Notes for Practical Philosophy

Can philosophy be practical? I would argue that it always is, in the sense that philosophers believe their views to be of worldly merit. Probably even the most abstruse philosopher is not analyzing something simply to find out how it is constructed, but is writing about it at least in part in order to have an impact by changing people's thoughts and actions. Philosophers such as Plato, Confuscius, Machiavelli, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Marx or Nietzsche all had ideas not only about what is but also how it should be, which they presumably believed in. The difference between a religion and a philosophy is that the former derives its justification from authority, personal or divine inspiration, whereas the latter derives its justification from reasoned inference usually based on replicable or universal phenomenological observations. However, it would be misleading to say that Philosophy as a whole system of knowledge can be practical, because there are as many different philosophies as there are philosophers. A life lived according to Spinoza would be very different from a life lived according to Nietzsche!

As a system of knowledge, philosophy has been losing ground to science over the past few hundred years, as more and more content becomes subject to empirical research. Like philosophers, scientists these days seem to be flirting with proscriptions for life, or at least neurobiological theories of why we humans are the way we are. Scientific theories derive their validity from a particular kind of observation and inference. I somehow doubt that Darwin wanted us to live by his theory, although he probably wanted us to change our minds about some things, but try telling that to Richard Dawkins.

I would argue that philosophy is of practical value as a way of thinking about things, not only about so-called philosophical questions but everything that can be addressed with thought, including (but not limited to) how to live, and other questions that have now become the provenance of science. Philosophy as a method concerns itself with critiques of the connections between ideas, thought in other words, and without such a critique ideas can become connected or disconnected simply by spurious juxtapositions. A train of thought can lead to a conclusion that might be false or erroneous, and philsophy urges us to beg the question 'but does that really follow?'

The philosophical method is discursive, and will not necessarily lead to one right answer in questions of practical life value such as whether to change careers, relationships, or to commit suicide, any more than it results in a single decisive view on what things are or why we are here. But it can help us avoid certain kinds of errors that come from wrong thinking, whether our own or others'.

The motivation to come up with a solution generally originates in feelings. Perhaps it's like a cooking timer.