bigideas

Reading a recent Leiter Report post on the kind of philosophy that gets media coverage might lead one to wonder what kind of popular philosophy we want, if any at all, and what good or harm popularisation does for a discipline.

These days people who describe themselves as “philosophers” are mostly university staff. In the UK and US, as I imagine in most countries, they’re paid by a combination of taxes and tuition fees. In both cases, the people being asked to pay up know little or nothing about what philosophers do all day or how they justify being paid for it, although one hopes the students end up with some idea after a while.

So one argument for popularisation is advocacy: people are more willing to pay for research they can roughly see the benefits of. Few people complain about paying for medical research, or indeed work that leads to new technologies that might have commercial applications. Not many these days even complain about high-energy physics, say, because lots of people have read a pop science book about quantum mechanics and think it’s cool.

Few people, though, have read a pop philosophy book, despite the fact that such things do exist, and are often very good. So perhaps the more often philosophical “breakthroughs” are reported in the Times, the more people will feel this is a vigorous and valuable activity worthy of funding, and an option for their kids when considering what degree to do.

Science news is about progress; it’s about new discoveries. The narrative of pop science is one of gradual, deliberate movement towards a goal of complete knowledge. So philosophical stories, when they make the news, are cast in the same way, and the sciencier they sound, the better. But philosophy isn’t a science, and any attempt to adopt the popular science pitch wholesale would be likely to backfire.

Philosophy doesn’t make startling progress; its victories tend to be in technical matters that are of little interest to the general public, and even then they tend to be qualified. Philosophical vogues come and go over the decades. Who’s an existentialist any more, or an Hegelian idealist? Yet such styles of thinking could well return. Philosophy is certainly not an accumulative body of knowledge. Writing a press release for your new paper about consciousness claiming a “breakthrough” or “discovery” is unlikely to be honest.

Philosophy especially suffers because of the current fashion for pragmatism. Nobody thinks anything is important any more unless it’s for something. Philosophy is, with a few exceptions, not obviously useful. Few philosophers would be well-advised to court the media by claiming their work has applications.

In The Differend, the philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard famously says:

So, in the [21st] century there will be no more books. It takes too long to read, when success comes from gaining time [...] Reflection is not thrust aside today because it is dangerous or upsetting but because it is a waste of time. It is “good for nothing”. It is not good for gaining time.

It seems to me that Lyotard is right in this: philosophy is one of the few activities we undertake that isn’t pragmatic, goal-oriented, progressive, time-saving, technological, and it’s for just that reason that our culture currently places a low value on it.

Yet it’s not clear why people read popular books about quantum mechanics. A tiny fraction are planning to become physicists. The rest just want to know, and want to think. In other words, they’re engaging in reflection. But because the apparent object of their reflection is physics, and because physics is useful, they’re not embarrassed by it. In reality, of course, the juicy stuff in those books is the metaphysics: what are space and time like, what is matter?

It’s never seemed to me that people in general should be interested in what philosophers write for its own sake. The newspaper science story consists of an executive summary, a briefing that masquerades as practical information even when it sometimes slips in the occasion for deeper thought. I’m with Lyotard: philosophy doesn’t work well in précis.

Real popular philosophy would consist in inviting people to think for themselves. “Recreational philosophy” could become, like recreational mathematics, a genre of puzzles and questions derived from, but not directly referring to, the activities of professors. Here’s David Singmaster:

Recreational mathematics is mathematics that is fun and popular – that is, the problems should be understandable to the interested layman, though the solutions may be harder. [...] Secondly, recreational mathematics is mathematics that is fun and used as either as a diversion from serious mathematics or as a way of making serious mathematics understandable or palatable. These are the pedagogic uses of recreational mathematics. They are already present in the oldest known mathematics and continue to the present day.

Let’s try translating that into philosophy:

Recreational philosophy is philosophy that is fun and popular – that is, the problems should be understandable to the interested layman, though the solutions may be harder. [...] Secondly, recreational philosophy is philosophy that is fun and used as either as a diversion from serious philosophy or as a way of making serious philosophy understandable or palatable. These are the pedagogic uses of recreational philosophy. They are already present in the oldest known philosophy and continue to the present day.

Certainly the last sentence remains true in its transformed version. So perhaps popular philosophy belongs on the newspapers’ puzzle pages, not alongside its science news. Philosophy takes the form of short questions with long answers.

I can think of nothing more appropriate than a Sunday afternoon spent considering a philosophical puzzle alongside the chess problem, the crossword, the sudoku or Chris Maslanka’s splendid pyrgic puzzles. When Martin Gardner or Douglas Hofstadter wrote their famous puzzles and games columns for Scientific American they often touched on philosophical matters, and that’s surely precedent enough. Julian Baggini‘s The Pig That Wants To Be Eaten is a nice example of one way to do it.

What’s more, a puzzle is one of the few genres we have left that encourages long, quiet thought. Far from a briefing note, a puzzle leaves you to do all the work. Isn’t this the perfect form for popular philosophy? And although such activity may not serve the vanity of individual philosophers, it might make for more philosophy overall.