A world that makes sense to you...
I’ve been reading some essays by William James—essays in popular philosophy—they’re described as. What really animates them is that he is working through different areas of philosophy—especially free will, belief, doubt, the moral world of science, etc.—for himself, and for any intelligent, earnest, well-intentioned person. That, rather than his own drive to come up with novel theoretical breakthroughs, which he will then push on the public, is what animates him—being a kind of friendly guide through the various avenues and lanes of philosophy.
As he describes his aim at the outset of the long essay The Dilemma of Determinism: “not…of forcing a conclusion or of coercing assent, but of deepening our sense of what the issue between the two parties really is…” Giving readers a sense of what is at stake in a given philosophical issue—in this case, the free will debate, between determinism and indeterminism—is what he’s after. To try to make the issue at hand in philosophy clear and present—and inescapably alive—to his reader, so that they cannot help but think it through for themselves. There is a certain irresistible gravitational pull to philosophy, and if the reader is positioned in the correct way, they will naturally fall into its sway, and start to think about the problems for themselves.
The benefit of this, it seems to me, is very clear, and simple, and rare, especially today—to think about a world that makes sense to you. It doesn’t really matter if you come down on the side of determinism or indeterminism. What matters is that you think through the implications of each position—is the universe totally determined or not?—for yourself. Why is this important? Because you need to live in a world that makes sense to you—and to have a future that makes sense to you. These very fundamental things seem very rare nowadays. Helping to supply them is, it seems to me, what the real work of a philosopher should be—and that’s the spirit that animates James’s writings, a kind of modest, philosophical laborer, modeling how someone can think about the world in a way that will make the world make sense to them.
Today it seems like most people have given up on trying to make the world make sense to them, or to imagine a future that makes sense—it’s all just kind of accepted as being permanently removed from sense. The world, and the future, are these senseless blobs, detached from us, detached from our capacity to understand or make sense of them, and these qualities keep increasing.
The role of philosophers, then, should be this—to help people think through basic problems and issues, so that they get accustomed to thinking things through for themselves, to gain practice in how to make things make sense for them.
When so many people cannot even begin to make sense of the world, that seems like the best guarantee that the world will keep getting worse—and that the future will continue being irrational, unwieldly, grotesque…