If someone tells us that it is very hard for an ordinary people to understand what a philosopher talks about, it would not be surprising, since philosophers are supposed to be more thoughtful and profound than ordinary people. But if professional philosophers tell us that they have problems to understand what other people talk about ordinary things happening in the world or write about philosophically meaningful issues, as long as not in the language that they feel comfortable with or not about the topics that they feel familiar with, then this world needs to worry about the capacity of the professionals of philosophy.

Recently, I had a conversation with a very bright young man who graduated from a top ranked department of philosophy in the US with a GPA 3.6/4.0. The conversation roughly went like this:

He mentioned that he was interested in the philosophy of ethics and philosophy of law. Then I remarked, “Philosophy of law should be more relax than philosophy of ethics since the law system is not fundamentally built on top of strict logic even though you might make it more reasonable with a more solid logic basis, but when you started to discuss the logic behind the ethics it is very easy to get into paradoxical situations just as Michael Sanders demonstrated in his famous online class.”

“Not necessarily.” he explained, “nowadays analytic philosophy is no longer the same as the analytic philosophy that started from Wittgenstein, for which people mainly analyzed concepts in language. We are building models that might be used to explain things.”

“But as long as you build your model on top of the basic logic of ethics such as everyone is equal, then you would still easily come to the paradoxes as Sanders talking about,” I remarked.

“No,” he said. “We build some ideal model to help us to understand the world.”

“Avant-garde physicists are building models which they would use to explain the real universe structure, but what you just said sounds like you guys are building a model which is not aimed at real world but just for your own satisfaction,” I said.

“No,” he responded. “We adjust our model in case we find that our model failed to explain something in real life.”

When noticing that I was not impressed by what he just introduced, he provided an example to support the methodology he just described. He told me that he was involved in a project of working out a model of blame, which studies how blames work in life. He explained, “When you blame someone, maybe he deserves the blame, but maybe not. Besides, blames would impact human social life in many ways.”

I commented, “That I will call 2^nd order philosophy. I won’t even call it as model. It’s just 2^nd order philosophical analysis. Actually, I have done a lot of that kind of analyses. For example, I discussed the so-called social mask in one article about the saying that people in a society all put on masks to hide the real them from others. My argument is that if someone does not put on a mask then he would be published by the society for most of the time, and if he has been repeatedly punished for not wearing a social mask since he was a child, then in the end he will put on different masks in different situations. Therefore, it is the society that puts the mask for him, not he himself puts on the mask.”

“That’s true, and interesting. But why you call it as 2^nd order philosophy?” he asked.

“Because it involves one step further analysis about the common perceptions of notions,” I explained. “[Social mask] is a notion. So when we attempt to identify the social mask, we are doing the zeroth order philosophy, when we start to speculate that people proactively put on social mask for various purposes, we step into the 1^st order philosophy territory, and when we start to examine the social force behind the action of putting on social mask, then we are in the business of 2^nd order philosophy. In the case of your so-called blame model, [blame] itself is a notion. When you discuss what is [blame], you are dealing with the zeroth order analysis of that notion, when you start to look into the fact sometime your object deserves the blame but sometimes not, you are dealing with the 1^st order philosophy, but when you start to look at the impact of [blame] upon the society in general, you are doing the 2^nd order philosophy.”

“That’s true,” he responded, but right away he changed his stand and said, “I disagree with you. Because what you said is against psychology.”

“This identification of 2^nd order philosophy has nothing to do with psychology yet,” I corrected him, and then brought up my favorite topic of fairness analysis. “When people argue about what is fair and what is not, they are making zeroth order fairness analysis. But what John Locke in his 2^nd…”

“2^nd Treaty of Government,” he uttered the name of the book before I even completed my sentence.

“Yes, the 2^nd Treaty of Government,” I smiled and then continued. “He started from the book of Genesis, and then developed his theory based on the fairness principle.”

“No,” he disagreed. “He was not based on fairness, what he did was …” He gave me a summary of Locke’s “2^nd Treaty of Government”.

“He did not explicitly use the term [fair] or [fairness] frequently in that book…maybe just four or five times…but his argument is clearly constructed on top of the fairness principle in the sense that all his conclusions were clearly made under the explicit assumption of fairness.”

“You can say that,” he agreed reluctantly.

“Now, the 2^nd order fairness analysis looks into the impact of fairness,” I was about to further explain to him what the 2^nd order fairness analysis is.

“I disagree,” he protested impatiently, and gave me an example of some argument made by someone in some book about what is fair or what is not.

“What you just said goes back to the zeroth order fairness analysis,” I responded.

“So you are talking about the issues of Sociology,” he said.

“No,” I responded. “2^nd order fairness analysis could be a very powerful tool for Sociology, political science, anthropology, economics, philosophy of ethics, philosophy of law, and so on.”

“This kind of pragmatic view has been very extensively discussed,” he remarked.

“2^nd order fairness analysis is not pragmatism even though it is a powerful tool for solving practical problems,” I responded.

“Do you know what pragmatism is?” he asked in a proud tone.

“Sure I know,” I smiled at him because I started to enjoying the first hand observation of the familiar tone of confidence from the professional community of philosophy. I continued to explain, “2^nd order fairness analysis is not focusing on the practical utility of fairness but looks into the dynamics of fairness.”

“What do you mean by dynamics?”

“The dynamics of fairness could be better perceived when we realize that fairness could do both good and bad,” I responded and then I provided an example analysis from my book “A brief discussion on fairness analysis”.

“What you said is the same as someone said,” He mentioned a name and then said, “you might want to read his book.”

“I am fed up with reading all kinds of irrelevant or meaningless books. But since you think what I just told you have already been discussed by him, then could you tell me what he has discussed?”

“Sure,” he described what that guy discussed in his theory which was so irrelevant to the topic of 2^nd order fairness analysis at all that it did not even stay in my memory for long. After I pointed out to him that what he described had nothing to do with 2^nd order fairness analysis, he brought up another name, Putnam, but was not able to explain which part of the theory of Putnam was about what I described with 2^nd order fairness analysis.

I guessed it might be too hard for him to capture the meaning of 2^nd order fairness analysis, or the meaning of 2^nd order philosophy in general, so I changed the topic to the reason for the decline of the mainstream philosophy.

“All those claims about that philosophy is dead are wrong,” he said with confidence.

“I agree,” I said. “But why so far no anyone from your professional discipline of philosophy could come out to defend the survival rights of philosophy forcefully?”

“Yeah, I agree. No one so far has come out to defend it. But it is because we just ignore those claims,” he replied.

“I would say there is some deeply rooted cause for the decline of professional philosophy,” I remarked.

“What is it?”

“The decline of philosophy has been caused by the fact that philosophy is the love of wisdom,” I replied.

He added some irrelevant comments, and I continued, “The very reason that philosophy could be the foundation of all particular sciences is because it is the love of wisdom as the ancient Greeks correctly told us. I once saw in a book of dialectic materialism the claim that philosophy is the love of the truth instead of the love of wisdom. But that is wrong.”

He agreed with me this time.

“But that very nature of philosophy as the love of wisdom is causing the professional philosophy to decline because we don’t have a hard criterion to judge the value of wisdom,” I replied.

“That’s not true,” he protested. “We do have hard criteria to judge wisdom.”

“No,” I said. “We could judge what’s right or wrong in certain circumstances, but we don’t have a general rule to judge who is wiser between two persons.”

……….

The conversation was interrupted when both of us were called off to join others for something else.

The reason I am reconstructing the conversation here is because the responses from that bright young man reflect a very typical problem of the professional community of philosophy. Obviously, he has a very good mastery of knowledge about various fields that concern professional philosophers, such as psychology, sociology, and so on, and also very familiar with the existing contemporary philosophical theories and the names behind the theories. However, throughout the whole conversation, he was not able to discuss responsively in terms of the logic behind the issues, and all his argument was this or that field of studies, or this or that person’s theories. Whenever I pushed further requesting him to explain the relevance of the theories he mentioned to the issue I was talking about, he failed to explain; in fact, he even did not seem to apprehend the issues very well or at least was not able to comprehend the logic behind the issues very well. That’s understandable because what I just mentioned to him during the conversation is still very new to this world so that it might be hard to capture the logic even for a senior professor. But what really looked problematic to me was that he was so content with responding to all the challenges he faced by referring to different names of figures in the discipline of philosophy or ascribing the issues to different fields of studies. That’s very typically reflecting the current situation of that profession community of philosophy: the love of wisdom has been replaced by contentedness of providing answers to real issues with a grid of existing names, fields, isms, and all kinds of seemingly helpful knowledge that would bring the aura of “being knowledgeable” to the supposedly problem solvers.

For quite a long time, the field of professional philosophy has been operated like a closed-door club, with its members only understanding those who speak the same language, including the complicated idiosyncratic system of references and even writing styles that only appear in the so-called professional philosophical journals, as others in the club, and only being interested in very limited so-called hot philosophical issues which are normally far away from the real philosophical challenges this world is facing. On top of that, it’s very hard for anyone to enter that club without being recognized by others for his/her background such as which school or which professor’s students, which institution’s employee, which society’s member, and so on. That form of game provides an effective protection, not for philosophy or the development of philosophy, but for the personal interests of the people in that club.

As a matter of fact, academically, philosophy could be the hardest subject among all subjects in human civilization, but still, it could also be not only the easiest to get in but also the easiest to become famous and powerful within the discipline.

The logical openness of the subject of philosophy makes it very hard to get a proper angle to look at issues that belong to its subject matter (i.e. all the existences) with wisdom and abstract out the well ordered meanings. For those very rare exceptions in mathematics or physics or other subjects, when the pioneers were exploring the new fields of interest, they often need more philosophical wisdom than empirical knowledge since empirically they can always start from small and then get into big, but intelligently they need to set up some new rules to slice a piece out from the open world.

But on the other hand, the academic philosophy is also a field that is not just apparently but indeed practically the easiest to get into, and become famous and powerful (if some other conditions allow so) without the need to be the real wise thinkers according to the idea of “love of wisdom” for a very profound reason that philosophy lacks a hard criterion, as we can find in all other subjects in human civilization, about what’s good and what’s bad in its theories.

Ideally, the subject of philosophy should be the manifestation of “love of wisdom” as ancient Greeks said correctly, and thus the ultimate human criterion to judge the quality of any philosophical theory is its worth for wisdom. However, the appreciation of wisdom is fundamentally dependent on the intelligent resonance between the thinkers. Two people with very different capacities of appreciation might make utterly different judgments about the quality of a philosophical theory.

Of course, there is a tool, which is harder than the appreciation of wisdom, for identifying a bad theory. That is logic, and for this reason, logic is at the core of philosophy. However, logic could only help to identify mistakes in a theory, in addition to help the readers to delve into the exposition of the theory, but cannot, by itself alone, help the appreciation of wisdom.

Although it does not mean that there is no any hard criterion for the judgment of any part of a philosophical theory, since a philosophical theory could involve a lot of scientific and artistic contents, but it is a fundamental nature of philosophy that we don’t ultimately have a hard criterion for judging the wisdom in philosophical theories. This ultimate missing of a hard criterion in the foundation of the subject would increase the weights of those non-truth factors in the operation of the discipline of professional philosophy (which still possesses huge amount of resources across the world). Here, by truth, I am also referring to the true values to the development of philosophy and true values to the benefit of human society.

One of the direct consequences of the abovementioned idiosyncratic nature of philosophy is the reduced quality of philosophical education in school. Kant once pointed out that philosophers could not be produced from classrooms, but could only be nurtured through practices of philosophizing. However, the capacity of philosophizing is more difficult to judge, because of its dependence on wisdom of the thinker himself and the wisdom of the teacher, than the answers to standardized questions, especially questions about the existing philosophical theories or stories of past philosophers; therefore, Kant’s dream of producing philosophers through practices of philosophizing would continue to be a dream for a long time.

Similarly, for the past a couple of centuries, we do have seen a large amount of philosophical writers who could write beautiful articles in terms of their applications of language skills, but we don’t have many great philosophical works and, accordingly, the main stream philosophy has been in a deep crisis. 

Because of the abovementioned hermetic nature of the society of professional philosophy, in the past few centuries, all professional philosophers have been produced from the department of philosophy across the world. Therefore, the current difficult situation of the discipline of professional philosophy would imply a pessimistic report of the education on both philosophical writing and philosophical reading, for otherwise, we should at least not have the chance to witness that mainstream professional reviews and commentaries could often be seriously wrong about the original works, even if we might be moderately conservative in our expectation of seeing a radical breakthrough in the philosophical perceptions about the world.

The negative effect of the previously mentioned idiosyncratic nature of the subject of philosophy has been greatly boosted by the sad fact that the professional philosophers have been very confused about the question “what is philosophy?” All the definitions of philosophy given by the society of professional philosophy have shared one commonality: partially reducing the territory of philosophy to a very narrow sub domain of philosophy.

When Kant said “Ancient Greek philosophy was divided into three sciences: physics, ethics, and logic. This division is perfectly suitable to the nature of the thing; and the only improvement that can be made in it is to add the principle on which it is based, so that we may both satisfy ourselves of its completeness, and also be able to determine correctly the necessary subdivisions”, he narrowed the scope of philosophy not only because his limited knowledge in sciences at that time, but also because he ignored that the task of philosophizing should not be just limited to the education as he pointed out, but should expand to the perceptions of all existences.

When Hegel made philosophy equal to his new logical system that was comprised of metaphysics and logic together with their common dialectics, he was quite close to the whole picture of philosophy since his system includes the Idea and Notion, which could account for everything as he pointed out. However, his philosophy was greatly narrowed into the so-called dialectic logic because of his own outpaced vocabulary, as well as the misunderstandings of his vision by the world because of his failure of expressing his vision in a better way.

When the existentialists extended Kierkegaard’s theory about existence in his theological framework into the general social world, obviously they narrowed the scope of philosophy way too much off what it really is.

When Whitehead claimed that philosophy was to provide a self-content logical framework for empirical knowledge, he was only partially right. When Russell said philosophy was something between theology and science, he was also missing a great deal about philosophy. And when Wittgenstein claimed that philosophy was about the interpretation of the language used in the knowledge created in all fields, as his teacher Russell noticed, he also greatly narrowed the scope of philosophy, although that emphasis on language interpretation helped our civilization to make a great progress at that time.

When dialectic materialists claimed that philosophy was the methodology and world-view, they also severely underestimated the power of philosophy in human civilization, since their definition not only missed logic and metaphysics, but also missed life-view, aesthetic view, and so on. They actually also proposed another definition which was closely related to the above definition but much trickier and more confusing, which was “philosophy is the love of truth instead of love of wisdom.” The tricky part is that there are actually no globally accepted criteria about what are the truths, and they wanted others to believe Marxism or communism to be the truth as they did. Even though, as I discussed above, lacking a hard criterion for true values is a profound cause for many problems in the professional discipline of philosophy, the love of wisdom instead of the love of a nominal truth would be the best academic foundation for all particular sciences, which is philosophy.

The reason why the confusion about “what is philosophy” was serious is because all abovementioned narrow definitions of philosophy have caused philosophy to go astray in different ways and caused confusion or even turmoil in the mainstream society accordingly.

Nonetheless, the current long lasting global crisis of professional philosophy has been considered to be best symbolized by the announcements of the end of philosophy by Martin Heidegger and Stephen Hawking, which have been the most dramatic things happened in this crisis. According to both Heidegger and Hawking, the main reason for philosophy to come to its end was the rise of science, which is no doubt one of the reasons for the decline of the professional philosophy, but a very minor reason.

In fact, instead of the academic field of philosophy itself, it is the survival of many philosophers that is directly threatened by the slicing away of the research territory from the traditional philosophy by science. It even should not be a threat to the academic field of philosophy at all if the ecological status of the field is healthy, since there are unlimited issues waiting for professional philosophers to handle. But obviously, the rise of science does take tolls on the academic field of philosophy, which actually reflects the existence of some internal hazards for professional philosophy as discussed above.

When the people around the world are facing the mayhem caused by the political and economic crises one after another, the threats of social crimes (no matter organized and random), the threat of global destructive military conflictions, the threat of the deterioration of our environment, the crisis of world-wide moral decline, the careless abuse of scientific achievements for personal benefits, and so on, all we have seen are sporadic remedies of crises by governments or some social groups through political, legal, military, financial measures case by case, as well as endless arguments between groups of people of different opinions or backgrounds of conflicting interests. But we have never seen any efforts or attempts from the society of the professional philosophy to propose an overall analysis of what is going on with our civilization, or analyses about the general logical reasons behind all kinds of political and economic crises, by logically strict serious philosophizing. In the meantime, professional philosophers continue to enjoying their closed-door hermetic games among themselves……