Reflection 3
CUTTING OUR UMBILICAL CORD FROM ACADEMIC PHILOSOPHY
If philosophical practice is a search for wisdom, then how do we conduct this kind of search? What kind of discourse do we need to use for this purpose?
I doubt that we can find the answer by looking at academic philosophy (although I myself have been involved in it more than twenty years). It is hard to see any special affinity between wisdom and what philosophy professors normally do. For the most part, they are engaged in discussing theoretical issues (e.g., how does the mind relate to the body?) or in constructing theories (e.g., about knowledge or language), or in analyzing other philosophers’ solutions and theories. This undoubtedly requires a capacity for critical and abstract thinking, but whatever wisdom exactly is, abstract thinking is certainly not all there is to it. A person may be a smart problem-solver—like a mathematics-whiz teenager—but this in itself does not seem to make him a wise woman. Or, he may be a first-rate theoretician in, say, philosophy of science, but in everyday life be a narrow-minded, short-sighted, unreflective, self-deluded person. And if so, can academic philosophy be relevant to the search for wisdom?
This is a crucial question for us, philosophical practitioners, because we have inherited from academic philosophy much of its conception of how to philosophize. And if academic philosophizing is not a good example for the quest for wisdom, then haven’t we been wrong in adopting its ideas and methods? Shouldn’t we turn our back on our philosophical heritage and search for other, new, better forms of philosophical discourse?
And indeed, I have the impression that much (though by no means all) of what philosophical practitioners do nowadays is based on ideas and methods borrowed from mainstream academic philosophy. To be sure, we practitioners are not into constructing general theories, but we do rely on the same basic kinds of discourse.
Thus for example, in philo-cafes we define an issue and discuss how to solve it—perhaps in a more friendly and relaxed manner, but basically like discussions in university classes. In standard philosophical counseling we often seek to clarify the counselee’s ethical or existential issue and discuss ways of solving it, very much like academics might attempt to solve the so-called ‘mind-body problem’ or ‘the problem of evil.’ We help expose the counselee’s hidden assumptions and discuss whether they are warranted, precisely as we expose and discuss Descartes’ or Kant’s assumptions in a philosophy course. We help counselees analyze and spell out their conception of love or authenticity, just as we do with Locke’s conception of tolerance or Hume’s conception of causality. And we use critical thinking tools to examine the coherence of a given view, or what follows from what, or the exact meaning of a given concept, etc.—very much like the way we examine standard philosophical theories.
In short, to a large extent we have adopted the traditional philosophical discourse, particularly its use of analytic critical thinking tools, as well as its search for solutions, bottom lines, conclusions. There is of course nothing wrong with this, especially if it helps people deal with their personal problems. But the question is whether this discourse can count as a form of philo-sophia, of a search for wisdom.
Plato’s cave allegory suggests that the role of philo-sophia is not to analyze and theorize and solve issues in our current understandings—the world of shadows. Nor is it to capture and enclose the endless richness of life in just another limited cave—neat solutions and theories. It is, rather, to call individuals to transcend their current ways of understanding towards broader, richer visions of life. The allegory also emphasizes that the process of philosophizing cannot be limited to one single faculty of our mind—abstract reasoning, which is what is used almost exclusively in academic theorizing and issue-solving. Rather, the process must involve the person as a whole, so that it could facilitate a real personal transformation.
This implies, I believe, that if we want philosophical practice to be truly transformative, if we want it to be more than a mere issue-solving device, if we want it to touch the individual’s life and inspire it towards growth in wisdom, then we must reexamine the forms of discourse which we have inherited from our historical predecessor, academic philosophy, and inquire whether they are suitable for philo-sophia. It seems to me that on the whole, we philosophical practitioners have not done so radically enough, and that we are still prisoners of our historical heritage. We have not been sufficiently bold to shake ourselves free from the familiar issue-solving and theory-building sort of philosophizing.
This does not mean that we should reject everything that is academic. Certainly there are wonderful treasures in the history of mainstream philosophy. But I believe that the decision to adopt or reject any particular idea or method should be done in the broader context of a careful and radical reexamination of forms of philosophical discourse that could serve the spirit philo-sophia. To be sure, it is an enormous challenge to part from a tradition that has been dominant for more than two millennia. It is much easier to rely on already-existing kinds of discourse, and simply apply them to our practice. However, by becoming philosophical practitioners we have decided, in effect, not to rest satisfied with already-existing ideas, and to venture beyond established boundaries in search of ways leading out of our philosophical cave.
