Why Philosophy Has Failed Us
Philosophy is rather like a comic book villain whose superpower is the ability to make people feel stupid. And so, to address philosophy effectively we must first break that superpower. Let’s do that before explaining why it has failed and why we need a replacement that won’t fail.
NOTE: This post is taken from an e-book I just uploaded to the Vera Verba store. In fact, this post is the first two sections of that e-book. If you want to understand what philosophy has been and where it needs to go, you’ll want to read the e-book. It’s 21 full-size pages (10,000 words) and its topics include The Group Level, Muscular Philosophy, Resolving Philosophy, Locke’s Infrastructure, Reason To Believe, What Is The Good?, Life-Based Society, and We’re Well Able.
Philosophy Has Ignored Actions of First Importance
Philosophers have, for a very long time, looked down at people who produce physical goods. Few professional philosophers have labored on loading docks, construction sites or similar places. They’ve had little experience with the creativity that keeps a farm, ranch or truck terminal functioning... that against the odds keeps a small business operating. As a rule they haven’t much appreciation for the people who accomplish such crucial things.
This situation is deeply problematic, because without physical production we all die. Any philosophy that doesn’t major on it is therefore misguided, and the famous philosophers have in fact ignored production. And once more: Without physical production we die. All of us.
None of this is to say that the famous philosophers were stupid people; assuredly many were not. Nonetheless, philosophy as it has been practiced has been badly misdirected, and we need not stand in awe of it.
The Freedom Divide
The best way I know to make the failure of philosophy clear – to immunize us from feeling stupid because we haven’t read its difficult books – is to look at meanings of liberty. After all, everyone prefers to be unimpeded… to be unopposed and unrestrained.
There are two fundamental definitions for liberty. The first comes to us via John Locke and Thomas Jefferson. It is both simple and profound:
Liberty is a condition in which an individual’s will regarding their own person and property is unopposed by any other will.
The other definition of freedom is complicated, and therefore confusing. There are many forms, but they all end up focusing on groups rather than individuals. They limit individual scope for the sake of an abstract “freedom,” which is always positioned under something or within something. They use difficult wording like this:
A balanced society where individuals have the freedom to act without unnecessary interference and access to opportunities and resources to pursue their goals.
I count seven “wiggle words” in that passage, and so unwinding it would be a waste of our time. But I will point out two simple facts: The first is simply that these definitions are loaded with fuzzy words on purpose. The second is far more dangerous:
Claiming that people have a right to something, like the famous “right to be free of want” or “access to resources” in the passage above, requires other people to provide those things. Such a gigantic requirement – forcing millions of people to pay for things – would have to be explained by any honest speaker or writer, but these definitions simply move on as if nothing was missed, leaving the hearers confused and feeling stupid because they don’t follow. That shows malintent, and in fact it’s a kind of abuse.
These definitions require unnamed people (that’s you and me) to pay for the “access to resources” their kind of freedom demands. These statements require not only the seizure of others’ wealth, but a dominating hierarchy that’s able to extract wealth from everyone at once.
And so the complex definitions of freedom require the opposite of freedom. Those requirements are always buried beneath a pile of confusion, but they remain mandates for the suppression of the first kind of freedom, where we get to do whatever we want so long as we don’t hurt anyone.
Before moving on, I want you to see the central example of this reverse freedom. It comes from the most highly regarded text for such things, used in more or less every political philosophy program at the university level: Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract (Book II, Chapter 7). I’ve separated this passage into sections to minimize it’s difficulty, but I haven’t changed the words:
[The legislator must] weaken man’s constitution to strengthen it; substitute a partial and moral existence for the physical and independent existence which we have all received from nature.
[He must] take man’s own forces away from him in order to give him forces which are foreign to him and which he cannot use without the help of others.
The more [man’s] natural forces are dead and annihilated, the greater and more lasting the acquired ones, thus the founding is more solid and more perfect...
[If] each citizen is nothing, can do nothing, except by all the others... one can say that the legislation is at the highest point of perfection.
If you’ve read those carefully you’re probably feeling repulsed by them (and rightly so). I think it’s necessary for you to see how anti-human this is... to grasp that this kind of philosophy is not your friend. And again I stress that this book and even this passage lie at the core of nearly every university curriculum on governance.
What we’re seeing from these two definitions of freedom are two opposing ways of looking at human life. Jefferson sees humans as positive and fundamental units, “not born with saddles on their backs to be ridden by a select few,” as he wrote late in his life. Rousseau sees humans as beasts that must be herded and trained. Or, to say this another way:
Jefferson’s liberty enthrones human will; Rousseau’s liberty crushes human will.
These views are opposites. Why then haven’t philosophers been loud and clear about this fact?
The sad truth is that philosophers have caved in when faced with this question and others like it, and the reason is simple: The operators of hierarchies could offer them respected positions, while the people who make things might buy a few books.
Therefore the philosophers have serviced hierarchies. This has been the failure of philosophers and philosophy. A person who claims to seek pure truth (and this applies equally to ministers), offends that claim by compromising for money.