How to be a philosopher

It’s not enough to be intelligent or to have an enquiring mind. The true philosopher is a special kind of person and must behave in a particular way to reveal and explore ‘the truth’.

1

Philosophers are, in a manner of speaking, in a precise and obscure sense of the term I am about to use, boring. - No, we really are. Honestly!
Philosophers, clumped together in any group where the ratio of philosophers to non-philosophers is 1:1 or greater (excluding the limit case where there are only two people in total and only one of them is a philosopher) will actually talk about philosophy. In the limit case, the non-philosopher will walk away or, quite possibly, assault the philosopher.
Philosophers will automatically correct each other's use of quantifiers and disambiguate statements in search of absolute precision where the intended meaning was perfectly obvious anyway. This is deeply annoying to others. It tends to make you deeply unpopular and gives you an insight into why Socrates was asked to suicide. We are just too bloody annoying at times.

Consider a recent case where there was some public discussion about the Australian flag. Simple enough it seems. The organisers of ‘The Big Day Out’ (which I am reliably informed is some form of music festival held on or near Australia Day) were worried. They asked that people not bring Australian flags to wave, display, strangle or beat each other over the head with as they might be a focus point for rampant, inappropriate and offensive nationalism of the ‘why don’t you go back where you came from’ style. Others decided to see this as a direct and offensive affront to normal and natural national pride – mostly, as far as I could see, people who weren’t charged with trying to control the crowd and who had a quite different agenda.
Being a would be philosopher I declined to take sides – not that anyone asked my opinion anyway. But rather than asking myself who was right, I started by asking first ‘what exactly is a flag?’ A time-honoured requirement for a philosopher is to first, define your terms. Even if everyone knows what you’re talking about. This sometimes takes so long that you don’t actually get around to analysing the case in point. Don’t worry about that, the pedantry is satisfying in and of itself.
So, I decided that a flag is an heraldic emblem adopted by a nation to act as an immediate and clear identifier and rallying point for its citizens. But what do we actually have? A British ensign, isn’t it? That’s the meaning of that emblem in the top, left-hand (superior) quadrant isn’t it? Institutions and territories owned by the British have/had ensigns indicating their subordinate status – note the Royal naval ensign as an example. The navy owned by Britain. Canada dumped theirs.
So it was worth defining the terms. The dispute is moot – we don’t actually have a national flag. The closest thing to a genuine national flag which represents something distinctive about an Australian people is the Aboriginal flag – a black people on a red earth under a yellow sun. Brilliant. Perhaps we could ask them nicely if we could stick that in the top left to indicate our debt to the original owners.
And if those people want to scream and shout about the British–Australian Ensign perhaps they could bugger off back where they came from – or at least first take a really careful look at what that bit of cloth really means. I mean, really!
Now that sort of thinking can get you a good kicking in just about any country hotel, hey? Nobody likes a smart-arse, especially if they suspect he might have a point.

2

'Gentlemen, it is a fact that every philosopher of eminence for the last two centuries has either been murdered, or, at the least, been very near it, insomuch that if a man calls himself a philosopher, and never had his life attempted, rest assured there is nothing in him; and against Locke's philosophy in particular, I think it is an unanswerable objection (if we needed any) that, although he carried his throat about him in this world for seventy-two years, no man ever condescended to cut it.'
Thomas de Quincey, 'Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts'

This is one of the finest insults ever offered – anyone who is to be seriously considered an important thinker should irritate people so much that eventually one of them will kill him or her. After all, Nietzsche pointed out that a philosopher goes in harm’s way by asking the questions that no-one ever wants to answer.
• All real philosophers cause so much trouble that they are killed.
• Locke survived to a good age unmolested.
• Therefore Locke is a dud.
That’s what I call good logic, a nice little syllogism. And it's good to remember that although Nietzsche wasn't murdered, he was morally assassinated after his death by the claim that he not only did he inspire the Nazis but he also died of syphillis, contracted in his youth in the brothels of Heidleberg or wherever. (He was absolutely no Nazi and is clear that he had a normal, regular, brain tumour but the rumour persists in many texts)

Now the fact of the matter is that philosophers don’t set out to annoy other people. They are a kind of sub-set of geek. So instead of just accepting a common understanding of things like ‘the light is red’ they’ll get all bogged down in discussing whether the red that you see is the same red that they see or if there can be any such thing as a colour or even whether the light itself actually exists by which time you’ve been T-boned by a monster truck coming through the other light which its driver knows for sure is absolutely and undeniably green. Damn.
That’ll solve some problems about whether you exist or not.

Philosophers aren’t trying to be difficult or dense. They just really want to know things that are pretty much unknowable. They want to know the answer to really simple and fundamental questions like –
‘Is the Good all right with God on the ground that it is good, or is it good on the ground that it is all right with God?’
Now that’s not a difficult question is it? I mean, there isn’t a single word in it with more than one syllable, after all. But for some strange reason most people, even those who enjoy cryptic crosswords and sudoku puzzles tend to get serious brain ache when asked things like that – and then they get angry, ugly and insist that it’s a pile of crap that doesn’t bloody well matter anyway. I mean, something good is just good innit?

Yeah, but what exactly do you/YOU/we mean by good?
Oh gawd, here we go again.

3

Now, if you want to be a philosopher, you’ll need to have lots of time on your hands for thinking. As Hobbes said, ‘Leisure is the mother of philosophy.’ It helps if you are wealthy, like most of the ancient Greek philosophers who had the good sense to choose their parents carefully. Or had rich friends who helped them out. Consequently, they had time to hang around in the Athenian Agora arguing instead of hanging on to a stony-ground plough or swinging a pick down a mine, activities which do not encourage much thinking about the nature of the universe or the form of the Good. If you’re a farmer or a miner you know that the universe is hard and lumpy and ‘good’’ is what you feel at the weekend when you don’t have to work. Argument over.
You also need a really weird sense of humour. I mean, really weird. You’ll laugh at things that other people don’t recognise as funny, don’t think are funny or didn’t even notice. Then they’ll want to know why you are laughing and when you try and explain, they’ll look worried and walk away quickly.
People of a philosophic turn of mind find this joke quite amusing –

A boy is about to go on his first date, and is really nervous about what to talk about with the girl. He asks his father for advice. The father replies: ``My son, there are three subjects that always work well. These are food, family, and philosophy. You’ll sound practical, caring and intelligent.''
The boy picks up his date and they go to an ice cream parlour. Ice cream in front of them, they stare at each other for a long time, as the boy's nervousness builds. He remembers his father's advice, and chooses the first topic.
He asks the girl, ``Do you like potato pancakes?''
She says ``No,'' and the silence returns.
After a few more uncomfortable minutes, the boy thinks of his father's suggestion and turns to the second item on the list.
He asks, ``Do you have a brother?''
Again, the girl says ``No'' and there is silence once more.
The boy then plays his last card. He thinks of his father's advice and asks the girl the following question:
``If you had a brother, would he like potato pancakes?''

Or how about -
Descartes is sitting in a bar, finishing a drink. The bartender asks him if he would like another. "I think not," he says and vanishes in a puff of logic.

Riiiiight. I suppose you had to be there. On the whole, philosophers don’t like games much because they don’t mean what they appear to mean. The rules are arbitrary rather than useful. However, Albert Camus was once a professional footballer (what you would incorrectly call soccer) and commented –
“All that I know most surely about morality and obligations I owe to football.’
Jean-Paul Sartre offered the opinion that-
“In football, everything is complicated by the presence of the opposing team.”
Perhaps French philosophers like games. While Sartre never played the game – he was much more interested in women – a true philosopher will find his comment more interesting. It has a Zen koan sort of quality to it (‘the sound of one hand clapping’) and requires some thought and analysis to squeeze the sense out of it. That’s the whole point.

4

The philosopher’s need to analyse everything is paramount. My wife bought me a book by H. G. Frankfurt because it contained a learned article “On Bullshit” in which Harry unpacks the term thoroughly. It’s interesting and useful as he decides that the material in question is neither lying nor what was once called ‘humbug’.
Christmas? Bah, humbug! Scrooge (Charles Dickens)
I read it and enjoyed it, disagreeing with him of course on a number of points and I even wrote a refutation of sorts.
I then turned to the rest of the book, the other seven or eight articles with some anticipation. I couldn’t even make sense of the preface, never mind the stuff about ‘free will’ and so on. I exercised my own free will (or perhaps followed a path pre-determined by my lack of intelligence) and gave up, putting down the book. There was no way I was going to get through it without a commentary and, well, life’s too short. (Is there a Dummies Guide?) I had been reminded that when certain levels of philosophy are reached, it is necessary to become almost unintelligible, even to lesser minds with some intelligence and education.
The French were really good at this. I mean, things like Existentialism were fairly straightforward for a while and then Germany lost another World War and the French got at it. It was part of their revenge, stealing the leading philosophical school of the time like some form of war reparation. And they kept going, dominating European philosophy for a while as people like Lacan and Derrida produced work of such mind-numbing incomprehensibility that some even accused them of being deliberately obscure. As if! They knew what they meant and it ‘s the responsibility of the rest of us lower orders of life to try and keep up. But if someone declares that he or she understands Lacan, I suggest that you back up slowly toward the exit. They might be mad or violent or both.
However, some complexity is expected and appreciated by philosophers. Donald Rumsfeld, who resigned as US Secretary of State over the Iraq war once briefed the Defense Department in 2002 by saying –
“As we know, there are known knowns. We also know that there are unknown knowns – that is to say, we know that there are some things that we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones that we don’t know we don’t know.”
Now journalists went into absolute convulsions, declaring this to be gibberish and proof that he was an idiot. It isn’t but he misjudged his audience. Even my spellchecker doesn’t recognise ‘known’ used as a noun in the plural form.
I guarantee that no philosopher did that. On the contrary, philosophers would have been saying that it was an interesting though simplistic analysis and there may be other classes of ‘knowns’ and ‘unknowns’ beyond these three - such as, 'what about the known unknowns, the things that we know that we can never know?'
It’s not gibberish, it makes perfect sense and it’s quite funny but it is a little difficult and not the best thing to be saying to a bunch of journalists who are going to respond with something like –
“Whaddya mean, we don’t know that we don’t know - and who gives a shit?! Shoot ‘em all anyway and let God sort ‘em out!”
What's even more interesting is that the higher levels of the military, the ones who deal with strategy, do think in these terms of 'known knowns' and are really quite good at philosophy and are well trained in it. Rumsfeld forgot that he was a politician and not an academic, just for a moment. Whoops.

5

Time to get back to the annoyance value of philosophers.
Socrates went around Athens asking people what they thought and believed and then demonstrating that they were wrong, simply by asking a series of questions that they had to agree with – no wonder they put him down like a rabid dog. I mean, it’s easy to deal with someone who disagrees with you because it’s obvious that they are simply idiots, right? But someone who makes you prove yourself wrong by trapping you with logic? How rude! They called him a ‘gadfly’, after the persistent little fly that bites horse’s bums no matter how much they flick their tails at them. They swatted him like one.
People try to read ‘The Republic’ these days and decide that Plato was a fascist, without really looking deeply at what he was saying. It contradicts their treasured beliefs, little things like democracy, so he must be evil. And I see his problem recur everyday.
Epicurus argued that society was corrupt, set up nice little hippie communes and had the cheek to admit women for education when everyone knew that they were inferior minds and uneducable. So they mounted a PR campaign that claimed he was up to no good in The Garden, eating rich food and chasing those same women around – what else could they be doing?. There are fine old bowls decorated with that lie pornographically and rather beautifully in fact.
Consequently, we all think that ‘Epicurean’ means living a life of luxury with gourmet food when what he actually said was that we should live very simply with good company and he was happy enough with a bit of basic cheese for a treat. A message destroyed by jealousy and then distorted by those who wanted sex and drugs and Duck å L’Orange. A similar thing happened to hippie communes in the 1960’s and 70’s – not many of them were about drugs and free love – most were just damn hard work producing enough food. The dope took the pain away.
Nietzsche demanded that philosophers get out there, ask the difficult questions and get themselves in trouble. No wonder that by the end of the next century, he’d been ‘convicted’ of providing an ethos for the Nazis and of a nasty death by syphilis, neither charge being fair or accurate.
It’s not a very encouraging history if you’re considering a career.

Even in recent times, Bertrand Russell was locked up in Her Majesty’s Prisons of jolly old England for a while for demonstrating against the government of the day and Jean-Paul Sartre was arrested for supporting the workers and students in the Paris uprising of 1968. But the French understand philosophers and the President of the Republic, Charles de Gaulle demanded his immediate release on the grounds that “One does not imprison Voltaire’ (an earlier and even more famous French philosopher and literary figure). Sartre even had a well-earned reputation as a ladies’ man despite being even shorter and uglier than Socrates – I mean, European women are so much more discerning, aren’t they? Intellectual groupies who didn’t mind that he looked like a cane toad. In fact, when he died around half-a-million Parisians lined the streets for his funeral procession – you’d have to shoot a top sports idol to get those sorts of numbers around here.

What conclusion can we draw from all this? Avoid doing philosophy properly unless you are prepared. They’ll hate you for it and retaliate. Except in France. And that’s not an option because the French won’t take you seriously unless you -
(a) Speak French perfectly, and
(b) Actually are French.