Bringing back (classical) philosophy

For the last few years, I have been reading bits and pieces of Stoic and Epicurean philosophies translated from old Greek and Roman texts.

One thing that strikes me about these texts is their balance between intellectual and practical. Yes, they want to learn the abstract guiding principles of the universe, but they’re constantly bringing those principles back to the real world. In De Rerum Natura, for instance, Lucretius observes phenomena in the natural world, derives a principle about them (usually one we know to be wrong with modern science, but still) and then tries to apply that principle to social or psychological phenomena.

Does it necessarily make sense to extrapolate sociology from physics? No. But at least he tries to keep things topical and has a goal of understanding and explaining. The more I think about it, the more I think it’s weird that modern philosophy avoids this.

Modern philosophy is weird, because it seems to be the act of applying arbitrary lenses to arbitrary situations with no regard for the value of the lenses or situations in reality. For instance, a modern philosophy student might take a hypothetical scenario (like the ubiquitous trolley problem) and then try to figure out how a particular lens on the world would approach it (like, say, utilitiarianism).

While the skill of applying a viewpoint to a scenario does have some intrinsic value (taking on other’s beliefs, empathy etc), doing so without regard to reality means it’s just a game.

If you were confronted with some variant of the trolley problem in real life, you would probably try to think creatively. You would probably try to find some aspect of the situation so that it doesn’t play out like the thought experiment. In fact, when most lay-people are confronted with such thought problems, they begin by trying to find such solutions. “Can I shout at the people to get out of the way? Is there something close by that I can throw? If everyone jumps off, does it stop on its own?” etc.

But that’s not how the modern philosophy game is played. In order to start the process of applying lens to scenario, both the scenario and lens have to be solidified and absolute. Only then does ‘modern philosophy’ begin.

Contrast this to something like Stoicism. Stoicism, and modern therapeutic techniques derived from it (like CBT), delve deeply into perception and how people judge a situation.

It’s not as though Stoicism and other classical philosophies didn’t have their own share of musings and philosophical games. However, they recognized that one’s own perception and interpretation of the world is an important thing to control, moreso than answering their games and riddles. In other words, it’s far more important to recognize that you’re actually not in a trolley problem than figuring out how to handle such a problem. So they placed their emphasis accordingly.

It’s this guiding light of relevance and reality that modern philosophy lacks. I understand this is primarily due to historical reasons — examining how to improve lives in a realistic sense was more or less heresy in the Western world for several thousand years — but now is the time to bring relevance back.

Philosophical games are fun, but they’re about as useful for everyday life as much as chess is for real-world politics. Let’s try to bring realism back to this field.

Note: William James made almost the same case in 1906 about bringing realism into philosophy. He called this ‘pragamtism’, just to give it a name. Philosophy responded in turn by adding the viewpoint to the list, and asking how a pragmatist might view their riddles 😒