Philosophy and abstraction via The Stone
What kind of philosophy is good for the state?
NYT’s The Stone published what is, to me, the first piece that effectively delivers on their mission. The question at hand is why philosophy appears to be so remote an inaccessible to those outside of academic philosophy. I’ll address the first response, by Alexander George.
The dilemma is that philosophical questions are of broad interest. Unfortunately, unlike the hard sciences, philosophy can rarely present concrete courses of action.
Philosophical questions can present themselves to us with an immediacy, even an urgency, that can seem to demand a correspondingly accessible answer. High philosophy usually fails to deliver such accessibility — and so the dismay that borders on a sense of betrayal.
Instead, philosophy tends to spin into every-greater abstraction. George argues that this abstraction leads necessarily to the incredibly intricate theoretical work done by academics.
The approach that involves the search for “new discoveries” of a theoretical nature is now ascendant. Since the fruits of this kind of work, even when conveyed in the clearest of terms, can well be remote and difficult, we have here another ingredient of the sense that philosophy spends too much time scrutinizing the sun.
I might add an additional reason: academics must publish, and having something worthwhile to say often requires some sort of theoretical innovation.
This question is of strong interest to the mission of The Public Philosopher. If there are to be philosophical/ethical answers to political questions, philosophy will have to supply them in widely comprehensible language. Ultimately, there will always be a layer of abstraction that goes beyond the needs of a population in resolving its everyday challenges. Unfortunately, it’s that abstraction that can often the locus of debate in academic circles.
-John
Photo by Flickr user kevindooley used under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
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