Dr. Erin Stackle: The Uselessness of Philosophy (Part 2 of 2)
Last week I posted the first part of an interview with Dr. Erin Stackle. You can find that post using this link. This post is the second and final part of that interview.
Dr. Erin Stackle is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Loyola Marymount University. She completed her undergraduate studies at Gonzaga University, and her doctoral studies at Boston College. She focuses her study and teaching on the work of Aristotle, Plato, and 20th-century phenomenology.
The Uselessness of Philosophy
Ian: Last semester, one of my favorite moments from your philosophy class was when you made the case for how philosophy is useless and why that is beautiful. Is philosophy really useless, and why is that a good thing?
Dr. Stackle: I use that language to be deliberately provocative, but do take it to be true. Whenever we talk about things being useful, what we mean is that this thing that we are doing, we are doing so that it will help us get something else that we want more. For example, I say that I want to get this degree because it will be useful to me. Or, to take another example, I always want to make money for the purpose of exchanging it for something that I actually want. I am not interested in numbers on a computer screen or green pieces of paper. I want to use them to get something else.
So, when I say about a particular major or field of study that it is useful, what I am saying is, “I want it, but I only want it to the degree that it helps me get something that I want more.”
I take philosophy, as thinking about the most fundamental questions, to be a response to one of our deepest desires—the desire to know and understand the world. When I am knowing and understanding the world, it is satisfying a profound desire I have. I do not want to know just so that I can do something else with the knowledge.
This desire to know is very evident to two-year old children. They spend a substantial part of their attention asking ‘Why?’ As they get older, many people, though, are less attentive to their strong desire to know. They notice it when solving puzzles, but otherwise get distracted by their practical responsibilities and need to seem competent.
I have often heard people who don’t really know what philosophy is say, “Why would you want to study philosophy? You won’t make any money!” Or, other people, who have looked at job data and its correlation to college majors say things like, “Studying philosophy will help you make money.” Both of these claims profoundly miss the point.
Philosophy is not valuable because it makes you money, nor valueless because it does not. Saying that would be something like saying that children are valuable because they look cute in baby clothes. These people have gotten it profoundly backwards. Money is not the point of philosophy any more than looking cute is the point of children. Do we want and need money? Of course. Money can be very good to the degree that it helps us get good things we want. But, money is none of philosophy’s business.
Making it philosophy’s business would be like saying that we want to know the world so that we can get these green pieces of paper. And, since we only want these pieces of green paper so what we can get other things, like food and shelter and other pleasant things, we would be relegating the human desire to know to a level below our most mundane desires. A desire for food, which is a desire we share with animals, ends up being, on this account, valued more highly than a desire for understanding the world, which is one of our most noble human desires.
In other words, valuing philosophy as useful is valuing what is higher in us for the sake of what is lower in us. It is turning the human person on her head.
When I say that philosophy is useless, I mean that it is a thing that I want for its own sake. I would study philosophy if no one paid me. I would study philosophy if it made nice people dislike me. I would study philosophy if it cost me a great deal of time and quite a bit of sleep. I would study philosophy because I just want to understand the world. It makes me more human. I love doing it. Understanding things more clearly is something I simply enjoy. If it also turns out that thinking more clearly makes me better able to convince people, I’m glad. But, that’s not why I do it.
Ian: Aristotle proposes in his Nicomachean Ethics that, for something to be a highest good it must be final, like you mentioned above with the comment about it being ‘for its own sake’, and self-sufficient. He also proposes a definition of ‘happiness’ as ‘excellently-governed rational activity with sufficient external goods in a complete life’. When you are pursuing this excellently-governed rational activity that he calls ‘happiness’ and when you are seeking knowledge through philosophy, should you be focused on these alone, and trust that these pursuits will bring with them the sufficient external goods (friends and money) we require? Or, should you also have a part of your mind focused on gaining friends and money?
Dr. Stackle: To answer the question clearly, let me back up and make a distinction about desire. As you know, we have two fundamental distinctively human desires: the desire to know, which we pursue with theoretical reason, and the desire for what is good, specifically what is good for me, which we pursue with practical reason. So, as you said, we seek both wisdom and happiness.
To the degree that I am studying philosophy simply for the purpose of knowing, this knowing is an end in itself.
It seems, though, that this cannot be the entirety of human happiness, because we also have bodies, we need friends, and we feel emotions. All of those things require practical intelligence to navigate well.
The happiness we pursue with practical intelligence must also, if it really is the final, self-sufficient good we seek, be pursued for its own sake and must include every good we desire. So, if money and friends are desirable, which they clearly seem to be, they must be integral to this happiness we pursue.
Ian: So, you’re saying that we don’t pursue happiness in order to get sufficient external goods, but that getting these sufficient external goods is part of pursuing happiness?
Dr. Stackle: Right. These sufficient external goods are essential to you being happy and practically intelligent. I can’t learn to be generous if I don’t have enough money. I can’t learn to be high-minded if I don’t deserve honor. I can’t even get started with becoming happy if I don’t have friends to help me along.
So, I need all of these external goods even to be able to be happy. And part of my being happy is continuing to get them. The cleverness and resourcefulness to figure how I am going to feed myself, take care of my family, and get to work is essential to the happiness I desire.
Ian: Could you say a bit more about the challenge of integrating these external goods into one’s happy life?
Dr. Stackle: To do so, let me clarify a bit the desire for happiness and why it is so important that this desire for what is good (happiness) actually be a desire for what is specifically good for me.
Someone might, for example, think that he wants to marry the most beautiful woman in the world. Such beauty, certainly, is incontestably good. But, as turned out to be the case for Paris with Helen, sometimes the most beautiful woman in the world is not actually good for you to marry. You might, for example, be more fully satisfied marrying the second or even third most beautiful woman in the world. Had Paris chosen to do that instead, it would have spared everyone the decade-long Trojan war, which devastated both his family and his city.
One way to articulate the project of practical reason is identifying from the many beautiful goods we encounter—delicious food, witty people, lovely houses, interesting jobs—which of these is actually specifically good for me.
When one is considering things as diverse as what to eat for lunch and what to major in as a college student, one must consider these in light of one’s highest good, specifically the concrete specific good of one’s concrete specific life.
If you enjoy sushi, and your body metabolizes and extracts from sushi the nutrients you need for today’s project of completing your statistics homework excellently, then sushi is likely a good choice for you to eat for lunch.
If someone offered you, instead, a very expensive steak dinner, which might seem to be better than your plate of sushi, it might, while objectively good, be nonetheless not good for you to eat for lunch today in light of the full particularity of your life today.
This same reasoning holds for each situation you encounter. You want, when considering what is good for you to consider it in the context of your life. Of course, it takes a great deal of intelligence and moral virtue to correctly judge what is particularly good for us in this particular situation. We are often wrong about what is good for us.
But, the fact that it is hard to determine what is good for us, and the fact that we are often wrong about what is good for us, does not change what is actually good for us. Something seeming like a good idea to me does not make it a good idea. For example, Paris thinking that taking and keeping Helen was a good idea did not make it one. My thinking that it is a good idea to go to sleep at 1 am does not make it one.
If we want to actually be happy, we must become smarter and more virtuous people. There is no shortcut.
There is also, to tie this back to your original question, no shortcut to the satisfaction of knowing the truth. People often complain that philosophers disagree about answers, and they conclude from this that there are no right answers. Or, they do not understand something a philosopher claims, and so decide that it must be meaningless or wrong.
I sometimes give the analogy of a quantum physics class. If someone walked into a quantum physics class with no training, it would not be surprising that he did not understand what was being said. We would infer from that, though, that the person needed to study more, rather than that the lecture was incoherent.
Since philosophy is asking even harder questions than quantum physics, it is no surprise that people without training find it confusing and are unsure how to navigate disagreements. Fortunately, though, we have inherited the beautiful tradition of philosophical conversation that people can read and study as a way of engaging these important questions more effectively.
And, by doing so, they can discover the useless satisfaction that is their birthright.