I am tempted to titled this as On romanticising philosophy for the idea came from this notion of the apparent ‘uses’ or ‘values’ of philosophy. Now I do not intend to defend my love for philosophy, and it may perhaps be due my own experience in coming into philosophy that I found absolutely nothing wrong with perceiving philosophy as ‘useless’, but I see instead an almost sacrilegious strike to insisting on promoting something like philosophy as useful or worthwhile for some other reason than for its own sake. The silver lining is that it is not just philosophy that falls into a trap like this.
Our first premise is that a thing—anything and everything—is only truly good/worthwhile/valuable/whatever-integral-ethical-concept-you-abide-by when it is so in itself, meaning that its good (let us stick with this as the general concept) should be independent. It must be both the means and the end. A human life is good in itself such that the human does not need to do anything to be perceived as good/worthwhile/valuable. Same goes with every other ‘living’ thing, but my invitation for this moment is to apply it to every other single thing that can be perceived, sensed, felt, thought of, imagined.
Oftentimes our ideas of the good are grounded in our cognitive framework of narration. We may not even realise that we are judging something, for the process seems so banal and harmless, except that I would argue, it is not. Take the next thought that comes into mind this very minute. You might have that thought and immediately another follows: what does this mean? What do I do with this? This first premise presents an answer to both questions.
What does this mean? The thing in itself.
What do I do with this? The thing in itself.
We can perceive this as simply saying ‘nothing’. There is no meaning to this thing; there is nothing to be done with this. Yet such notions are grounded in particular conceptualisations of ‘doing’ and ‘meaning’. To begin with, is not thinking a ‘doing’ anyway? With the first premise, we can say that any other such ‘doing’ consequent to the thing is unnecessary or at the very least irrelevant to the scope of understanding its good.
Then by meaning, is one asking about a way of making sense of something or is it a searching for the substance or essence of that thing? Our second premise is that everything leads to the latter question. We wonder about ethics, about the good, about meaning, because we wonder about the source or substance of our experiences. It is the quintessential existential question: what is the point? What is there something rather than nothing? It asks not for some reason but the ultimate question. That ultimate question, the second premise says, is “from where does all things come and towards where is it all heading?”
The third premise says that the second premise is answered/addressed by the first premise. Hence, the reason for human life is human life itself, the point of the flower is the flower, the meaning of breathing is to breathe.
The point of philosophy is philosophy.
Now let us proceed to our silver lining. The three premises, ideally, make a complete and proper logic. However… there might still be plenty of ‘however’s’. There are plenty of ways of explaining why that is so, but I think they all circle around some notion of belief or structure that perpetuate a logic that is outside of what had been tackled by the three premises. For example, the notion of the necessity of a response: that if something happens, one must respond to it whether positively, negatively, or even neutrally. So then one might ask, which one is the right response? What should I do? What will happen next? And so on.
To clarify, “doing nothing” is a response, a doing tangential to a thing (unless you are doing nothing for the sake of doing nothing). Hence, the point of earlier arguments is to say that anything outside of the thing itself can be set aside until further notice. Whether or not you do something in response to a thing does not affect its inherent and true good.
Applying it to our first example, philosophy, whether from doing philosophy comes something good or bad does not determine the good of philosophy. We look at philosophy as an end in itself. The only sole justification for doing philosophy is doing so for its own sake. Not because it is useless, not because it is useful, not because of some neutral ideas about it. This is applied and applicable to everything else. Doing something for some supposed ‘purpose’, searching for the ‘meaning of life’, trying to understand what such and such mean. It seems insane if one says, well, how about eating? I eat because I am hungry—the good is in satiating my hunger, right? To that I offer this perspective: satiating hunger and eating as two different things though they might often coincide. Hence their goods remain to be in themselves: the good of satiating hunger in doing so; the good in eating in doing so. Perhaps we can try to eat for eating’s sake and observe how such an experience vastly differs from eating for the sake of something else. The caveat is that it is understandably difficult to do something for something’s sake with the intention of determining if it truly is good in itself.
We can glean some wisdom in that. When we eat, though it might be good for itself own sake, it naturally and inevitably leads to some other things that may be just as good such as satiation and nutrition. Same is true with philosophy: in exercising the love of wisdom, we might garner some wisdom, pick up some other skills, and experience things that are wonderful in themselves too. This then might lead to a more causal perception of things, such as philosophy being good because of the wisdom that comes of it.
Causality is arbitrary and unreliable, which again does not mean it is not ‘good’ because all three premises apply to it too, but that may be for another reflection.