From time to time, I get cranky. I rant. It’s nothing serious. It’s more of a parody of seriousness. Sometimes, I find that I need to poke fun at my own irritations and my own convictions about the importance of things. It keeps me happy, and when it happens in class, it usually keeps my students amused. But at the end of the day, it is a way of laughing at my own seriousness while in the midst of that seriousness. It helps.
So accept this in the spirit of a cranky rant as I poke fun at my own serious convictions…
As a philosopher, I’m used to being marginalized. My colleagues in the business school make about twice what I do in the humanities and their offices have windows. And air conditioning. Far too many people consider Philosophy a luxury and the rarest form of laziness. My discipline isn’t concrete (whatever the hell that means), and we’re considered weird by eight-year olds (there was a Letter to the Editor in the APA proceedings a few years ago…).
I’m also used to explaining to people precisely what it is that I do. And I’ve adjusted to their befuddled expressions when I tell them that I think. That’s all. Just think. And like many of my philosopher friends, I’m endlessly amused by the fact that what I do is not done with any frequency by the people who look down their noses at my profession. I get back at them in small ways. I correct their grammar in my head. I make faces when they’re not looking. That sort of thing…the usual.
But there is one claim about my livelihood that tickles my irksome, and I hear it all the time in various ways and various forms, and recently it led to a rant that I felt I should share with the whole world. The claim is:
Philosophy is subjective.
It may not be phrased precisely this way, but in any of its forms, it is nearly always uttered with a casual tone as if its truth value were beyond dispute. “Nothing to see here. Just stating the obvious, you know how it is.” And whether it is verbalized or not, I always hear the claim in my head like this:
Everybody just KNOWS that philosophy is subjective. Duh!
Of course, I am immediately insulted. Clearly, I didn’t get the memo on that little mot juste since I kinda staked my livelihood on this totally subjective thing. Oops. I guess somewhere along the way towards my doctorate I should have realized what is immediately obvious to everyone EXCEPT those in the profession. How foolish of me to think I could make a career out of subjective things. In my defense, I can only say I was blinded by the money. Wait. They’re paying me for this? I guess my university didn’t get that memo, either.
Of course philosophy is subjective. If it can’t be sold in the 7-11 or the Starbucks I should be working at, I guess it doesn’t exist. It’s all just opinion. I mean, it’s not like there are any answers or anything. And I’ve pulled off the greatest magic trick since since Keanu Reeves got an acting job: I get paid money to tell people things they already know, and to make them doubt things they already know (and that no one really doubts), and then to admit – finally – that they really can’t be known…which we knew all along. How tricksy of me. I’m getting paid for not knowing things!
And since philosophy is subjective, it matters a whole lot less than those more “objective” disciplines like math and the “hard” sciences. Those are really tough. And boy, they really have a lock on the truth. They just tell it like it is. No partiality there. No opinions, nothing subjective. Just cold, hard facts. Like phlogiston. And Eugenics. And that whole Earth being flat thing. Well, you know. Accidents happen. Like thinking the Sun revolved around the Earth. But hey, we had the right facts, we just didn’t have the tools to interpret them properly. The facts didn’t change, just how we were able to understand them. Of course, that doesn’t sound like science. That sounds like therapy.
So the “hard” sciences get a mulligan on the Earth being flat and stationary and WE are subjective? Un hunh.
Ranting aside, though, there are serious problems with the claim that philosophy is subjective, and they go deeper than a basic misunderstanding about philosophy. As I watch what is happening to the humanities generally, I wonder about the connection between the devaluation of “soft” disciplines and the perception of the subjectivity of things like philosophy. I also notice that genuine thinking occurs less and less frequently in our mainstream discourse. So, it’s worth taking a careful look at the “subjectivity” of philosophy.
I often note, when I hear this claim, that my critic is employing a valuable, utterly non-subjective distinction whose origin is found in the very discipline now under attack. Subjective/objective is a philosophical distinction through and through, and the notion that some things are subjective and some objective (in whatever sense of the term) comes to us from philosophy. Isn’t it interesting that such an importantly valuable and productive distinction arises from a discipline that is attacked – through that very distinction – as useless and unproductive? It also raises one of the most important functions of philosophy: reflection.
To someone not given to philosophical reflection, the status of a claim of subjectivity will never arise. Is the statement “Philosophy is subjective” itself a subjective or objective claim? This is more than navel-gazing. The question points to our capacity to submit our distinctions to interrogation and analysis, to examine the reasoning and support for our claims beyond simple assertion. Reflection is decisive for reason. It means that we are able to interrogate ourselves regarding what we are doing and why. It means we are able to look beyond the given to the sources and causes of what is given. Reflection allows us to engage what we perceive, to evaluate, compare, assess and judge. Unreflective claims regarding the subjectivity of philosophy point out in dramatic fashion just how greatly the peculiar talents of philosophy are needed.
But more dangerous than the status of the claim is its substance. It’s not entirely clear what someone means when they call philosophy subjective, and I think a variety of things are intended, some more well-meaning than others. First, though, if the claim means something like “Philosophy is all just opinion,” then it’s a stupid claim. Philosophers, like all thinking persons, are prone to opinions. I have many: Cheese is awesome. Truffles are awesomer. Kitties are better than doggies. But when I’m engaged in my profession, I am not in the business of opinions. I evaluate arguments. I assess truth claims. I look at evidence and support, and I employ quite non-subjective rules of thought, logic, analysis, and evidentiary weight in my deliberations. Do philosophers engage in speculation? All the time. Just like all of the other disciplines out there. Remember phlogiston? But speculation is the lynchpin of reason. Speculation is a part of precisely what is so important and necessary about thinking: we reflect, and in that reflection we move beyond what is “simply” given, beyond what “the facts” show, and we engage our capacity for self-interrogation and evaluation.
Just what do you think a scientific theory is if not speculation? If you think gravity is “true,” then you profoundly misunderstand both truth and the nature of scientific claims. Gravity is no more true than the flying spaghetti monster. However, and this is important, as a theoretical explanation it is far better than the flying spaghetti monster. It is able to effectively and adequately explain both past and present phenomena, and it has enormous predictive power for future phenomena. Using its rules, we can both explain and predict with a significant degree of certainty, and what’s more, this explanatory and predictive power has been demonstrated again and again and again in a variety of familiar and novel settings. Given all of this, it is reasonable to infer the accuracy of our understanding of gravity as an important force in the universe. But note that what would make the above sentence “true” has nothing to do with gravity. It has to do with the rules of inference, the weight of evidence, and the significance of repetition, prediction, and evaluation in the consideration of what we perceive. The formulation of the theory, the weighing of the evidence, the assessment of the certainty of the theory: none of this would be possible without that peculiarly speculative enterprise of reflection that characterizes our reason. In this way, the speculative character of science and the speculative character of philosophy are identical.
I suspect that this is where people get concerned, and another meaning of subjectivity comes out. “Philosophy is subjective” often means that philosophy deals with things that cannot be proven, or at least, with things that lack the kind of empirical verification and replication that science can provide. If I want to know about the movement of physical objects, I can easily get answers of a concrete, empirical sort. If I want to know about the movement of mental objects, empirical certainty is hard to come by. Hume describes it best, I think. We make great strides in the world of physical and empirical things. However, when we devote the least attention to that which is closest to us – our own minds – we can take only a few steps and then the entire realm of the mind becomes opaque and confused. At this point, things get really “subjective” and not at all empirical or certain.
Welcome to my world, cupcake. The set of philosophical questions cannot (and should not) be exhausted by the set of empirical things that can be “objectively” verified. Have you ever found a sunset beautiful? Would you want to quantify that empirically? It doesn’t mean that I cannot explain its beauty. It doesn’t mean that its beauty is purely “subjective.” It means that the beauty of sunsets requires different practices, standards, inferences, and rules than those governing more “objective” phenomena. But the experience and understanding of beauty is no less important than the understanding of the composition of our sun. The most important human values are often those that lack “empirical” or “objective” confirmation: beauty, meaning, truth, goodness. This is not a failure of philosophy any more than it is a failure of science. It is a recognition that knowledge is not univocal, that human understanding and reason rely upon more than merely “objective” standards of proof and confirmation. Is the sun that you measure more “accurate,” more “true,” more “real” than the sun that I eulogize, paint, worship or write about in an allegory?
It should be clear that the status of “facts,” “objects,” and “objective truth” are all in question in this account, and in this murky, difficult, reflective space, philosophers are at home. There is a rigor to what we do that exceeds in measure the rigor of science. We do not take for granted an explanatory worldview that allows us to organize experience under a single principle. Our job is much harder. We address our interests and our questions to that reflective space that opens when familiar certainty drops away, when doubt and ignorance are genuine, when there is reflective disequilibrium among our truths. This requires a productive and importance sense of ignorance.
When I teach the Euthyphro, I make this point often. At the crucial moment when Euthyphro turns away from giving a definition for piety, he expresses a productive ignorance. After all, were he to give the aim of the gods upon which the definition would rest, he would have an inhuman knowledge, an impious knowledge, a knowledge that the gods themselves did not possess. In his recognition of his ignorance, he realizes something that was in a sense always true: he doesn’t know what piety is. But this ignorance moves from unreflective dismissal to reflective importance when he is faced with the problem of defining piety in a way that would exceed the boundaries of all and any human knowledge. He becomes aware, albeit briefly, that there are some answers we cannot give, and some questions we cannot ask. “What is piety?” was never the right question. Or rather, the question of piety is lived in the experience of the boundaries of human knowledge and the recognition of the limits of that knowledge before the gods.
There is much more that I could and probably should say, but this is a good place to end. Maybe it’s best just to say that philosophy addresses the questions that we live, and not merely the ones that we ask. I think that says it all.
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