239. Who's a Philosopher?

We all want our sons and daughters to think straight, don't we?  That's why we send them to college.  And we love the idea of having them think straighter than other people.  That's why we're thrilled when we get them into an Ivy League college.  Small classes, the best professors, the closest attention.  And we lose our buttons when they win a Rhodes Scholarship and go to Oxford.  They could be the most critical, least confused, straightest thinkers in the world!

Well, what we all want for our children, and thrill to, is just what college teachers, and certainly liberal arts college teachers, want and thrill to.  This goes for teachers at every level, with classes of every size, regardless of their remoteness from Oxbridge, since all English-speaking teachers, whether they know it or not, have their eyes on the tutors there.  If they don't (and some these days don't) the Freshman Composition course will redirect their vision.  And what they will see is people holding people to the writing standards of Francis Bacon and Robert Boyle and John Locke and Joseph Addison and Jonathan Swift and Charles Lamb and John Stuart Mill and on up in the line through Rachel Carson and all the other culturally polished, plain-speaking "gentlemen" who gave us the educated middle style, the style of today's New Yorker and The New York Review.  It's the style the philosophers J. L. Austin and Martha Nussbaum write in. 

It's a style we English speakers can be proud of, but not too proud.  French speakers had the style too, and followed the same model (called the honnête homme).  Just because they (or their leading philosophers) in later years exchanged that model for a German one is no reason to deny them credit.

Now, though philosophers have needed for a long time a precise language that's in touch with the world it seems to have dawned on them only slowly that these gentlemen, these honnêtes hommes, gave them what they needed.   The language of medieval theologians, the Scholastics, was, like that of mathematicians and logicians, precise, but it was not in touch with the world.  The language of the streets, like that of poets and novelists, was in touch with the world, but it wasn't precise.  Philosophers want both.  And here were these gentlemen, men of the world, in touch with the world, readers of literature that keeps them in touch, men and women with leisure to sharpen their language, and keep each other sharp and in touch.  (Leisure — that's why we have to specify "gentlemen.")  Let us, said English philosophers (and not just "Ordinary Language" philosophers), hold ourselves to their language. 

The question this raises for me is, Who gets the name "philosopher"?  I've been using that word pretty freely here.  Mill clearly deserves the title, but how about Boyle and Carson?  Straight thinkers speaking in plain language.  How about the Oxford tutors?  Are they just  "philosopher producers"?  How about the tutors in subjects other than philosophy?  "I've just produced the straightest thinker in the world here but she's not a philosopher."  How about me, teaching composition in America?  With luck I could make the same statement.  We've got a lot of people lining up for that compliment-word.  (If you doubt that it's a compliment-word you might look at the admiring evaluation a friend of mine in the Philosophy Department got from a student: "This man is almost a philosopher!")

One of the things everybody seems to agree on is that philosophers are "people who are very careful about what they believe."  What are the marks of that care?  Traditionally, as Bertrand Russell classically explains, the most significant mark is the refusal to take appearance for reality, as the practical person does.  Practical people confidently say things like, "That's a brown table."  They don't consider that a table appears in different colors according to the light and the person taking it in.  But one color, says Russell, has "just as good a right to be considered real" as any other color, and "therefore, to avoid favoritism, we are compelled to deny that, in itself, the table has any one particular color." If you don't know that you are privileging one color over another you are not yet a philosopher.  If, however, you have lost your confidence and started to worry about the possibility of your privileging, you are "well launched on the study of philosophy."

By that mark J. L. Austin, who didn't give a hoot about the difference between appearance and reality, loses his title and Martin Heidegger keeps his.  With a more lustrous crown.  And training in composition?  It plays no part in the making of a philosopher.  You can, without demur, say, "Hannah Arendt writes sentences her tutor can't make head or tail of but man they are so philosophical" (Post #209).  Philosophers can think as crookedly as your son did before you sent him to college.

Also removed from the line by the appearance-reality test are all those gentlemen we composition teachers are so respectful of.  Appearances are what they are in touch with.  And they speak confidently.  Why?  Because as long as the appearances are consistent, as long as the table appears brown at the next meeting with the teacher, as long as it appears brown to everybody at the group meeting, the gentleman tutor can confidently say, "That's a brown table."  That's settled and they, building on it as a fact, can go on to its implications for the coming dinner.  (At which one of them may say to Russell, "You underestimate us, sir.  Surely we know that brown tables appear differently in different slants of light.  That's the way brown tables do.  We'll have no trouble agreeing.")  That's the main reason they get together, to work out the implications of what they can agree on.

That right there, getting together to work out the implications of what you can agree on, isn't that exactly what Plato's Socrates and his gentlemen friends did?  And don't they deserve to be called "philosophers"?  If they don't what could Alfred North Whitehead have been thinking when he said that the history of philosophy was "just a series of footnotes to Plato"?

But refusal to take appearance for reality is only one traditional mark of the care that distinguishes philosophers.  Another is discontent with flawed or insufficient systems.  Aristotelian logic is insufficient.  Get busy and develop symbolic logic.  Hume's empiricism is too crude.  Revise and revise until you get logical empiricism, and then, when you suspect flaws in that, identify dogmas and myths and become discontent again.  It's like going from Newtonian physics to Einsteinian physics to quantum physics, where you're still restless.

This test certainly takes teachers like me out of the line.  We are content with systems that are flawed and live easily with systems that are, for the needs of others, insufficient.  If Newtonian physics is all we need then Newtonian physics is all we'll work with.  It will be the same with logical empiricism.  Flaws in the system are not the problem.  Getting people to stick to the system they have, the system for keeping an essay, an inquiry, or a self-examination going rationally, that's the problem.

But as long as we accept flawed systems we are going to appear less qualified for the title "philosopher" than those who do not accept them.  I say "appear" because in one respect we, and the gentlemen we rely on, are more careful than the winners of the title.  We look more closely at, and give more appropriate weight to, the great constraint on both our activity and theirs: human mortality.  We have better claim to the title "realist."

Go back to care about belief.  Gentlemen in the world know that all who exercise that care have a short life span and limited abilities.  Seeing death ahead, and feeling their own limitations, they will care less about appearance-reality questions than those who don't see that, as will those who see limits to their own intellectual powers.  "Life's too short and I'm too dumb to figure out whether a table, in itself, is really brown or not."  The same goes for finding and giving weight to flaws in systems that are already working well for them. 

So what looks like carelessness comes out as a superior method, the payoff for being in closer touch with the world.  Methods worked out with a view to people who are going to use them, according what matters to them, are superior to those that don't.  Gentlemen, if they weren't such gentlemen, could make that point in the common room: "You haven't noticed that we die?  That our brains have limited power?  How careless of you.  Really, old man."  So philosopher and gentleman would part, one to his metaphysics or metalogic, the other to his unmarked papers.

It's a put-down that philosophers have gotten used to over a couple of millennia, I know, but it's still worth indulging in.  How else are we going to hold them to careful use of their title?  A philosopher who, before answering a question, asks himself, "How does this question matter?  How does it fit into what matters in life," is superior to one that doesn't, and is less vulnerable to the put-down.  If one can get called a philosopher by being very, very careful about an inconsequential belief then surely something is wrong with our use of the word "philosopher." A gentleman would say that it's better to be a little careless with a consequential belief than very, very careful with an inconsequential (he'd say "trivial") one.  "The correct name for one who does the latter is 'pedant,' not 'philosopher.'"

We shouldn't forget, though, that there's another way to distinguish a philosopher: by the appeals made to him as an authority.  If he's the final authority he's a philosopher.  (A pedant is a final authority but there's nobody around — except other pedants — to appeal to him.  Nobody cares.)

The educated gentleman comes off pretty well by this test.  Half the composition teachers and tutors in the Western world appeal to him.  He, like those in Socrates' audience, is the listener who must be satisfied.  Otherwise Socrates won't be satisfied.  And everybody wants to see Socrates satisfied because he talks only about subjects that matter.