How Philosophers Think

A ton of it is plain Dunning-Kruger. They spend two minutes looking at something they don't understand, dub it stupid, and feel smug about being smarter than the people who do it.

That said, philosophy seems to practically beg people to do that, and I've spent some time trying to figure out how and why. Scientists flood the Internet to challenge bad science. Especially physics, which a lot of people practice in exactly the same way they approach philosophy -- without doing the math, or doing the experiment, or having any applications.

Philosophers don't do that, and I struggle with that. There may or may not be such a thing as "bad philosophy", but it's certainly true that people mis-represent the state of the art of philosophy. The most visible philosophers are rarely the ones doing the most important work.

People are quick to jump on the Sokal Hoax -- as if they had any idea what the journal Social Text was actually for. Who's out there to explain it? Science won the Science Wars -- but did anybody actually show up to fight against them?

Sciences aren't immune, either. A field like sociology is barely separated from philosophy, and gets a lot of derision -- as if it would be so much better if it would just realize that human beings are billiard balls with no more than three dimensions of freedom, and we could gin up experiments with N=10^20 every afternoon the way the LHC does. But if you were offered the answer to the question "How can we end homelessness?" or "What is the real nature of dark energy?", which one actually matters more?

It's easy to feel smug about the simplicity of physics and the tremendous power we can get out of that. A lot of people get a cheap thrill out of that. But it's lazy, and I really wish there were a way to talk about it.

That's just a further reason why it makes no sense. The categorization is developed as mysticism.

Welcome! Ok thanks, will check him out. Not really into dark though! Arggh, yeah. He sounds miserable. Getting a headache reading that..well, it was 1933 I guess. Sounds a bit like Cioran, who I expected I might like but it's just continual depressed whining as if being smart means you must be miserable as hell, and pitying those whose don't share your misery. That doesn't sound smart. Mencken and Kierkegaard are about as far as I willingly go in that direction—not very far. But they're very funny and brilliant writers.

Well, one of Nietzsche's most amazing productions is one of his first, the short essay On Truth and Lie in a Nonmoral Sense (1873), somewhat in a similar vein to that Zapffe, but, uh, well, behold how it starts! :

In some remote corner of the universe that is poured out in countless flickering solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the most arrogant and the most untruthful moment in "world history" — yet indeed only a moment. After nature had taken a few breaths, the star froze over and the clever animals had to die.

Someone could invent such a fable and still not have illustrated adequately how pitiful, how shadowy and fleeting, how purposeless and arbitrary the human intellect appears within nature. There were eternities when it did not exist; and someday when it no longer is there, not much will have changed.

Further on, one of his most quoted passages:

What is truth? a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short, a sum of human relations which were poetically and rhetorically heightened, transferred, and adorned, and after long use seem solid, canonical, and binding to a nation. Truths are illusions about which it has been forgotten that they are illusions, worn-out metaphors without sensory impact, coins which have lost their image and now can be used only as metal, and no longer as coins. We still do not know where the desire for truth originates; for until now we have heard only of the obligation which society, in order to exist, imposes: to be truthful, i.e., to use the customary metaphors, or in moral terms, the obligation to lie according to an established convention, to lie collectively in a style that is mandatory for everyone.

Actually he had a lot to say about him—check out Schopenhauer as Educator, a long essay from Nietzsche's first (full-sized) book, Untimely Meditations aka Unfashionable Observations aka Thoughts Out Of Season—it's a very grateful tribute.

William James wrote so many great essays, and one of the most accessible, and touching, is On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings and its sequel What Makes A Life Significant. OACBIHB has a lot of great long quotes from various places, actually that reminds me, I think I rediscovered Stevenson's essays from a long quote in that, which is itself a huge debt. I'm into writers who faced life with joy and courage, and who love passing on that gift—Emerson, Stevenson, Chesterton etc.

Santayana - I never got anything from the systemy Life of Reason or Realms of Being, maybe I should try again one day. Soliloquies in England etc are short nontechnical essays on all subjects. My favourite books of his are the ones with long essays on particular philosophers or philosophical/cultural scenes, like Character and Opinion in the US. And the chapters on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in Egotism in German Philosophy are among the best things written on those guys, as seems so often the case with Santayana. Cheers!

p.s. Come to think of it, this page on my website has links to a fair bit of James' stuff, and a few good quotes by and about him! http://www.adamponting.com/william-james/