“Preach the need for change, but never reform too much at once”. - Robert Greene
The opening question from Chris Williamson on this episode of the Modern Wisdom podcast (with about half a million views on the YouTube version alone) was:
What do you think is the problem of modern philosophy?
Immediately 100 thoughts flash in my head.
The question was posed to Robert Greene, who is most known for his New York Times best-selling book, The 48 Laws of Power.
Greene is a regular guest on the big podcast circuit, and his book on power apparently has been wildly popular, particularly in the hip-hop community.
One of my first thoughts when I heard that question was, "Wow, I had no idea Robert Greene had such a command of the field of philosophy that this question assumes".
Here's a paraphrase of how Greene answered:
Like so much in our culture, philosophy has lost its soul. What Socrates was saying was brilliant, but if he was around today, people would laugh at him. They would say, “It’s all speculative! Where’s the data? For me, philosophy has to have a direct connection to my life, to my soul. I want to know how to live. I want to know how to think.
I think there is some truth to this, but although Socrates himself is not around today, his writing is obviously still around today, and I don't see many people laughing at his writing or asking where his data are.
But taking Green's point at face value, maybe the idea is that contemporary philosophy, as opposed to ancient philosophy, has lost its practical usefulness and become too technical.
(As an aside, I prefer to use the term contemporary philosophy when referring to philosophical works in the past few years, decades, or even century, depending on the context. "Modern" is ambiguous: it can mean either contemporary or from the modern era after the Middle Ages to about the 19th century.)
If you listen to the first Selling Plato podcast episode with Tom Morris, he more or less agrees that academic philosophy has become too specialized in many ways, getting away from the Big Questions that got many people interested in philosophy in the first place.
It's a fair point. You don't see many papers in the top journals in philosophy connecting philosophical concepts to everyday life.
But should we see those kinds of papers in top-tier academic work? I'm not sure. I'll come back to this.
Greene goes on to give an example of what contemporary philosophy gets wrong:
I saw an essay called, "What It’s Like to Be a Bat" and was intrigued, so I bought the book that the article was in. But it didn’t grab me the way Nietzsche or Schopenhauer or even Heidegger grabs me.
Greene goes on to explain that the point of the essay is that we can’t know what it’s like to be a bat.
That's true, Nagel's essay does argue that point.
But Greene disagrees: he argues we can imagine ourselves as a bat, or even a spider.
The problem is that Greene gets the essay completely wrong.
And it would be strange if a good rebuttal to Nagel's 1974 essay--one of the most cited philosophical pieces in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy--was as easy as, "Nah, I can imagine myself as a bat".
Nagel is arguing something completely different from what Greene describes. Even my undergraduate students could correct Greene, because I assign this essay in my Intro class.
Nagel doesn't argue that I can't know what it's like for me to be a bat.
He argues that there is something about consciousness or subjective experience that is more or less unknowable apart from being the thing that has that subjective experience.
So even if somehow your consciousness were able to inhabit a bat’s body, you would only know what it’s like for YOU to inhabit a bat’s body, not what it’s like for a BAT and its unique subjective experience to be a bat.
For that reason, it’s impossible to ever know what it’s like to be a bat, and the point of course generalizes for all subjective experience.
It’s impossible for me to know what it’s like to be you, for example, even if somehow we managed a body swap.
In that case I would only know what it’s like to be ME inhabiting your body, not what it's like to be you with your unique, subjective experience.
So it's possible that Greene misses the value of at least some contemporary philosophy because he fails to do the more difficult work of careful interpretation. And that's a good cautionary lesson.
Understanding Greene involves understanding his most famous disciple, Ryan Holiday, who has single-handedly made Stoicism the most popular philosophy in broader culture today.
It's not even close.
When I ask my students if they have ever heard of epistemology, typically no one raises their hand.
When I ask my students if they have come across Stoicism, the majority of students raise their hand.
A post on Holiday and Stoicism is for another day (and was touched on in that Tom Morris episode I mentioned above), but both Greene and Holiday, neither with any philosophical training, have taken parts of ancient philosophy and marketed those parts to a massive broader audience.
Part of the project here with Selling Plato involves doing the work of bridging a gap between unappealing, academic philosophy and the broader public's interest in philosophical topics and the Big Questions.
I'll be honest: I don't know if it can be done on a mass scale.
I don't know if it's possible to both address people's interests and concerns while keeping the integrity of the academic work.
Greene has been masterful at marketing and addressing people's interests, but has failed at employing good, contemporary, academic work for his purposes. Much of what he thinks of as philosophy is just co-opted self-help tips.
Many philosophers succeed at maintaining the integrity of contemporary work, but fail at packaging it in a way that has much appeal.
Succeeding at both is indescribably difficult, if not impossible.
But for now I'm convinced the attempt is worth doing.
Until next time.
Jared
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