Only philosophers embark on this perilous expedition to the outermost reaches of language and existence. Some of them fall off, but others cling on desperately and yell at the people nestling deep in the snug softness, stuffing themselves with delicious food and drink. ‘Ladies and Gentlemen,’ they yell, ‘we are floating in space!’ But none of the people down there care.¹
What is philosophy? This is a perennial question that people keep asking me over the past few years. My reactions to the question are quite consistent: a reluctant facial expression and a shrug. I never wanted to even consider or think about the answer to the question. And explaining my own willful ignorance would even be more tedious. So a shrug it is.
When I was in college, my friends used to use the old saying as an answer: “philosophy bakes no bread!” And yes, that only means that philosophy doesn’t feed you. It doesn’t do anything useful. Though sometimes philosophers would argue against that accusation with something defensive such as, “but we do not live by bread alone — we also need intellectual nourishment for our well-being!”² it still doesn’t change the fact that it doesn’t do any apparent good. If there is anything coming out of philosophy, it would probably be depression episodes triggered by the despair of being stuck in an isolated tin can that moves aimlessly in a suffocating space, a.k.a. being forced to pose extremely difficult problems that don’t seem to mean to ever be solved.
It’s less like intellectual nourishment than a mental illness one. Philosophers are the Victor Frankensteins of the world.
But even more urgently: studying philosophy formally doesn’t make money. At all. No job posting, with an exception of philosophy teaching positions, would say that you need to have a degree in philosophy to apply. And, no, your philosophical skill doesn’t help you at work.
If you’re a philosophy student, it would surprisingly be much easier to learn to think and speak with pretentious jargons than to talk simply, even when you’re not, not even subconsciously, trying to look sophisticated, and when all you want is, for example, to talk about why it’s wrong to put a sauce on another person’s meal without their permission. Unfortunately for you, at most workplaces, you would need to be clear because no one would be patient enough to listen to and tolerate your pedantic explanations. And if, as a philosophically-trained individual, you couldn’t stand oversimplification, it would be extremely hard for you to even be motivated to sacrifice the precision gained from jargons for clarity. Most of the time, your boss wouldn’t need to know how the definitions that they use are not completely helpful in capturing and clarifying the problems that they face; problems are meant to be solved, not merely captured and clarified.
And thus the saying: philosophers bakes no bread. Philosophers don’t really produce. Philosophers can, of course, solve problems, but always with the knowledge that it wouldn’t be enough; problems would not just go away after being resolved. They stay, hiding in the most delicate places, only to be rediscovered later in a transformed shape.
As someone who has been formally studying philosophy for almost six years without a break, it’s hard for me to accept this. The possibility of doing anything other than merely finding troubles and breaking them down is harrowing.
For the past few weeks, I’ve been learning to code in HTML. I just made a website; I designed and am developing it for fun. I could spend 24 hours a day only to troubleshoot and debug some parts of my codes, and when they are resolved, I always let out a loud, exaggerated sigh of relief; I want to hear myself being satisfied for some good few seconds before I find another trouble in my code.
In fact, I made the problems myself. The satisfaction from resolving them is addictive because, with coding, I can see the instant, concrete consequence of my solution. When my blog’s URL keeps redirecting me to the wrong address, and the problem wouldn’t go away with a set of solutions that I had in mind, for example, I researched at length about what else could cause it. I spent almost six hours to work on it only to find out that the solution was merely clearing the caches in my dumb browser. But still: it had satisfied me in a non-superficial way. By going through possible-but-incorrect solutions, I had the opportunity to exercise my fluency in web programming. Moreover, the result of clearing caches was crystal clear: the URL stopped redirecting me and brought me straight to the beautiful, correct page.
On top of them all: it gives me hope that if I face a similar problem in the future, I still would not be able to resolve them with the same tools which I used to fix the previous problem. And I would have to find another tool.
At that time, I realized that this obsession over the infinite nature of problems was what got me committed to philosophy in the first place. Philosophy is a black hole; philosophers suck and incorporate everything to their works — from math to fashion, from quantum mechanics to that one Seinfeld episode — and always manage to find something problematic to be resolved. They make puzzles out of everything. The only problem I have with going through this when I do philosophy is that my work wouldn’t show whether I succeed or fail in my debugging; heck, they wouldn’t even demonstrate whether my troubleshooting is incorrect or not!
All I want is to believe true things, and I want them to be proven. I don’t want my work to be clear, convincing, coherent, and interesting, but false. In pursuit of correctness, I let go of what I should have done with my works — should have made it clear, convincing, coherent, and interesting — even though that pursuit is, in the end, a vain effort, because correctness conditions for the philosophical works themselves are never certain. And I have trust issue with anything less than certain.
Just like how I couldn’t sleep until I could debug my codes, it’s hard for me to continue my work with uncertain correctness. I want to understand things, but my either-it’s-correct-or-it’s-worthless attitude prevents me from attaining even some bare minimum of comprehension. And an all-consuming fixation over my inability to comprehend drags me to one of the darkest corners of my mind: a space for ridiculously paralyzing anxiety about how a failure to understand just means a definitive failure in my personhood. By now, ladies and gentlemen, you may have noticed that what I have been telling you is a stupid example of intellectual immaturity.
Now I realize that, as long as this immaturity is still embedded in my work ethic and professionalism, I have to take a step back from philosophy, a discipline that I love so dearly, and start looking for opportunities for seeing the visible and obvious culmination of human labor, like an URL that works the way it’s supposed to be.
What to make of this immaturity? What should I do to put an end to it?
Well, I’m not quite sure. When Gaarder said that philosophers “yell at the people nestling deep in the snug softness,” he seems to imply that non-philosophers usually live in ignorant bliss, and a philosopher is there to futilely drag them out of it. I don’t agree. Non-philosophers don’t float in space, but on earth, they don’t just drink wine, either. Most of them just breathe air that space lacks and still try to survive.
To force myself to pause in my pursuit of certainty, I need to breathe those real air. I want to believe in my personhood again. I’d like to think that oversimplification is more than a coping mechanism. It represents the truth in practical reasoning: that us humans must embrace our cognitive limitations in order to fully function practically. I can’t pretend that I can have it all; I can’t both globally reject oversimplification and be functional. Earth’s air is thin, free, and abundant. And to be able to breathe in space, I need to earn it. Learning about it on earth, before someday taking off again.
[1]: Jostein Gaarder, Sophie’s World, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994.
[2]: Nicholas Rescher, Philosophical Standardism: An Empiricist Approach to Philosophical Methodology, p. 67, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994