What It Means To Be A Philosopher These Days
About thirty years ago (oh, has it really been that long?), I fell in love with philosophy. I was immediately smitten with the types of questions it asked, and the many, many ways to answer them. I loved that it was a bottomless pit of thrilling discussion, that every new idea I encountered acted as a catalyst for five others. I loved how intensely human it felt, how it kept me honest, how it made me a better writer, and a better teacher.
It also made me the butt of a lot of jokes. There was always some hot dog at a party or at a meeting, smug smirk firmly plastered on their face, who would ask “What do you do with a philosophy degree?” A comment about me becoming an expert in deep fried, industrially-prepared cuisine would follow, and then maybe a query into the whereabouts of my toga. On the surface of things, they were asking how I would use philosophy to make money, how I would take my place as a tax-paying consumer. Why else would one study anything?
It’s taken me a while, but I’ve figured out what they were really wanting to ask (even if they didn’t know they wanted to ask it). They wanted to know what on earth a philosopher was, and what a philosopher does. And that, my friends, is a question that even philosophers themselves find difficult to answer, but as I mentioned before, we kind of have a thing for difficult questions with slippery, multiple answers, so it’s all good.
I thought I’d give a glimpse into the parts of my life that revolve around me being a philosopher. Full disclosure- I’m not an academic philosopher and haven’t been for quite some time. If you’d like to know what’s in their job description, they need to tell you. I’m a public philosopher, a friendly neighbourhood philosopher, and after three decades in these shoes, here’s what I think I do:
First of all, I’m a pest. I say the quiet part loud. It is literally my job to not leave well enough alone. The words “just because” tend to make me nauseous, and when anyone tells me they just don’t like to think about something, especially something really important, I become a mouthy, impertinent little gremlin. I have ways of making people talk, and they tend to walk away from me a little bit tired and a little bit pensive.
Second, and in my defense, I tend to make space for people to see some really cool stuff. Our lives are veritable junk drawers of ideas, perceptions, feelings and actions, and we rarely stop to sort them out. Philosophy is an opportunity to pick through it, to find long-forgotten treasures, and chuck a few things that we aren’t using anymore (in particular the things that wedge themselves in there so that we have to pry the drawer open in the first place). In philosophy, we get to talk about fantastic things we’ve been pondering for a long time. We get to talk about fantastic things that humans in general have been pondering for a long time. Don’t come at me for the part about being a pest.
Third, and most importantly, I provide a pause point, a chance to breathe. I’ll admit that, left to my own devices, I’m not the world’s most logical person. I tend to let things wash over me in tidal waves before I go back and start flipping over rocks and trying to make sense of it all. I need to think philosophically in order to centre myself and get anything done, and I’m not alone in this. We are an 8-billion-strong cohort of knee-jerk reactions, and we are living through an unthinkably bad patch of history. Philosophy is, if nothing else, an invitation to converse, to invite new voices in, to throw new ideas against the wall and see what sticks. It doesn’t force hasty answers, and it doesn’t require or even allow there to be winners and losers. It does tend to shine a spotlight on our screw-ups, and that’s sometimes a lot to take. It also doesn’t give instant clarity. It is, however, forgivingly fluid and continuous. Bad ideas, ideas that hurt and destroy, can be replaced with better ones. There are ways to fix things that have gone terribly, terribly wrong, and there are opportunities to re-evaluate later. And then again later…and again later.
To be clear, I don’t give answers in my philosophical practice. How could I? I don’t have them to give. But I am pretty adept at helping people figure out new ways to think. Sometimes all that entails is showing them that they are indeed allowed to think, to question, to disagree, to dust off the curiosity they packed away as they grew up. Sometimes a person needs to experience what it’s actually like to think, and not just float along or react. When I work with kid thinkers, it’s really just a matter of getting out of their way and keeping the screaming and fart jokes to a minimum.
And what does this mean, on a daily basis? Well, I teach, I do workshops, I put up a video or two, I squish big questions into social media posts, I make stuff that might spark a conversation here and there…and yeah, I write stuff like this. A lot of the time, it feels like shouting into the void, but it’s a job that actually lets me sleep at night. Neither a fryer nor a toga in sight.