Does philosophy make progress? If so, how?

Pfhorrest

The word "philosophy" derives from Greek words meaning "love of wisdom", in a sense of "love" that in Greek meant attracted to or drawn toward it. I take it then that characteristic activity of philosophy is the pursuit of wisdom, not the possession or exercise thereof. Wisdom, in turn, is not merely some set of correct opinions, but rather the ability to discern the true from the false, the good from the bad; or at least the more true from the less true, the better from the worse; the ability, in short, to discern superior answers from inferior answers to any given question.

As regards philosophical progress, the preceding definition of philosophy gives us an immediate answer to the question of what progress in philosophy would look like, because this definition tells us what philosophy is trying to do, and progress is then just success at doing that. Because philosophy, thus construed, is not directly trying to answer questions about what is real or what is moral, philosophical progress is not made by correctly speculating on the nature of some specific thing's being or purpose. Rather, philosophical progress is made by devising useful methods of answering questions about those things, and consequently the related issues of the meaning of such questions, and the importance of those questions. The importance of the question, its pragmatic import, what you need to know the answer for, narrows in on which of the possible meanings of the question matters to you in that context, and with that understanding comes the start of the means of answering it.

In that respect, I think enormous philosophical progress has been made across history with respect to questions about reality, as the physical sciences have settled on a critical, empirical, and realist approach colloquially called "the scientific method", rejecting appeals to authority and the supernatural. Progress with respect to questions about morality has been slower, but still apparent, with concerns for liberty and hedonic flourishing becoming gradually more widespread, in contrast to obedience to authority and intangible moral purity; though there is still quite far to go in that respect.

180 Proof

↪Pfhorrest

Complementary to, or convergent with, the OP ... an excerpt from an old thread:

What is philosophy aiming for, by what criteria would we judge success or at least progress in philosophical endeavors?
— Pfhorrest

1.2 Philosophy's horizon, at which it's always been aimed, is wisdom - habits of 'thinking well' (free mind) and 'living well' (free body) acquired through reflective inquiries & reflective practices. (By reflective I mean 'self-examining'.)

1.21 The criterion is internal to thinking & living since philosophizing - the exercise itself - is its [own] product, unlike e.g. chemistry which produces new & improved formulas or industrial materials; or painting which produces new expressive styles & artworks; or politics which produces new movements & social arrangements. To the degree, at any moment, a philosophical discursive practice has filtered-out pseudo-questions & pseudo-problems as well as marginalized the irrelevant/trivial, this [reflective-critical process of elimination] counts as "progress" of an evanescent kind, achieving topic-specific clarity. — 180 Proof

I.e. 'progress' by pragmatic negations - making room for agency (pace Kant) - rather than by incrementally more general, or abstract, totalizing systems (or "theories of everything").

Pfhorrest

↪180 Proof

So you think that while a philosopher can make progress on themselves, philosophy as a field is no better today than it was thousands of years ago? Not even better at leading people to clarity of thought in such a way?

Den

Power: The population of humans on Earth can transition from a warrior species to a humanitarian species that celebrates life by educating the available populations. Why support people that sell billions of bullets? It's not in our best interests. Life is growing, and getting smarter. We need to adapt with learning, caring, and realizing the growth potentials of life itself. Schools and hospitals with advanced communications would be a good start. Currency? Is it necessary? Does it serve humanity? I am not a Republican or Democrat. I am a humanitarian. Humanitarianism is a philosophy that has power.

jgill

If you include political philosophy - modes of governing - I would say that is clearly an area of intense interest today, and perhaps progress is being made there. But, if you are speaking of topics like ontology, I see very little of substance being produced. A little like highly abstract mathematics IMO.

Pfhorrest

↪jgill

Definitely including political philosophy. That is part of the area I see progress still remaining to be made, because progress there has historically been so slow. Ontology and things on that half of the field, on the other hand, have come very very far over the millennia, and have very little (and only very technical) progress remaining to be made, so very little progress can still be made there anymore.

TheMadFool

That philosophy doesn't make progress maybe true but it's a different story for those who engage in philosophy - the philosophers. all of whom seem to show a marked improvement in almost every sphere of life.. Progress in philosophy seems to be measured in terms of definitive answers to difficult questions, ingenious solutions to complex problems, but we all know that the answers and solutions offered are not up to par. Perhaps to judge philosophy - whether it's made progress or not - in this way is unfair and maybe missing the spirit of philosophy which, first and foremost, is to come to terms with our own ignorance.

Deleteduserrc

I.e. 'progress' by pragmatic negations - making room for agency (pace Kant) - rather than by incrementally more general, or abstract, totalizing systems (or "theories of everything"). — 180 Proof

Yes! Philosophy, at its best, rids you of the traps thought can keep you in, so you can move on safely to what matters. Its a painstaking self-inoculation. Totalizing systems are like guys who steroid themselves against past humiliations into near-immobility.

dimension72

Philosophy makes progress because everything makes progress. Anything created by a being that knows nothing but progress has to be a thing which progresses, no? Naturally mankind is bound to progress with the passing of time.

Regression, an antonym of progression, isn't a term that can be easily applied to life.

Pfhorrest

I don’t understand this seemingly pejorative use of the term “totalizing”. In all fields, finding common principles that underlie many diverse phenomena is an admirable goal. Are QM or GR too “totalizing” of physics because they explain too many diverse phenomena previously accounted for by separate, unrelated theories? How is not relating things to each other good?

More on topic, is that not exactly what constitutes progress, at least for most fields? Explaining more and more with less and less?

path

I don’t understand this seemingly pejorative use of the term “totalizing”. — Pfhorrest

In this context the issue is maybe a totalizing personal type, with which I associate an earnestness and a love of careful classification. The anti-type here is the ironic aphorist. In both cases there are totalizing theories, but the difference is how tightly versus ambivalently they are held.

As far as progress goes, I think philosophy takes a baseball bat to the usual comforting fantasies in pursuit of an unusual comforting fantasy, which is a vision of the world through our dead God's eyes.

I find that there's a connection between the loss of these fantasies and 'learning how to die.' So I'm an ambivalent aphorist, who's not quite sure that the wise are wise in their wisdom.

Ash on an old man's sleeve...is all the ash the burnt roses leave. But what else has he got, our old man, whilst this machine remains stubbornly to him? He doesn't have to be physically old. It's philosophy that paints you gray.

Deleteduserrc

I don’t understand this seemingly pejorative use of the term “totalizing”. In all fields, finding common principles that underlie many diverse phenomena is an admirable goal. Are QM or GR too “totalizing” of physics because they explain too many diverse phenomena previously accounted for by separate, unrelated theories? How is not relating things to each other good? — Pfhorrest

let's flip that. Why is totalizing good even if you have no audience? (also, importantly, synthesizing isn't the same as totalizing.)

jgill

In all fields, finding common principles that underlie many diverse phenomena is an admirable goal. — Pfhorrest

That is certainly true. Higher levels of generalizations in mathematics has led to understanding how seemingly diverse concepts are alike. But this knowledge may not shed light on many existing puzzles in specific areas beneath these umbrellas. Generalizations avoid the nitty-gritty. Sometimes abstraction is merely abstraction.

path

Philosophy, at its best, rids you of the traps thought can keep you in, so you can move on safely to what matters. Its a painstaking self-inoculation. Totalizing systems are like guys who steroid themselves against past humiliations into near-immobility. — csalisbury

I like that. For me the traps might be personalities, where the danger is becoming fixed and predictable and essentially (?) a bad poet. Philosophy is strange in wanting to transcend personality while tending to demonstrate it. 'This is the way that I like to transcend the ego. This is what I understand as scientific. ' Philosophy is something like a 'big picture' relationship with the world. The deep stuff (along with politics and art) is a secular replacement for religion. The totalizer brings the good news, the squared circle. The aphorist has a tone like:

These fought in any case,
and some believing,
pro domo, in any case . . .

Some quick to arm,
some for adventure,
some from fear of weakness,
some from fear of censure,
some for love of slaughter, in imagination,
learning later . . .
some in fear, learning love of slaughter;
Died some, pro patria,
non "dulce" non "et decor" . . .
walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men's lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy;
usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places.

Daring as never before, wastage as never before.
Young blood and high blood,
fair cheeks, and fine bodies;

fortitude as never before

frankness as never before,
disillusions as never told in the old days,
hysterias, trench confessions,
laughter out of dead bellies. — Pound

https://poets.org/poem/hugh-selwyn-mauberly-excerpt

path

Generalizations avoid the nitty-gritty. — jgill

Yup, and so much of life depends on the skilled handling of the nitty-gritty. Skill is not a set of handy general propositions, though handling such general propositions is its own skill. Philosophy is the skill of playing with difficult and totalizing ideas.

Deleteduserrc

I like that. — path

My plus-stroke taken, I offer a plus-stroke to you in return, a perenially recognized personality, with an invariable, quite-worldly, courtly signature. The offerings burnt, the room confirmed cool ( whose quotes don't you like path?) I can only respond by saying

Deleteduserrc

another aphorism @path

You can't kill or triumph over a discarded self by proximity to a marquee truth. I mean, heck guy, what do you think the import of 'path' is?

path

↪csalisbury

I was hoping to squeeze more out of you on the totalizer versus the alternative. As I read him, the non-totalizer or aphorist is just as in love with grand narratives. I would like there to be a nice fluffy god out there, something that sews the mess together. What's available (ignoring simple animal immersion is joyful little things that might do the heavy lifting) is a transcendence that's hard to divorce from the morbid.

'In anguish there are only distances.' The age demanded an image of its accelerated grimace. The ground opening was a flap. Is there progress, if there is such a thing, in philosophy, if there is such a thing? He splits up a peach of grass.

path

another aphorism path

You can't kill a discarded self by proximity to a marquee truth. I mean, heck guy, what do you think the import of 'path' is? — csalisbury

I'm not exactly clear on what you mean. I do see that anti-totalizers like myself are mostly ringing variations on Nietzsche. I haven't had the sense of a discarded self for quite a while now. That's what I'm calling being old. In my 20s I went through lots of changes. In the 30s I was already just sharpening an equilibrium state.

I like path as a metaphor for the singularity of a journey. I want some transcendent god's eye view, but I know...from within some approximation of that view...that we are all stained by our histories. What I liked about the first post I responded to in this thread was the theme of vulnerability. It's painful to realize that we can't be our own parents, literally and metaphorically. We are enabled as individuals in the first place by a system we did not choose. That's what's fascinating about Dreydegger or Hegel or the sociology I'm reading lately. We can manage only a minor deviation here and there. We are late to a party that has seen everything, including its having seen everything. And another critique of a certain kind of start-from-zero totalizing is that it needs to forget its thrownness, that is has parents, that it is constrained in ways that it does not recognized, caged in the vocabulary it takes for granted. But what's outside the cage? Perhaps merely an enlargement of that vocabulary. 'I'm set free to find a new illusion.'

Deleteduserrc

↪path

look back on all the things you've gilded ('it was like dostoevsky' etc) and ungild them without going full-celine, which is a reverse-gilding. If you can honestly remember accurately a past relationship without mythologizing it, you're way better off than if you can expound heidegger or hegel. But the shitty thing about that is there's no way to demonstrate that quickly for the next post (in order to then move on to the orgiastic big idea (or big idea about the impossibility of the big idea etc)) you have to do it.

Pfhorrest

↪path

I'm pretty anti-fond of Nietzsche, especially of his style, so I'm not surprised to see that this anti-totalizing personality that I find off-putting in a similar way finds affinity with him.

I'm unclear what you take the aim of philosophy to be, that your account of its progress is as you've said. And if you see attempts to do different things as unrecognizable as philosophy.

I, for instance, as outlined in the OP, see philosophy as something like meta-science: the aim of philosophy is to account of how best to go about answering our various questions, investigating things like what our questions even mean, what criteria we use to judge the merits of a proposed answer, what methods we use to apply those criteria, what faculties we need to enact those methods, who is to exercise those faculties, and why any of it matters at all.

There's no kind of comforting narrative or anything about God in any of that (though I address the topics of comforting narratives about God and such under the banner of that last question about why anything matters, mostly to reject them). The only thing "totalizing" about any of it is just a big picture of what abstract principles have what implications on all of those different kinds of meta-questions.

Do you (or others like you here) see that kind of project as not philosophical? Or not totalizing in the sense you mean?

path

↪csalisbury

Maybe I'm just crazy, but I think myth haunts everything. I was usually in bands with male friends, and we were all lit up by a fantasy of what the band could be, and each thought the others were great musicians, truly cool, etc. It was great.

I'm suggesting that everyone is lit up by myths. That the place beyond myth is itself a seductive myth. I don't think that there are real or core selves, though of course there is more and less spontaneous interaction. If you are gesturing at that pure state of play that lovers and friends can achieve, and this is the place beyond myth, then I do understand you and agree. I just read those states of play as still swimming in the myth, only playfully, less fastened to some image of the self.

Deleteduserrc

That the place beyond myth is itself a seductive myth — path

Yeah that's the move. And it ballasts itself with the idea of pure states of play and so forth. The problem is its wrong, and I may be wrong, but I have a hunch, based on your shuttling between personas, that you're probably in a vicious repeating circle. Well, one part of the circle at least seems bristling with the idea of a pure state of play, which is a temporary salve - but then, and so on and so on

Deleteduserrc

Let's cut to it in plain language - You're full of shit. Everything hasn't been great, people temporarily provide you access to that pure whatever, and then cease being able to, so you have to look elsewhere, and they get dimmed and something else gets bright and pure creation etc. This justifies treating them like shit and then retroactively recasting it in literary terms. You have a core self, and its registering all of this, but you keep slicing off parts, to leave yourself pure for the next stage. You're pathologically tied to a process of killing off old identities and creating new ones, and this is tied directly to the idea of the impossibility of confronting reality, and the inescapability of living in myth. This persona will be dead in a month, and you'll start back over, ingratiating yourself through 'i love this idea' responses until building to some kind of climax and feeling guilty and destroying all evidence. No?

path

I'm unclear what you take the aim of philosophy to be, that your account of its progress is as you've said. And if you see attempts to do different things as unrecognizable as philosophy. — Pfhorrest

One of the things I like to think I've learned from philosophy is a suspicion of definitions. The word 'philosophy' is alive and well as a token in our form of life. The life of this token (and of tokens like 'truth') exceeds any careful articulation. I'm not saying that such articulations are worthless. I simply can't approach them without some sense of the futility of the game. I don't write the English language. The English language writes me.

That said, I associate the most important philosophy with a basic stance taken on existence and a basic vision of existence. In that sense philosophy is like a map for maps. So I largely agree with this:

I, for instance, as outlined in the OP, see philosophy as something like meta-science: the aim of philosophy is to account of how best to go about answering our various questions, investigating things like what our questions even mean, what criteria we use to judge the merits of a proposed answer, what methods we use to apply those criteria, what faculties we need to enact those methods, who is to exercise those faculties, and why any of it matters at all. — Pfhorrest

I'm surprised you don't see the connection of the above with some kind of comforting narrative. If you think there are neutral answers to those questions above, then that to me is a highly comforting narrative. 'Reason is one and universal.' That's all we have left of the Pentecost.

The only thing "totalizing" about any of it is just a big picture of what abstract principles have what implications on all of those different kinds of meta-questions. — Pfhorrest

How entangled is all of this with the stance that the individual philosopher takes on existence ? To read Nietzsche or Schopenhauer is feel your way into their world and their role in it as they see it. As philosophy becomes safer and more dry, perhaps it also becomes the dry legitimization of an ordinary sanity that doesn't really need it.

path

Yeah that's the move — csalisbury

Like I said, maybe I'm crazy, but I really do think that we are profoundly mythological animals and that our interactions occur within a shared gallery of types. We all play off on each other against an inherited background of types. TV imitates life imitates TV. It doesn't mean we don't love one another, but it does raise the question of what exactly it is we love. A beloved person is another vortex in the shared cultural stream, another critic of the movie of the world, perhaps a co-hero, and philosophy is perhaps the critic as hero.

Deleteduserrc

Like I said, maybe I'm crazy, but I really do think that we are profoundly mythological animals and that our interactions occur within a shared gallery of types. We all play off on each other against an inherited background of types. TV imitates life imitates TV. It doesn't mean we don't love one another, but it does raise the question of what exactly it is we love. A beloved person is another vortex in the shared cultural stream, another critic of the movie of the world, perhaps a co-hero, and philosophy is perhaps the critic as hero. — path

:vomit:

Pfhorrest

As philosophy becomes safer and more dry, perhaps it also becomes the dry legitimization of an ordinary sanity that doesn't really need it. — path

I do think that that is the direction that philosophy needs to head, getting back on the topic of progress.

There some old aphorism I heard once in my first philosophy class along the lines of "Before walking the path to enlightenment, tables are tables and tea is tea. Along the path to enlightenment, tables are not tables and tea is not tea. Upon reaching enlightenment, tables are again tables, and tea is again tea." (If anyone can help me find the original source of that, I'd appreciate it).

I see progress in philosophy as consisting of, basically, tallying up all the broad kinds of confusion that people could find themselves getting trapped in, elucidating why those approaches are wrong, and then once people are securely shielded from that kind of insanity, letting them just go about life in a way much like they would have if they had never been tempted into that kind of confusion. Or as I write in the intro to my philosophy book, in which I try to make such progress:

The general worldview I am going to lay out is one that seems to be a naively uncontroversial, common-sense kind of view, i.e. the kind of view that I expect people who have given no thought at all to philosophical questions to find trivial and obvious. Nevertheless I expect most readers, of most points of view, to largely disagree with the consequent details of it, until I explain why they are entailed by that common-sense view. Many various other philosophical schools of thought deviate from that common-sense view in different ways, and their adherents think that they have surpassed that naive common sense and attained a deeper understanding. In these essays I aim to shore up and refine that common-sense view into a more rigorous form that can better withstand the temptation of such deviation, and to show the common error underlying all of those different deviations from this common-sense view. — The Codex Quaerentis

Tzeentch

Doesn't philosophy mean 'wisdom of love'?

Pfhorrest

↪Tzeentch

No, but apparently Levinas thinks it should mean that. (Funny enough, I just discovered him tonight when trying to search for anything on the pejorative meaning of "totalizing").

path

I'm as full of shit as the next person, but I still think you are misreading me. Of course everything hasn't been great. This is the world we are talking about, the old meat grinder. The irony of the ironist only makes sense if philosophy is not some magic cure-all. Lately I've thought about how most parents have children in their 20s and therefore don't even know what life is as they pass it on to others. I often think of Schopenhauer, especially given the insanity of our times. The whole dream of being a good scientist smells strange now.

The 'pure whatever' thing is great, but isn't that the structure of life? People fall in and out of love, be it sexual or Platonic/creative.

Does philosophy make progress? If so, how?

Welcome to The Philosophy Forum!

Categories

More Discussions