Those Who Can't

Quite a few years ago now, I spent some time as a college philosophy major. I realized pretty quickly that I had seriously misunderstood what that meant. I was a young man looking for answers, trying to understand the core of what life was about so that I could live accordingly. And while the great philosophers – some of them, anyway – offered those answers and attempted to explain that core, the academic approach was to regard all their ideas as if they were merely moves in some endless intellectual game: Plato says this, but Aristotle denies it, Spinoza offers this, but look at what Kant says instead – my rook to your queen’s pawn, my club to your heart.

Worse, as I later learned, the academic teachers of philosophy had for generations misrepresented the teachings of ancient philosophy. Ironically, this misrepresentation arose from the writings of scholars of the 17th and 18th centuries who truly admired Plato and Aristotle, but in an idiosyncratic and conditional way: extolling the philosophers as the originators of rationalism, but condemning them for failing to maintain the kind of hyper-rationalism they themselves wanted to practice and spread.

Another element not to be disregarded was the tendency – and not just among academics – to believe that “newer” automatically means “better.” For teachers of philosophy, this translates into the belief that the speculations of Hegel or Wittgenstein or Heidegger or Foucault must be ever more complete, more scientific, more true, than those of Plato, Aristotle or Epicurus, because we have built upon, we have surpassed, their groping attempts to explain reality. In a word, philosophy, like everything else, has “evolved.”

Finally, and most damagingly, we have the triumph of the belief that “learning” is a noun, not a verb; that knowledge is a sort of commodity to be acquired and traded in measurable chunks. It’s likely that this view was inevitable once the bureaucratization of education began within industrialized society, because it enables the creation of standardized curricula and lesson plans and all the rest of the apparatus required to turn schools into factories (sorry, “manufacturing plants”). What this meant for philosophy departments, as for all others, is that the professors taught the curriculum – in other words, the entrenched misunderstandings, misreadings, biases, tendencies – and not the subject.

The subject of philosophy is, of course, wisdom; or rather, the seeking of wisdom. Not surprisingly, professors of philosophy have for several centuries shied away from attempting to teach such things, perhaps in largest part because they are so open-ended. What they teach is not philosophy, how to “do philosophy,” how to be a philosopher, but what different philosophers have said and how to quibble with it. The measure of how far the professors are removed from the actual doing of philosophy is the fact that while every one of the teachers and textbooks I encountered in my time as a philosophy major happily defined the word “philosophy” as “love of wisdom,” not one ever tried to explain what “wisdom” might be.

What I took away from my experience as a philosophy major was the belief that Western philosophy had absolutely nothing to offer to a seeker of the kind of core understanding of life I mentioned earlier. It took me a lot of years and a long roundabout trip through Eastern religion and Western occultism and mysticism to realize that I had been completely misled. When I finally returned to ancient Western philosophy, to the philosophers themselves and not the professors, I discovered that what I had been looking for in the first place was always there.