Perennially Absurd: Philosophy at the Margins of Existence
Don’t fall for the aggrandizement. The wellspring of human meaning is eternal.
There are two defining facts of human existence: death and suffering. Everything else is a gamble. Whether it’s a cruel joke or not is debatable, but it’s undoubtedly a source of a latent, perennial unease at best and acute, debilitating fear at worst. Because we’re doomed to die as abruptly as we’re born, we desperately want to extend enlivening experiences and alleviate unstimulating or unfortunate ones. And while the angst of our eventual and eternal departure is understandable, there’s little choice but to take it in stride. Operating in the conjectural world of future demise at the expense of the immediate present and its profundity is impractical, foolish. Wisdom is, in part, learning to discern what is properly deserving of our dread. In this regard, maybe the Roman, Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius was right to say that when we reject our injuries, the injuries themselves disappear.
Control is perplexing and ephemeral, simultaneously the source of our energy and apathy because so much is simply beyond us. So, we surrender to the tide of circumstance. It’s in this vein, that love is a contemporary of our finitude and misfortune: strangely unelected and oscillating gifts of an enriching madness. And much to the chagrin of the scientistic intelligentsia, philosophy epiphanizes that even if it is passé.
But philosophy at least illuminates the complex tapestry of existence in a way the démodé trend of “philosophy bashing” fails to recognize. From biology to physics, á la Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss, Neil deGrasse Tyson or Stephen Hawking, sound bites abound of public intellectuals reciting anti-intellectualizations of philosophy’s end.
“Most of us don’t worry about these questions most of the time. But almost all of us must sometimes wonder: Why are we here? Where do we come from? Traditionally, these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead,” said Stephen Hawking, the world renowned theoretical physicist, cosmologist and author of ‘A Brief History of Time.’ “Philosophers have not kept up with modern developments in science. Particularly physics.”
Hawking’s musings were given in 2011 at Google’s annual Zeitgeist Conference in Hertfordshire, a county in southern England. One year later, Lawrence Krauss was interviewed by Ross Anderson of The Atlantic and remarked that: “Philosophy is a field that, unfortunately, reminds me of that old Woody Allen joke, ‘those that can’t do, teach, and those that can’t teach, teach gym.’ And the worst part of philosophy is the philosophy of science; the only people, as far as I can tell, that read work by philosophers of science are other philosophers of science. It has no impact on physics whatsoever, and I doubt that other philosophers read it because it’s fairly technical. And so, it’s really hard to understand what justifies it. And so I’d say that this tension occurs because people in philosophy feel threatened — and they have every right to feel threatened, because science progresses and philosophy doesn’t.”
There’s a half-baked, emergent pattern of appealing to authority. Scientists capitalize on their prestige and leverage popular publishing trends and media appearances on an open-minded market. But given the highly specialized nature of contemporary academics, grand generalizations readily demonstrate that expertise in one area often fails to adequately transfer to another.
Charged with the product failure of practical progress, the history of philosophy is largely irrelevant speculation. The argument goes, because philosophers don’t add to the store of positive knowledge in the way empirical science does, the profession is dead. Sure, tantalizing ideas come and go, but science and technology tangibly lead civilization toward the horizon of our imaginations.
But that entire presentation is categorically mistaken and woefully narrow, if not naïve. Take the philosophy of science and the philosophers who operate in that domain, as examples. They’re interested in how science works, not in producing new theories. The philosophic sub-field is, as the blogger and co-producer of the Rationally Speaking podcast, Massimo Pigliucci, wrote: “epistemology applied to the scientific enterprise.” The point is not to “advance science,” rather, it’s to comprehend science’s successes and failures. Because, yes, science occasionally gets things wrong and it’s important to understand why.
Contrary to popular opinion, philosophers make progress. And unpacking that headway is fascinating because, as Pigliucci elucidates, the conceptual space philosophers operate within is fiendishly slippery and incredibly expansive relative to its empirical parallel. Because philosophers traverse the conceptual terrain “by constructing arguments, entertaining counter-arguments, and either discarding or refining a certain view,” the resultant “process does not usually lead to one final answer.” Rather, it excludes deficient ones. David Chalmers, a Professor of Philosophy at NYU, ruminated along similar lines in his paper ‘Why Isn’t There More Progress in Philosophy,’ and specified that as “a result, philosophical arguments typically lead not to agreement but to sophisticated disagreement,” which further leads to “a sort of negative progress where areas of philosophical space are eliminated, but only in small fragments at a time.” So, progress isn’t absent, it’s hidden. Philosophy is a labyrinthian discipline because shoddy iterations of philosophical positions are deserted for more complex attempts to solve them.
Ultimately, the tit-for-tat discourse between philosophers and physicists illustrates that the latter has either failed to keep pace with philosophy or, again, erroneously flaunts a category mistake as an argumentative tour de force. And the irony of the sentiments expressed by Hawking and his ilk is twofold. First, to defend their positions, they must philosophize because claiming “philosophy is dead,” is a metaphysical claim that requires justification. It’s inescapable. Secondly, and as the late physicist Victor Stenger pointed out in his final co-authored essay, ‘Physicists Are Philosophers, Too,’ penned for The Scientific American, the growing schism between philosophers and physicists disrespects their symbiotic roots: both practitioners engage themselves in the ancient and magnificent philosophical tradition that birthed these great institutions. Inevitably, physicists are also philosophers.
Along similar lines, some argue that everyone is born a scientist that, all too often, is trained to become otherwise — as a delightfully curious, infant fugitive molded into an uninquisitive vanguard of market capitalism. Patrick Jimenez, a graduate student studying psychology at USC, and a Chaffey College alumni who earned his undergraduate degree in philosophy from Pitzer College, agrees that we’re all born as cerebral wanderlust. The point is not to lose it but, instead use it to properly acquaint ourselves as an immunity against cultural clichés to life’s animating questions. “Philosophy is searching for something that is more certain and more durable,” Patrick said. “Philosophy deals in a way of being, a way of orienting yourself to existence. More than anything, it’s a process.”
And that’s the perennial beauty of philosophy. It’s through that orienting process that it transforms the familiar and mundane, a consequence of its beguiling intellectual seductions. “My sophomore year of college I took an intro to philosophy class, and I didn’t even know what philosophy was at the time. But we started reading Plato. And I literally had almost a conversion experience to philosophy because this was the first time I’ve ever encountered someone who wants to think about the world on the level I want to think about it,” said Dr. Daniel Kern, a Professor of Philosophy at Chaffey College. “I did some dabbling in theology and computers and stuff, but I never really left philosophy, I always returned to it because I never really found anything that just dealt with life and issues at the level that philosophy has dealt with them.” Because, to Dr. Kern, the fundamental value of philosophy isn’t about its “practical use, it’s about grappling with the meaning of life.”
And it’s that process we must learn to love. Because comfort, for all its convenience, is stultifying. To remain suspended in arrested development, to die without ever having lived, is the most common of all tragedies. “The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe,” wrote Fredrich Nietzsche, the proto-existentialist German philosopher and author of ‘The Will to Power.’ “If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”
Sure, philosophy may not produce tangible, practical progress like engineering and physics. But as a metric for the value of human life, practical progress is wholly incomplete. True, science as an institution continues to refine its descriptive potency. Yet, while describing the processes of physical phenomena is no doubt important, the material universe pales in comparison to the immaterial subjectivity of consciousness. So far, all the theories that have attempted to reduce the utterly baffling conundrum of subjective experience, have failed to hold their explicative water — despite the seriously robust, detailed accounts of the bodily mechanisms involved.
It’s the specter of the Enlightenment that has been both materially liberating and existentially limiting, that the scientific method works — brilliantly. But its explanatory potency has its limits. Reducing experience to physics misses the mark. Life is participatory. It isn’t a matter of sufficient explanation. No doubt physics, neuroscience and neurobiology explain the form and function of matter and motion, the nervous system and behavior in relation to action or emotions. But they fail to do justice to the visceral, subjectivity of individual experience. It’s tantamount to downplaying love’s emotive transport, its enrapturing intensity as simply a matter of the smattering of external and internal stimuli triggering particular neuronal and hormonal activity. While it’s true that the sensation of love is obviously biological, triggered by the firing of neurons followed by a hormonal deluge, that’s not why it’s important: love matters because it animates not because we can describe the entire process.
In ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’, author Albert Camus highlights philosophy’s enduring import, drawn from the wellspring of our collective plight. In short, Sisyphus cheated death. As a punishment for his deceit, Hades banished Sisyphus to the underworld and sentenced him to push a boulder up a hill for eternity, unless he could manage to roll the boulder onto the other side. Motivated to return to the realm of the living, Sisyphus attempts the ordeal. But he fails. No matter how close Sisyphus gets to accomplishing the feat, he can never quite get the boulder onto the other side. So, he continues to exert his will in perpetuity to no avail. However, the point is not to feel sorry for Sisyphus. Not because he doesn’t deserve our pity but, rather because: we’re no different. We strive daily, amassing material wealth knowing that everything eventually turns to dust. There’s no inherent meaning to life according to Camus — except for the meaning we manufacture. We stare into the existential abyss, realizing that our origin and our fate are one in the same, derivatives of our sobering finality and anguish.
But Camus says that we must imagine Sisyphus happy. Because he’s accepted his life for how absurd it is, he affirms his existence by learning to love the heroic process of striving. Each of us has the power to do the same, to live maximally; heroically cognizant of the contradictions of our fruitless efforts and our definitive cessation. And yet, we carry on. Because merely ruminating over the facts of reality never changed anything, we should recall Ludwig Wittgenstein’s admonition. “Death is not an experience in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.” So, go ahead, live a little.
