There is a common misconception about those people like me who love to read and discuss philosophy. Many people seem to have an image of the philosopher-type as Socrates at his worst, running around challenging people on their closely held beliefs. An army of nay-sayers showing people why they are wrong by using reasoning they don’t care about or understand, without offering up a new framework to adopt so that they can be right moving forward. The only thing philosophers believe is that beliefs are childish, and like all childish things can be easily pulled apart and shown to be something other than what the believer initially thought it was — instead of safety and security, belief offers false hopes and dreams that at their worst can become dangerous to the believer and those around them. Normal, sane, non-philosophically inclined humans who believe the world has meaning see the philosophical project at large as an intruder kicking in doors at bath time and throwing out everyone’s bath water with their babies along with it. Philosophers hold nothing sacred, hold no real beliefs of their own, and think the world would be better off if we all understood that nothing matters.
The above misunderstanding of philosophy is a fair one, and I am not so entrenched in the dogma of critical thinking and rationality that I cannot fathom a good explanation for where it comes from. Out of context quotes from many wonderful philosophers give people the impression that philosophers are sad, damaged individuals who wake up every morning and ask themselves “should I kill myself or have a cup of coffee?” This line from Camus does a great job demarcating where the conflict between philosophers and non-philosophers arises: all one needs to do is read one sentence further, listen for a few more seconds, and the point of the setup is revealed, that “one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.” All of us who go on living instead of putting a bullet in our brains are courageous just for making this choice. The misunderstanding is between how much a philosopher believes people want to read, and how much patience most people have to give to the philosopher’s words.
So, who is to blame here? Either the problem is that the philosopher cannot seem to get to the point, or the reader cannot sit still long enough to watch the whole argument unfold. It should be rather unsurprising that I lean toward the latter explanation, but there is more work to be done here before anything definitive can be said. For it is here that we are presented with a brand-new mental Necker cube that is ripe to be plucked and endlessly dissected by philosophers: what came first, the soundbite or the type of impatience that has propelled it into being normal humanity’s favorite way to consume information? Or are both of these insufficient to explain the other?
The title of this essay is misleading, and I feel like I must apologize for that. I don’t think I ever lost my nihilism, because for the most part I never became a nihilist. This essay was a product of a conversation during philosophy club which prompted me to write this down as a good title for an essay. So here I am writing it, when I should be working on any one of a hundred other things at the end of my final semester at philosophy school. Worse, I’m doing the one thing I feel like I have been trained to never do at all: giving my unsupported opinion about life its meaning.
If we take the time to read the words of the people who we take to be nihilists (not those who actually SAY THEY ARE, who are essentially unsalvageable), as in the whole damn book the small bite came from, it becomes almost impossible to believe that they thought the universe is meaningless. Even in a world where meaning must be created by the observer for itself, there ends up being all kinds of meanings everywhere, at least as many as there are human observers. I spent a little bit of time occupying this particular stance, and that was the closest I got to being a true-blue nihilist. But even that is an extremely anthropocentric, self-serving view that just seems laughable after a cursory glance at the history of the universe. All these amazing incidents over the past 13.7 bn years were meaningless until I showed up and bestowed it with meaning. A world where nothing means shit until a human assigns it with purpose looks rather grand indeed; an insignificant creature who is ignorant of everything that brought it into existence required a little change of attitude before the universe could have meaning. How lucky the universe is to have stumbled up us, H. sapiens, givers of significance to all of existence! My current stance today is much different, and I believe meaning existed long before humans. The universe would have meaning even in the absence of humans to say it did. So, just to be clear, I never once believed that the universe is meaningless, and after reading real nihilists realize I was never even close to being one of them.
My lucky, middle class, aging, white ass never had a chance to become a real nihilist because of two things. First, the opportunities I was afforded just from the circumstances of my birth mentioned in the previous sentence. A largely happy person surrounded, largely, with happy people, who knows rent money is just an awkward phone call away if he ever needed it, is not likely to fall into despair over how miserable and uncaring the world is. Second, I always had the time to sit and read my way through an existential crisis. This is also a result of my privilege as stated, which bought me the time to be able to read, in context, the original texts that many philosophical snippets are pulled from. I simply am lucky enough to have the spare time to investigate the truth of things, where many people simply are not.
Another fortunate thing can happen when a privileged human becomes interested in reading philosophy: they find new friends who are also interested in reading philosophy. Philosophy fills people up with questions and ideas that spill out endlessly when they find a similar soul who is also topped to the brim with philosophical thoughts. My philosophy friends and I have conversations whose length is limited only by how long we can stay awake and how pissed our SO’s will be if we stay out any later. There is never enough time to touch on everything, but we try to anyway. The way we debate might lead people to believe we were trying to win, but as people who are used to criticism, a defeat in argument is just a new way to remove bad ideology from our box of thinking tools. I personally value any opportunity to change my mind, and I am fortunate to know people who give me ample opportunity to do so. These opportunities would be much fewer and far between if it weren’t for the people I have met who are also hopelessly doomed to love philosophy like I do.
In fact, the whole course of this essay has changed just from texting portions of it to philosophical friends. They keep me in check, show me there are other ways to view the world besides through my own eyes, and what really needs advocating for is more free time for all people. Freedom, no matter how much some snooty philosophers would like to think, is not inherent within us, but is something we help build for each other. A single person alone in the woods — ignoring the fact that this idea of how humanity started is a total fabrication — is not free at all; they are committed to focusing on the problems of the moment, which include building shelter, finding food and water, and making sure there are enough supplies tucked away to make it through the cold, low-resource winter months. Groups of people can share these duties so that individuals can specialize in a way that makes each individual highly efficient in their assigned task, which gives the group the superpower of abundance creation. Suddenly, there is more than is needed for today, maybe for the next year, and everyone can sit and share ideas, fictional or otherwise, to help pass the time in a way no organism has ever been able to do before. We make songs and sculptures, play games. We do philosophy. Together.
Seeds are best planted into soil that has already been turned, and its best that the one doing the planting understands the soil it is working with. How much greater would people’s understanding of the benefits of philosophy be if instead of encountering lone quotes on the internet, they were spoken to them by a trusted friend? How much more inspired would people be to read more closely the source of the soundbite if they knew they had the whole weekend, maybe even more, to explore the literature without falling behind on their daily humdrum duties? How much more variety and diversity of philosophical texts would be available if it were valued by the general public as something fun and worthwhile to do with each other? It is an unavoidable fact of history that most Western modern philosophy got written because of Western wealthy donors, either private or through the university, supporting the thinking and writing habits of those lucky Western few who could secure this for their Western selves. Modern philosophy has been a rich white man’s business, and because of how remote the existence of these philosophers of old seems to the average working human, the only option for having new philosophical seeds planted in one’s mental soil is through a stranger, many times a foreign one to both one’s century and culture. Of course these strangers seem nihilistic; usually they are with respect to everything the new reader cares about.
Philosophy, as my good friend Leah says, is best done as a group activity, and thus it is a tragedy that one is usually introduced to it alone through lonely, naked, marooned snippets. Thus, the problem sketched in the beginning of this essay, where philosophers write more than people have the attention span to absorb properly, has an obvious source in the inequality of time the two groups have to devote to philosophy. Philosophers have all the time in the world to write and read, and normal people only have a few minutes out of their day to even try to tackle some of it if they wanted to. There are really only two options within this system to solve the problem, but neither sounds satisfactory: either we dumb down philosophy (keep it to 250 short words please!) or ask people to shirk their daily commitments in order to take it seriously.
The only thing left my feeble mind can think of is a completely new society-wide incentive structure, where we count GDP in time available for people to waste, and the more of it, the better. What a fucking amazing world it would be if we all had as much time as we needed to find answers to our questions, to slow down and smoke a joint and stare at the world long enough to come up with questions of our own. We all might want to learn some big new words and abstract concepts, so we can be lazier when we talk about them with one another. Now THAT would be a world bursting with meaning, and I only wish I could read the philosophy that would be birthed by such a culture.