On the Utility of Philosophy

The Calling of Saint Matthew, Caravaggio (est. 1599)

Author's note: On re-reading this essay I think that it may be a 'personal piece': I think there may be a large amount of thought and context that lurks behind its words and ideas, thought which is left unexplained but which is important to understand what I'm saying. Sorry if that is the case, it's probably not just you. I often write to clarify for myself; this isn't really designed to convince, though i would like it if it left you with the sense that my pursuit of philosophy is worthwhile. At some future point I'd like to rewrite it for a wider audience.

I have long been attracted to the study and practice of philosophy without knowing why. For most of my life it was the only thing I had studied on my own with any seriousness — in fact, the only thing I felt capable of studying. I got into it because I thought that there would be Answers there. Then for a while I thought there were in fact none, and felt good about myself by holding only meta-philosophical positions, not Philosophical ones in the traditional sense. Now I'm not so sure that was correct; perhaps I was overzealous. But whether there answers are or not, philosophy is apparently inherent to my way of interacting with the world. I know this because a year ago I had a personal crisis (documented elsewhere on this site) over the fact that I was non-technical — to say it more precisely, I didn't have developed technical skills — and cut off philosophy entirely, in an effort to focus my energies elsewhere. As a consequence I became bored and depressed. Philosophical questions imbue the world with significance that it, evidently, does not otherwise have for me.

I now structure most of my intellectual project around philosophy. All of my work, all of my interests, are in essence philosophical interests. I work on interpretability because I want to understand intelligence, I want to see what kinds of ontologies the learning systems produce, how they grow and how they cooperate; I want to refine what it means to be human in the face of intelligent machines. Likewise, I work on intellectual history research because I want to understand the ideas that shape the world around me — or, more accurately, whether the ideas that seem to be influential truly exert any force. And my undergrad major is in math; I'm still not sure what mathematics is, but I am interested in it because abstract structure feels, in some important sense, fundamental to the world. At the very least, mathematics is famously "unreasonably effective" in the natural sciences — for example, the standard model of particle physics is formulated in terms of Lie groups, which describe continuous symmetry in abstract terms.¹

This is all to say that philosophy is bound up with most of the things I care about in my life, and no doubt touches every single thing in my life indirectly. Thus I have often asked, and been asked, why it is worth studying. And what even is it?

Philosophy is, among many other things it is famous for, famously difficult to define. Taking a position on what philosophy is, or alternatively what is philosophy, tends to be a philosophical position. For example, a major movement in 20th century analytic philosophy in the tradition of the younger Wittgenstein attempted to cut off vast parts of philosophical practice as logically meaningless non-philosophy. Wikipedia does about as good and uncontroversial a job as I could hope for with its lede:

Philosophy (from Ancient Greek philosophía lit. 'love of wisdom') is a systematic study of general and fundamental questions concerning topics like existence, knowledge, mind, reason, language, and value. It is a rational and critical inquiry that reflects on its methods and assumptions.

Of course, like many definitions, there are edge cases. Do we count Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus as a 'systematic study'? Is it 'rational and critical', 'reflecting on its methods and assumptions'? Is it really even philosophy?

Whatever. This definition is not my personal understanding of it. Here is my philosophical position on philosophy: philosophy is the process of frame-making. It is both interpretive and creative or constructive, or both. Philosophy provides vocabularies² with which to think about things, any things, what to make of those things in some qualitative sense. Those vocabularies produce new options, new doors to open, new actions to take, new lines of thinking to unroll.

This is an expansive definition. It includes all sorts of things that fall under other domains, particularly theology. It technically includes all of natural science too — or, more precisely, it includes what you get when you consider the consequences of natural science.

This conception of philosophy is the core idea here. I'll spend the rest of the essay showing you various facets of that stone, low-dimensional cross-sections of its volume, dancing with this definition to many kinds of music. I hope that this will clarify what it actually means to think about philosophy in the way that I propose. And in the process of this clarification, I hope it will become obvious why one might study philosophy.

I. Philosophy as meaning-making

I mentioned above that philosophy is inherent to, uh, my conscious existence. This view of philosophy, as a process of meaning-making, is the most essential one for me in the sense that it is the one that is closest to my intense intrinsic motivation to pursue it.

Philosophy is frame-making on my life. Philosophy provides the terms on which and the vocabulary with which I talk about (or don't talk about) value, meaning, my existence as a person. "How should I live?" is a (probably) very important question. Do I live a life worth being proud of? Do I make the world better? How do I do those things, or do them more? What is worth doing? And, crucially — are these the right questions to ask? Are there questions here to ask at all?

In the past couple of months I have been working through a way of thinking about political philosophy without conventional normativity, attempting to provide a way of looking at the world that simply does not involve a notion of person-independent, abstract, juridical Right. It involves, instead, expanded self-identification with organisms at many scales (e.g. the family, community, school, company, project, one's country or one's civilization) such that things we'd normally say are "the right thing to do" — like voting, or community service, or upholding the law (in most circumstances) — become homeostatic processes whose utility is self-evident, acts for which asking for justification is as silly as asking, "Why should I sleep? Why should I eat?" The real difficulty of the project, once you have the initial concept, is fleshing out the details, making things consistent and reasonable, but I am optimistic about my ability to do that. For now, my previous mini-essay The human project should suffice to give you a sense of what I'm going for, even though it was written long before I started seriously developing this way of thinking.

But the current end result has already been fruitful for me. In the process of developing this way of thinking, I've expanded my sense of what is explicitly my 'self' to a much broader class of organisms — my family, my community, my country — and with that my understanding of the goals I'm pursuing, the things that I desire, and what I am, or rather what "I" is. And this altered frame of thought makes my life literally feel much more meaningful, day-to-day, decision-to-decision. I find doing things for other people to feel better. I get more satisfaction in doing small actions that I would previously have considered "the right thing" — things that I 'wanted to want to do'. And on the cosmic level, my life feels much more exciting, having expanded my 'cognitive light-cone,'³ my sense of what goals 'I' am able to pursue. The world feels more primordially Alive.⁴

And of course, this framework is the current (as of writing) state of my philosophical evolution over many years of thinking about questions like the ones I mentioned above.

II. Philosophy as interface

There has always been a blurry line between philosophy and other pursuits like empirical science and math and logic. Philosophy has historically been a 'philosophy of the gaps';⁵ as a field like physics comes into its own, it splits off away from the broader field of philosophy and gets its own specialization. Many philosophers practiced other sciences as well — Descartes, Aristotle, Russell, Leibniz, Hume, James, Dennett, Marx — to name just a couple random ones that come to mind. Indeed, most of these disciplines (as I sort-of claimed above when I gave my definition of philosophy) still contain a deep well of ideas of philosophical importance. Advancing quantum theory has important implications for metaphysics. Ideas from biology about evolution help us reckon with things like changes in human values over time. Incentives given by academia do not tend to incentivize the advancement or publication of such ideas; the methodology of focusing philosophy through the lens of empirical science (where empirical science has anything to say, of course) is what I mean by technical philosophy, and I think it is under-emphasized in the way we currently practice philosophy.

So in many cases things that used to be called philosophy, in the broad sense, became useful to refer to as its own specialization, with its own methods, and drifted from the focus of philosophical inquiry to inquiry about the subject for its own sake. The distinguishing factor is whether it develops systematic scientific models — can you pin down the objects of inquiry experimentally? Can you measure them, support hypotheses, and build the observations into an edifice of knowledge? If so, it'll sprout.

But in cases where this doesn't happen we get a lot of interesting things. Metaphysics is (well, often) un-empirical. Epistemology is complicated in that regard. So is ethics. These we still call philosophy for that reason. You cannot observe a Good. You cannot pin down a Knowledge or an Ultimate Reality in the way you can pin down an atom.⁶ There are many things which we wish to talk about but which we will struggle to work with in a systematic way — perhaps they are too complex and dynamic to model, or too conceptually tricky to operationalize. In this case, where it doesn't properly emerge into a science, philosophy acts as an interface. Since I need terms here, for the sake of this essay I'll refer to a model as a structure of hypotheses that are systematic and predictive of (almost) all of an object or system's behavior, an interface is an incomplete cross-section of some system or object. Often we have mutant cross-breeds of theory and interface, like economic models mixed with interfaces for ethical thought, or metaphysical interfaces.

Critically, interfaces and models both open up what design theory calls affordances — a description of a system implies some set of actions that you can take on it. So even if your interface is incomplete, it gives you some traction on what you can do to influence the behavior of some system.

Sorry for the abstraction here. Examples should clear it up. Marxism is a paradigmatic example: it is both philosophy and economic science. Marx has a whole metaphysics of commodities; the labor theory of value is both a description and a prescription for what things are worth, and it leads to a theory of capitalism as inherently exploitative. But if you replace the labor theory with some other theory of value like marginal utility, the picture for capitalism as exploitation gets much murkier, at least along the traditional lines of argumentation for Marx. As this fusion of philosophy and economics, Marxism as a whole acts as an interface — contrary to what you might hear from a strawman, no, you cannot explain all of human behavior through material conditions. Marxist analysis is good at explaining some parts of human life, but it's bad at explaining others; either way, it gives you at least some way of analyzing problems, and implies some action, maybe not the right one, to take to fix them.

A lot of continental philosophy⁷ and social theory falls into this category too. Gender theory is an incomplete interface for human life experience and society. It lets you think about individual relationships and societal dynamics through performance of roles, expectation, and upholding self-image. Sometimes this analysis will be appropriate, and will give you traction on changing society for the better; sometimes it will be overcooked, and you'll be looking for a gender-focused solution to a problem that is only superficially related.

Likewise, critical theory and Nietzschean vitalism give you frames with which to think about power. Both of them will be useful for some purposes — for some analysis and some actions — but not others. Nietzsche's philological theory of the evolution of ethics in On the Genealogy of Morals is genuinely useful as a model of the moral psychology of a person or group sometimes. Is Freudian psychoanalysis philosophy? Yeah, under the expansive definition I gave above; philosophy and psychology overlap a lot. Psychoanalysis gives you an incomplete model of your own and others' mental processes, selves, how you work on a lower psychological level. Also society as a whole: I remember reading Civilization and its Discontents and remarking on the fact that Freud really could have become a political philosopher. Near the end of the essay he remarks on the possibility of civilization, and it really seems like he's about to launch into his vision of the least bad society — but clearly and deliberately chose not to. I am still curious as to why.

In further support of this point, I will cite a book review that still mystifies me:

I’ve been wanting to learn more about Lacan for a while. Partly because I never understood him in school. Partly because Slavoj Zizek is into him and everyone seems to think Zizek is smart. And partly because I recently realized that Kleinian psychoanalysis, which I also never understood, actually has useful insights (hint: compare Part III of this post with the theory of part objects) and for all I know Lacanian psychoanalysis might be the same way.

But also: I have a couple of friends and acquaintances who are (or were) really into Lacan. They’re all exactly the same: highly-driven highly-charismatic people, alternating between eerily brilliant and totally incomprehensible, and always deeply misanthropic throughout. Teach fits this same mold. Does the personality type attract you to the theory? Does the theory produce the personality type? It’s a weird enough coincidence that it makes me want to learn more.

And: I have a running argument with one of these people. The argument is: I accuse him of becoming a cult leader, he denies it. During a recent spat, he said something like - “okay, I agree that lots of people are fascinated by me / attracted to me / tend to do whatever I want, in a way that doesn’t make sense under the normal rules, and that you couldn’t replicate even if you wanted to. You can judge me for it, or you can admit there’s a hole in your map, something that I understand and you don’t. If you want to understand it too, read Lacan.”

(Book Review: Sadly, Porn - Astral Codex Ten)

The trick is not to get captured by any one interface. I've met many people in college, and seen even more of them online like this. They speak only the language of Theory, or the Gospel, or Communism, or Nietzsche, or even Effective Altruism. These are not total models of the complexity human life! They are interfaces with it! They can be great interfaces and nonetheless incomplete! Admission of incompleteness is not a fault but a strength; theories that predict too much are useless!

What you do is you in studying this kind of interface-building philosophy is build an 'internal interface market' for systems or objects that are too complex or qualitative to yet have a complete model. When something mysterious happens, when you're looking for an explanation of some phenomenon, you auction it off to the bidder offering the most explanatory power. Different interfaces will provide different descriptions of the phenomenon and therefore different imply different actions in response. Take them as advice.

If you have no market, you risk accidentally becoming one of those people captured by a single interface, not knowing that you are. Humans cannot help but have a world-view; those who claim that they don't care about philosophy are often those most held within its clutches. This is not inherently a criticism, to be clear — in many cases, more empirically-based action and less abstract thought about values and framing is what is needed, since the 'good thing' is patently obvious, and the difficult thing is to actually marshal the resources to solve it — but the notion of an idea-free 'man of action' is silly. And in any case, ideas are a powerful way to move yourself, if not other people.

Even if you escape that fate, passing up on philosophy is passing up access to the vast experience of human contemplation. Compared to what you could have had, you're left with a shallow relationship to parts of human life that don't have exact totalizing models.

III. Philosophy as power-maker

I have thus far spoken of philosophy as interface for yourself — a tool for you as an individual to make more sense of the world. But ideas spread; shared interpretation of phenomena is tremendously powerful, because it produces the same action in response. In other words, interpretations organize people towards action. Thus, propagation of philosophical framings, of interfaces, is extremely powerful, since multi-agent organisms are capable of far more than individuals. These multi-agent actors are the kind that can be harnessed by good leadership into massive historical change.

I have hit on Communism a lot in this essay, but it remains a great example. Communist theory unites a description of international geopolitical events and local-scale events into a single framework. It wants to be a model, and markets itself as such. It implies various kinds of actions, extremely persuasively — the 20th century was filled with revolution after revolution for a reason. over and over again. Similarly, variants on Christian theology and the ideologies that developed on top of that theology have been historically massively influential, both Catholic and Protestant, in different ways. Massive violent conflict, the foundation of new states and crumbling of old ones, the changing of political order, was wrought by the kind of interpretations that won out following the Reformation. Philosophy from the Enlightenment gave a channel through which liberal political energy could flow. Critical theory and its derivative ideologies energized widespread societal change in the 2010s, and also catalyzed the strong reaction against it we have seen since then.

Political movements are inherently ideological. The movement of people requires ideas to move them. This is not to advance a purely intellectual or ideological theory of history, of course; ideology is effective or ineffective based on how it interacts with the ultra-complex system that is the society it is introduced in — the social bonds, the economic conditions, the cultural history. And its effectiveness depends both on the competence of people who follow it, as well as its inherent suitability to the world conditions in which it finds itself.

I understand this to be because it is framing. Ideology is just a powerful kind of philosophy; as such it provides interfaces for the world. Useful ideology provides a relatively accurate diagnosis for problems, and the affordances it opens up will actually improve the problems it identifies. Unhelpful ideology inaccurately attributes effects to the wrong causes, and thus opens affordances that won't make things better. Both of them explain the world and organize people behind these explanations; some of them are better at doing so than others.

So philosophy on this view gives rational grounding to political existence. It provides structuring for people to take actions. Studying it provides you understanding of 'what's in the water': the fundamental framings that both your society and others' societies take as given. This gives you, individually, power, both analytical power and worldly.

IV. Other kinds of philosophy

Often philosophy is defended on the grounds that it makes you a better 'critical thinker.' I hope that I have provided a much more interesting set of reasons to study it above, but the idea that it makes you better at certain kinds of analytical thinking is probably true in most cases. I won't say it always is, because philosophy students (broadly construed — I count myself among them) can be... very intellectually silly.

I bring this argument up for two reasons. First, to provide an example of the fact that there are many other ways of thinking about philosophy that I have not provided here, that do or do not integrate with the idea of philosophy as framing that I have described. Second, I mention it because this is the argument that I hear most repeated in order to defend 'philosophy,' where philosophy refers to 'the kind of philosophy that is taught in many analytic-only university philosophy departments'. I find it profoundly boring as an argument. But that's not surprising; I find the institution of academic philosophy similarly disappointing — that is to say, it's not a home for me. Given this view of philosophy outlined above, this judgment should not be surprising.

Academic analytic philosophy has historically provided some vast and fascinating intellectual projects. I am a big fan of philosophy of language, for example, and philosophers from that tradition (particularly younger Wittgenstein and Rorty) have been highly influential for my thinking. I think that some parts of philosophy of mind are pretty good as well, and am glad that people like Chalmers are doing the work they do. But the kind of big-framing philosophy that I care about is and find fascinating is hard to do in our current academia. Not impossible, but hard, given the publish-or-perish incentives and the tastes of the departments. I'd mention Peter Singer, Judith Butler, Nick Bostrom, René Girard, Nick Land, and Slavoj Žižek as philosophers on faculty that have produced large-scale framing work that has had wide influence.

But consider: Singer is a professor of bioethics at Princeton, not of philosophy. Butler is a professor of comparative literature and critical theory, not of philosophy. Bostrom was briefly a philosophy postdoc until he created his own separate academic situation by directing the Future of Humanity institute. Land was a lecturer in continental philosophy, who worked in the CCRU, which was similar to the FHI in the sense that it was a collective of philosophers and other researchers working outside of traditional academic philosophy. Girard was a professor of French, French Literature, etc. for most of his career, including at Stanford. Žižek is a professor of German at NYU and a professor of 'philosophy and psychoanalysis' at the European Graduate School.

The (analytic) philosophy department is not the place for the kinds of people who will write philosophy that organizes people into grand organisms; it is not the place that the important philosophy (for this view of importance) will be written. I think an academic analytic philosopher would say 'that's fine, that's not what it's meant to be,' and we'd be in agreement! The kind of questions that academic analytical philosophy tends to pursue are not really questions that interest me. And it is profoundly sad to me that the understanding of 'philosophy' that many people will end up with is the one that these (analytic) philosophy departments give them.

This conclusion is not meant to be a polemic against analytic philosophy; my distaste for it is only that, a matter of taste, and I don't intend to argue that it's useless. This conclusion does represent frustration with the fact that such work has monopolized the conventional understanding of philosophy.

The ways of viewing philosophy that I have provided here do not always point at 'philosophy' in the sense that it is often used. The people who work in philosophy, in the sense I have provided, are often not the people whose job titles are 'philosopher'. So when I say 'study philosophy,' I mean something more complicated than "get a philosophy degree at some big name university." What it exactly means to study philosophy is something I'm still trying to figure out. But I hope it is clear from this piece why figuring that out, and actually doing the studying itself, appears so worthwhile to me.

Footnotes