What my Philosophy degree didn’t teach me about philosophy
Finding value in the lessons learnt through living, not studying.
Of all the consequences that studying Philosophy at university has left me with, perhaps the most entertaining is the catalogue of reactions people have when they learn this fact about me. I’ve never quite put my finger on where the source of their incredulity lies. For some it reads on their face as surprise, if not because it’s specifically me who studied the subject (perhaps I’m not considered to be serious enough) then a more general astonishment that anyone would choose to dedicate three years of their life, amassing so much student debt, for a degree that ostensibly has limited practical value in the real world.
Sometimes there is a hint of awe — ‘Really? Wow, I could never study that’ — which I put down to the reputation Philosophy has earned as a notoriously difficult subject that is reserved for only the most studious thinkers, an assumption I intend to challenge with this post. (This particular breed of response will often be followed with my being asked to weigh in on a clichéd philosophical dilemma, as if I had actually spent my entire degree trying to work out whether, if a tree falls in a forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it actually make a sound?)
In most instances, including the majority who are largely indifferent, I can’t help but feel there is a hint of scepticism about the relevance of philosophy lurking. It’s a mindset I have been guilty of perpetuating myself with my own self-deprecatory remarks; I am likely to be the one who caveats my own academic history with a hasty addition of ‘but I don’t know why I chose it, it has nothing to do with anything I do now. I just enjoyed it at the time.’ As if I can so neatly delineate between the decisions and events of my life that have or haven’t led to where I am in this present moment.
It is ironically only as I have reentered the UK higher education system as a Masters student, five years after graduating, that I can reflect more critically on what impression my degree left on me — not only in the form of theories, arguments and logical deductions stored in my memory, but in a deeply rooted curiosity that follows (or would it be more accurate to say leads) me wherever I go. But for all that I did encounter in lectures and seminars between the years 2012 and 2015, it’s taken five years of living in that real world to appreciate what my Philosophy degree (capital P) failed to teach me about philosophy as it is lived (little p).
SIMILARITIES FIRST, DIFFERENCES SECOND
Comparison is one of the most useful processes our minds are capable of. It’s what allows us to see and make sense of much of the world. When we encounter new objects or concepts that we haven’t encountered before, our mind has this incredible ability to rummage through the archives and pull out the nearest comparator, allowing us to contrast what lies before us with a mental image against which we can better understand it. It’s round like a ball. It’s blue like the sky.
This also opens us up to the world of differences, not just visually but conceptually as well. Seeing difference can help us to categorise our understanding just as effectively as comparison, and it’s a mechanic that is taken full advantage of in our education system. Philosophy as an academic subject is largely taught in terms of the differences between how different schools of thought or individual thinkers would approach a problem; sometimes there is even disagreement on what the problem actually is. The contrast between Plato and Aristotle for instance, a teacher/student duo considered to be the two greatest thinkers in Western philosophy at least, has been immortalised in art by Italian Renaissance artist Raphael in the fresco The School of Athens, in which Plato is portrayed pointing up to the sky — supposedly hinting at his fondness for abstracts and universals — standing next to his student Aristotle, who is holding his hand out towards the physical world which gave rise to his own more practical, empirical philosophies. While this is a nifty visualisation of where the two thinkers differed in their approach, a narrative which dominates the discourse of the two thinkers, it omits the commonalities between them, of which there were perhaps more than there were differences.¹
I refer to this here as a single tangible example of where differences come before similarities. When you spend three years learning about every topic in this way, by appealing to contrasts, what you are left with is an impression that there is no consensus at all: the history of philosophy reads as one huge series of disagreements, incompatibilities, and unwillingness to stand on common ground.
I chose sides in my coursework and exam papers, and academically I embraced the distinct differences between one argument and another that my course was forcing me to accept. But on a personal level, I was not entirely satisfied with the lines that were drawn so harshly between one thinker’s ideas and another’s. Half a decade on, I have come to see the value of philosophy lies not in its rigidity, but in its flexibility, which in my mind conjures up visual images of Ditto — the blob-like Pokemon that can transform into any shape, remaining somewhat constant in substance and identity, but malleable and adaptive to the situation it finds itself in.
I found myself agreeing with author Eric Weiner, as I listened to him exploring the philosophies that can help us cope with the Covid-19 pandemic, saying
‘This is the beauty in philosophy unlike religion or politics. In philosophy, you can construct your own. I call it the IKEA philosophy — some assembly required. You find the commonalities, and if it works for you, and it helps you see more clearly, live more fully, then in the words of William James: truth is what works.’²
He was quick to caveat that this subjective truth should not be what guides us in all cases (especially as Trump had not yet left the White House), but in a soft sense we can mould our own subjective truths in the form of our personal guiding philosophies. I confess that I had considered it a failure of sorts that I had not graduated from university with a strong alliance to any one particular philosopher or school of thought, as if I’d only played the spectator and not had a chance to get onto the field. Looking back on it now, I embrace the patchwork-philosophy approach and realise that the failing was not on my part to choose one and stick with it, but that it is perhaps an oversight of our education system for placing too much importance on distinctions and differences, and not teaching us to see in terms of similarities and likeness — a shift in perception that would surely have farther reaching benefits than just within the confines of philosophical debate.
PHILOSOPHY CAN BE PHYSICAL
It’s arguable that it doesn’t really matter whether the tree makes a sound or not; what matters is that it’s falling down in the first place. I’ve heard many people describe 2021 as a year of action. We can no longer afford to make future-looking commitments to reduce carbon emissions or switch to renewable energy, we have to be making demonstrable changes to the way we live and we have to start making them now. Which invites me to ask, what contribution can an armchair discipline like philosophy bring to the table?
It’s this general characterisation of philosophy as something that one does only with their head that has earned Stoicism the by-line of a ‘practical philosophy’, setting it apart from its purely theoretical counterparts.³ The Stoic philosophers (the main ones being Marcus Aurelius, Lucius Seneca and Epictetus) appeal to daily experiences to explore their philosophies, solidifying their teachings as more ‘relevant’ to the realities of the human condition. My own reading is thus far limited to Seneca, who speaks plainly of how to manage our fear of ageing (‘old age is its time of bloom’), on moderation in the face of consumption (‘you can live happily without it as well as with it’), and on our tendency to exaggerate our own suffering (‘we suffer more often in imagination than in reality’) to name the subjects of just three of his 124 letters.⁴ It is pearls of practical and easily quotable wisdom like this that I have seen circulated across social media for the duration of lockdown, giving stoicism a modern day revival fulled by the powers of the Instagram algorithm, reaffirming its distinction as one of the few, if not the only, practical schools of philosophy.
What I am rooting for is a more generous view of philosophy in its entirety as something that can be mobilising and activated — physically as well as mentally. Many revered philosophers exerted themselves physically as much as they did mentally, using physical activities like walking, playing cards or even fencing to think through their ideas before committing them to paper. That very much puts the ‘old man in an armchair’ stereotype to bed (though we still have to do some work on the man part).
To keep the furniture metaphor going, I consider my degree to have furnished my mind with a lot of fully constructed pieces that can all fit in the room but, well, they wouldn’t make the cut for an #interiorinspo post. What if Philosophy were taught as a more embodied practise? I might have been provided with a build-your-own wardrobe — materials, tools and (topline) instructions provided, like the Technical challenge in GBBO — for me to cobble together my own personal philosophy, participating in the construction process (and probably making a few mistakes and personalisations along the way). I’d graduate with a strong sense of my embodied philosophy, a guiding set of principles with which I can create my own version of the wonderful every day, as IKEA would say.
Philosopher and ‘ecosopher’ Arne Næss considers our embodied philosophies to not only be useful but vital to initiate genuine, transformative action, particularly with regards to how we relate to the natural world. Speaking of aligning our intention of living more sustainably with our actions, ‘They are then to be classed as practising philosophers, whatever their degree of ignorance of academic philosophy. Sometimes this ignorance may be an advantage.’⁵ As much as I hate to think my academic investment places me in a worse position to be a practising philosopher, or a sustainable citizen, I concede that Næss may have a point. If we spend too much time in our heads, we neglect to translate productive thoughts into transformative actions.
Perhaps such self-realisation is too much to expect of an undergraduate degree, I merely fantasise on it here to draw out the ultimate benefit that philosophy could bring if it were positioned as a discipline of aligning body and mind, and not a discipline rooted in intellect alone. It is perhaps taken for granted that the literal translation of the Greek work philosophia, ‘love of wisdom’, seems to refer only to the wisdom of the human mind — as it is taught in universities, anyway. As German philosopher Friedrich Nietszche said, ‘There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.’ And beyond our human bodies, in the natural world around us, there is yet more wisdom to be found, understood and imitated. I find myself naturally doing so on my daily walks, a time in my working day where I find my mind is ironically at its most active, despite having stepped away from the desk in search of respite. Sure enough, I soon find myself negotiating with my gloves to hastily type impatient thoughts in the notes on my phone that spring to mind mid-circuit around my local park, as opposed to the more convenient (though less stimulating) setting of my desk — hardly wisdom on the scale of the thinkers keeping company in this post, but embodied thoughts nonetheless, that arrive to me in response to the environment that I find myself in.
MAKING SPACE FOR INTUITION
To finish, I offer one final thought from Arne Næss that struck me as, not incompatible, but refreshingly dissimilar to the general rule of thumb in Philosophy that one must always substantiate their argument with reasoning. ‘My advice is to stop giving reasons when you announce something you personally find intuitively obviously true or correct,’ writes Næss, ‘or something that you cannot imagine yourself giving up except for reasons you have never heard of and cannot see how they could be convincing.’
On the face of it, it seems like a reasonable request, not only of Philosophy students but also of all responsible human agents, to be able to account for the decisions we make on a daily basis. We may not have to voluntarily offer those explanations, and we may not be consciously aware of the exact reason for doing something (because it is habitually or culturally hard-wired into us), but if we were asked to explain why we just acted in a certain way, often we would be able to answer the question.
We are existing in a world, and I believe a particular moment in the history of that world, where our actions and choices can be scrutinised from all angles. Acting on the basis of logical reasoning will only get us so far, and I interpret Næss’ words as appealing to the wisdom that is best used when it is felt, not when used in a rational deduction. For those who aspire to move through the world in a way that is compatible with whichever philosophy they subscribe to, perhaps you can find comfort in Næss’ words as I do, that ‘You are no less philosophical or deep or scientific for stopping at a certain point to repeat again and again certain announcements without giving reasons.’⁶
‘SOONER OR LATER, THE WORLD WILL MAKE PHILOSOPHERS OF US ALL’
To engage in philosophy is to give into one of the most human tendencies of all: to ask questions. As toddlers, as soon as we are able to form words, much to the dismay of our parents and carers, we erupt with questions about anything and everything. And yet, at some point in our maturation, that innate curiosity is dampened as we learn in one way or another that questions should be rationed; that some questions are stupid, some questions aren’t polite to ask, and some questions we aren’t meant to know the answer to.
Philosophy creates a safe space for asking questions, and from my experience so far, in this space no question is a stupid one — though there may be times when the question you’re asking is not quite the right one. Writing this essay has largely been a cathartic exercise for me, allowing me to explore the less obvious question of what a Philosophy degree can’t teach us about its subject, rather than the question one might initially seek the answer to (as I did all those years ago), which is what it can.
In a way this has been an attempt to justify, to myself more than anyone else, the sustained relevance of a degree subject I dedicated three years of my life to. I realise now that I may be guilty of projecting scepticism about philosophy’s place in the world onto others, when perhaps it has always been my own insecurities that have caused me to doubt its practical value to my new academic venture, my professional career, and my personal life journey.
I cannot tell you if the tree makes a sound. I can tell you that studying Philosophy and continuing to engage with it now has shaped how I approach the world, and has equipped me with one of the most valuable tools one can possess — curiosity — to withstand the uncertainties and instabilities that we all find ourselves navigating at the moment. Above all, it has forged in me a willingness to see my place in the world, and to act on the basis of that sight, slightly differently.
Thank you for sticking with me until the end of this post. If it has inspired any thoughts or questions I’d love to hear about them in the comments, and if you would be interested in keeping updated with future posts please follow me.
This post is also published on my personal blog www.mollywithawhy.co.uk where you will find shorter and longer reads navigating themes rooted in philosophy, ecology and innovation, from big picture thinking to small everyday experiences that call for reflection.
References and further reading:
¹ You can see the painting and read a topline overview of Plato and Aristotle’s distinct philosophies here: https://www.britannica.com/story/plato-and-aristotle-how-do-they-differ
² Philosophy in the Age of Covid-19, with Eric Weiner and Danielle Sands on Intelligence Squared podcast — a thought-provoking 30 minute episode that highlights some of the more tangible philosophies we can turn to right now, that has seeded some of the ideas explored in this post.
³ This is an informative read on Medium that debunks the idea that Stoicism is a practical philosophy at all: https://medium.com/the-sophist/the-problem-with-stoicism-cd4183f7a24
⁴ Quotes taken from Seneca’s ‘Letters from a Stoic’ — a collection of 124 letters of correspondence between Seneca and Lucilius. If you want some easy-to-digest philosophy to dip into, this is a good option as each letter can be read on its own for a daily dose of wisdom.
⁵ Arne Næss, Ecology of Wisdom — a beautiful book exploring where philosophy and ecology merge in the intriguing space of ecosophy. I intend to delve deeper into this new territory (for me) and hope to write more about it in future posts.
⁶ Arne Næss, Ecology of Wisdom, ‘Sustainability! The integral approach’
