Psychology of Philosophy

Psychology of Philosophy

Probably every field of study has its own distinctive type of psychology. A certain type of mind will be drawn to a particular subject. It is not difficult to see how this pairing proceeds. If you are interested in people, you will naturally be drawn to psychology; not so if you are fascinated by numbers. If words fascinate you, linguistics will attract you. It is safe to say that historians are interested in the past, but not so much in general theories. A fondness for animals may lead you into zoology. A desire to travel may bring you to geography. If the stars grab your attention, astronomy may be your calling. If money excites you, economics may be your chosen area of study. Certain talents and abilities will figure into this: what you were good at in school. Extraversion or introversion may take you in one direction or another (e.g., politics). But what psychology orients people towards philosophy? That is not so obvious, given that philosophy has no well-defined subject-matter. Would anybody say they had a childhood fascination with concepts? Is it a love of paradoxes and puzzles? Is it a desire to argue? None of that sounds very plausible. Is it simply masochism? My best explanation is that it is a liking for certain sorts of language—philosophical language. The words resonate in your head; they feel good on the tongue. They seem impressive, profound. The philosophical personality is linguistically primed, smitten with the jargon, enamored of the sound of the sentences. It isn’t that philosophy is about a certain range of objects; it’s the way it talks that engages the passions. The philosophical personality above all wants to speak like a philosopher—to be master of the vocabulary. He or she may also have a weakness for depth and difficulty, and the language of the subject is thought to help with overcoming this weakness; the philosopher is a deep speaker as well as a deep thinker. A philosophical education is largely acquiring a certain kind of verbal skill—in speech and writing. You learn how to talk the talk.

This connects with a certain characteristic of philosophy: the tendency to be enamored of certain words and phrases. These may come and go; they seldom persist forever. Here is a selective list: form, substance, idea, fact, experience, reason, a priori, a posteriori, analytic, synthetic, necessary, contingent, analysis, logical form, truth condition, criterion, identity, family resemblance, speech act, sense-datum, rigid designation, possible world, noncognitive, normative, what it’s like, reductionist, anti-realist. Where would we be without these words? They roll so deliciously off the tongue. They sound so imposing, grand, profound, scholarly. It is a pleasure just to be around them. And yet they can be slippery, poorly defined, and misleading. The go in and out of fashion, one day greeted with an approving smile, the next with a condescending sneer (“Oh, you still believe in that rubbish”). They are, let’s face it, disturbingly meme-like: buzz words, catch-phrases, verbal tics. They are more substitutes for thought than real thought. You must have heard people (typically graduate students) who half-know how to use them or use them obsessively (“epistemological” in every sentence). They aren’t a way to think clearly but to obfuscate and bamboozle. They tend to go unexamined, trotted out not scrutinized. They lend themselves to obscure verbal altercation. This is their psychology (psychopathology)—the psychology of philosophy.

It is hard to know what to do about this situation. We can’t ban them; they perform a useful service (as memes often do). They are not all bad. The best I can suggest is that they should be handled with care, responsibly, and used in moderation. Don’t litter your speech and writing with them. Don’t rely on them to do your thinking for you. Don’t let them dominate your philosophical consciousness. Keep them at arm’s length. Be suspicious of them. I am as guilty as the next man—I use them all the time. But I feel guilty about it, as if they are shaky crutches rather than sturdy limbs. I would like to do without them, I really would; and one day I will (I tell myself). They have grown up (sprouted) over time, at certain periods, for certain purposes, and they have stuck, for good or ill; they are not the result of strict screening and rigorous peer review. So, don’t use them too easily or heavily, and only when you need to. It is not a virtue to use them but a vice (or ingrained habit). The philosopher needs to clean up his psychology: he went into the subject because of his love of the jargon (to put it unkindly) and now he needs to clean house, tidy the place up. He needs to root out the termites of thought—those insidious little memes that eat away at the foundations of reason. Or rid his mind of verbal junk, however superficially appealing (the fast food of philosophical thought). You can keep it in some form, but don’t live or die by it. Don’t let it call the shots.[1]

[1] It was a virtue of ordinary language philosophy to discourage technical jargon (though it may have gone overboard). Some people are certainly worse than others.