THE VAGUENESS OF ACADEMIC PHILOSOPHY

by F Richard Singer III         edition date 11/07/07

website: www.conceptualstudy.org      email: richardsinger3@sbcglobal.net

Remark I could restrict this paper to explaining why I find traditional philosophical questions vague, and why before revising my net for philosophy, my own philosophical thinking had been seriously flawed by a deeply rooted vagueness which I was unable to acknowledge. However I will venture beyond this. I will conjecture that all traditional philosophy is flawed in a similar manner, and that contemporary academic philosophy takes these flaws to new levels of sophistication. Stated so broadly, this conjecture is too vague to be a proposition. I merely offer it as a vague indication of a background attitude, and it would be dishonest to ignore this attitude. As I expose the vagueness of my own philosophical questioning, I feel that this is more than just a personal weakness, that it is a symptom of a general weakness that pervades philosophical reasoning. This is why I no longer have a serious interest in academic philosophy. Had others not pressed me, I would probably make no attempt to even formulate the conjectures below that may be clear enough to be propositions. I make no attempt to provide evidence for these conjectures. However I will make some comments indicating why I find them fairly plausible.

• Most philosophical questions are vague because they are motivated by deep emotional needs
  that are seldom made explicit.
• Most humans have a strong need for some firm external grounding for their most fundamental
  beliefs and values and purposes.

These needs motivating philosophical questions are so central to being a person that I would call them spiritual. One difficult, but effective way to meet these needs is to live with more courage to face uncertainty than we usually muster. Instead we often learn to substitute verbal reassurance for this courage, finding a security which floats on an unrecognized sea of vagueness. This is possible because we have a facility for manipulating language without regard to its informational content. This is especially the case with language remote from direct experiential feedback. Philosophical discussion tends to involve vague remote impersonal synthetic subcepts. The only other area of human endeavor that I find more remote is contemporary mathematics, but most mathematical questions relate to a fairly clear public net for mathematics.

The need for some firm external grounding may be rooted in a longing to a feel a significance that seems to be beyond our mere personal power to obtain. This is too important to confront without some strong feeling that there are guarantees, if we can only find them. Those who can meet this need thru an uncritical acceptance of some belief system have little interest in philosophy. Philosophy provides an alternative illusion for meeting this need, an illusion which seems rational. We acknowledge the tentative nature of our knowledge, but act as if somehow we can have an impersonal process that is more fundamental than mere personal competence. I have chosen to ground my knowledge as pluralistically as possible in personal competence.

Reflecting on the role of religion in human life, I sense more anxiety about what might come after death, than a fear of death itself. Themes of suffering seem so much more vivid than themes of joy. As has been noted, Dante’s Inferno seems more real than his bland vision of heaven. I conjecture that most philosophical questioning also relates to our awareness of death and personal vulnerability, at least indirectly, and perhaps even to our uncertainty about what comes after death. Those with a physicalistic attitude deny spiritual needs and find comfort in some paraceptual ontology that helps them believe that finite personal purposes are sufficient, that personal action ceases with biological death. Others need to believe that there is more, but to believe in more is not necessarily comforting. When philosophy can leave such concerns to our deeper ways of study, perhaps it can also learn to help create a net that helps focus on spiritual queries without trying to answer them.