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Should the Masses be Taught Philosophy?
A dialogue on elitism and the need for reason’s integration with intuition
This is a dialogue I had with Robert Joyce (who’s known here as Scott Joyce), on the problems of communicating philosophy to the public. These problems include philosophy’s potential overreliance on technical uses of reason, and an aversion to the kind of intuitive understanding that makes sense of experience for most folks.
Robert
Benjamin, as I understand it, you propose that philosophers act as neo-shamans by journeying into the abstract, often unsettling realms of thought, returning with insights that challenge conventional understandings of reality, concepts that, in pre-modern societies, might have been approached through mystical or ritualistic experiences. A difference might be that shamans often enter altered states of consciousness through rituals, meditation, or psychoactive substances, whereas philosophers, through deep reasoning and reflection, also alter their perception — but through rational and conceptual inquiry.
My objections to that are based on biological observations, akin to Kahneman’s System 1 and System 2, but stronger. Thus, I’d point to the interaction between the relatively new logical mind, largely based on words, and a much older metaphoric…
