My problem with philosophy

For some time, I've had a sort of love-hate relationship with philosophy; I sometimes become curious and absorbed in certain distinctions and elucidations and sometimes feel that they are of no value at all. My philosophical appetite is very fickle I suppose. I think that this has been demonstrated to some small degree over the last few months of keeping this blog... for the sake of convenience, some posts on my understanding of philosophy are listed below in chronological order (though I'm not terribly proud of them, with the exception of the last):

i. The future of philosophy
ii. Journal Entry - The Philosophical Jigsaw Puzzle
iii. What's left of metaphysics
iv. phi‧los‧o‧phy |fəˈläsəfē|


There seems to be one very simple nagging and perhaps naive (though it doesn't seem incorrect) principle that is always in the back of my mind. This principle is that however elaborate, prolonged and intricate a philosophical system comes to be, in the end it's conclusions must be self-evident. (If this is not the case, the conclusion is a product of the sciences or dogmatism.) This is quite an impediment on the subject--how difficult it becomes for philosophy to identify something profound!

I've often thought that it would be infinitely valuable for some author to compile a list of the fundamental questions that remain within the domain of philosophy, so that, with the questions identified, they could be addressed in a more clearheaded and expedient fashion. The problem with this method is that the unanswered questions do not take the form of a particular "this or this?", but rather "what is this?". In this respect, philosophy does not adopt the role of clarifying dilemmas, but of defining (i.e. constructing) them... and I would contend, further, that these dilemmas are artificial, resulting from a disoriented or very definite use of language where the former would say something illusory and the latter would say something ultimately trivial.

An example of a "defining" dilemma would be like asking, "What is freedom?" or "What is law supposed to do?". The only true philosophical answer to these is to understand "freedom" or "law" out of their common usage and in a (new) narrow, technical sense. However, this is what spoils the process, because in that marginalization the solution to the "dilemma" proper is ignored in favor of a constricted and often pedantic exploration of concepts, distinctions, and logic. I started to first think about this a few years ago when I began doing Lincoln-Douglas debate in high-school, and it appeared to me that the key to succeeding in your position was to adjust the definitions as to expunge any sort of penumbral area (if I may borrow Hart's term for no apparent reason). But in doing this, the real question that is posed is ignored (a new question takes its place)... because that question (which is generally determined to be an even-ended pro-con dispute) has either an inherent misrelation of ideas or hopelessly ambivalent terminology therein which does more than obstruct a solution--it forbids one.

At present, I am confident that what I have explained above is accurate... I could continue it further for the sake of clarity or to "systematize" it in order to inject it with some academic credance, but I think I lack the enthusiasm to do so. I would very much appreciate ANY and ALL responses to what I have stated above... I desperately want my idea to be challenged, it could determine whether or not I continue to pursue philosophy as one of my 2-3 majors in college.

And to pre-empt a clever quip that I wouldn't doubt to hear, I am not saying that all philosophy can express nothing (therefore I am not presenting a philosophical inquiry in why philosophy is non-sense or anything to that effect), on the contrary I am asserting that philosophy can only proffer trivial conclusions and the arguments in this post are following in that tradition. In this sense, I believe philosophy (in a narrow sense) has the capacity to identify and correct artificial and superfluous problems created by philosophy (in a broad sense... including quasi-philosophical concepts that appear in language).

I'd really like some feedback on this. Am I mistaken?



10/15 update:

Further discussion on facebook (I'm not sure if the link will work... in any case you'll need to login to view it):

1. Fun with metaphilosophy

And a few excerpts to elaborate on my argument above:

Nonetheless, I'm not sure that my ideas came through quite as I had hoped (I get whimsical at times when writing for my own amusement, hence the "how...profound!" statement). I'm not expecting "poetry" from philosophy in any sense, nor am I necessarily desiring a direct and substantive practical application of the products of philosophy. The idea is that the appropriation of language toward generalized accounts (philosophy in a broad sense) creates fundamental inconsistencies which are to be solved by philosophy (in a narrow sense). In this view, philosophy is incapable of expressing anything _beyond_ that... it's basically the synthetic clarification of language. And it's in that respect that it lacks any "profound", non-banal, or non-trivial quality, as I see it.

And in the comparison to astrophysics, etc. I don't think those are acting in the same manner. Astrophysics formulates theories to try to explain the workings of our world (even if this isn't of "practical" value), it's a *science*, viz. something with which it's conclusions rest in empirical confirmation (or the lack of empirical dismissal). Philosophy has nothing of this character intrinsic to it--some branches will deal with empirical inputs as presuppositions, but nothing which fundamentally tells us the nature of things as they are, only the nature of language and logic (which I again argue are present due to inadvertant artificial constructions).

Where I'm getting bogged down is in my present conviction that philosophy doesn't say _anything_ illuminating. Even in practical cases like ethics I think that philosophy plays a fairly insignificant role. The presupposed axiological or aesthetic judgments are the foundations on which the logic and "philosophizing" follows; philosophy plays no role except explicating the contents of the presupposed value judgments or evaluative criteria which are incapable of being formulated _by_ philosophy. And in cases of competition or comparison between ethical systems, the discussion ultimately takes place on the grounds of value judgment, which are foreign to philosophy as a study.

(I generally take preference and value in philosophy as something different altogether--be it psychological or deontological. I usually just call it "philosophy in a broad sense" or "dogmatic" philosophy.)

I couldn't agree more about philosophy determining whether or not propositions are valid, but I don't think that that is just a metaphorical example--that's all that philosophy (in what I have called a 'narrow sense') can hope to do.

In my view, the only real "philosophy", so-called, is metaphilosophy (and I suppose a practical extension of this would be epistemology). If philosophy then proves that logic can pronounce something that is outside of itself then that field may be annexed to it... but to my understanding this has yet to come to fruition. To this end, philosophy says what we me may sensibly say and what we may not sensibly say, but nothing more.

With regard to philosophy's universal applicability, i.e. as the "science of possibility", I would still contend that this is in merely in the domain of logic. In the realm of imaginable 'universes', the only "abstracted" ones that I can intuit are those of math and geometry, and they too are functions of logic. Further, I'd argue that language functions to _characterize_ and _describe_ experience so it isn't as far-reaching as I believe you are suggesting.

As to the bits about metaphysics, I'm somewhat confused. Firstly, I'm uncertain as to how numbers can have any metaphysical alignment. How can operators or operands even be considered in the domain of metaphysics? Secondly, in the case of the cat and cat-with-one-hair missing, the complication is that you are biding into the problem of identity by ascribing an "objective" quality of singular immutable identity (i.e. object-ness) to it. That seems to be a pretty acute demonstration of what I'm talking about when I speak of artificial constructions created by language. And if you were to gradually progress to a hypothetical "nightmarish cat" that is without limbs, a tail, fur, and numerous other items that in all make it wholly alien to the normative conception of 'cat', I would then ask how this is not a dilemma created solely by the misappropriation of language and belonging to no other domain. In this example, experience is the case (the phenomena which you are referring to by the name 'cat'), not the way in which it is characterized.

[...]

But in all of this, I hope you can see why I have come to consider philosophy as mostly trivial. Philosophy has metaphilosophy, logic, and some consequent epistemology going for it... and that's about it. And, as I argued before, philosophy that follows from presupposition (e.g. ethics, jurisprudence, political philosophy, etc.) does nothing more than carry out the logical form and inclination of those presuppositions, so the philosophizing doesn't even play an active role...

What I meant was that language, in it's origins, development, and proper function, describes experience (i.e. a state of affairs such as "The sheet of paper is on the table" or "The sun is rising"). This state of affairs is empirical if the statement is to be regarded as "true" or if the inquiry is to be practical in the least. As to problems with metaphysics and causal necessity, identity, being, and so forth, they, again, are strictly "artificial" (I can think of no better way to describe it) problems resulting from the _misuse_ of language in relating "apposite" concepts (a good example of which would be Zeno of Elea's dichotomy paradox).

As to metaethics, I think it is coordinated properly under metaphilosophy and philosophy, but it is then quickly disposed of. The best statement of this that I can think of is the Dostoevskian (if that's actually an adjective) "How can there be crime if God does not exist?". The only real philosophical (i.e. metaethical) statement I believe one can claim of ethics is that it rests on ontological, deontological, or preferential presuppositions. And this statement is essentially an exercise in the philosophy of language that is guided by epistemology, such that it doesn't describe a state of affairs but instead describes "latent" meaning within terms of language to which there are no empirical states of affairs that properly correspond. Yet this still does not offer greater insight to the "way things are", it merely states, "By the word 'self' in this context (by so-and-so and in this syntax) it is meant..." In a sense this also requires presupposition--and it still does not properly correspond to the way things 'are', only the way that we describe them, and with many such terms oftentimes being inherently contradictory or misrelational _in_ meaning ('self' included, given the right context and supposed meaning).

And on another note, I've since decided to simply minor in philosophy. So my current inclination will be toward two majors and two minors: majors in drawing/painting and sociology, and minors in art history and philosophy. We'll see how this holds up.