Human Brain

STEVEN JAMES BARTLETT

ON PHILOSOPHY

 

A View From a Psychologist-Philosopher

 

Steven James Bartlett

 

T

he definition that any discipline develops for itself is based on a set of ideals, on a set of ideas that describe goals not yet completely realized. This has especially been true of the discipline of philosophy, which, despite its long past, continues to raise the question what it is and what it should be.

 

A person’s choice of discipline can be thought to express an often not entirely self-conscious interplay between a perceived set of ideals and the individual’s response to those ideals. Here, I’d like briefly to describe my own early perception of a particular set of philosophical ideals, and my response to them.

 

I was first introduced to philosophical reflection during long midnight discussions with my intellectually sharp and articulate mother; these were intense, impassioned, thought-provoking discussions, sometimes debates, and often unsystematic. Through them, I was introduced at a young age to ultimate problems and questions, to the mental enjoyment of their challenge, and to a rational framework based on the conviction that real and lasting solutions and answers could be found to them.

 

By the time I found my way to a first class in philosophy, I had become a self-motivated learner with no feeling of dependency upon my teachers to instruct me. Teachers, like books, were only potential resources, and where one was limiting I knew I could look elsewhere. When I took my first university course in philosophy, I was then majoring in physics, a discipline I was attracted to by its reputation as an intellectual challenge requiring precise thought. After two years, however, I felt disappointed in what I perceived as a lack of theoretically self-conscious thought; instead, I saw a willingness to rely uncritically on formalized expressions of physical laws and on a group of mathematical tools in order to produce near-rote solutions to applied problems. I suspect that had I remained in physics, had I been able to delay my wish for foundational understanding, some of my interests could eventually have been satisfied in pure theoretical physics. However, youth is impatient, and so I focused attention on philosophy, particularly epistemology, and also mathematical logic, both of which offered, I felt, the opportunity for genuinely basic knowledge.

 

As a result of a problem-solving, scientifically-based mind, I read the history of philosophy as a testament of earlier proposals to answer certain conceptually fundamental questions, a record of past attempts from which one might learn, but which were to varying degrees unsuccessful and to be left behind as mere history. I therefore have never favored philosophy as a study foremost of its own history, nor of philosophy as principally a study of the thought of previous thinkers.

 

I was drawn, then, to philosophy by an interest in a degree of comprehension that is maximally basic—as basic as is theoretically possible—which does not merely accept and work out the consequences of a set of presuppositions, but rather examines those presuppositions critically, and in the process examines the basis for such an examination itself. To accomplish this in a rigorous way, avoiding mere belief, avoiding what is fashionable, popular, and to be accepted because it is commonsensical, has led me to study a variety of topics with a willingness to turn away from consensus beliefs and explanations—a willingness to consider ideas that are counterintuitive and to question majority opinions.

 

This reflects a choice to be radically independent, to be independent in the radical—i.e., root—sense of reaching for the ultimate basis of one’s understanding of things. Radical independence is, I have learned, rarely encountered, whether in philosophy or in other disciplines. It requires a degree of mental boldness—of being comfortable with disaffiliation from prevailing group-centered paradigms—a form of boldness that many feel is insecure and does not respond to a need for the comforts of group togetherness.

 

Elsewhere on this website, interested readers will find a variety of evidence of this willingness to march to a different drummer.

 

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