Is philosophy just idle talk?
Probably there is not one single topic in philosophical discussion where you don't find two contradictory positions. Therefore it is not surprising, that many people think, there is no value at all connected to this human endeavour. The implicit argument against philosophy is based on one of the basic assumptions of propositional logic: every proposition is either true or false, there is no third possibility (tertium non datur).
So take for instance the proposition the sun is shining. I look out the window, it is high noon and there are no clouds. The proposition is true. I repeat my observation at midnight and have to concede: the proposition is false. Of course logicians would object, that logic is independent of time, an eternal static thing so to speak.
Quite a different approach to logic, though, we find in the scriptures of Friedrich Hegel. He maintained, that contradictions are a vital prerequisite of all progress. The german word aufheben can have a dual meaning: to save and to abolish. In his expression synthesis it is just that, the combination of two mutually excluding ideas into one, encompassing both.
If we apply Hegel's idea to philosophy at large, it is not idle talk at all but the necessary ingredient for a dynamic development of ideas.
So take for instance the proposition the sun is shining. I look out the window, it is high noon and there are no clouds. The proposition is true. I repeat my observation at midnight and have to concede: the proposition is false. Of course logicians would object, that logic is independent of time, an eternal static thing so to speak.
Quite a different approach to logic, though, we find in the scriptures of Friedrich Hegel. He maintained, that contradictions are a vital prerequisite of all progress. The german word aufheben can have a dual meaning: to save and to abolish. In his expression synthesis it is just that, the combination of two mutually excluding ideas into one, encompassing both.
If we apply Hegel's idea to philosophy at large, it is not idle talk at all but the necessary ingredient for a dynamic development of ideas.
Comments (66)
I enjoyed the reference to the "scriptures" of Hegel.
But I tend to doubt that people find philosophy to be idle merely because you find in it contradictory positions. You can find that to be the case in law, medicine, engineering, sociology, psychology; most any human endeavor in which expertise is claimed, in fact.
They may be more inclined to find it to be idle because much of it has no bearing on how we live. That wasn't always the case, and isn't entirely the case now, but I think that would be a fairly common belief.
Quoting Philosophim
Otoh, positivist and analytic approaches to philosophy almost killed it by cutting off its revelance to how people live and what they care about. Fortunately, in recent years the wall between analytic and continental has been eroding.
Academic philosophy? 50/50. Philosophy Twitter is a society of PhDs who are absolutely f-ing morons and can't construct a simple sentence to get across an idea that they already know is bunk.
But if you speak to faculties and policy gurus who are trained in philosophy, it's so bloody interesting its hard to take it as anythign but fundamentally important (though, that's an emotional response lol).
It's quite possible for philosophy to address how people live and what they care about without having recourse to the kind of obscurity, and sometimes even esotericism, analytic philosophy and OLP were and are intended to expose and avoid. But in any case their therapeutic value applies primarily to metaphysics and epistemology.
God forbid philosophy should be obscurantist or esoteric (code words for I have no idea what theyre talking about). Im not denying it is possible to locate writers here and there who choose to be deliberately obscurantist or esoteric, but mostly these accusations are leveled against philosophers whose work I am very familiar with and understand well, and I see the difficulty not in the choice of writing style of the philosopher but in the unpreparedness of the accuser to grasp the radically new and difficult concepts embedded in the text. I associate analytic philosophy less with a clear and accessible style of writing than with an attachment to a certain set of metaphysical presuppositions (for a long time, they were just bookends to Hume and Kant) that they have lately been in the process of abandoning , leading to the fading of the boundary between analytic and continental in terms of style of language and approach. Joseph Rouse and Lee Braver are examples of contemporary philosophers who have no trouble moving back and forth between the two cultures.
Indeed. I've found Braver accessible. He is also an excellent communicator in lectures and interviews.
I'm afraid I find philosophy very difficult and time consuming and at my age, with many other priorities, I am unlikely to acquire a useful reading of most thinkers, especially those who formulate more radical approaches. But I am keen to survey some of the directions and themes taken up.
I confess I got carried away somewhat.
I was trying to respond to your claim that analytic philosophy somehow nearly killed philosophy by "cutting off its relevance to how people live and what they care about." I don't think it did nor that it could do so, because I think it and OLP primarily address the dissolution of problems which most people don't care about and have nothing to do with how they live, but have become typical philosophical problems. Which is to say metaphysical and epistemological problems peculiar to philosophers like those addressed by such as Ryle and Austin. They're valuable in that respect, and I think the clarity, precision and close analysis used in that task have value generally.
I know that Marcuse thought as it seems you do, but I think he overreacted and didn't understand the focus of analytic philosophy and OLP. I view them as concerned primarily with method.
I think philosophy starting becoming irrelevant to how we live and the problems of living long before analytic philosophy and OLP arose. I don't think that Descartes or Kant, to name a few, have much to say of any relevance to how we live or should live.
As for contemporary philosophers who address matters of concern in living our lives, I'd mention Martha Nussbaum and Susan Haack as among them. The former has an affinity for Stoicism and other ancient schools, and the latter is a pragmatist, which no doubt explains why I refer to them.
I say no it's not just idle talk, but I think life is so full, there is room for objective, absolute, eternal truth. Philosophy, for me, involves the pursuit of that. It leads to true discovery of what is, was and will be. Which I find enjoyable, even if I'm not sure I discovered any such things yet.
But if you really thought there was no absolute in the picture, it's just idle talk. If you still enjoyed it like a game, fine, but playing a game is close to idleness.
Without any absolutes, the playing field is leveled by the playing. Philosophy's frustrations and discipline would not be worth it to me anymore. (But then, from what I can tell, even if all was just playing, idle banter when playing with words, we would have an absolute idleness, which calls me back in toward the view that philosophy is truth and wisdom and deals in absolutes and not simply idleness).
However that's not to say that the other branches are not important at all. If we want to search for truth, then we can never discount anything.
Philosophy of mind, metaphysics, etc. can all be very useful and help us search for truth.
But no, philosophy in general is no mindless babble, since it is what got us stuff like science. And the claim that philosophy is mindless babble is also philosophy. There's no way around.
Sounds like more of a gay science, than just an art. Idle "Truth" talk being one component of the science, or maybe a shading tone of brown as you re-paint the old cave metaphor for artistic purposes.
The Temporal logicians wouldn't object. There are tons of different non-classic logics out there.
It is sunny. (It was true this morning.)
It is sunny. (It is not true a few hours later.)
A richly textured one, at that.
God's teeth. Let's not sully art by claiming philosophers are artists.
There's a lot of pretty bad art out there and it kind of sullies itself IMO.
That said, depending upon one's definition of art, i would think that some of the works of great philosophical imagination (even if you hold they are wrongheaded) count as artistic responses, something like poetry.
Is there such a thing?
Hegel applied this principle to human mind, in his famous work "Phenomenology of Spirits" for describing and understanding the workings of human consciousness. Marx took over the idea applying the principle into the existence of material and the operational principle for the societies, providing the ideological foundation for the extreme materialism and communism.
Quoting Pez
Agreed. :up: :fire:
Philosophy of law is pretty clear, to know Justice as intimately as a man knows a woman. Philosophy of mind or religion is naturally a bit more abstract and open to interpretation. I'd say so, at least.
You can lead to a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. Everything is open to interpretation. Solipsism for example, I would call a non-philosophy and more of what should be a clinically recognized mental illness, however it follows all (if not most of) the rules and seems to be derived of a valid, fundamental question (what is real, what isn't, how can we be sure, etc.).
It seems to be more a means to an end not an end itself. Or something.
It creates conceptual "bricks", that do have substance, though perhaps little, that someone is supposed to use to perhaps build a house or bridge to a desired location that would have otherwise not been possible or of greater difficulty than without. Now, you can build a cheap, shabby, and even dangerous house or bridge if the bricks are not placed in ideal order by someone who doesn't know what they're doing. Or, you could feel high and mighty about being able to seemingly defeat any opinion you don't agree with by talking around it with fanciful magniloquence that seems to add up perfectly, if not just in one's own mind, and leave the person your speaking to dumbfounded to the point they forgot what they were doing. To each their own. Some are builders. Some are on a personal or selfless quest for knowledge. And surely, of course, some do indeed just like to hear themself talk. Guilty as charged. :smile:
I'd be interested to know what those may be. But I think it takes more than imagination to create a work of art.
Quoting Ciceronianus
Likewise it takes more than mere imagination to create great works of philosophy.
Generally agree. But for sake of debate (it's own point): "You [can't help but] always admire (be fascinated with) what you really don't understand." - Blaise Pascal
Rings true, no?
On that note, might as well consider any type of anti-realism about observable things a mental illness. Since anti-realism about observable things works under the premise that the mind is unreliable, might as well make the practice of philosophy itself a mental illness.
Not that I would disagree. When was the last time we had a truly happy philosopher?
I am now reading a book on Hegel's philosophy of right which is written in quite an analytic style (at least for me) with a lot of emphasis on untangling the argumentative structure of the book. I find it is written crisp, clear and indeed exposing holes in Hegel's arguments but never disparaging and reading charitable. I think both camps profited from the interaction and considered putting an end to mud slinging.
I think philosophy, in the end, is about questioning presuppositions and, what comes down to the same thing, discovering the rational in the real, as per Hegel. It might well not be there, but we like to understand the world we live in, understanding in a full sense, not merely explaining its mechanics. The branch of enquiry that does such a thing we call philosophy. It might well be idle chatter, but then, everything might be. It depends on the distinction between idle and useful and how that distinction is made, often implicit. Making the implicit explicit is however the bread and butter of philosophy.
Which is why I wrote 'creative imagination.' Personal taste will account for much of this. For instance, I don't find Nietzsche appealing, but I think he was a literary giant. Things which don't resonate with us personally, which we may even resile from, may still be great and inspired works.
Brian Leiter is a decent inroad, if you want to check it out. I don't recommend beyond some comments on the Leiter Reports
I proud myself in replying "Never heard of it" when someone asks me something internet-people-related, so I will extend that to this cybersubspace too.
Might be best to take ourselves as blessed to not have these concerns.
Of course in a forum like this it would be surprising, if anyone would admit that he's talking rubbish himself. The lack of esteem in much of the rest of the population might have its cause in that for common sense the relation to our daily life is not easily visible and sometimes even wanting. To unprepared people it might sound like mere word tinkle.
But take for instance the controversy regarding determinism. The related question "does it really matter, how we live or does it make no difference in the end?" has a strong relation to daily life.
I think my request for examples of the great philosophical works of imagination akin to art will go unanswered, and with good reason. As for Nietzsche, he was a cultural critic, and a critic of art, but I wouldn't call him an artist. His Zarathustra is more like one of the prophetical books of the Old Testament than art.
It's interesting that artists have sometimes been called "philosophical" but philosophers haven't, to my knowledge, been called artistic. Santayana thought that Dante, Goethe and Lucretius were philosophical poets, for example.
Art is distinguishable from philosophy because it is evocative, and can be supremely so through the ability of an artist. Philosophy tries to explain, sometimes in dull detail. These are different things. When philosophers try to be artists, they fail miserably because they don't have the talent.
Take Munch's The Scream. It achieves in a single image what page after page of plodding, repetitive, self-pitying descriptions of angst and existential dread cranked out by some philosophers seek to explain and expound on. Take Picasso's Guernica, and imagine a philosopher trying to describe, let alone explain, what it evokes, about modern warfare and fascism. Take Wallace Stevens' Sunday Morning and try to imagine a philosopher addressing with such subtlety and in such a memorable way the failure of Christianity in the modern world and the preference for pagan naturalism which arises in its place.
Re: Is philosophy just idle talk?
Are you here, participating in idle talk? :smile:
(Really, what a strange thing to ask in a philosophy forum! :brow: )
Quoting Ciceronianus
Growing up, art was a talent that came naturally to me. After graduating high school , I briefly contemplated pursing art as a career. But in high school I had stumbled upon a set of insights that at the time I thought of as belonging to psychological theory. These insights had a profound impact on my life, and I have been elaborating these ideas ever since, at first within a psychological mode of discourse and later as philosophy. I chose against a career in art because I needed to be able to believe that I could express the insights I was developing as effectively within the language of art as I could within psychology or philosophy, and the answer I came up with was no.
This doesnt mean that I believe philosophy or psychology are in general superior forms of knowing. Many intellectuals make the e silly mistake of elevating their own preferredmode of expression to the status of objective supremacy over all other modes. Poets think theirs is the purest way to truth, musicians consider music to be the most authentic expression of meaning, others give preference to the political, the scientific, the technological, or the philosophical. All these modes are all absolutely equal in their uniqueness and their non-superiority over other modes of creativity.
Ill leave you with this from Deleuze:
[quote
Art and philosophy crosscut the chaos and confront it, but it is not the same sectional plane; it is not populated in the same way. In the one there is the constellation of a universe or affects and percepts; and in the other, constitutions of immanence or concepts. Art thinks no less than philosophy, but it thinks through affects and percepts.This does not mean that the two entities do not often pass into each other in a becoming that sweeps them both up in an intensity which co-determines them.
The plane of composition of art and the plane of immanence of philosophy can slip into each other to the degree that parts of one may be occupied by entities of the other. In fact, in each case the plane and that which occupies it are like two relatively distinct and heterogeneous parts. A thinker may therefore decisively modify what thinking means, draw up a new image of thought, and institute a new plane of immanence. But, instead of creating new concepts that occupy it, they populate it with other instances, with other poetic, novelistic, or even pictorial ormusical entities.
The opposite is also true. Igitur is just such a case of conceptual persona transported onto a plane of composition, an aesthetic figure carried onto a plane of immanence: his proper name is a conjunction. These thinkers are "half" philosophers but also much more than philosophers. But they are not sages. There is such force in those unhinged works of Hölderlin, Kleist, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Kafka, Michaux, Pessoa, Artaud, and many English and American novelists, from Melville to Lawrence or Miller, in which the reader discovers admiringly that they have written the novel of Spinozism.
[/quote]
We should probably have a Truth and Reconciliation category for people to confess that they have been talking rubbish! Welcome to The Philosophy Forum, by the way.
I've not had much success studying philosophy. Back in the '60s, philosophy wasn't on the curriculum of the state college I attended. 15 years after graduating, I tried some basic courses through extension at the University and found them awful. I share the blame with Philosophy. Academic philosophy just is not my cup of tea.
I'm an old man now, and have spent the last 15 years in the big open pit mine, scraping out good ore to fill in the holes that my undergraduate education left. The history and sociology of cities has been a productive vein. So has the history of technology; trying to understand our several ecological crises has been useful. The Roman Empire and the Medieval period in Europe is always fruitful. There is so much good scholarship out there!
Revisiting books I should have read as an English major is useful too, but I've gotten better results from nonfiction. I am currently reading Zola's Au Bonheur des Dames, The Ladies Paradise, set in a mid-19th century Parisian department store. It's fiction in translation and it opens a window on the development of retail consumer culture. Its history is longer than I thought it was.
I have nothing to offer on Kant or Hegel, Plato or Aquinas.
I envy you, then.
I'm quite willing to acknowledge there can be an overlap. Santayana's three philosophical poets no doubt address philosophical issues. But I think there's a difference between evocation and exposition. I shouldn't say a philosopher can't be a poet. I know that a lawyer can be one, as Wallace Stevens was a great one, though an insurance lawyer. I find that astonishing and so believe it's very rare, though some lawyers enjoy quoting poets and especially Shakespeare. Lawyers and philosophers are prosaic, ultimately. The creation of beauty is beyond them; analysis is no friend to expression.
I think the good reason is the one I already gave.
Quoting Tom Storm
Perhaps you have a slightly implacable, fixed notion of what counts as art. It doesn't have to be a poem, painting or sculpture. And perhaps I am too generous..
I would hold that great literature is art. IMO Camus and Sartre and Nietzsche certainly qualify there. You could add Schopenhauer, who writes exceptional prose. I would imagine there are many contenders. As I said, you don't have to like them as thinkers to see the artistic nature of the works.
I think we can probably also include acts of great creative imagination, which find new ways to describe the world. Might we not also include thinkers like Spinoza or Husserl?
Of course, this can swiftly end up in that quagmire of debates, what counts as art? And Christ knows we don't want to wade around in that one.
Literature, though, can simply mean prose, or writing, which includes more than art. Someone can write well and not be an artist. U.S. Grant wrote very well (in his memoirs), but isn't considered an artist. Christopher Hitchens wrote excellent essays, but wasn't an artist. We speak of legal literature, medical literature, etc., without meaning to refer to art or artists. Literature as art would more properly refer to novels and short stories, I think.
But you're correct that if we start debating what art is, we'll be going on a journey beyond the scope of this thread and one that may never end.
But my argument isn't that any particular figures be considered primarily as artists, or that we should reclassify their oeuvre.
My point is that what they do can also be understood as art. They sometimes exemplify and perhaps even perfect an artistic mode of expression. Grant's memoirs are a literary masterpiece. Along with many other things, Grant turned out to be a significant literary artist.
Quoting Ciceronianus
I never much fancied Hitchens' essays to be honest. (I have most of them on my shelf) I prefer his talks or speeches. But again - the essay is an art form. Why can't we say that a significant journalist's talent is artistic when it is great? No doubt Hitchens wrote some exceptional essays and he made imperishable contributions to the art form. I don't think you have to be an 'artist' to produce works of significant artistic merit.
To my way of thinking what counts as art is determined by the presence of creative imagination and technical skill and what counts as great art is determined by a superlative degree of both.
:up:
And this is not required at all. On the contrary, adherence to a specific philosopher or type of philosophy might even be regarded as an obstacle to the necessary ingredients of all philosophy: open-mindedness, curiosity and creative impetus.
Of course You are right! It was meant to be a bit provocative. I could re-formulate my question into: How can You convince someone, who thinks that philosophy is just idle talk, that at least not all of this kind is mere empty stream of words?
Demonstrate the social ninjitsu skills that come from long involvement with philosophical arguments?
This is much better!
But I would simplify and replace the second part with "that (it may be true sometimes but) this is not usually the case". Or something like that.
Consider, though, that if we contend that anything is a work of art if it's done very well (e.g. Grant's memoirs) or that anyone who writes very well is an artist, we may be broadening the definition of art to a point where most any talented person is an artist, and any well-crafted product becomes a work of art. That seems to me to be a misuse of "art" and "artist" or at least an exaggerated use of those words. I don't think it makes much difference to say that is the case only with respect to something very, very well written or a person who writes really, really well.
But I suppose to continue this discussion we should do so in another thread.
Listen to them be wrong, and explain why they are, on something very important like an ethical position or their understanding of reliability of the senses.
The one that has always worked for me, in terms of pointing out what phil. is and getting some interest going, is running over the synthetic/analytic propositions. People tend to review most of their life decisions once this hits home.
Decisions are easy to reconcile, little more than footprints on the beach before the daily tide rolls in. Indecision, however, is what drives men to madness and can haunt one's very soul forevermore.
Quoting unenlightened.
I think I agree that mechanic is to racing driver as philosopher is to politician, or at least mechanic can be to racing driver, as philosopher can be to politician.
But wouldn't you be lowering your opinion of racing and politicking, if philosophy is idle talk? I'd argue you were. If idle talk was the same as sharpening language, then a politician has no tools; and if these are compared to mechanics and racing drivers, the whole thing is brought down and idle, and wouldn't run - around the track or for the office.
The talk is idle, but the philosopher is productive. It's the linguistic view of philosophy, that we are not in the business of making pronouncements like physicists priests or politicians, but of making the language fit for such purposes. Hence some of Wittgenstein's somewhat cryptic notions about his book saying nothing, but showing the fly the way out of the fly-bottle and pulling the ladder up behind it. I'm not sure i agree with him, mind. But he was an engineer by training, so he knew the difference between a mechanic and a driver and the value of each.
Philosophy has turned to a monstrosity, it is unrecognizable, even to herself, when did this happen, has it always been like this, don't think so. A historical investigation might shed light into this.
Until there is a remedy, I suggest to depose philosophy from her throne of queen of sciences, and replace her, as Nietzsche suggested, with psychology.
I agree with You. I even think that most of Hegel's writings is not just idle but pompous word tinkle. Nevertheless I find his basic assumption of dynamic evolution of ideas interesting. Wouldn't even this forum be quite dull and uninspiring without conflicting opinions that might lead us to new insights?
And yet, out of/in reaction to Hegel, emerged, arguably, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, existentialism, psychoanalysis, postmodernism, Marx, and Marxism, the understanding of dialectic, and so on and so on. I agree it is all idle talk if it is simply absolute Truth one is after. If it is, like everything human, stabs at the shadows in the dark cave, with the motive of coming up with useful artifacts, it is not idle talk, but rather, one of our many forms of science.
I was impressed by his writings on logic ("Wissenschaft der Logik"). Staring from nothingness ("Nichts") to find that being ("Seyn") without any attributes is essentially nothing, found me at home with my occupation during the last few years regarding Zen-Buddhism and the concept of "Shunyata". Applying the notion of dialectic leads quite easily to a dynamic process of everything else. Besides, his emphasis on subjective immediacy ("Unmittelbarkeit") reminded me of Whitehead's "actual entities".
Maybe I should read his "Phänomenologie" after forty years again. But in my opinion he uses to many words (idle talk) and impedes thus seeing the basic ideas, to see, as we say in German "den Wald vor lauter Bäumen nicht".
Yes, but not just ideas. The point of Hegel's (Plato's) dialectic is that logical & physical contradictions (competing ideas & forces) --- in isolation --- are not just false, but stagnant*1. Yet contradictions, when synthesized by physical stresses or social debate or philosophical dialogue, can be progressive. In fact, some thinkers have concluded that all emergent evolutionary processes are dialectic in method*2.
Physical evolution opposes Positive & Negative forces that push & pull on matter, resulting in adaptive changes in constitution. Likewise, Metaphysical evolution opposes contrary ideas & beliefs, in order to adapt them to new situations*3. Hence, in effect, synthetic Philosophy is metaphysical evolution, winnowing & harmonizing obsolete beliefs, in order to get us Closer to Truth*4. :smile:
*1. Dialectical Evolution of Truth :
Dialectic in Classical philosophy is denoted as a form of discussion that takes place between two entities; it is the logical reasoning and a form of a method through which the introduction of proposition and counter proposition is practised while the main aim of the debate remains the same, that is reaching an objective truth through this course. Much of the prestige and role is deserved by the classical philosophers Socrates and Plato in the evolution of the Dialectic method.
https://unacademy.com/content/upsc/study-material/philosophy/dialectical-method/
*2. Physical & Historical Evolution are Dialectical Processes :
Darwinism is Hegelian dialectics applied to biology or you might say that Hegelian dialectics is Darwinism applied to history.
https://evolutionnews.org/2020/09/darwinism-as-hegelian-dialectics-applied-to-biology/
*3. Evolution of Truth :
Our understanding of the truth is constantly evolving.
https://evolutionoftruth.com/
*4. Both/And Principle :
My coinage for the holistic principle of Complementarity, as illustrated in the Yin/Yang symbol. Opposing or contrasting concepts are always part of a greater whole. Conflicts between parts can be reconciled or harmonized by putting them into the context of a more complete whole system.
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page10.html