The New Age
In Defense of the Amateur Philosopher
Why the world is going to need a lot of good writers.
“Philosophy” used to mean “love of wisdom,” and people devoted their lives to it for that reason. Nowadays professional philosophers would be embarrassed to acknowledge so naive a conception of their craft. Today a philosopher may be a specialist in deconstructionism or logical positivism, an expert in early Kant or late Hegel, an epistemologist or an existentialist, but don’t bother him with wisdom. It is a common fate of many human institutions to begin as a response to some universal problem until, after many generations, the problems peculiar to the institutions themselves will take precedence over the original goal.
— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
If I ever need to have open-heart surgery, or if it becomes essential that I have a brain tumor surgically removed, I most definitely do not want an amateur doctor to be the one to do it.
I would want someone with years of experience conducting those operations to take up the job, and I would feel queasy at the notion of anything less.
But when it comes to the pursuit of wisdom — which is what philosophy effectively is — it is okay to embrace the title of “amateur.”
