In our own culture academic philosophy is a highly marginal and specialized activity. Professors of philosophy do from time to time seek to wear the clothes of relevance and some of the college-educated public are haunted by vague cartoon-like memories of Philosophy 100. But both would find it surprising and the larger public even more surprising if it were suggested, as I am now suggesting, that the roots of some of the problems which now engage the specialized attention of academic philosophers and the roots of some of the problems central to our everyday social and practical lives are one and the same. Surprise would only be succeeded by incredulity if it were further suggested that we cannot understand, let alone solve, one of these sets of problems without understanding the other.
Yet this might become less implausible if the thesis were cast in historical form. For the claim is that both our general culture and our academic philosophy are in central part the offspring of a culture in which philosophy did constitute a central form of social activity, in which its role and function was very unlike that which it has with us. It was, so I shall argue, the failure of that culture to solve its problems, problems at once practical and philosophical, which was a and perhaps the key factor in determining the form both of our academic philosophical problems and of our practical social problems. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 36
Ideas matter, even philosophical ones. They can be both a cage and the door through which we pass to get out of it. Certainly many people can and do live good lives without ever having cracked a book about philosophy. Many people find ways to live lives of integrity in the bleakest of circumstances.
But everything that is healthy in us wants something better than ‘bleak’. And so the question arises about what ‘better’ might be, and how might we attain it? That involves both thinking and action, theoria and praxis. That’s the work of philosophy.
How we think shapes how we act in the world, and how we act in the world shapes how we think. We act, we critique whether the action was effective, and we adjust our thinking and our action when it wasn’t effective. We’re all familiar with the cliche that insanity is to do the same thing over and over again but to expect different results. But often the problem is that we’re satisfied with the same results. We’ve accommodated ourselves to bleakness. There’s no point in doing anything differently because there is no ‘better’ to be had. Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we all die.
So if that’s your view—if that’s your “philosophy”—I probably have nothing to say that interests you, because I do think something better is possible, not just for us as individuals, but for us as a society. But it’s extraordinarily difficult for us to frame it in thought and imagination because of the way that bad ideas constrain us, keep us caged, and make real possibilities for living something ‘better’ seem impossible. And sure, maybe some as individuals find a ‘better’ that works for them, but there’s a real truth in the motto No Man Left Behind. We are all diminished as individuals if we don’t find a way of moving forward toward something better together. Better cannot be fully realized as a possibility if it is achieved alone.
So ideas matter because they are the source of our imprisonment but also the key that opens the cage that imprisons us. So obviously, it’s important to understand how bad ideas shape the consensus thinking that we take for reality in late modernity. We need to understand the architecture of our cage. That’s a philosophical task.
My metaphor for this cage is the Techno-Capitalist Matrix. Like the character Cypher in The Matrix, we can settle to find ways to live comfortably within its bleakness, or we can make the effort to live in the ‘desert of the real’ in the hopes of ‘renewing the face of the earth’.
We are not in the action stage yet. We are in the stage that requires that we frame in thought and imagination what ‘better’ is. We need to build some consensus around that, and then out of that alternative consensus ideas for effective action will emerge. The problem for us now is that we are acting without thinking. We, those among us who lean Left politically, are doing the same thing over and over again thinking we will get a different result. Something different is clearly called for, and that requires some serious thinking, some hard philosophical work–for all of us, not just academicians. Alasdair MacIntyre is one resource to help us do that. More on him in what’s coming.
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