Dead German guys

If you’re a regular, you know that I often write about niche topics ranging from electronic circuit theory to snowblower maintenance. For the past several weeks, I’ve been also trying to cover a bit of geek-adjacent philosophy: formal logic and its paradoxes, the question of sentient machines, a critique of scientific materialism, and the nature of truth.

The challenge is how do I keep it interesting: similarly to mathematics, philosophy is one of the disciplines most people learn to tune out. Why this happens with mathematics is no mystery: as my colleague Thomas Dullien put it, we treat math education as a filter, not a ladder. We pile on cryptic abstractions until most students give up. This endows the field with a mystique of an apex intellectual activity, which I suspect suits some career mathematicians. It means that every university worth a dime has a math department and that the organization is left to its own devices, working on problems no one else dares to understand.

Philosophy is a bit more of a conundrum. It’s not seen as complicated; instead, it’s viewed as a waste of time. It’s a bunch of dead German guys writing about “the meaning of meaning” and then throwing around menacingly-sounding, vague terms such as Erkenntnisvermögen or Übermensch. When geeks want to discuss the ethics of their profession, they don’t turn to the classics; they usually invent philosophy-lite, often gravitating toward techno-rationalism — an internet-centric mixture of self-serving utilitarianism, sketchy statistics, and quasi-religious beliefs about AI (allegedly with a bit of a sex cult on the side).

I think this happens because of how philosophy is presented in school; most often, it’s just a footnote in the history or literature class. You learn about the Ancient Greek philosophers who might have invented democracy and triangles, but also had issues with turtles and talked about bodily fluids (“humors”) an awful lot. Or, as Bertrand Russell put it in 1945:

“In every history of philosophy for students, the first thing mentioned is that philosophy began with Thales, who said that everything is made of water. This is discouraging to the beginner, who is struggling — perhaps not very hard — to feel that respect for philosophy which the curriculum seems to expect.”

If you went to a Catholic school, more emphasis might have been placed on Thomas Aquinas. He borrowed liberally from Aristotle and laid out the doctrine for the coexistence of science and faith; he also had plenty of thoughts on whether a demon could get a woman pregnant (the answer was yes) and what that meant for the institution of marriage. Then, closer to the modern era, we have the most famous of the dead Germans: Friedrich Nietzsche. Whatever his schtick was — beyond good and evil? — the Nazis and the Bolsheviks sure liked him a lot.

In the end, we don’t challenge students to develop thoughtful positions on the issues they care about and don’t push them explore the relevant history of philosophical thought. It’s not that they don’t want to: we never had a shortage of teens who memed about Karl Marx or argued the trollish positions of nihilism, hedonism, and solipsism on second dates. There’s also plenty of cult films with strong philosophical themes: The Matrix, Fight Club, Blade Runner, Inception, The Truman Show, Minority Report, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Memento, Ex Machina, Contact, Being John Malkovich, The Man From Earth, Moon, Dr. Strangelove, and more. We like this stuff; we just don’t see the connection to Heidegger or Kant.

A bit uncharacteristically, I’m not going to end this post with a quip. I’m curious about readers’ experiences: did you have a positive experience with philosophy in school? Have you tried exploring it on your own time? What did you learn?