Blame the French (Revolution)

 Having two physicists for parents ensured beyond much doubt that my sister and I would study the humanities. She took up history for the reason most people take up history – it is the only discipline to combine knights and the Chicago citation style. I took up philosophy for, what I later learned, was a stupid reason: to pursue truth and acquire wisdom. In declaring my interest in philosophy, my peers, not to mention my parents, addressed me as if I had declared interest in abstract art (the sort which, combined with hard drugs, will destroy civilizations). Philosophy, it was contended, was useless and would lead to poverty of mind and body.

I maintain we ought to blame the French for this modern bias. Reading Mr. Burke’s somewhat famous account of the revolution, one encounters numerous disdainful references to “philosophers.” The members of the National Assembly, and later the Legislative Assembly, and later still the National Convention, all fancied themselves to be philosophers. Their commitment to an abstract conception of the “rights of man” was supposed to justify this claim. Yet one idea does not a philosopher make, nor do pie-in-the-sky ruminations equal wisdom. The true philosopher takes the human condition as a given and then seeks to form philosophy to men, rather than form men to philosophy. “Know thyself,” precedes “Write about thyself.”

Further, philosophy which truly understands the human condition is then free to explore art, education or government. ‘Tis a sign of the state of philosophy – or rather of the virtue of philosophers – whether they are able to conduct with poise and precision the affairs of day-to-day living. Cicero was an able statesman. Plato perhaps would have been a good king. Yet, the philosophers in France demonstrated a total inability to write laws that would sustain a nation for even a few years; much less an ability to write philosophy that would be eternal. Perhaps this slide from antiquity to modernity explains the common scorn currently dished out to students of philosophy. Just this week I was told that the purpose of my degree was this: “That now you know why the customer wants fries with that.”

I assume, of course, that my interlocutor was referring to french fries, which makes me seethe all the more.