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Every time I've looked at philosophy in my life, I kept searching for this promise - where intellectual giants grapple the truth and discover their secrets. Wh

Every time I've looked at philosophy in my life, I kept searching for this promise - where intellectual giants grapple the truth and discover their secrets. What I've found, from famous books by famous philosophers all the way to pop philosophy books to vague philosophical discussions... is some of the muddiest and most convoluted self-indulgent thinking i've ever seen. I am thus convinced that philosophers ENJOY the mud, not the clarity. If clarity comes, it seems more likely than not that it is an accident, and other philosophers come quickly to obfuscate it. "yes, we see the same color, but do we REALLY see the same color?", as if an infinite regress of definitions somehow makes their thought process more valuable. And, from what I can tell about famous philosophies, perhaps to other philosophers they do.

HKH2 5y ago
Are you willing to prioritize truth above that which is socially acceptable? If you do, your philosophy will probably remain hidden, and if not, your philosophy will probably be irrelevant like what you describe.
- andagainagain 5y ago
  why would that be true? Many things that are true are socially uncomfortable and are still known. History is chock full of examples of things which others in the field (and society) hated but could not disprove, and then became well known. I can think, off the top of my head, examples in math, human biology, plant biology, psychology, and martial arts, (the last one due to the wonders of the internet). It seems to happen all the time.
  - batavian 5y ago
    Many things that are deemed socially uncomfortable are a part of the same board on which the socially comfortable game is played. Moreover, the vast majority of examples one can come up in science are not truths, and in fact a core premise of science is each state of scientific knowledge is contingent and not final, i.e. it's not True, but it should be a more faithful description of what is happening than we had before.
  - HKH2 5y ago
    There are many examples in history of people who have risked their reputations or even lives to say certain things. I've no doubt the memory and works of some have been wiped out completely; humans are awfully petty at times. It's all too easy to dismiss one's critics out of hand, yet if you want a relevant argument you at least have to consider some criticism dispassionately. I'm not sure that we as a society have got better at doing that.
belugacat 5y ago
Wittgenstein came to the same conclusion. Whereof one cannot speak, one must remain silent. And he’s just paraphrasing the Buddhists/Taoists (and a bunch of other lesser known religious orders) who had that same insight a few thousand years earlier. Most people aren’t interested in silence though. The mud keeps humans entertained and hungry. Those humans build the societies we live in, monks living in silence in monasteries do not.
- morgangalvin 5y ago
  In the Tractatus (TLP), which you quoted, Wittgenstein came to a conclussion about language, not about philosophy itself. He rejected many of the major themes of the TLP in his later work, Philosophical Investigations (even jokingly calling the person who wrote the TLP an idiot) Wittgensteins metaphilosophical thoughts are best captured in the Blue Book (a series of lecture notes) and Philosophical Investigations.
  - denton-scratch 5y ago
    I don't agree that he rejects much of TLP in Phlosophical Investigations, although most secondary sources say he did. So I'm deviant. I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on this subject, 40 years ago. I think it's a bad idea to write an undergraduate dissertation that implicitly criticises prominent philosophy writers; they are probably your examiner's drinking buddy. I got a gamma (scrape pass).
jolux 5y ago
It really depends who you read. Some philosophers are better writers than others, some philosophical traditions prioritize clarity more, and some translations are really bad. If you’re looking for relatively straightforward thinking, Plato is often where freshman philosophy students start and his work is considered background knowledge for basically all of the rest of western philosophy.
- andagainagain 5y ago
  Name me two. And I've read some Plato some years ago. I would not classify him as a clear thinker by any remotely modern standards.
  - ebruchez 5y ago
    For amazing clarity, read Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper.
  - arolihas 5y ago
    What of his work have you read that was so unclear?
    - andagainagain 5y ago
      I read about half of "The Republic". I would pull out the book again to find a good example, but I think I donated the book a few months ago.
  - jfarmer 5y ago
    You might like American Pragmatism: CS Peirce, FP Ramsey, CI Lewis, William James, John Dewey, etc. Peirce's "How to Make Our Ideas Clear": https://courses.media.mit.edu/2004spring/mas966/Peirce%201878%20Make%20Ideas%20Clear.pdf https://courses.media.mit.edu/2004spring/mas966/Peirce%20187...
    - User23 5y ago
      Peirce also, along with Frege, independently discovered the existential and universal quantifiers, to name just one major contribution. His existential graphs[1] are extremely cool too. Peirce is grossly underappreciated largely due to the efforts of his less gifted but more politically astute childhood "friend" Simon Newcomb to obliterate his career and legacy. The Peirce gateway is full of great stuff[2][3]. This[4] is the companion paper to How To Make Our Ideas Clear. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential_graph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential_graph [2] https://arisbe.sitehost.iu.edu/ https://arisbe.sitehost.iu.edu/ [3] https://arisbe.sitehost.iu.edu/menu/library/bycsp/bycsp.HTM https://arisbe.sitehost.iu.edu/menu/library/bycsp/bycsp.HTM [4] https://arisbe.sitehost.iu.edu/menu/library/bycsp/fixation/fx-frame.htm https://arisbe.sitehost.iu.edu/menu/library/bycsp/fixation/f...
routerl 5y ago
> I am thus convinced that philosophers ENJOY the mud, not the clarity. As in programming, there's some truth to this, in that needless complexity can afford a certain job security. But you've ignored another possible interpretation, which is that the subject matter is muddy. Until Frege, Russell, et al, not even mathematicians had a clear notion of "inference" or "proof"; it was always a case of "I can't define it, but recognize it when I see it". Until, suddenly, we did define it, and all the muddy conversations that came before now seemed misguided. We see this movement very clearly in all sciences, but I especially like examples from the history of mathematics, e.g. when Paul Gordan said, of Hilbert's finiteness theorem, that "This is not Mathematics. This is Theology." John Searle once said that "philosophy is the asking of questions that come naturally to children, and answering them with methods that come naturally to mathematicians". Once those methods are sufficiently formalized, the problem domain simply leaves philosophy and becomes some part of mathematics, or a new empirical science. This comes off as extremely self-indulgent, because it is, since almost every school of philosophers is trying to take some muddy conceptual domain and give it shape and structure, to help the subject along the path towards quantitative inquiry. Think of philosophical schools as analogous to systems architectures: with an eye towards certain desiderata, they're laying foundations for the rest of the system as it is likely to eventually exist.
neonological 5y ago
>What I've found, from famous books by famous philosophers all the way to pop philosophy books to vague philosophical discussions... is some of the muddiest and most convoluted self-indulgent thinking i've ever seen. I find philosophy to be highly irrational. It studies topics that are uniquely different yet it categorizes these topics as the same thing. Aesthetics aka beauty is a philosophy, and so is logic. How do these things exist on the same level? Aesthetics is a human attribute and a human opinion and made up concept, logic is an observable phenomenon fundamental to the universe. The infinite regressions are also pointless paths to explore. By induction we know it's infinite already so why continue to explore?
- BlueTemplar 5y ago
  > How do these things exist on the same level? Through Mathematics ?
  - neonological 5y ago
    Mathematics makes beauty and logic equivalent fields of study that belong in the same category? How?
    - BlueTemplar 5y ago
      Geometry plays an important role in aesthetics (symmetry for instance). (Also math in music.)
      - neonological 5y ago
        That's applied math though. It is categorically on another level in the hierarchy. Why would one specific application of math, the application of math in beauty be placed by philosophy on the same level as logic fundamentally. Math is derived from logic after all. Why isn't philosophy placing the study of the application of math to origami in the same category? Why does beauty arbitrarily take precedence over origami?
idolaspecus 5y ago
> Every time I've looked at philosophy in my life, I kept searching for this promise - where intellectual giants grapple the truth and discover their secrets. This expresses an approach to philosophy that I think is, at its roots, ineffective. It treats "philosophy" as "Philosophy", as some thing, some well-defined corpus that deals with truth and can be explored top-down systematically, something that you can "look at" or "come to" or whatever. But that's not really what "philosophy" is or, rather, there is no "philosophy" in that sense. There's just people in the world trying to understand it and to communicate their understanding. There's just questions and people all the way down, nothing else. We use the name "philosophy" because it's convenient but I'd say it's maybe the least useful name for anything we've ever come up with. Philosophy is ultimately personal, it's the most personal, and most of the most famous philosophers can only be appreciated if you go out of your way to read them from a deeply psychological and empathetic perspective. At least this is my experience. It's not easy and takes a lot of work to get into the headspace of whoever you're reading, but once you get there you'll feel the lightbulb go off. This is especially important when you read older philosophers or philosophers who have a fundamentally different metaphysics from yourself. Of course, sometimes you just can't get there with certain thinkers. For example, I have a really really really hard time taking Hegel seriously.
- iraphael 5y ago
  +1 to this point. I also find it easier to read certain philosophers than others because they themselves seem to be empathetic in the way they write their thinking. Almost as if they know that they could be wrong about the conclusions they're coming to, and that the truths they uncover aren't necessarily absolutes but instead, at least to a certain degree, subjective and personal. Reading phenomenology for instance doesn't get me feeling like the author is self-indulgent. I find it easier to empathize with the philosopher because the philosopher is trying to empathize with me.
- jolux 5y ago
  Have you read Kant? I've had a lot of trouble with Hegel as well, and everyone tells me it's because he's responding to or building on arguments that Kant makes that seem to be pulled from whole cloth without that context (Kantext?). We're certainly not the only ones though, a lot of famous philosophers think Hegel is bullshit. I don't know how much respect the Hegelian lineage has outside of continental philosophy circles these days. I suppose Fukuyama is pretty Hegelian.
SavantIdiot 5y ago
On the flip side, do you really thing every conversation Aristotle had with his students was a cloud of gilded exhalations that would echo down the millennia? I don't think I would be surprised to learn the majority of the conversations that took place over the decades of Aristotle's life were a grueling, repeated, and mind-numbing grind to a treatise. As that is what is usually required to produce something original and authentic in my tech world. If someone were to lay out a transcript of all of his discussions, could it be possible they read like today's internet posts? I've read books of correspondence between great minds (Einstein, Feyerabend, Franklin), but those were carefully curated exchanges. Not free-flowing arguments like discussion boards.
milkey_mouse 5y ago
> I am thus convinced that philosophers ENJOY the mud, not the clarity. I agree that this describes many philosophers, but "quietists" such as John McDowell and (late) Wittgenstein would disagree: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quietism_(philosophy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quietism_(philosophy)
jfengel 5y ago
Yes, philosophers love the mud. That's why they're philosophers. Everything we call "science" is something that has been separated out, cleaned up, and polished. Darwin and Newton both considered themselves "philosophers", because they looked in the mud and took out a nice, separable piece of it. What's left as "philosophy" is the mud, the stuff that we haven't taken away from the philosophy department by giving it a new name. We continue to take philosophy's successes: linguistics, economics, even cognitive science were originally done under the remit of a philosophy department. You can't tell the serious work from the people just being self-indulgent until after the fact. Especially from the outside: a lot of the serious work looks ridiculous until it's successful. Getting to the point where you can tell requires more effort than most people are willing to put out -- which is fine, because it's not actually important whether you judge it well or not. But in the interests of intellectual honesty, you'd do well not to judge a discipline with only a cursory understanding of it. And before you object to me describing your understanding as cursory, let me assure you that questions like "do we REALLY see the same color" are precisely not what real philosophy looks like. It's the same kind of red flag that "Can we use dark matter to go faster than light?" signals as not serious physics.
- BlueTemplar 5y ago
  Case in point, these days the question "Do we REALLY see the same color ?", is much more one about physics, signal processing and (neuro)biology.
- NikolaeVarius 5y ago
  I'm having a pretty hard time trying to figure out why people are so quick to toss out philosophy without trying to understand it. The principles of liberal democracy, separation of church and state, and all that feel-good stuff is not something that "really exists". Its a bunch of stuff that a bunch of philosophers spent years observing society to create stuff to try and make a coherent framework for humans to live by. I still think to this day that my philosophy of science course in college was one of the most defining classes of my life. It really changed how I look at existence and modes of thought
  - 5y ago

HKH2 5y ago

Are you willing to prioritize truth above that which is socially acceptable? If you do, your philosophy will probably remain hidden, and if not, your philosophy will probably be irrelevant like what you describe.

andagainagain 5y ago
why would that be true? Many things that are true are socially uncomfortable and are still known. History is chock full of examples of things which others in the field (and society) hated but could not disprove, and then became well known. I can think, off the top of my head, examples in math, human biology, plant biology, psychology, and martial arts, (the last one due to the wonders of the internet). It seems to happen all the time.
- batavian 5y ago
  Many things that are deemed socially uncomfortable are a part of the same board on which the socially comfortable game is played. Moreover, the vast majority of examples one can come up in science are not truths, and in fact a core premise of science is each state of scientific knowledge is contingent and not final, i.e. it's not True, but it should be a more faithful description of what is happening than we had before.
- HKH2 5y ago
  There are many examples in history of people who have risked their reputations or even lives to say certain things. I've no doubt the memory and works of some have been wiped out completely; humans are awfully petty at times. It's all too easy to dismiss one's critics out of hand, yet if you want a relevant argument you at least have to consider some criticism dispassionately. I'm not sure that we as a society have got better at doing that.

belugacat 5y ago

Wittgenstein came to the same conclusion. Whereof one cannot speak, one must remain silent. And he’s just paraphrasing the Buddhists/Taoists (and a bunch of other lesser known religious orders) who had that same insight a few thousand years earlier. Most people aren’t interested in silence though. The mud keeps humans entertained and hungry. Those humans build the societies we live in, monks living in silence in monasteries do not.

morgangalvin 5y ago
In the Tractatus (TLP), which you quoted, Wittgenstein came to a conclussion about language, not about philosophy itself. He rejected many of the major themes of the TLP in his later work, Philosophical Investigations (even jokingly calling the person who wrote the TLP an idiot) Wittgensteins metaphilosophical thoughts are best captured in the Blue Book (a series of lecture notes) and Philosophical Investigations.
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  I don't agree that he rejects much of TLP in Phlosophical Investigations, although most secondary sources say he did. So I'm deviant. I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on this subject, 40 years ago. I think it's a bad idea to write an undergraduate dissertation that implicitly criticises prominent philosophy writers; they are probably your examiner's drinking buddy. I got a gamma (scrape pass).

jolux 5y ago

It really depends who you read. Some philosophers are better writers than others, some philosophical traditions prioritize clarity more, and some translations are really bad. If you’re looking for relatively straightforward thinking, Plato is often where freshman philosophy students start and his work is considered background knowledge for basically all of the rest of western philosophy.

andagainagain 5y ago
Name me two. And I've read some Plato some years ago. I would not classify him as a clear thinker by any remotely modern standards.
- ebruchez 5y ago
  For amazing clarity, read Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper.
- arolihas 5y ago
  What of his work have you read that was so unclear?
  - andagainagain 5y ago
    I read about half of "The Republic". I would pull out the book again to find a good example, but I think I donated the book a few months ago.
- jfarmer 5y ago
  You might like American Pragmatism: CS Peirce, FP Ramsey, CI Lewis, William James, John Dewey, etc. Peirce's "How to Make Our Ideas Clear": https://courses.media.mit.edu/2004spring/mas966/Peirce%201878%20Make%20Ideas%20Clear.pdf https://courses.media.mit.edu/2004spring/mas966/Peirce%20187...
  - User23 5y ago
    Peirce also, along with Frege, independently discovered the existential and universal quantifiers, to name just one major contribution. His existential graphs[1] are extremely cool too. Peirce is grossly underappreciated largely due to the efforts of his less gifted but more politically astute childhood "friend" Simon Newcomb to obliterate his career and legacy. The Peirce gateway is full of great stuff[2][3]. This[4] is the companion paper to How To Make Our Ideas Clear. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential_graph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential_graph [2] https://arisbe.sitehost.iu.edu/ https://arisbe.sitehost.iu.edu/ [3] https://arisbe.sitehost.iu.edu/menu/library/bycsp/bycsp.HTM https://arisbe.sitehost.iu.edu/menu/library/bycsp/bycsp.HTM [4] https://arisbe.sitehost.iu.edu/menu/library/bycsp/fixation/fx-frame.htm https://arisbe.sitehost.iu.edu/menu/library/bycsp/fixation/f...

routerl 5y ago

> I am thus convinced that philosophers ENJOY the mud, not the clarity. As in programming, there's some truth to this, in that needless complexity can afford a certain job security. But you've ignored another possible interpretation, which is that the subject matter is muddy. Until Frege, Russell, et al, not even mathematicians had a clear notion of "inference" or "proof"; it was always a case of "I can't define it, but recognize it when I see it". Until, suddenly, we did define it, and all the muddy conversations that came before now seemed misguided. We see this movement very clearly in all sciences, but I especially like examples from the history of mathematics, e.g. when Paul Gordan said, of Hilbert's finiteness theorem, that "This is not Mathematics. This is Theology." John Searle once said that "philosophy is the asking of questions that come naturally to children, and answering them with methods that come naturally to mathematicians". Once those methods are sufficiently formalized, the problem domain simply leaves philosophy and becomes some part of mathematics, or a new empirical science. This comes off as extremely self-indulgent, because it is, since almost every school of philosophers is trying to take some muddy conceptual domain and give it shape and structure, to help the subject along the path towards quantitative inquiry. Think of philosophical schools as analogous to systems architectures: with an eye towards certain desiderata, they're laying foundations for the rest of the system as it is likely to eventually exist.

neonological 5y ago

>What I've found, from famous books by famous philosophers all the way to pop philosophy books to vague philosophical discussions... is some of the muddiest and most convoluted self-indulgent thinking i've ever seen. I find philosophy to be highly irrational. It studies topics that are uniquely different yet it categorizes these topics as the same thing. Aesthetics aka beauty is a philosophy, and so is logic. How do these things exist on the same level? Aesthetics is a human attribute and a human opinion and made up concept, logic is an observable phenomenon fundamental to the universe. The infinite regressions are also pointless paths to explore. By induction we know it's infinite already so why continue to explore?

BlueTemplar 5y ago
> How do these things exist on the same level? Through Mathematics ?
- neonological 5y ago
  Mathematics makes beauty and logic equivalent fields of study that belong in the same category? How?
  - BlueTemplar 5y ago
    Geometry plays an important role in aesthetics (symmetry for instance). (Also math in music.)
    - neonological 5y ago
      That's applied math though. It is categorically on another level in the hierarchy. Why would one specific application of math, the application of math in beauty be placed by philosophy on the same level as logic fundamentally. Math is derived from logic after all. Why isn't philosophy placing the study of the application of math to origami in the same category? Why does beauty arbitrarily take precedence over origami?

idolaspecus 5y ago

> Every time I've looked at philosophy in my life, I kept searching for this promise - where intellectual giants grapple the truth and discover their secrets. This expresses an approach to philosophy that I think is, at its roots, ineffective. It treats "philosophy" as "Philosophy", as some thing, some well-defined corpus that deals with truth and can be explored top-down systematically, something that you can "look at" or "come to" or whatever. But that's not really what "philosophy" is or, rather, there is no "philosophy" in that sense. There's just people in the world trying to understand it and to communicate their understanding. There's just questions and people all the way down, nothing else. We use the name "philosophy" because it's convenient but I'd say it's maybe the least useful name for anything we've ever come up with. Philosophy is ultimately personal, it's the most personal, and most of the most famous philosophers can only be appreciated if you go out of your way to read them from a deeply psychological and empathetic perspective. At least this is my experience. It's not easy and takes a lot of work to get into the headspace of whoever you're reading, but once you get there you'll feel the lightbulb go off. This is especially important when you read older philosophers or philosophers who have a fundamentally different metaphysics from yourself. Of course, sometimes you just can't get there with certain thinkers. For example, I have a really really really hard time taking Hegel seriously.

iraphael 5y ago
+1 to this point. I also find it easier to read certain philosophers than others because they themselves seem to be empathetic in the way they write their thinking. Almost as if they know that they could be wrong about the conclusions they're coming to, and that the truths they uncover aren't necessarily absolutes but instead, at least to a certain degree, subjective and personal. Reading phenomenology for instance doesn't get me feeling like the author is self-indulgent. I find it easier to empathize with the philosopher because the philosopher is trying to empathize with me.
jolux 5y ago
Have you read Kant? I've had a lot of trouble with Hegel as well, and everyone tells me it's because he's responding to or building on arguments that Kant makes that seem to be pulled from whole cloth without that context (Kantext?). We're certainly not the only ones though, a lot of famous philosophers think Hegel is bullshit. I don't know how much respect the Hegelian lineage has outside of continental philosophy circles these days. I suppose Fukuyama is pretty Hegelian.

SavantIdiot 5y ago

On the flip side, do you really thing every conversation Aristotle had with his students was a cloud of gilded exhalations that would echo down the millennia? I don't think I would be surprised to learn the majority of the conversations that took place over the decades of Aristotle's life were a grueling, repeated, and mind-numbing grind to a treatise. As that is what is usually required to produce something original and authentic in my tech world. If someone were to lay out a transcript of all of his discussions, could it be possible they read like today's internet posts? I've read books of correspondence between great minds (Einstein, Feyerabend, Franklin), but those were carefully curated exchanges. Not free-flowing arguments like discussion boards.

milkey_mouse 5y ago

> I am thus convinced that philosophers ENJOY the mud, not the clarity. I agree that this describes many philosophers, but "quietists" such as John McDowell and (late) Wittgenstein would disagree: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quietism_(philosophy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quietism_(philosophy)

jfengel 5y ago

Yes, philosophers love the mud. That's why they're philosophers. Everything we call "science" is something that has been separated out, cleaned up, and polished. Darwin and Newton both considered themselves "philosophers", because they looked in the mud and took out a nice, separable piece of it. What's left as "philosophy" is the mud, the stuff that we haven't taken away from the philosophy department by giving it a new name. We continue to take philosophy's successes: linguistics, economics, even cognitive science were originally done under the remit of a philosophy department. You can't tell the serious work from the people just being self-indulgent until after the fact. Especially from the outside: a lot of the serious work looks ridiculous until it's successful. Getting to the point where you can tell requires more effort than most people are willing to put out -- which is fine, because it's not actually important whether you judge it well or not. But in the interests of intellectual honesty, you'd do well not to judge a discipline with only a cursory understanding of it. And before you object to me describing your understanding as cursory, let me assure you that questions like "do we REALLY see the same color" are precisely not what real philosophy looks like. It's the same kind of red flag that "Can we use dark matter to go faster than light?" signals as not serious physics.

BlueTemplar 5y ago
Case in point, these days the question "Do we REALLY see the same color ?", is much more one about physics, signal processing and (neuro)biology.
NikolaeVarius 5y ago
I'm having a pretty hard time trying to figure out why people are so quick to toss out philosophy without trying to understand it. The principles of liberal democracy, separation of church and state, and all that feel-good stuff is not something that "really exists". Its a bunch of stuff that a bunch of philosophers spent years observing society to create stuff to try and make a coherent framework for humans to live by. I still think to this day that my philosophy of science course in college was one of the most defining classes of my life. It really changed how I look at existence and modes of thought
- 5y ago