Stephen Colbert and Philosophy - Aaron Allen Schiller [10]
If we each possessed a right to intellectual comfort, one would have a moral duty not to be an educator. As Colbert points out, nothing is more intellectually uncomfortable than learning new ideas.
So what have we learned now? When your friend won’t budge on his JFK conspiracy mumbo-jumbo, no matter how much unanswered argument and evidence you give him—and he keeps saying he has a right to his opinion—you can tell him he doesn’t. You’re not obligated to agree with, listen to or let him keep his opinion. If anything, you’re obligated to convince him otherwise. At the least, if he thinks he has a right to his opinion, he must admit that he has that right only in virtue of the fact that he has no interest in the truth.
The Truth about Politics and Philosophy
If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, I hope it lands on a philosophy professor.
—Stephen Colbert, I Am America (And So Can You!)
That’s how Colbert summarized Introduction to Philosophy. (Ouch! That wounds deeply, Stephen.) Unfortunately, far too many people think philosophers are a bunch of old white guys talking about esoteric crap and “paradoxes” that can’t be answered and don’t matter in real life. “If anything just comes down to opinion, it’s philosophy.” And even though politics has more obvious, real world implications, getting to the fact of political matters seems just as impossible. How can you establish that individual liberty is more important than national security? How could you verify that church and state should be separate? Doesn’t it just come down to opinion? If so—if there is no way to prove who’s right—don’t we all just have a right to our own opinion? Can’t we just think from the gut about politics and philosophy?
The answer is “no.” For one thing, these conceptions of philosophy and politics are mistaken. The thought that philosophers sit around all day and think about whether God could make a rock bigger than he could lift is a gross mischaracterization. I’ve never even used that one—well, maybe once while teaching Metaphysics. “Nothing here you can’t pick up by eating the wrong mushrooms on a camping trip” (I Am America, p. 126)—so says Colbert about Introduction to Metaphysics. Funny? Yes. Mischaracterization? Double Yes.
Philosophy, in Greek, means “love of wisdom.” What philosophers do is think about everything. They will break down any problem to its bare bones—its assumptions, its methods, it concepts—analyze them, identify what they imply and raise objections until they solve the problem at hand. Sometimes they do indeed analyze trivial things. “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” is said to be a question that concerned Medieval philosophers.20 But now, most of the questions we consider are about stuff we worry about everyday: ethics, the law, liberty, religion, God, and freewill just to name a few. Part of the purpose of this series of books is to expose the general public to this fact.
Actually, philosophy is the forefather of many disciplines. Hippocrates (460-377 B.C.E.), the father of modern medicine, was a philosopher. He thought a lot about how the human body worked and the ethical obligations of physicians, became convinced that illness wasn’t due to evil spirits, wrote the Hippocratic Oath and POOF! … modern medicine was born. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.) was the first to categorize species of animals—like biologists do today. Descartes (1596-1650), who revolutionized philosophy with his Meditations on First Philosophy, also revolutionized mathematics with the Cartesian coordinate system. The same is true for the greatest political thinkers: Hobbes (1588-1679), Locke, Rousseau (1712-1778), Mill (1806-1873), Rawls (1921-2002) were all philosophers—philosophers, mind you, who still influence us today. (Locke argued for our natural right to life, liberty and property—sound familiar?) The list goes on. This is why when you get a doctoral degree