The Return of the Citizen Philosophers
Mary Midgley's appreciation of what philosophy is about, and why we all need it
“Philosophy, in fact, is not just one specialized subject among many, something which you need only study if you mean to do research on it. Instead, it is something we are all doing all the time, a continuous, necessary background activity which is likely to go badly if we don’t attend to it.” - Mary Midgley
Philosophy is as old as civilisation, which is to say it goes back to the emergence of the city and its complementary space, the countryside. That we cannot speak with confidence of the philosophy of the ancient city of Ur is a result of its written records having being lost. But in the land that is now China, cities and ‘the Hundred Schools of Thought’ appear together, for scholars exist as soon as there are books or something like them. Alas, contemporary academic philosophy is a corrupted and ruined endeavour, broken in part by an unswerving deference to the sciences that have forgotten that they too were once a philosophical practice (natural philosophy). Philosophy is yet another victim of the creeping specialisation that gave us hive universities incapable of thinking about thinking.
My mentor Mary Midgley understood philosophy as a kind of conceptual geography. The philosopher’s task was to look at life as a whole, establishing a wide enough perspective to provide a coherent sense to all our immediate problems. She proposed that this was philosophy’s distinctive activity: filling in the background, linking up our ways of thinking and mapping their relationships - a means of making sense of the entirety. It is not just another speciality among all the other insectile specialisations, but rather a practice that matters deeply to us all. Philosophy’s very aim is uniting aspects of our existence that seem disconnected - helping to build maps of our collective lives that can be trusted.
With Midgley’s approach, we begin to appreciate that philosophers cannot merely be looking inward, even though this inner reflection is a part of the philosophical experience. The philosopher’s business is to organise what matters to everyone - and this is not a private luxury just for specialists. It is something we all require in order to live meaningfully and, crucially, to live together peacefully. We all engage in philosophy all the time, not necessarily with great skill or erudition, but necessarily. No-one can live sanely without some kind of map to explain how everything fits together. Badly constructed conceptual geographies that seek to conceal our social problems produce an inevitable resistance - the ire against so-called ‘conspiracy theories’ can be understood in this very light. We are governed by those who fear philosophy for the same reasons they fear citizen democracy: it lies beyond their control.
To regain citizen democracy, we must recover philosophy - we must go back to thinking about thinking. This is an obligation that lies on all our shoulders, but it doesn’t require that we all become philosophical scholars. Engaging with the thoughts of those who went before us is an exceptionally powerful way to hone our philosophical skills, but even if you’ve never read Aristotle or ‘the Hundred Schools of Thought’, you still practice philosophy. It is, as Midgley attests, something we all engage in constantly, a continuous background of thinking that goes awry whenever we stop attending to it. Indeed, it is precisely because we have stopped attending to it that our cultures and nations feel as if they are teetering on the brink of either civil war or the totalitarian suppression of thought.
For Midgley, philosophy was not so much like nuclear physics as it was like riding a bicycle or paying with money, and even more so like music - another human practice that works powerfully upon our imagination. Philosophy profoundly shapes us, connecting our inner experiences to the worlds we live in. What’s more, good philosophy, much like good music, is timeless. Much as with music, poetry, and the arts, philosophy possesses an eternal quality that speaks to us across all the ages of civilisation. Thinking about thinking is a requirement for the good life. The task of reconstructing a worthwhile civilisation lies in the hands of each of us who willingly takes on the challenge of the citizen philosopher.
Hi Chris.
As the creator and curator of the Substack blog “Citizen Philosophers”, I’m compelled to comment!
Quote:
“The philosopher’s business is to organize what matters”
Although the assertion: “We all engage in philosophy all the time”, follows logically from your previous statements, I disagree. What a word points to can be so expanded that it becomes useless. For me, in seeking to organize what matters the philosophically inclined dig deeper: what lies below the immediate? what lies below that? Perhaps this is what you mean if your “to everyone” is added to the quote above.
I take it as a fundamental truth that the dizzying array of human behaviors and abilities is not uniformly distributed; all have some lows, a large middle, and a few highs. It is a combination of their ability, and desire, to dig deeper, that distinguishes a philosopher. Furthermore, to actually be a philosopher one must communicate the results of their thoughts to others.
Although I think that only a few are called to philosophy, engaging in philosophy has never been easier. Tools for doing so are as close as the nearest internet connection and billions of us now have such a connection immediately at hand! The stage is set for “the return of the citizen philosopher”. Unless darkness descends, genuine philosophers will appear. But doing so requires that they turn a deaf ear to many enticing and distracting pied pipers.
“Thinking about thinking” and digging deeper are certainly things that philosophers do, but there’s more. ChatGPT3.5 (11/01/24) tells me that the word “philosopher” was first used by Pythagoras around 500 BCE. About the same time savants in what is now China began to speak and write what the Greeks would call “philosophy”. Under a different name philosophers were active in India in 1000 BCE.
ChatGPT concluded its response with “This early usage and the stories around it highlight that philosophy was seen as both a discipline and a way of life, not just abstract theory.” So, from the get-go “philosophy” referred not only to modes of thought, but also to ways of living. This denotation is what most people mean by “philosophy”; as in “my philosophy is …”.
Some of us are presently pretty sure that the root cause of every action we make lies in the pattern and movement of electrons, molecules, and cells in our brains. For each of us, at a fundamental level some of these patterns are “our philosophy”. Across more than a hundred billion individuals in more than 20 thousand generations no two of these patterns are identical, although they can appear so when expressed in words. Since the action of every human being is controlled by these patterns, every human being has “a unique philosophy” of life. But only a very few of us actually think about these patterns (and many other things!). I suggest that we call only those that do “philosophers”. Everyone has a philosophy. Only a few philosophize.