What We Misunderstand About Philosophy
There is something that disgusts the average person about philosophy. I won’t say the average reader, as we know that being classed among the so-called “readers” of the world you have to at least have some amount of appreciation for learning, even among those whose reading is primarily technical manuals and/or smut (they are trying to learn something, at least). But if philosophy means “love of learning,” it’s safe to say the average person is disgusted by philosophy. Is that because they’re philistine ogres? Maybe. In fact, probably. But were we to compare the brutes of antiquity to the average person of today, it’s obvious the Philistines possessed a philosophy, so I think we shouldn’t be so harsh toward them. After all, a philosophy is merely a love (relationship) of (toward) learning (experience). Do you have a relationship toward experience?
I suppose the disgusting, vulgar thing about philosophy as it appears to most people is it makes much ado of nothing in particular, with seemingly no utility. Smut is at the very least sensually pleasurable, whereas those texts and personalities deemed philosophical rarely are. When laypeople think of philosophy, they think of a sweatered douchebag smoking a joint, pontificating at a party while everyone else is, you know, partying. These are narcissistic types who don’t even necessarily want their ten-dollar words understood by anyone else. In fact the less understandable they become, the more pleased they are with themselves. I say this with zero ill-will, myself a former stoner-philosopher frequently maligned for this very fact. Eventually I gave up weed but could never kick that other habit. Philosophy is a hell of a drug. But the reason we (rightfully) malign this stoner-philosopher (read: dork) is because he has little relationship-toward-experience. He does not want his words to be understood, and revels in himself as some sort of enigma. Even though, comically, no one cares to solve his riddle. He is one who no sane person wants to imitate, because nothing about him is real or worthy of envy. He is miserable in his strained condescension. Even if you could understand his ten-dollar words, they wouldn’t correspond to anything real or worth experiencing. Does he want to mean anything at all? The answer is likely no.
He has mistranslated the manly “love of learning” into a dweebish “lust for knowledge.” But becoming more obvious every day is the fact that a body of knowledge only grows increasingly confused without experience. This is the difference between talmudic and biblical understandings of what is called “wisdom.” Talmudic “wisdom” is formulaic, seeking to gain understanding through the accumulation of facts, data, and case studies; whereas biblical wisdom is a principle, and only correctly applied and understood via a certain strength of character.
And so to the degree that philosophy has suffered at the hands of poor affiliate PR, I can forgive you philistines for not regarding philosophy as anything more than disgusting, vulgar, proud, ostentatious, base, unclean. No amount of slurs could rightly encapsulate the wretchedness of an ill-conceived philosophy. You have every right to feel that way about philosophy in so far as it has thus been presented. Western culture in general has failed to realize any relationship-toward-experience, and the scientific method has failed us due to a lack of philosophical tenure. To propose a solution to this problem is likely out of the scope of this article. But if you’re this far, I feel obliged to offer something you could take home.
We all, in varying degrees, possess a relationship-toward-experience, much in the same way we were begotten by fathers and mothers who were begotten themselves. Do all of us know or even like our parents? Even if you were totally estranged from your parents, given up for adoption at birth, you could go and search them out for whatever reason. That’s a different story, but the analogy could be stretched quite far. No doubt there are incontrovertible aspects of your relationship toward your parents; the time and location which gave rise to their union, the means of your conception, the conditions of your birth, upbringing, the choices you each make every day regarding one another. Poor parenting could leave one embittered, and most would excuse you for making poor decisions as a result of such parenting, but the results of your decisions would be the same. And so one would do well to ask what one’s relationship is to their experience, for better or worse, and what one ought to do about it, if anything at all.
It’s true, though, that some are simply less fortunate: not everyone is born with the same capacity as another, each of us deprived in some sense of that which is provided in another. Perhaps sight is missing, or status, or cunning. Lest we lament, we should remember: to whom much is given, much will be required. But none of this is any excuse to not be in some way meaningfully engaged with one’s own experience in some positive way– even total renunciation is in some way a positive engagement. For now it’s funny to consider, and perhaps taken for granted, that the same thing that gave rise to you allows you to enter into conversation with it. As experience shapes you, so too do you shape experience. And even now as I try to describe it, there is something vulgar in putting it to words, so perhaps I’ll stop short of clarity and move forward.
We all, again I say, have a relationship-toward-experience. And some of us are even straining to articulate just what our experience is. How heroic! This is, I think, the first level: willingness to converse.
A man tells of his day, and his wife tells of hers. The shapes of their stories are different– perhaps he leaves out the troubles and only recounts the tasks accomplished, even trying to make it seem like he accomplished more than he even really truly set out for. And she, in her own way, offers a detailed account of her day. There are many characters, winding plot points, emotions, and utterances– she can barely remember them all. She does not bother to assess what’s worth remembering– she’s already remembering it, near breathless. They grow weary of the other– she wonders why he does not know certain things even about his own day– he does not know why his brother proposed, or how he did so, or when the wedding might be, but only that he proposed. He, likewise, does not know why she includes so many details about this friend of her acquaintance, whom he will never know, whom she herself hardly knows, whom even if he did by chance come to know , would nevertheless have no need of knowing on such a level. They lie down to sleep and wonder if they will ever possibly come to be understood by the other. They are lying side by side. He can’t sleep on account of the multitude of business, resolving to forget even more, mind tired from remembering, wanting only to exist eternally present. She sleeps but dreams of all the questions she forgot to ask, resolving to remember even more, mind tired of not knowing, wanting only to remember and foretell a perfect past and future.
They at least both agree that their sweatered friend at the party just a few paragraphs ago is quite full of himself; that he ought to smoke less. That he really had nothing to say, after all. What they don’t realize is they are perhaps more guilty than he, precisely because it is they who truly do have something to say, an experience with which they would be most pleased to develop a relationship, but they insist on what they have always known. It’s a mistake to assume that what is missing is for the one to adopt what necessarily belongs to the other– for him to become baroque and her to become opaque.
We all have a relationship toward experience, but not all of us have cultivated a relationship toward that relationship. To do so consciously could be called philosophy. What we misunderstand about philosophy is it’s much more akin to poetry and dance than it is to pontification. If only our dancers knew that– then we might all finally learn something.
