The Use and Abuse of Philosophy

I'm always interested - and not infrequently disappointed - in how people react when I tell them I majored in philosophy. A college acquaintance of mine, for instance, once told me that she didn't like philosophy, because she found it to be too abstract. This puzzled me, especially because she herself was majoring in government. She seemed not to understand that all fundamental questions in her field - and, for that matter, in all of the humanities - go back to philosophy.

Philosophy is to the humanities what mathematics is to the sciences: it is the foundation upon which everything rests. Philosophy, like mathematics, appears at first to be abstract, even detached from reality. And for this reason, many people dismiss it as being too difficult, or of too little use in daily life to warrant serious study.

But philosophy is not at all abstract - it is eminently pragmatic and practical, and your mind can't live a day without it, any more than your body can survive without water or food. Philosophy is not some head-in-the-clouds pastime involving ridiculous questions about what sound a tree makes when falling in the forest. It is simply the practice of rational, critical thought.

My friend majoring in government, for instance, would have done well to consider that the core questions in her field are all philosophical considerations: what is the most just form of government? Is the death penalty just, or is it cruel and unusual? Is it fair to tax the rich and redistribute wealth to the indigent, or is true justice characterized by letting people keep what they earn? Does bigger government expand the borders of liberty, or does it limit them?

The other fields in the humanities also grow out of philosophy. One cannot study history, for instance, without considering why we should even care about the past in the first place. One cannot study art without aesthetics, anthropology without a theory of human nature, or sociology without an examination of social norms.

Even the sciences require an implicit study of philosophy. The scientific method is nothing more than an organized approach to dealing with the central challenges of epistemology: how do we know what we know, and what is the most responsible and reliable way of acquiring knowledge? And of course, all of the sciences rely on mathematics, which in turn rely on logical reasoning. One could thus go so far as to explain the project of science as the use of one branch of philosophy - logic - to pursue another branch - epistemology.

Simply put, philosophy is thinking - nothing more, nothing less. And the last time I checked, thinking is a fairly pragmatic and important activity in daily life (though ironically, one too often taken for granted by the very people who pride themselves on being pragmatic).