Why Philosophy?

I believe that we need philosophy in order to lead a complete and fulfilled life. In my own life I came to this realization the hard way, by trial and error. As a young person throughout my teenage years I spent very little time or effort on critical thought, in so many ways I wasn’t concerned with learning how to think. What I really wanted was to have someone who I respected tell me the right answers, rather than spend the effort required to learn how to think for myself. This inability to think critically and logically left me vulnerable to some toxic and harmful ideas. Not the least of which was joining a Christian cult which readily exploited my lack of critical thinking skills.

I moved to Idaho in May of 1997 and only had a few friends. That first winter I was lonely and bored. Missing home and family I began attending a church group attended by many friendly people who gave me a great deal of attention. They possessed such steadfast conviction about the truth of the religion which they offered me. I was extremely underequipped in assessing the structure of beliefs that came from them. Indeed I barely even questioned whether these ideas were true or what their effects would be in my life. I succumbed unquestioningly to everything these nice people offered to me. In times when I questioned the things which I was being told I would reassure myself with something like, “It must be true or else they couldn’t be so sure.” After going through the motions and looking for reinforcement I slipped into the mindset of a true believer. I became one of those selling these lies. I would often experience dissonance in the realization that I was not so sure about some of these things, especially when it came to behavior restrictions and how members were being treated. I did not like the things that I saw coming from the leaders and other members but I did not have at my disposal tools which would combat these bad ideas. I did not know how to disagree with someone who was so certain in their dogmas. This back and forth mental wrangling led to nearly 6 years of personal torment culminating in a dramatic “falling away”. During this period I was visited many times by fellow members who attempted to persuade me to stay. I began to realize that it was fear and not reasons which held sway over the members of that group. Slowly but surely I began to break free.               

  Although simply breaking the chains of unquestioned dogma left me: without a rudder, zero direction and a scrap heap of faulty ideas and useless assumptions. As I began the painful and difficult process of learning how to live on the other side of my membership in that destructive group, it was philosophy that served me best. Although, I would not have even known to call it philosophy as I began to think critically and analyze the things I had been told. Increasingly I began to employ these useful skills in every area of my life, at work, in relationships, in financial planning decisions and even in recreational pursuits such as hiking in the wilderness. Far from being the worst thing that could have happened to me, succumbing to the atmosphere of a cult, led me by a circular route to the thing I was longing for; answers. The big surprise came in the knowledge that truth cannot be fed.  Truth at its best must be discovered through a deliberate search. Once I began rejecting the conventions of authority I was enabled to gain ownership of the ideas and beliefs which I accept as true, this has given truth substance and purpose in my life. In discovering that certainty resides not in unbending dogma but in a humble openness to new evidence, my energy is no longer wasted maintaining insecure and shaky beliefs. Instead I can be fluid and adjust to new data, inching ever closer to reality, which becomes a friend the more I embrace it. This is where philosophy is most useful to the average person; in being able to decide what is true and what is right.

But what is philosophy? In the broadest sense philosophy is the pursuit of wisdom. To many purists it is the love of wisdom. But philosophical thought ranges from analytic and formal logic to simply asking big questions such as; why there is something rather than nothing or what does it mean to be. Actually in its simplest sense it is something we all do in our day to day lives. It is the attempt to know what is true. It is a set of ideas and beliefs about how the world works and how we can best make our way through life. This is where philosophy pays it dividends. It doesn’t tell us what to think but how to think. And it helps us determine what to do and how to be. This is where philosophy came to my rescue; it offered me the tools to decide what is true and right and it stilled my conscience as I rejected the guilt and fear based belief system.

            One strange and surprising idea is that I had a philosophy while in that group, albeit a naïve and foolish one. At a root level we are really left with no choice about whether we will have a philosophy or not. The choice lies in whether we possess a philosophy which is our own or something which was handed to us. Simply put we can have a philosophy that is a junk heap of amassed and unrelated ideas which are not logically coherent, cancel one another out and quite simply do not correspond to reality. Or we can through a process of purposeful thought and analysis learn to think critically about what we believe. And thus come to some reasonably solid ideas about how the world really is. I learned the hard way which of those two choices is optimal. But learn it I did.

            In philosophy we are dealing with the foundations of many of our beliefs. Why is the foundation for our beliefs important? A belief is like a lever, once it is firmly held as true it sets into motion courses of action or inaction as the case may be. But what did it mean for me to say that I believed what I was being told? During that time of my life it simply meant that I had accepted what someone else handed me as truth. According to philosophy this is a bad belief. In fact in order for the word belief to have any meaning at all it must mean that the proposition in question is true, not merely that we wish it was true. Beliefs represent our attempts to build a model of the world which we can then rely on as we live our lives. To make the best use of our beliefs we need: internal coherence, logical consistency and most of all intellectual honesty. These traits are what differentiate a good philosophy from a bad one. These are what I strive for today. And I have found that once in place a good philosophy quite simply provides the tools I need to make accurate conclusions and to reject unfounded and ineffective beliefs.

                        Certainly many of the beliefs we possess about the world have come to us by second hand information. For instance I have never seen a person fall to their death from a great height.  Yet, I am next to certain that it is correct to believe that jumping out of a plane without a functional parachute would be very unwise indeed. How can I be certain this is true? This is a very important matter which seems absurd to even question, given what we know about gravity and falling bodies. The crucial question to ask when confronted with the acceptance of ideas which are really based upon second hand information is; do I have any reasons to doubt that this is legitimate? 

            My example is simple enough to answer, but what if we increase the level of uncertainty in our question? Take for instance something like the question. Is it wrong to eat other animals? This question might admit many different answers, but the question would not even occur without some hint of interest in ethical matters. It is important to recognize that a question like this one regards something which is nuanced and not obvious. It is in this type of pursuit that an adherence to critical thought and a habit of questioning even the questions themselves comes home to pay the bills. There are literally an infinite number of questions like this example, which we face every day (some of them very important) which we cannot address without some form of philosophical thought and the framework it provides.  

            Consider the realm of morality, right and wrong. For much of my life I took morality to mean something akin to following the rules, doing what I was told. Since learning how to think and question, morality has become something much more challenging and also deeply rewarding.  Simply abiding with the rules has been supplanted by a desire and a conviction to think for myself and to question authority, to analyze and decide with my own powers of reason what is the correct course to be taken. Many times throughout history justice has been wrought only through defiance of the rules set out by the authorities. An example which is extremely instructive is the American Civil Rights Movement during the 1960’s. The right thing to do was at the time against the law. Those civil rights activists were operating on philosophical ideas of peaceful resistance. The foundation of what they did was a conviction which sprung from the idea that people should be given equal treatment regardless of race, creed, social status, etc. The segregationists had a philosophy as well, flawed though it is. Dogma is the best word to describe the ideas which gave ground to the bigotry present in an opposition to civil rights. Without the equipment provided by analytic thought, the ability to question, self-examination and the rejection of authority, individuals and groups are ill equipped to combat such bad ideas.

The hallmark of a mind concerned with using philosophical tools to align with reality and reject fantasy is openness to revision, an intellectual honesty which compels them to say the most important words one can utter; I don’t know. All knowledge rests on and begins with this honest admission. If we possess beliefs about which nothing could possibly admit of us changing them then we can be sure that this belief is not an attempt to represent reality, it is merely wishful thinking or something worse. Even my own belief in the necessity of philosophy is provisional, open to revision and fluid in interpretation. One might think that certainty is a sign of strength and force, but it is really fear and insecurity which buttresses absolute certainty, not solid evidence. It is openness to new ideas and better more complete information that produces a security which no dogma can, a security stemming from personal integrity.

Reality is a harsh judge; whatever tools we have at our disposal which can enable us to align with how the world really is must be implemented in order that we not end up on the wrong side of the real world. I once chose a comforting fantasy over the edgy reality. In hindsight I see now that the easier softer way comes not from fluffy ideas which aren’t true and only disappoint; it comes from confronting and embracing reality, life on life’s terms. Philosophy continues to equip me with what I need to face the music and what a sweet song it is. 

The Meaning of Death.

Among the various species of the Earth human beings are uniquely equipped with comparatively large brains. Obviously we are afforded many benefits by having this equipment. Although not everything provided by this cognitive ability is beneficial at all times. We are enabled to imagine distant and abstract things, such as the future. We can picture many things which may never come to pass. But one thing we can fully imagine which is unavoidably certain is our own death. Indeed death confronts us every day. We see on the news a fatal car accident, a relative or an acquaintance dies from illness. All of this, and we know that we ourselves will die. What effect does this knowledge have on us individually and collectively? Even more what are the effects when we are made consciously aware of our mortality? What are the behaviors and psychological consequences handed to us with this ability to recognize our own mortality?

These questions have become somewhat of a quest for a team of experimental psychologists who were inspired by the ideas put forth by Ernest Becker in his Pulitzer Prize winning book The Denial of Death (Becker). They set out to develop methods which would test the speculations which Becker made about the psychological effects of death anxiety in human beings. Becker’s framework has fallen under the name of Terror Management Theory (TMT).             
            In its simplest form TMT states that the human capacity to be aware of death and the resulting finality creates a potential vessel for anxiety and terror. Human beings then erect structured worldviews and cultural symbols which bolster self-esteem and meaning for the individual in the face of their own death. These external cultural ideas are internalized and provide the individual with an increased sense of self-esteem as long as they live up to the standards the cultural framework provides. Human worldviews are largely based on symbolism having been constructed by people and they are many and diverse. The personal security afforded by these cultural constructs is threatened directly by the opposing views of other people and other cultures. The opposite effect holds true as well. Others who possess the same worldview bolster the shield provided by the mutual worldview. This security and protection from death anxiety is largely dependent on the perceived validity for a particular set of beliefs. This dependence on cultural ideas leads people to strive in defense of their culture from other cultures which oppose or threaten this security system. These defenses come in several forms from disparaging other views, attempting to convert others to one’s belief system or by simply killing and exterminating those who hold differing beliefs. Crucial to the security of anxiety protection systems is an absolute certainty about the ideas it contains (Pyszczynski, Greenberg and Solomon).

In the late 80’s Greenberg and colleagues realized that the TMT hypothesis needed to be verified with experiments. Thus began nearly two decades of research into the effect caused by subtle reminders of death (also known as mortality salience or MS). They have performed over 300 hundred different clinical examinations in 15 different countries and a multitude of cultural settings (Greenberg and al.). Their research has shown that death anxiety is reduced by increases in self-esteem, that reminders of death raise favorable reactions to those who support one’s belief structure while raising hostility to those who threaten it, that direct threats to an individual’s self-esteem raise the ability of death related thoughts to have psychological import and that higher confidence in one’s culture and belief structure produces a dramatic reduction in death anxiety.

The first study performed by the team involved American Municipal Court judges. In this test the judges were asked to assign bail for someone accused of prostitution. One half of the judges completed a survey which contained direct death reminders. The TMT hypothesis predicted that since prostitution is generally considered morally reprehensible in America the judges in the MS group would be more punitive. The results confirmed this prediction. The average bail assigned by the judges in the death primed group was $455, while in the control group the average was merely $50 (Solomon, Greenberg and Pyszcynski, Pride and Prejudice: Fear of Death and Social Behavior).

In another study conducted in 1998 the effects of terror management on physical aggression were tested and analyzed. The experimenters set out to answer whether MS encourages physical aggression toward others who possess a different worldview, particularly those who are threatening. After the participants performed a mortality salience or control induction survey, they read an essay written by another participant which either supported or threatened the political views held by the subjects. Then in a second seemingly unrelated study under the guise of personality and taste preference, participants were directed to choose a quantity of extremely spicy hot sauce for the writer of the essay to drink. As TMT would predict, the amount prescribed by the control group did not vary, but those in the mortality-salience group assigned a much larger quantity of hot sauce for those whose essay threatened the participant’s culture than to those who supported and agreed with their worldview (McGregor and Leiberman). 

Although these studies and the many others performed by Greenberg and his colleagues are far from conclusive they validate in many ways the speculations put forth by Becker in The Denial of Death. His speculations posited that human beings are troubled by the inevitability of death (Becker 501). Becker proposed that we cope with this potential existential crisis through the construction of culture and especially hero worship. Our natural impotence in the face of death can be combated by creating a hero system which can enable us to imagine that we transcend death through participating in something bigger than ourselves (Becker 133).    

One might be tempted at this point to reason that if confidence in and adherence to a cultural framework truly does reduce anxiety and provide security for people in the face of their death, then what’s the harm? As noted by Becker himself the problems begin when the framework provided by our culture is threatened (Becker 4615). We rise to defend our worldview from outside threats. This defense often takes the form of drastic violent action, warfare, even attempts at annihilation. Taken to its extreme this armor of defense against anxiety begins to hold the person prisoner (Becker 1762). The flip side comes when we encounter persons or cultures which bolster the protection against death anxiety. We are drawn to them and experience fondness; rather than being threatened our self-esteem is buttressed by them. They are our allies.

One real life instance where this occurred on a global scale came from the atrocities of Sept. 11, 2001. Ask anyone and they will be able to recall in striking detail where they were and what they were doing on that fateful day. As a people the nations of the West and all of the resulting worldviews were threatened in dramatic fashion on that day. As TMT would have predicted in the days following the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, the nations who support and share the American worldview and cultural constructs rose to support and defend those idea which seemingly came under threat. While many of those who hold views in line with the attackers celebrated in the streets the falling of the great cultural symbols which threaten much of what they value.

One of the most obvious signs of this worldview defense came from a dramatic spike in American flag sales immediately after 9/11. As noted by Klee Manufacturing and Distributing owner Carol Klee Carter, of Flint, Michigan. “The demand for U.S. flags was so overwhelming that there just wasn’t any red, white and blue material left in the United States. Some people waited months to get one.” Even more telling is her own recounting of the events of 9/11 and the threat it posed, “After what happened to our country, people realized we were the best country and no one wanted to see that happen again,” Klee-Carter said. “Everybody came together and it was wonderful. They cared for one another and loved one another” (Mostafavi).

The flip side of this patriotic symbolism and a nation united came in the form of revenge seeking. And it goes without saying that the attacks themselves were perpetrated by persons who were themselves defending strongly held views from threats posed by the west.

This back and forth cultural struggle goes on both globally and locally every day. There are of course socially acceptable ways to defeat a cultural enemy as well. We can trounce them in a debate or even just talk down those who are different from us. We see this every day.

The research which has been performed on TMT has largely confirmed the speculation of Becker. It has put into perspective what is possibly the primary motivation behind all of this struggling to be right and to convince others of our positions. Our striving to find symbols and ideologies with which to ally ourselves is explained when death anxiety is added to the equation.  Death is terrifying and this terror is too much to handle for our fragile psyches so we place bandages on it with culture and hero worship. When the security afforded by these cultural constructs is placed in jeopardy we attack, defend or cling to them even harder. The work of TMT researchers aims to provide us with a window into our own tendencies and thus take one step toward equipping us to overcome these tendencies and their effects. While their work is far from conclusive it has been instructive and illuminating. And it is certainly interesting.