Tom Edelson: Philosophy

An Invitation to Read About My Spiritual Journey

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 15:05:25 GMT

Actually, my home page at The Well has had, for some time, a link called "Notes on my spiritual journey". But the linked-to document was in plain text, and not so easy to read.

Now, there's a newer version up, in HTML, and the content has been revised a good bit, too. You can find it via the home page, or at http://www.well.com/user/edelsont/personal/my-spiritual-journey.html.

It offers some insight into the "Quaker" and "Taoist" parts of my self-description (in the masthead of this blog). It doesn't say anything about the "poly" part, but I hope to address that soon.

My Spiritual Journey may also be the only page on the Web with links to all of these Wikipedia pages (among others):

At first glance, my spiritual journey may look like a random walk. But there's some interesting scenery, and good mental exercise, along the way.

Categorie(s) for this post: About me, Philosophy, Quakerism, Writing.

What attracted me to Philosophy?

Tue, 28 Aug 2007 16:24:33 GMT

This follows up on the two previous posts; together, the three of them attempt to answer the questions,

How, and why, did I come to choose "philosophy" as a major, and go all the way to a Ph.D. in that subject?
What does that [the answer to the first question] tell one about my outlook on life, even now, more than forty years later? (And in particular, how might it help one to understand "where I'm coming from", and "what I'm getting at", in [some] things that I write today?)

The post dated August 8 of this year began the process by laying out the bare bones of the autobiographical facts which need explaining, and then posing the questions.

The one dated August 18 offered a partial answer to the first part of the first question; that is, it focused on some factors that kept me from choosing another, otherwise appealing, academic path: majoring in a "hard science" subject like physics.

But now we reach the heart of the first question: what were the positive factors which drew me to choose philosophy as a major, and then as a Ph.D. subject?

I don't know (don't remember?) what answer I would have given to that question at the time. But I am fairly sure that I would not have come up with anything like the answer I shall give now.

This answer isn't simple: there's no way to reduce it to a single sentence. I shall, indeed, first give the answer as briefly as I can, and then expand on it a little; but even the shortest form must begin with some background, that is, by stating some [alleged] facts about my state of mind at the time.

I was in considerable emotional distress much of the time, and it was at its peak during my sophomore year -- the year in which I was supposed to declare my major. (Apparently, for sensitive souls, having a particularly hard time during the second year of college is actually rather common.) A good part of the distress was associated, in my mind, with a lack of clear goals for my life; a lack of clear reasons for doing anything, in fact. And it seems that I believed that studying philosophy would (or at least might) remedy this: might lead me to discover a sense of purpose.

Some of the pain had a more specific cause: I can remember some that was about romantic difficulties. But at times, I had some quite seriously suicidal thoughts, and a few times, took actions towards implementing them; and at those times, the thought in my conscious mind was that there was no reason to go on living, because there was no reason ... no "valid" reason ... to do anything.

Some readers may have the highly logical response: if there's no reason to do anything, then, in particular, there's no reason to kill yourself. If that occurred to you, congratulations, because my self-perception is that that very thought saved my life, more than once. I believed that I was getting ready to kill myself; and then I didn't, because (again, in my conscious mind) it then occurred to me that there was no good reason to complete this action, any more than there was a good reason to do anything else.

If I recall correctly, at those times, I followed out the implications of these thoughts rather accurately ... for a while. I can remember a time in an attic when I was thinking of hanging myself. Once I "realized" that there was no reason to do that (either), I sat there and didn't do anything (except breathe) for, perhaps, twenty or thirty minutes. Then I got hungry, or felt a need to pee, and acted on that desire.

In some ways, then, my thought processes were highly logical (one might also say, frightfully so) ... given my premises. But not in all respects. For instance, I didn't ask myself if there was anything to be learned, relevant to the "big question" of purpose in living, from the fact that certain desires did lead to action, without stopping to consider whether, say, being hungry actually gave me a valid reason for seeking out something to eat.

And even more strikingly, from my present perspective: I don't recall that the following question ever occurred to me, after I had established, in my mind, that if there's no reason to do anything, then it follows that there's no reason to kill myself. That question is: why was it that, even after that, brooding about having no reason for anything still, in fact, led me to thinking of killing myself?

(I also don't recall being bothered by any inconsistency in the fact that, as described in my previous post, I managed to come up with what I considered a valid reason not to major in physics, though that was otherwise appealing. It would seem that accepting a valid reason not to do something was, for some reason, less problematic.)

At any rate, it was against this background that I made the decision to become a philosophy major; and then I pursued the subject all the way to a doctoral degree. I knew that questions like "what are good (or valid) reasons for doing things?" were questions that [some] philosophers worked on trying to answer. (They fall into the sub-field known as "ethics".)

I was regarding the question, "are there any good reasons for doing anything?", as, quite simply, an open question. (And thus, adopting what must have seemed like an appropriately skeptical, "nothing is certain" attitude, applying that even to my own apparent certainty that there were not any good reasons for doing anything.) It was, in my eyes, a philosophical problem that had not yet been solved, at least to my satisfaction; and I proposed to try to solve it.

I must have been hoping that the answer would "turn out to be": yes, there are such things as good, or valid, reasons; for only in that case would finding the answer relieve me from further instances of the distress associated with thinking that there are not. And I do, now, have a confident, intuitive sense that the desire to escape that distress was, at some underlying psychological level, the true motive (note in passing: not "reason") for choosing to follow this path. Or a big part of the motive, anyway.

And that brings me to a stopping place, for I have completed an answer to the first question: how, and why, I came to pursue the academic career that I did.

One might think that the next step would be to try to answer the second question: what does this piece of my history tell one, that's important in understanding the mind-set that I bring to life now? I do intend to try to answer that, but not right away. (Nor even "in the next post", nor "Real Soon Now".)

Instead, I plan to put this topic aside for a while, and go about the business of living ... including "writing about computers, life, and society". That may well include a different kind of follow-up to this topic: having made this momentous decision to devote myself to the study of philosophy, with emphasis on questions like "Are there any good, or valid, reasons for doing anything?" ... did I come up with any sort of answer?

But as to what all this tells you about me ... that may just sort of come out in the process, and not need to be answered explicitly. Also, perhaps y'all will be able to help me figure it out.

Categorie(s) for this post include: About me; Philosophy; Quakerism

So why not, say, physics?

Sat, 18 Aug 2007 19:55:53 GMT

Here, I'm going to try to answer the first part of the question which which I ended the last post, namely, the blog entry titled "How I became a "philosopher" ... and what it tells you about me". That's the "negative" part of the question: why didn't I pick one of the other majors I'd considered, like, for example, physics?

When I started college in 1964, I had a pretty strong idea that I wanted to get a Ph.D. and become a college professor, or, at any rate, some sort of researcher And yes, I was attracted to the teaching side of being a professor, too, but most fundamental was the desire to go on my own quest of the mind: to devote my efforts to finding answers to some of the intriguing, puzzling, downright maddening questions with which my head seemed to be filled. I wanted to understand the world, a lot better than I did understand it yet.

Unlike some choices of occupation, this one didn't dictate a choice of major; in fact, it hardly constrained that choice at all. The choice of major was just a choice of which category of questions I most wanted to pursue. That wasn't easy, because there were so many of them that seemed to be beckoning to me.

When you entered as a freshman, you were suppose to declare a major tentatively, and at that time I put down "mathematics". That form of abstract, "pure thought" inquiry had appealed to me the most, in high school.

We were supposed to declare a major "for real" by the end of the sophomore year. As that academic year got underway, I realized that it wasn't at all clear to me what I would, and/or should, choose. So I tried narrowing the choices to five possibilities. But it was an odd sort of narrowing, because the five were so diverse: mathematics, physics, history, economics, and philosophy.

In the end, though, it came down to a choice between two: physics and philosophy. Or perhaps it would be historically inaccurate to put it that literally; but at least, those two will serve as representatives of a choice between two paths ... broader, and more fundamental, than the literal choice between the two specific majors.

If I had [still?] been motivated entirely by the prospective joy of learning and discovering things, I think I would have chosen physics. It had supplanted mathematics, by then, as the most appealing form of purely intellectual inquiry, to me.

So why didn't I choose it? There were at least two reasons, but the one that was more about physics, itself, was a concern about the consequences of my actions. Even though I thought of myself as wanting to pursue "pure research", I knew that people often find practical applications for discoveries that others have made.

And I was concerned, in particular, about the possibility that my work might find application, without my cooperation, in weapons. I was not, never have been, a total pacifist; but I also didn't have total faith that my country would use military force only when, and to the degree, that I would call it truly necessary.

While this was during the time of the Viet Nam conflict, I think a bigger part of the context, for me, was the "cold war"; particularly, the enormous quantities of "strategic weapons" held constantly at the ready by the United States, the Soviet Union, and some others. I believed that these were excessive, because they were, on each side, more than enough to destroy the threat posed by the presumed enemy. It seemed clear that if these arsenals were used, there would be no winner, and that the loser would be the human race, and life on Earth, as a whole.

As I look back on this now, I haven't changed my opinion about these strategic weapons: that having that much firepower on line was something whose danger, to all, outweighed its benefits. I do find myself less clear, though, about the logic of taking that as a reason not to become a physicist. For one thing, it doesn't seem all that likely that I would have, without intending to, made a discovery that would enable the making of yet more lethal weapons. (It also seems a tad bit grandiose to think that likely enough to worry about; but such is the way of youth.)

I could have also made the argument, to myself, that if the leaders wanted to make the "overkill" capacity even worse than it already was, they could do so, by adding even more of the same kinds of weapons So perhaps [further] scientific and technological innovation in strategic weapons had already become, in a sense, irrelevant; the limits of that innovation no longer constrained how horrific a scenario the military planners could present us with, given enough money to spend, and the belief that there was a reason to do it.

I don't actually know, today, whether I think that this sort of "don't worry about it" argument would have been valid, or not. For purposes of explaining the choice I made back then, in what must have been the 1965 - 66 academic year, I don't think it matters, because to the best of my recollection, such an argument simply didn't occur to me at the time.

The concerns about military applications of my research, were I to become a physicist, were real, though, logical or not, and they were a factor, at least, in my choice of major. There were other factors, too (and not all of them neatly separable from this one), but those were more a matter of what drew me towards philosopny as a major, rather than what drove me away from physics. So I will deal with them in another post.

Categorie(s) for this post include: About me; Philosophy; Quakerism

How I became a "philosopher" ... and what it tells you about me

Wed, 08 Aug 2007 21:38:08 GMT

The general masthead for this blog (currently) says: "Writing about computers, life, and society from the perspective of a 'poly Quaker Taoist' living in the Triangle region of North Carolina." I thought it might be helpful to say a little more about what "my perspective" actually is, when writing about "life" or "society". There are more facts about me that could help you to understand "where I'm coming from", beyond the fact that I label myself as polyamorous, and as simultaneously a Quaker and a Taoist.

One of those facts is that ... while almost my entire working life has been as a computer professional, of one sort or another ... my academic major was Philosophy.

In fact, I have three degrees: an "A.B" (Bachelor's) from Cornell, and an M.A. and Ph.D., both from the University of California at Berkeley; and all three of them are in Philosophy, not (for example) Computer Science.

So how does this help you understand "where I'm coming from"? Well, for one thing, if my writing, despite my efforts to the contrary, sometimes sounds like something written for an academic journal ... this could be why.

But [perhaps] more importantly, I'd like to tell you [at least part of the reason] why I chose this particular major, and pursued it all the way to a Ph.D.

From an employability standpoint, there is, for the most part, only one thing you can "do with" a Ph.D in Philosophy: teach philosophy in a college or university. There are exceptions, that is, other jobs for which an employer may choose specifically to look at "philosophers", among others, as potential recruits; but, in my experience, they are rare enough to fall into the "exception that proves the rule" category.

As it turned out, I didn't end up having a career in teaching philosophy (and how, and why, that happened is a whole 'nother story). But at the time that I enrolled in the Ph.D. program, that was the career that I intended to pursue. So why did I want to do that? The academic life, in general, appealed to me; but why philosophy and not one of the other subjects which held a lot of interest for me, such as mathematics (my declared major when I first entered Cornell as an undergraduate) or physics?

That's one question, but can be viewed from two sides: the negative side (why not [e.g.] physics?), and the positive side (why [specifically] philosophy?). I will be addressing both sides of the question ....

... Real Soon Now.

Categorie(s) for this post include: About me; Philosophy.