ought to think, judge and feel, regardless of how we actually do those things. And even more austerely, how is not the issue: it is rather, what are the principles of. . .? and here you fill in the ellipses with knowledge, ethics, metaphysics, etc.--the rigorously defined subdisciplines of philosophy. Application of those principles--the how-to question--is an issue for 'applied philosophy,' and anyone who's been around the discipline long enough, knows that there is great controversy among philosophers as to whether or what degree 'applied philosophy' is really philosophy at all.

At this point I confess that Immanuel Kant, the philosopher to whom I have devoted the greatest amount of study, Kant himself heaped aspersions on the 'common reason' as devoid of genuine philosophical content. By 'common reason' Kant appears to mean common sense, proverbial-type wisdom, the kind of how-to knowledge I'm talking about. Those inquiries do not concern or deliver the unchangeable 'oughts' of thought and action, but instead the actual, empirical ways people do think and act--and they may vary from one time and place to the next.

But I'm not so sure. I would like to think that these how-to questions--how we think, judge, feel--are important considerations for anyone interested in the good life. And even Kant agrees that to live well is the ultimate aim in life. (And in fact, I would contend a faithful reading of Kant would include a more positive place for empirical psychological observations--for the how-tos. But Kant is a vexed, and vexing thinker. Often he taketh away and giveth on the very same page!)

There are two points I would like to make in rebuttal:

(1) There may be things about us--about who we really are--that are more or less settled. Features of our nature that philosophy can ill-afford to dispense with contemplating. Kant himself, for example, thought that the freedom of the individual was one such deep fact. And contrary to his own protestations, Kant's writings are replete with the kind of deep and meaningful observations about how we actually do think, act and judge.

(2) Even if, upon cross-cultural observation, these 'facts' are not as settled as we might think, there is a way in which philosophical psychology can give is invaluable insights as a kind of testimony of who we see ourselves to be. It can be, if you will, baseline data, or better: a meaningful self-assessment that tells us where we are. For only once we know where we are can get about the task of getting where we need or ought to go. Such observations may not be the destination in philosophy, but they probably must be part of the origin.

Philosophy--if it is to be a quest after wisdom on how to live the good life (and I still do believe it involves just such a quest, even if it is far from romantic)--philosophy cannot dispense with getting our bearings. That is a properly Socratic approach to philosophy, I think, and no matter how 'scientific' or technical philosophy becomes, it should never abandon that approach entirely. In fact, I think we always have to come back to it at dusk, as the owl of Minerva takes flight.

So, in the end, I think the greatest benefit of studying modern philosophy is that we can converse with the great minds of modernity in their search to better understand ourselves. Their observations are often deep and penetrating. And if their 'thought experiments' fail (as I think many of them do), they are blessed failures, experiments whose results are still open to meaningful interpretation and study. These insights are worthy of philosophy, and might just be indispensable to living life well.