Why Philosophy Still Matters

by A.J. Grunthaler

I was flipping through this weekend's Wall Street Journal, and I found an interesting article about a problem corporate America is having with our current crop of college graduates.  It seems that a fairly sizeable percentage of these graduates lack the basic critical thinking skills necessary to do white collar work.
 

READ THE ARTICLE IN THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
 

Having taught college students for over 20 years, this weakness in critical thinking doesn't surprise me at all.   And I was pleasantly surprised by the article's claim that nine out of 10 business owners were aware of--and presumably concerned about--this deficiency.  These same businessmen, however, would probably argue that we need to spend less time focused on liberal arts in colleges and more on basic skills that can be easily transferred to the workplace. 

The problem with this way of thinking is that it is precisely a liberal arts education that trains students to think critically about the world around them.  Philosophy, with its emphasis on logic and reasoning ability, obviously accomplishes this end most directly.  But I think that the study of literature, history, sociology, and even art, helps sharpen the reasoning skills of those studying these disciplines. 

It's unfortunate that the liberal arts are under siege at the very time that the benefits derived from them are more vital than ever to our economy.   Convincing more and more students to major in disciplines like accounting and business management might seem like a prudent thing to do in  difficult economic times, but unless these same students are trained to think rationally, the long-term economic benefits to the larger society will probably be nonexistent. 

A Different Way to Think About Happiness

Michael S. Russo

Molloy College

I’ve spent the past twenty years thinking about happiness. My Master’s Thesis was on focused Stoic ideas about happiness, my doctoral dissertation dealt with the evolution of Augustine’s understanding of happiness, and more recently, I’ve been doing some work on Hindu and Buddhist conceptions of happiness.  You’d think that, after almost 25 years fixated on the question of happiness, I’d know by now what happiness is and what the best way to become happy would be.  The sad truth is that the more I explore this question, the more my own thinking about happiness evolves and mutates.  Happiness, I’ve discovered, is one slippery concept and there’s a reason why philosophical questions about its attainment have been debated since ancient times.

But the more I study the problem of happiness, the more I come to realize that we Americans have some particularly screwy ideas about happiness that may in fact get in the way of our own long-term happiness.  In particular, we seem to think that real happiness is measured almost exclusively by our present economic conditions (stuff + now = happiness).  Happiness is typically linked to GDP (Gross Domestic Product), a measure of how much we are producing and consuming at a given time.  The presumption is that the higher the GDP, the happier the people of a nation must be.  Americans have one of the highest GDPs in the world, so naturally, we must be among the happiest people in the world, right?

But what if the very lifestyle that we are living in the present is a threat to our long-term sustainable happiness and well-being?  Imagine that we Americans are like heroin addicts.  An addict needs his fix all the time in order to be happy, but the approach that he takes to achieving this happiness (abusing drugs) all but ensures that he can’t sustain his happiness in the long-term.  What if our happiness is like the happiness of the heroin addict?   In fact, using GDP to measure a people’s happiness is like asking a drug pusher whether an addict is happy while he is dwelling in a drug-induced state.  The addict may think he’s happy, and the pusher would say he’s happy, but would anyone of sense really believe that this is sustainable happiness?

Fortunately, there’s another way to measure the happiness of people rather than simply by using GDP.  Nic Marks of the New Economics Foundation has developed what he calls the Happy Planet Index.  Marks takes for granted that things like a person’s present perception of happiness and his or her life expectancy are important criteria of happiness.  But he also takes into consideration the impact that an individual’s lifestyle has on the planet when determining whether that individual’s happiness is ultimately sustainable.  The formula he uses for making this determination looks like this:

• Experienced well-being:  people around the world are asked to describe on a scale of 1-10 their experienced state of well-being, with 0 representing the worst possible life and 10 representing the best possible life.
• Life expectancy:  based upon the 2011 United Nations Development Report.
• Ecological Footprint: basically examines how much of the world’s resources are used by individuals in different nations to sustain their lifestyles. 

Here’s the way Marks explains his approach to happiness during his 2010 Ted Talk.

So, if instead of thinking about happiness purely in terms of the ability to consume in the present, we think about happiness in a more sustainable way, how does the United States rank compared to other nations of the world?  The Happy Planet Index has a nifty traffic light score to rank individual nations:  green (good), yellow (middling), and red (bad).

http://www.happyplanetindex.org/data/

As you can see, the results are radically different depending upon which criteria for well-being we are looking at.  But if we’re really concerned with sustainable happiness, we need to look in particular at the HPI map.  As you explore this map, consider which are the best countries to live in for sustainable happiness and which are the worst.

I’d like to propose that what Marks says about the happiness of different countries applies to the happiness of individuals as well.  Think about your own life, for example.  Do you perceive yourself to be living a happy and healthy life?  If you do, that’s terrific, but, as Marks points out, you also need to consider whether your happiness is ultimately sustainable.

To determine this, take a few moments and complete the following Ecological Footprint survey.  Try to answer the questions to the best of your ability, and, if you’re uncertain about the answers to any of the questions, just make the best educated guess possible.

https://www.powerhousemuseum.com/online/bigfoot/

At the end of the survey, see how many hectares it takes for you to live the lifestyle that you do.  1.9 hectares would be ecologically ideal, but anything under 2.5 hectares would indicate a more or less sustainable lifestyle.  What was your score on this survey?  How many planets would it take to sustain the kind of lifestyle that you live if everyone on the planet chose to adopt it?

The question that we all need to ask ourselves in the end is whether the perceptions we have about our own happiness correspond with the reality of whether or not our happiness is ultimately sustainable.  Marks seems to suggest that, if there’s a real dichotomy between the two, our happiness is based upon delusion—a delusion that I would argue is similar in many ways to the delusion an addict would have about his own happiness.  At the very least, becoming aware of this dichotomy should make you start to ask some very fundamental questions about the validity of our Western, materialistic notions about happiness in a world characterized by an ever-increasing scarcity of resources.  

Quiet Time

 

 

There was an excellent piece this Sunday in the New York Times about the importance of silence:

 

I'm Thinking. Please. Be Quiet

George Prochnik

 

SLAMMING doors, banging walls, bellowing strangers and whistling neighbors were the bane of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s existence. But it was only in later middle age, after he had moved with his beloved poodle to the commercial hub of Frankfurt, that his sense of being tortured by loud, often superfluous blasts of sound ripened into a philosophical diatribe. Then, around 1850, Schopenhauer pronounced noise to be the supreme archenemy of any serious thinker.

     

His argument against noise was simple: A great mind can have great thoughts only if all its powers of concentration are brought to bear on one subject, in the same way that a concave mirror focuses light on one point. Just as a mighty army becomes useless if its soldiers are scattered helter-skelter, a great mind becomes ordinary the moment its energies are dispersed.

 

And nothing disrupts thought the way noise does, Schopenhauer declared, adding that even people who are not philosophers lose whatever ideas their brains can carry in consequence of brutish jolts of sound.      

 

continue reading...

 

 

As I write this post, a helicopter is circling over my house, dogs are barking outside, cars are rumbling down the street.  It's not the same intensity of noise that people in big cities often experience on a daily basis, but it's damn distracting nonetheless. 

 

Most people I know, don't seem to mind the constant noise and bustle around them.  They may even feel comforted by it--a sign that they are not all alone in the universe.  In fact, they probably feel strangely unsettled by the experience of silence, because they are so unused to it.  Perhaps this is why we willingly choose to inflict ourselves with unnecessary noise from the moment we enter our homes to the moment we drop into sleep at night.  I even know people who need to keep the TV going all night long just to be able to fall asleep.

 

Our inability to appreciate and enjoy quite, doesn't bode well, I'm afraid, for a discipline like philosophy.  Philosophy demands that we have ample quite time to ponder the big questions of life in an environment free of distractions.  No great ideas, I would argue, could ever spring from a mind that is inflicted with incessant noise.

 

No silence, no wisdom; no wisdom, no progress; no progress....Well, I'll leave it to you to finish the rest of this thought.  I'm afraid that I'm far to distracted by all the noise all around me to continue. 



The Skeptic's Way

By Michael S. Russo

 

I’ve been teaching philosophy now for over 20 years, and it always amazes me at how gullible students are.  Every year when teaching my philosophy of Leadership course, I come in the first class and inform the students—in a very bad Irish brogue—that I am Fr. Liam McCarthy from County Gallway in Ireland.   I then go on with the prepared script:

 

“Dr. Russo, I’m afraid, has been deemed ill-suited to teach this class and I’ve been asked to take his place.  What I plan to do is examine the leadership styles of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, his blessed Mother Mary, and the saints and martyrs of the Catholic Church, including, but not limited to Saints Perpetua and Felicity, St. Odo of Cluny, and, of course, the blessed Barengarius of Tours.  Our text will be the Bible, which I plan to teach to you in the original Greek.  Many of you, I fear, will not do well in this course, because you are weak of mind and prone to the frailties of the flesh.  I want you to know that I have no problem failing every one of you, if you fail to meet my exacting standards.  Does anyone have any questions?  Good.  Then let’s begin our class with a prayer taken from the Catholic rite of the dead.”

 

I say all this with a perfectly straight face, while at the same time trying to the best of my ability to maintain something like a Barry Fitzgerald-style brogue from The Quiet Man.  It’s a ludicrous performance, and no one with any sense at all could possibly believe that Fr. McCarthy could be real.  But the students all do.  And when I can no longer sustain my performance, break out in laughter, and inform them that they’ve been had, most of my freshmen still don’t know how to react:  They sit paralyzed for some time, trying to figure out how they could have believed something so patently absurd to be true.

 

I know what you’re thinking: how stupid can these freshmen be?  But they’re not stupid at all.  In fact, only honors-level students take my leadership class.   And I would bet that, if you were in this class, you would buy into the reality of Fr. McCarthy, even with his abysmal brogue and his absurd 1950s Catholic worldview.   You would accept that Fr. McCarthy is for real, because, like most human beings, you’ve been trained to accept many things on faith that you have no real evidence for at all.  

 

For instance,
 

• you believe that you were born in a certain place at a certain time to certain parents. 
• you believe that the world you experience with your senses exists as you perceive it.
• you believe that this planet that we are on is part of a larger universe that is very, very large and contains many other solar systems.
• you believe in God and that when you die your personal identity will live on in some form.
• you believe that when you look into the mirror every morning that the person you see staring back at you is the real you.

Unlike the reality of Father McCarthy, these are all somewhat plausible beliefs, to be sure.  You’ve probably embraced many of these beliefs most of your life and people that you trust and love undoubtedly hold to them as “gospel truth.”  But how do we really know that any of these so-called “truths” are actually true at all? 

 

Mind Games

 

Let’s play a few mind games.  For these games to work, you’ll have to put aside all the beliefs about your life that you have taken for granted are true.

 

We can start with your experience of reading this very text.  Your assumption, I’m sure, is that you, __________________ (fill in your name), are sitting down in front of your computer reading the words that appear on the screen.  But can you really be certain that this is what you are actually doing?  Haven’t you had the experience of thinking that you were enmeshed in some activity—hanging out with your friends, visiting a strange, exotic place, making love to a desirable partner, only to wake up and discover that everything you thought was real was actually nothing more than a dream?  But while you were dreaming, the dream seemed totally and completely real to you, didn’t it?  Well, how do you know that something similar is not going on right now?  Perhaps instead of reading this text on your computer, you are, in fact, in deep REM sleep, dreaming about reading this text.  Can you really be 100% certain that this is not the case (remember, while you are in a dream, everything seems completely real to you)?

 

Let’s try another mind game, just for fun.  Once again, you are reading this text, imagining that what you are experiencing is real.  But I’m here to tell you that the you that you think is you is not really you, and the world that you think is really real is not real at all.  You are actually a being of a much more highly evolved species than homo sapiens (You have a body only about 4 feet tall, four fingers on each hand, a huge cranium to support your impressive brain, and no icky genitalia, since reproduction of your species is done purely through mental contact).  Every 150 years members of your species go into a coma-like state, called “The Phase”  in order to regenerate, and remain in this state for about five years.  During that time, it’s not uncommon for beings like yourself to imagine themselves as completely different sorts of creatures on strange new worlds.  For example, while you are in your coma-like state, you’ve imagined yourself as _______________ (fill in your name) living in a place called ___________ (fill in your town and country), on a planet called Earth, in a period described as the early 21^st century.  You’ve even created a bizarre physical form for yourself that is totally unlike the “real” form that you actually possess (pubic hair…yuck!).  The further along you are in The Phase, the more elaborate the dream becomes until you no longer even begin to question that it’s real.  You establish relationships, develop a career, beget children, etc.  But—and here’s the kicker—you are now approaching the end of your five year sleep cycle and very soon will be ripped from the fantasy reality that your mind has created.  When that happens, everything you experience in that dream-like state will become nothing more than a vague memory that you will eventually forget completely as you resume your “real” life. 

 

I know that you are probably thinking that both scenarios that I’ve described are completely implausible.  You know exactly who you are, and you know damn well that what you are experiencing at this very moment is precisely what it appears to be.   But can you really be certain that is the case?  In fact, the “certainty” that you possess about just about every aspect of your life is actually more like a belief or conviction—something that ultimately can’t be proven or disproven.  You could, in fact, be sleeping or you could be an alien creature in comma-like state.  How could you ever prove that you’re not?

 

The Way of the Skeptic

 

What’s the point of all this, you’re probably asking by now?  The point is to set you on a path that some philosophers have called the ultimate road to self-realization.  It’s called the path of skepticism, and its practitioners—called, not surprisingly, skeptics—argue that true liberation comes from embracing the uncertainty inherent in human life.  “Dubito”—I doubt—is the motto of all skeptics, and a truly radical skeptic doubts every aspect of his experience. 

 

The way of the skeptic is the opposite of that of the dogmatist.  Dogmatists believe they have certain knowledge about the nature of reality, the right way to live, how to organize society, etc.  Their supposed certainty leads to conflict with other dogmatists who also believe that they hold the truth. Aggression, violence, war, and genocide are the end results of embracing a philosophy that holds that one’s own truth is absolute and everything else is error, lies, and heresy.

 

The skeptic, in rejecting the idea of universal or transcendent truth, avoids the tension and conflict that the dogmatist inevitably experiences when his views run counter to the views of others.  When the skeptic encounters someone with an alternative perspective on reality, he simply acknowledges the beliefs of the other and moves on humbly and graciously. He doesn’t get angry or frustrated, because he has no personal stake in the debates dogmatists love to have among themselves.

 

The total suspension of judgment that the skeptic has about what is true or false leads to a kind of inner peace that dogmatist can never possess.  Things may “appear” or “seem” to be true to the skeptic, but when he’s shown that this is not the case, there’s no psychic rupture that occurs within him.  His beliefs are recognized to be beliefs, and nothing more, and when new beliefs come along that are superior to the ones he’s previously held, he’s capable of embracing them with a cognitive flexibility that the dogmatist could never even imagine.

 

Not convinced?  Try suspending judgment for just a week on matters that you’ve always assumed to be true.  For just a week, instead of reacting dogmatically when your beliefs encounter opposition, make an effort to remain open to conflicting viewpoints.  You just might find that your life has become much more pleasant by giving up some of your certainty about the truth…and you also might find that the world around you becomes a much nicer place as a result.

___________________


Dr. Michael S. Russo is a Professor of Philosophy and Ethics at Molloy College in New York, the manager of The Sophia Project, an online repository of educational resources in Philosophy, and the author of That's Right: An Introduction to Ethical Theory.  He can be reached at mrusso@molloy.edu.



Why Socrates Still Matters

The first time I encountered Socrates was when I was 21 years old. I was a freshman at Fordham University, and like all freshmen, I was required to take an introductory course in philosophy to fulfill my general education requirements,

In all honesty, I didn’t have a clue about what philosophy was. I had come from a fairly conservative Catholic high school—a prep seminary, actually—where we were taught to accept the teachings of the Catholic Church without much questioning at all. I had learned everything there was to know about the Old and New Testaments and the Christian doctrine, but philosophy was one thing that the good fathers who taught me seemed to have little use for.

In fact, when I told the priests at my high school that I was going to a Jesuit college, they responded with actual alarm. I remember one of my teachers telling me before I graduated, “Just be careful that you don’t lose your faith, Michael. Those Jesuits will teach you to QUESTION EVERYTHING!.”

So there I was back in 1982, a freshman in my Introduction to Philosophy class, not really knowing what philosophy was, but having the suspicion that I was going to be corrupted in some way by my encounter with it. When I met my instructor, a young adjunct instructor named Ed, who seemed far too cool to be a professor, I became even more concerned. “You’ve been living in a world where you accept everything as true based upon your upbringing, your faith, or your own biases,” I remember him saying during our first class. “But I’m going to teach you how to challenge your presuppositions about reality and see if they hold up in the light of reason.”

Ed’s plan for the class was fairly straightforward. We were going to be reading what were known as the Socratic dialogues of Plato—those texts that Ed said best represented the actual thought of the philosopher Socrates. And the reason for this was simple: Everything you needed to learn about the methods of philosophy, Ed maintained, you could learn from understanding the approach that Socrates took to the discipline. And that approach could be summed up as “QUESTION EVERYTHING.”

So the priests in my high school were right, I thought. One week in a Jesuit college and they were already trying to brainwash me into abandoning my faith!

The first text we had to read in the class was the Apology, Socrates’ famous speech in defense of his philosophical way of life. Despite my reservations, I found myself being captivated by the person of Socrates, who certainly was not afraid to poke fun at his accusers, even though his life was hanging in the balance. But what impressed me most about Socrates was his dogged determination to discover The Truth about the right way to live, no matter what the consequences. So he spent his life cross-examining those who “claimed to know”—the so-called experts—only to discover that he was far wiser than they were, because at least he realized how little he actually knew.

And this, I believe, is the key to Socrates’ continued relevance 2,500 years after his death.

We live in a world in which everyone claims to know The Truth. All around us we have experts telling us what we need to eat in order to be healthy, what policies we need to support in order to put our country back on the right path, what doctrines we have to believe in order to be saved, and so on. What Socrates teaches us is that we shouldn’t simply accept the opinions of those who claim to know, but rather we should be involved in a life-long process of questioning the so-called experts to see if what they say actually holds up to reason. Sometimes the opinions of the experts will be right, but quite often, we’ll discover that the experts, to put it frankly, are full of shit—that they know even less than we do, but their pride prevents them from admitting their woeful ignorance.

The example of Socrates also teaches us the importance of humility in our quest for the truth. Recognizing the limitations of our own knowledge is a first step to being open to the possibility of actually moving in the direction of the truth. Like Socrates, we may not grasp this truth completely in our own lifetimes, but our lives, like his, will be much better spent for making the effort. And we will certainly become just a little bit wiser as a result.

When my first philosophy class ended, I discovered that the fears of my high school teachers were totally unfounded. My encounter with Socrates in that class didn’t destroy my faith, but rather, helped me to sort through the teachings I had grown up with to see which actually made sense and which were the product of irrational superstition. My encounter with Socrates also began my life-long love affair with the discipline of philosophy that has enriched my life in ways that I could hardly have imagined while I was sitting through Introduction to Philosophy.

I may know less about the really important issues in life than I did as a freshman in college (I knew everything back then). But now at least, I take consolation from Socrates that the recognition of my own ignorance may one day prove to be the source of my future wisdom. 

Philosophy for Everyone

In the distant past one could not have been considered a well-educated person if one had not studied philosophy at the university level and could converse with some degree of familiarity at least about the ideas of Socrates and Plato, Kant and Hegel.  In the 19th century philosophy truly was "the first science" and along with classics was considered an indispensable part of a young man's formative education. 

That all changed in the 1960s, when universities began to abandon their commitments to the liberal arts and philosophy began to be viewed as an esoteric discipline with little practical application.  Members of the elite might study philosophy, but it was hardly the sort of discipline that would attract the kinds of middle class students who were beginning to attend college in larger numbers.  Today most students could probably pass safely through college without ever even having to take a single philosophy class.  But at prestigious intuitions like Harvard, Yale, or Stanford philosophy continues to have the kind of cache that has made it attractive to the sons and daughters of the new aristocrats of American society.

In 1999 a group of idealistic young faculty members in the Department of Philosophy at Molloy College in New York decided to reclaim their discipline and sought to make it accessible to just about everyone.  The result was the creation of the Sophia Project--an online repository of philosophy resources that included thousands of pages of primary sources with commentaries, original articles, and even entire online courses.  What was truly amazing about this project was that ordinary people from around the globe were accessing the information provided on the site and using it for their own intellectual edification. 

The Sophia Project was removed from the Molloy College website for reasons too complicated to go into here.  But it has now re-emerged, better than ever, in a new form on its own website.  The same animating spirit that drove the original Sophia Project was behind its re-creation: that ordinary intelligent folks should have access to philosophical wisdom in a format that is "easily digestible." 

We didn't include all the resources from the original Sophia Project on the new site, but there's certainly enough there to stimulate even the most voracious reader of philosophy.  I'd encourage you to check The Sophia Project for yourself and let us know what you think.  You might just find that you rather enjoy reading some of the greatest selections from some of the greatest texts written by some of the greatest thinkers that mankind has ever produced. 


Visit the New Sophia Project!

Dare to Disagree

Hey, my friend,
you're not supposed to come here
and just look around
like some kind of idle tourist
on vacation in Disneyland.
That's not what this scene is all about.

On my turf, I'm THE MAN,
and you are never--
and I mean never--
supposed to agree with THE MAN,
at any time,
about anything,
no matter how insignificant it might be.

THE MAN, after all, expects you
to agree with him
(or at least be afraid to disagree):
that the source of THE MAN's power.
But when you challenge THE MAN,
and tell him that he's
full of [insert expletive here],
and explain exactly why
he's so gosh-darn wrong,
then THE MAN
looses all of his power
and you see that he's just like
the guy behind the curtain
in that old movie about
Dorothy and Toto:
he's all bluster and no substance.

So I really do dare you to
to knock my arguments down
(if you can),
and maybe I'll return the favor sometime.
After all,
that's supposed to be why
we're in this wisdom-seeking business
in the first place,
isn't it?