Philosophy is not a self-help book or a series of prescribed answers. Rather, it is a series of questions, or a way of asking questions that is intended to optimise truth and clarity. Ideally, philosophers should ask questions about the nature of life and reality with total openness, that is without any emotional attachment to a particular answer. As a species we suffer terribly with confirmation bias – we become attached to a way of looking at something, and find the prospect of being proved wrong about it somehow embarrassing. Consequently, we become threatened and disgruntled when someone disagrees with our ideas about what is true, or what is the best solution to a problem. We hunker down over our belief (we may have put years into forming it and learning about it), and become far more interested in being right than knowing what is true.
I decided to embark on postgraduate study in philosophy initially in the incredibly naive belief that if anyone had the capacity to detach from that very unproductive human impulse to be right rather than enlightened, it would be philosophers. Of course, philosophers are made of meat like everyone else, and prone to all the same pettiness and defensiveness as others. They are equipped to reason past or around many emotions they may experience. Sometimes, however, like anyone else, they just don’t, or can’t. They’re only people, after all.
It didn’t take me long to realise that philosophy is a sort of wonderful trap. Like a microcosm of Plato’s cave, once you learn to detect the lack of logic with which we think, it is impossible to see anything else. If you find yourself in an argument with a family member as a philosopher, it can be doubly frustrating on both sides. I recall a disagreement I had with some extended family who turned up out of the blue when my mother was terminally ill. I pointed out that they had not been very good to my mother in the past, and calmly questioned their motivations for resurfacing now. One of them told me that I had a chip on my shoulder, as though this constituted a counter-argument to the points I had made. Frustrated, I pointed out that what she was saying may or may not be the case, but it didn’t preclude the points I was making from being valid or true. It was perfectly possible for me to have a chip on my shoulder (whatever that really means) and also be correct. She looked at me, baffled, as though I was speaking in tongues.
Philosophy has enriched my life more fully than anything else, but it can be a double-edged sword. For most people, like my relative above, emotions constitute grounds for making statements about how things are in the world. Philosophers, or anyone who has studied logic and how conclusions we draw have to connect to the premises preceding them in order to make sense, can be both incredibly frustrated and frustrating for others as a result. Of course, emotions tell us many important things – but about ourselves. They are not in themselves an important indicator of the truth of what is occurring in the world outside our skin. Feeling something doesn’t make it true.
But feelings certainly feel true for everyone. It is very difficult when you lie awake at night worrying about work or mortgage payments or whatever else to reason away the feeling. Philosophy is a practical skill – it can help you to dispassionately recognise the patterns you fall into, and to look at the more unflattering sides of yourself, even if it hurts to do so. But it cannot flick a switch at the back of your head to turn an inconvenient feeling off. I often think how convenient that would be, to be able to shut down feelings temporarily when they are unhelpful, like when you are simultaneously trying to work and fearing that the finished article won’t be any good. Philosophy has always helped me to remember that no matter how intense my feeling, it is only that. It is not a revelatory truth. However, that doesn’t get you back to sleep when fear has you in its grip.
