[andagainagain]

Every time I've looked at philosophy in my life, I kept searching for this promise - where intellectual giants grapple the truth and discover their secrets.

What I've found, from famous books by famous philosophers all the way to pop philosophy books to vague philosophical discussions... is some of the muddiest and most convoluted self-indulgent thinking i've ever seen.

I am thus convinced that philosophers ENJOY the mud, not the clarity. If clarity comes, it seems more likely than not that it is an accident, and other philosophers come quickly to obfuscate it. "yes, we see the same color, but do we REALLY see the same color?", as if an infinite regress of definitions somehow makes their thought process more valuable. And, from what I can tell about famous philosophies, perhaps to other philosophers they do.

[idolaspecus]

> Every time I've looked at philosophy in my life, I kept searching for this promise - where intellectual giants grapple the truth and discover their secrets.

This expresses an approach to philosophy that I think is, at its roots, ineffective. It treats "philosophy" as "Philosophy", as some thing, some well-defined corpus that deals with truth and can be explored top-down systematically, something that you can "look at" or "come to" or whatever. But that's not really what "philosophy" is or, rather, there is no "philosophy" in that sense. There's just people in the world trying to understand it and to communicate their understanding. There's just questions and people all the way down, nothing else. We use the name "philosophy" because it's convenient but I'd say it's maybe the least useful name for anything we've ever come up with.

Philosophy is ultimately personal, it's the most personal, and most of the most famous philosophers can only be appreciated if you go out of your way to read them from a deeply psychological and empathetic perspective. At least this is my experience. It's not easy and takes a lot of work to get into the headspace of whoever you're reading, but once you get there you'll feel the lightbulb go off. This is especially important when you read older philosophers or philosophers who have a fundamentally different metaphysics from yourself. Of course, sometimes you just can't get there with certain thinkers. For example, I have a really really really hard time taking Hegel seriously.

[jolux]

Have you read Kant? I've had a lot of trouble with Hegel as well, and everyone tells me it's because he's responding to or building on arguments that Kant makes that seem to be pulled from whole cloth without that context (Kantext?).

We're certainly not the only ones though, a lot of famous philosophers think Hegel is bullshit. I don't know how much respect the Hegelian lineage has outside of continental philosophy circles these days. I suppose Fukuyama is pretty Hegelian.

[idolaspecus]

Maybe that's true but tbh I'm kinda over Hegel, I don't imagine there will ever be a time in my life where attempting to seriously understand Hegel will be worth the time.

[denton-scratch]

Marxism is derived from Hegel's work.

[iraphael]

+1 to this point.

I also find it easier to read certain philosophers than others because they themselves seem to be empathetic in the way they write their thinking. Almost as if they know that they could be wrong about the conclusions they're coming to, and that the truths they uncover aren't necessarily absolutes but instead, at least to a certain degree, subjective and personal.

Reading phenomenology for instance doesn't get me feeling like the author is self-indulgent. I find it easier to empathize with the philosopher because the philosopher is trying to empathize with me.

[DyslexicAtheist]

> I have a really really really hard time taking Hegel seriously

I really enjoyed Schopenhauer 80+ pages rant in "Parerga & Paralipomena" on Hegel and why he considered him a fraud. Nothing in philosophy is as consistent as Schopenhauer's "Hegel bashing" or using the term "Hegelian" only in a dismissive way.

Maybe I ought to read Hegel since he is a central figure in Western philosophy. My excuse so far has been that he is only needed if I want to understand and keep up with what influenced thinkers like Marx, the "Frankfurt School", etc. So far I haven't felt not reading Hegel is a problem. It might have even shielded me from a lot of pretentious texts but idk.

Agreeing and emphasizing with Schopenhauer was perhaps my reason for why Hegel now feels like a waste of time. Putting the effort needed into fully understanding him will be pure uphill struggle. This limits my understanding on Hegel to how Schopenhauer understood and interpreted him.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parerga_and_Paralipomena

[yesenadam]

I used to enjoy Schopenhauer, and am still fond of him, but his student Nietzsche has taken his place for me, a cheerier, funnier companion. Well, like me, Nietzsche was inspired by Emerson throughout his life. Emerson was never funny, but always inspiring.

Santayana's Egotism in German Philosophy is one of my favourite books in philosophy, a history of German/"continental" thought from Leibniz to the Nazis—published 1916. Chapter II, The Protestant Heritage[0] begins:

"The German people, according to Fichte and Hegel, are called by the plan of Providence to occupy the supreme place in the history of the universe.

A little consideration of this belief will perhaps lead us more surely to the heart of German philosophy than would the usual laborious approach to it through what is called the theory of knowledge."

Gold! I love Santayana's gentlemanly, restrained sense of humour, so superior to, say, Russell or Nietzsche's savage mocking.

The best short thing I've read on Hegel is William James' essay On Some Hegelisms[1], and the long Note at its end, where he recognized Hegel-style thinking in his own crazed thinking while on nitrous oxide. Very funny, insightful stuff. After all, psychological experiment was James' own field:

"It is impossible to convey an idea of the torrential character of the identification of opposites as it streams through the mind in this experience. I have sheet after sheet of phrases dictated or written during the intoxication, which to the sober reader seem meaningless drivel, but which at the moment of transcribing were fused in the fire of infinite rationality. God and devil, good and evil, life and death, I and thou, sober and drunk, matter and form, black and white, quantity and quality, shiver of ecstasy and shudder of horror, vomiting and swallowing, inspiration and expiration, fate and reason, great and small, extent and intent, joke and earnest, tragic and comic, and fifty other contrasts figure in these pages in the same monotonous way. The mind saw how each term belonged to its contrast through a knife-edge moment of transition which it effected, and which, perennial and eternal, was the nunc stans of life. The thought of mutual implication of the parts in the bare form of a judgment of opposition, as 'nothing — but,' 'no more — than,' 'only — if', etc., produced a perfect delirium of theoretic rapture. And at last, when definite ideas to work on came slowly, the mind went through the mere form of recognizing sameness in identity by contrasting the same word with itself, differently emphasized, or shorn of its initial letter."

[0] https://archive.org/details/egotismingermanp00santuoft/page/...

[1] https://archive.org/details/willtobelieveoth1910jame/page/26...

[DyslexicAtheist]

thanks for this wonderful William James quote and the links. I've yet to read him and I already sense from this quote I like his way with words.

From what I understand Nietzsche himself didn't have too many great things to say about Schopenhauer. He must have rubbed people the wrong way wherever he went and perhaps the only way for him to ever be recognized is be dead long enough so the writing is removed as far as possible from the man.

I'm going to read Santayana - thanks for the tip. Much appreciated. If you appreciate funny philosophers do check out Peter Wessel-Zapffe[1] a crazy Norwegian who loved his mountains and is quite dark[2] in a brilliant way.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Wessel_Zapffe

[2] https://philosophynow.org/issues/45/The_Last_Messiah

[yesenadam]

Welcome! Ok thanks, will check him out. Not really into dark though! <Checked him out> Arggh, yeah. He sounds miserable. Getting a headache reading that..well, it was 1933 I guess. Sounds a bit like Cioran, who I expected I might like but it's just continual depressed whining as if being smart means you must be miserable as hell, and pitying those whose don't share your misery. That doesn't sound smart. Mencken and Kierkegaard are about as far as I willingly go in that direction—not very far. But they're very funny and brilliant writers.

Well, one of Nietzsche's most amazing productions is one of his first, the short essay On Truth and Lie in a Nonmoral Sense (1873), somewhat in a similar vein to that Zapffe, but, uh, well, behold how it starts! :

In some remote corner of the universe that is poured out in countless flickering solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the most arrogant and the most untruthful moment in "world history" — yet indeed only a moment. After nature had taken a few breaths, the star froze over and the clever animals had to die.

Someone could invent such a fable and still not have illustrated adequately how pitiful, how shadowy and fleeting, how purposeless and arbitrary the human intellect appears within nature. There were eternities when it did not exist; and someday when it no longer is there, not much will have changed.

Further on, one of his most quoted passages:

What is truth? a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short, a sum of human relations which were poetically and rhetorically heightened, transferred, and adorned, and after long use seem solid, canonical, and binding to a nation. Truths are illusions about which it has been forgotten that they are illusions, worn-out metaphors without sensory impact, coins which have lost their image and now can be used only as metal, and no longer as coins. We still do not know where the desire for truth originates; for until now we have heard only of the obligation which society, in order to exist, imposes: to be truthful, i.e., to use the customary metaphors, or in moral terms, the obligation to lie according to an established convention, to lie collectively in a style that is mandatory for everyone.

Actually he had a lot to say about him—check out Schopenhauer as Educator, a long essay from Nietzsche's first (full-sized) book, Untimely Meditations aka Unfashionable Observations aka Thoughts Out Of Season—it's a very grateful tribute.

William James wrote so many great essays, and one of the most accessible, and touching, is On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings and its sequel What Makes A Life Significant. OACBIHB has a lot of great long quotes from various places, actually that reminds me, I think I rediscovered Stevenson's essays from a long quote in that, which is itself a huge debt. I'm into writers who faced life with joy and courage, and who love passing on that gift—Emerson, Stevenson, Chesterton etc.

Santayana - I never got anything from the systemy Life of Reason or Realms of Being, maybe I should try again one day. Soliloquies in England etc are short nontechnical essays on all subjects. My favourite books of his are the ones with long essays on particular philosophers or philosophical/cultural scenes, like Character and Opinion in the US. And the chapters on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in Egotism in German Philosophy are among the best things written on those guys, as seems so often the case with Santayana. Cheers!

p.s. Come to think of it, this page on my website has links to a fair bit of James' stuff, and a few good quotes by and about him! http://www.adamponting.com/william-james/

[routerl]

> I am thus convinced that philosophers ENJOY the mud, not the clarity.

As in programming, there's some truth to this, in that needless complexity can afford a certain job security.

But you've ignored another possible interpretation, which is that the subject matter is muddy. Until Frege, Russell, et al, not even mathematicians had a clear notion of "inference" or "proof"; it was always a case of "I can't define it, but recognize it when I see it".

Until, suddenly, we did define it, and all the muddy conversations that came before now seemed misguided. We see this movement very clearly in all sciences, but I especially like examples from the history of mathematics, e.g. when Paul Gordan said, of Hilbert's finiteness theorem, that "This is not Mathematics. This is Theology."

John Searle once said that "philosophy is the asking of questions that come naturally to children, and answering them with methods that come naturally to mathematicians". Once those methods are sufficiently formalized, the problem domain simply leaves philosophy and becomes some part of mathematics, or a new empirical science.

This comes off as extremely self-indulgent, because it is, since almost every school of philosophers is trying to take some muddy conceptual domain and give it shape and structure, to help the subject along the path towards quantitative inquiry.

Think of philosophical schools as analogous to systems architectures: with an eye towards certain desiderata, they're laying foundations for the rest of the system as it is likely to eventually exist.

[jfengel]

Yes, philosophers love the mud. That's why they're philosophers.

Everything we call "science" is something that has been separated out, cleaned up, and polished. Darwin and Newton both considered themselves "philosophers", because they looked in the mud and took out a nice, separable piece of it.

What's left as "philosophy" is the mud, the stuff that we haven't taken away from the philosophy department by giving it a new name. We continue to take philosophy's successes: linguistics, economics, even cognitive science were originally done under the remit of a philosophy department.

You can't tell the serious work from the people just being self-indulgent until after the fact. Especially from the outside: a lot of the serious work looks ridiculous until it's successful. Getting to the point where you can tell requires more effort than most people are willing to put out -- which is fine, because it's not actually important whether you judge it well or not.

But in the interests of intellectual honesty, you'd do well not to judge a discipline with only a cursory understanding of it. And before you object to me describing your understanding as cursory, let me assure you that questions like "do we REALLY see the same color" are precisely not what real philosophy looks like. It's the same kind of red flag that "Can we use dark matter to go faster than light?" signals as not serious physics.

[NikolaeVarius]

I'm having a pretty hard time trying to figure out why people are so quick to toss out philosophy without trying to understand it.

The principles of liberal democracy, separation of church and state, and all that feel-good stuff is not something that "really exists". Its a bunch of stuff that a bunch of philosophers spent years observing society to create stuff to try and make a coherent framework for humans to live by.

I still think to this day that my philosophy of science course in college was one of the most defining classes of my life. It really changed how I look at existence and modes of thought

[jfengel]

A ton of it is plain Dunning-Kruger. They spend two minutes looking at something they don't understand, dub it stupid, and feel smug about being smarter than the people who do it.

That said, philosophy seems to practically beg people to do that, and I've spent some time trying to figure out how and why. Scientists flood the Internet to challenge bad science. Especially physics, which a lot of people practice in exactly the same way they approach philosophy -- without doing the math, or doing the experiment, or having any applications.

Philosophers don't do that, and I struggle with that. There may or may not be such a thing as "bad philosophy", but it's certainly true that people mis-represent the state of the art of philosophy. The most visible philosophers are rarely the ones doing the most important work.

People are quick to jump on the Sokal Hoax -- as if they had any idea what the journal Social Text was actually for. Who's out there to explain it? Science won the Science Wars -- but did anybody actually show up to fight against them?

Sciences aren't immune, either. A field like sociology is barely separated from philosophy, and gets a lot of derision -- as if it would be so much better if it would just realize that human beings are billiard balls with no more than three dimensions of freedom, and we could gin up experiments with N=10^20 every afternoon the way the LHC does. But if you were offered the answer to the question "How can we end homelessness?" or "What is the real nature of dark energy?", which one actually matters more?

It's easy to feel smug about the simplicity of physics and the tremendous power we can get out of that. A lot of people get a cheap thrill out of that. But it's lazy, and I really wish there were a way to talk about it.

[BlueTemplar]

Case in point, these days the question "Do we REALLY see the same color ?", is much more one about physics, signal processing and (neuro)biology.

[yesenadam]

> Darwin and Newton both considered themselves "philosophers"

The word "scientist" was only coined in the 1830s. Science for the vast majority of its history existed as a branch of philosophy called natural philosophy.

[belugacat]

Wittgenstein came to the same conclusion.

Whereof one cannot speak, one must remain silent.

And he’s just paraphrasing the Buddhists/Taoists (and a bunch of other lesser known religious orders) who had that same insight a few thousand years earlier.

Most people aren’t interested in silence though. The mud keeps humans entertained and hungry. Those humans build the societies we live in, monks living in silence in monasteries do not.

[morgangalvin]

In the Tractatus (TLP), which you quoted, Wittgenstein came to a conclussion about language, not about philosophy itself. He rejected many of the major themes of the TLP in his later work, Philosophical Investigations (even jokingly calling the person who wrote the TLP an idiot)

Wittgensteins metaphilosophical thoughts are best captured in the Blue Book (a series of lecture notes) and Philosophical Investigations.

[denton-scratch]

I don't agree that he rejects much of TLP in Phlosophical Investigations, although most secondary sources say he did. So I'm deviant.

I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on this subject, 40 years ago.

I think it's a bad idea to write an undergraduate dissertation that implicitly criticises prominent philosophy writers; they are probably your examiner's drinking buddy.

I got a gamma (scrape pass).

[SavantIdiot]

On the flip side, do you really thing every conversation Aristotle had with his students was a cloud of gilded exhalations that would echo down the millennia?

I don't think I would be surprised to learn the majority of the conversations that took place over the decades of Aristotle's life were a grueling, repeated, and mind-numbing grind to a treatise. As that is what is usually required to produce something original and authentic in my tech world.

If someone were to lay out a transcript of all of his discussions, could it be possible they read like today's internet posts? I've read books of correspondence between great minds (Einstein, Feyerabend, Franklin), but those were carefully curated exchanges. Not free-flowing arguments like discussion boards.

[HKH2]

Are you willing to prioritize truth above that which is socially acceptable? If you do, your philosophy will probably remain hidden, and if not, your philosophy will probably be irrelevant like what you describe.

[andagainagain]

why would that be true? Many things that are true are socially uncomfortable and are still known.

History is chock full of examples of things which others in the field (and society) hated but could not disprove, and then became well known. I can think, off the top of my head, examples in math, human biology, plant biology, psychology, and martial arts, (the last one due to the wonders of the internet). It seems to happen all the time.

[batavian]

Many things that are deemed socially uncomfortable are a part of the same board on which the socially comfortable game is played.

Moreover, the vast majority of examples one can come up in science are not truths, and in fact a core premise of science is each state of scientific knowledge is contingent and not final, i.e. it's not True, but it should be a more faithful description of what is happening than we had before.

[HKH2]

There are many examples in history of people who have risked their reputations or even lives to say certain things. I've no doubt the memory and works of some have been wiped out completely; humans are awfully petty at times.

It's all too easy to dismiss one's critics out of hand, yet if you want a relevant argument you at least have to consider some criticism dispassionately. I'm not sure that we as a society have got better at doing that.

[jolux]

It really depends who you read. Some philosophers are better writers than others, some philosophical traditions prioritize clarity more, and some translations are really bad. If you’re looking for relatively straightforward thinking, Plato is often where freshman philosophy students start and his work is considered background knowledge for basically all of the rest of western philosophy.

[andagainagain]

Name me two.

And I've read some Plato some years ago. I would not classify him as a clear thinker by any remotely modern standards.

[jfarmer]

You might like American Pragmatism: CS Peirce, FP Ramsey, CI Lewis, William James, John Dewey, etc.

Peirce's "How to Make Our Ideas Clear": https://courses.media.mit.edu/2004spring/mas966/Peirce%20187...

[User23]

Peirce also, along with Frege, independently discovered the existential and universal quantifiers, to name just one major contribution. His existential graphs[1] are extremely cool too. Peirce is grossly underappreciated largely due to the efforts of his less gifted but more politically astute childhood "friend" Simon Newcomb to obliterate his career and legacy. The Peirce gateway is full of great stuff[2][3]. This[4] is the companion paper to How To Make Our Ideas Clear.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential_graph

[2] https://arisbe.sitehost.iu.edu/

[3] https://arisbe.sitehost.iu.edu/menu/library/bycsp/bycsp.HTM

[4] https://arisbe.sitehost.iu.edu/menu/library/bycsp/fixation/f...

[yesenadam]

Also Richard Rorty. I seem to never agree with anything he says—he always goes too far—but have all his books and find him very stimulating. Hilary Putnam talks in his books about their disagreements, and Putnam always seems to take the more sensible side. Putnam is a very clear and stimulating writer—his Realism with a Human Face is perhaps his best and a good place to start, filled with remarkably good essays.

p.s. Dewey's Art as Experience changed my life. I'm a musician/artist and philosophy student, and it solved all my problems concerning art, which each further book of analytic philosophy of art had only multiplied.

[andagainagain]

Thanks, I'll save that for later reading.

[jolux]

Two what?

I'm also curious what defines your standard for clear thinking. Philosophy is at a level of abstraction higher than any other intellectual discipline, and to a certain extent it's not possible to discuss philosophy in the way we discuss engineering, for example. It's the difference between relying on assumptions to communicate effectively and attempting to analyze the assumptions themselves.

[keiferski]

I find Nietzsche to be an extremely clear writer, but only if you have an understanding of his background and the topics he’s engaging with.

Kierkegaard plays a lot of games in his writings, but I think his ideas themselves are very straightforward.

[ebruchez]

For amazing clarity, read Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper.

[bionhoward]

Marcus Aurelius and Seneca

[arolihas]

What of his work have you read that was so unclear?

[andagainagain]

I read about half of "The Republic". I would pull out the book again to find a good example, but I think I donated the book a few months ago.

[milkey_mouse]

> I am thus convinced that philosophers ENJOY the mud, not the clarity.

I agree that this describes many philosophers, but "quietists" such as John McDowell and (late) Wittgenstein would disagree:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quietism_(philosophy)

[neonological]

>What I've found, from famous books by famous philosophers all the way to pop philosophy books to vague philosophical discussions... is some of the muddiest and most convoluted self-indulgent thinking i've ever seen.

I find philosophy to be highly irrational. It studies topics that are uniquely different yet it categorizes these topics as the same thing.

Aesthetics aka beauty is a philosophy, and so is logic. How do these things exist on the same level? Aesthetics is a human attribute and a human opinion and made up concept, logic is an observable phenomenon fundamental to the universe.

The infinite regressions are also pointless paths to explore. By induction we know it's infinite already so why continue to explore?

[BlueTemplar]

> How do these things exist on the same level?

Through Mathematics ?

[neonological]

Mathematics makes beauty and logic equivalent fields of study that belong in the same category? How?

[BlueTemplar]

Geometry plays an important role in aesthetics (symmetry for instance). (Also math in music.)

[neonological]

That's applied math though. It is categorically on another level in the hierarchy.

Why would one specific application of math, the application of math in beauty be placed by philosophy on the same level as logic fundamentally. Math is derived from logic after all. Why isn't philosophy placing the study of the application of math to origami in the same category? Why does beauty arbitrarily take precedence over origami?

[BlueTemplar]

Not historically. Also remember that Pythagoricians were a mystic cult.