Why I Am Not A Philosopher

”Philosophy is concerned with two matters: soluble questions that are trivial, and crucial questions that are insoluble”

Stefan Kanfer; quoted in Martin Gardner, “The Whys Of A Philosophical Scrivener”

The right hand banner at Massimo Piggliucci’s blog quotes the Marquis de Condorcet and Noam Chomsky, both of whom claim that the responsibility of public intellectuals is to reveal the institutional lies and prejudices:

” It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies.”

Thus does Piggliucci assume the mantle of Public Intellectual, and the presupposed responsibility attached to it.

How does one achieve the vaunted title of intellectual, anyway? There is no college regimen that produces intellectuals after studying intellectualism. There is no award that I know of which promotes a person from herdmate to intellectual elite. There is no guild or union for journeyman intellectuals, no licensing requirement, no on-the-job training for apprentice intellectuals preparing to certify as Master Intellectual.

Thomas Sowell declares that “Intellectual”, especially “Public Intellectual”, is a job name. These are to be strictly differentiated from people who use their intellect. Public Intellectuals typically are people who stay in school much longer than almost everybody else. Many never ever leave school their entire professional life. This, they presume, gives them wisdom. And the wisdom attained through constant schooling by other permanent school dwellers is thought to be superior to any wisdom attained in the outside world. Such superior wisdom, of course, is a characteristic of eliteness. Hence the urgent responsibility to dispense wisdom to the less wise.

The same goes for Philosopher. “Philosopher” is a job name, like doctor, engineer, produce manager at the grocery store, Mary Kay salesman. It is a profession. And these people also are to be strictly differentiated from people who have philosophies, which is everyone else in the world.

As a profession, Philosopher has several requirements and limitations.

It cannot accept the norms and mores of the current society, otherwise there is no path to eliteness.

It cannot accept any objective basis for irrefutable truth, or else its job is done and unemployment looms.

It must, however, supply derived subjective truths as rational, despite the lack of any firm basis for rationality due to the lack of objective truth.

Its product is words, and its success depends on selling those words. The sale of its words is enhanced by its controversy, both in erratic thought and erratic personal habits. Some claim that the more obscure the words, the higher the quality of the philosophical product.

Controversy in thought comes directly from condemnation of popular culture and the populace in general, including arrogations of the need for populace control that is necessitated due to the errors and stupidity of the populace.

Controversy in thought comes directly from denying absolutes, then declaring new absolutes which are morally imperative and binding. After which detractors are attacked with Ad Hominems and public cursings in gutter-speak. If you think this is an exaggeration, you need to get to know Dennett and Chomsky better.

This is the Dennett-Chomsky-esqe philosopher job description. One which attacks unreasoningly, places blame before data is in, verbally crucifies those who disagree, declares a demographic to be evil against all evidence to the contrary. One which uses the job description as the basis for truth, as if a title imbues every thought with the power of Truth. One which first chooses a “truth”, then vigorously searches out rationalizations to support it, even if those rationalizations must be meticulously fabricated out of thin air.

The professional Philosopher bears no resemblance to those of a philosophical persuasion, those who wish for accuracy, validity and truth, as well as an intellectual basis for thinking that those things might exist.

Professional Philosophers are no longer formed by introspection: in fact the value of introspection is denied outright as error-prone subjective delusion. Nor are they formed by any searching for first principles, which also are denied outright. Professional Philosophers are hired for their belief in, and ability to sell, preconceived and approved agendas. In fact, Professional Philosophers and Modern Skeptics travel in herds, or at least gaggles, all producing and selling the exact same product.

In short, Professional Philosophers are salesmen. They sell books. They sell universities. They sell worldviews. Primarily they sell Philosophical Materialism, Atheism and relativism.

What they sell doesn’t matter for my purposes here. It suffices to observe that selling a product requires taking a firm and unshakably positive position on the value and validity of that product. It becomes irrelevant whether the product actually has those qualities: the sales pitch is leveraged toward sales, not truth.

The victim in this is intellectual integrity and the search for truth - intellectual integrity because the buyer no longer has any need to think beyond the massive oversimplification which he buys, and the search for truth because the search is over: “truth”, however paradoxical, is prepackaged to sell easily. But wait, you also get eliteness, too!

In a sense, I am selling something too, although not for personal gain, and certainly not the canned product which the Professional Philosophers are now selling. What I pitch here is a need for individual intellectual accuracy in the search for validity in a worldview. This is an intellectual habit, one of personal inspection and introspection; one of finding those principles that are basic to rationality; those that underlie logic; those that, if false, would change the entire nature of the universe, and can be known to valid because of that non-falsification. It is a habit of personal intellectual integrity regardless of whether it is congruent with anyone’s packaged philosophical product.

And high on the list, it is an intellectual habit that does not deny any validity a priori and without scrutiny, because to do so is to live under a dogma.

Upon those incorrigibly valid intellectual principles, both a process for determining validity, and a worldview based on valid principles can be derived.

This is not Professional Philosophy, however. In fact, it seems to go against the professional job holders in Philosophical positions. Nonetheless, those of the original philosophical bent usually go against the intellectual journeymen of their time anyway; they are radically individualist in their search mechanisms, in their demand for validity, in their rigid intellectual integrity.

I aspire to the latter over the former, which is why I am not a Philosopher.