Philosophy Has Changed ...

The courage to live philosophically cannot be taught

Philosophy has changed.

In the ancient world, philosophy was not an impenetrable academic echo chamber, but a way of life aimed at helping people improve their souls and live well.

Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Diogenes, Epicurus, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius …

These were individuals who not only lived their philosophies, but genuinely believed that living philosophically was the key to a good life.

Today, philosophy is an academic discipline that almost exclusively exists within universities and is aimed at producing academic research.

It is incredibly rare to find a modern professional philosopher living their philosophy.

Most academic philosophers today have a collection of positions that they defend within tightly circumscribed academic debates.

The thing is that these positions, in the vast majority of cases, don’t really add up to a coherent way of living outside of the academy (they do add up to a way of living and making a living within a particular academic subfield).

It is a common for newer philosophy students to ask, usually around the middle of the semester, what their professor’s philosophy is — “What’s your philosophy?”.

Students are often curious about whether their professor genuinely believes any of the theories they have learned how to collectively demolish, and whether these ideas really matter in the “real world”.

Typically, the professor’s answer leaves them feeling a bit disappointed and confused about what philosophy is really all about.

There are a few ways that I have seen this play out.

First, a professor might tell the students more about their various “views” regarding specific theoretical positions one can adopt. But again, these “views” or “claims” that they believe are often answers to hyper specific questions, and don’t add up to something livable. Sometimes their views can have something to do with their actual life outside of the university, but very often they do not.

Alternatively, they might adopt the ironic role of a Socratic, and refrain from giving any indication of what they actually think. The typical justification for this is either that it is irrelevant what they actually think, or that it is for the student’s own good to have no idea what the professor’s views are.

Lastly, they might dismiss the question as naive, and explain that philosophy is an academic field of research, and to think of philosophy as a way of life is to misunderstand what philosophy means today.

I actually think that this is, unfortunately, the most accurate answer.

While it is correct to point out that philosophy today largely has nothing to do with how one lives, I don’t think it is right to treat the student’s question as naive or confused.

In fact, I think it is totally reasonable for newer philosophy students to think that philosophy has something to do with how to live, since this was, historically, the predominant approach to philosophy. If philosophy today doesn’t have anything to do with how to live, it is also totally reasonable for students to wonder why they are paying thousands of dollars to learn about it!

If a student really wanted to know more about their philosophy professor’s way of life, the most relevant questions to ask them would not be about their philosophical beliefs. They would be personal questions about their cultural background, socio-economic background, their educational background, and their political affiliations.

What they would end up discovering is that most academic philosophers live nearly identical lives to other academics in other disciplines, and that there is often nothing about the fact that they have specialized in philosophy which uniquely affects their way of life.

In the ancient world, the different “schools” of philosophy represented very different ways of living, such that you could usually tell which school someone belonged to simply by observing what they ate, how they dressed, and where they would hang out.

The reason for this is that in order for someone to count as part of a philosophical “school” in the ancient world they actually had to live out a set of philosophical beliefs, rather than pay money to belong to an institution.

The point of philosophy was not to produce research, but to live.

I should mention, at this point, that much of what I have about philosophy pertains to how it has come to exist in the modern research university.

Outside of the university, there are familiar examples of philosophy as a way of life that still exist in the modern world. Consider how much information you can gather about this person’s way of life simply from looking at them:

If you know anything about Tibetan Buddhism, you can infer a significant amount of information about this individual’s way of life simply from looking at their style of dress, their hair, and what they are carrying in their hands.

By contrast, if you were to try and distinguish between a philosophy professor and a human resources specialist simply by looking at them, it would be impossible.

Although philosophy has changed in some parts of the world, you do not need to change with it.

The choice to live philosophically is a personal one that does not require any special academic training.

Many people who are interested in philosophy struggle to find their way into the subject and feel the need to read certain difficult works in order to be considered “serious”.

But here’s the thing.

What makes you serious about philosophy is not how much you know about its history or various theories, but how you incorporate it into your daily life.

This requires courage more than knowledge.

It requires the courage to be different, to question those around you, and to be willing to drop everything you have ever known in order to pursue your personal truth.

This is something that cannot be taught.

-Paul