[Recently I was asked to speak to the inductees of the Philosophy Honors Society (Phi Sigma Tau) at the University of South Carolina. What follows is a rough approximation of what I said, rewritten for a wider audience.]
In Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe, a spaceship full of telephone sanitizers and other purportedly useless members of society are sent to colonize a planet. Predictably, those who sent them then die of a disease that spreads via unsanitary telephones.
But what about all of the other societies in the universe, who never had telephone sanitizers in the first place, and apparently don’t need them? Are they worse off without the sanitizers? Are they somehow less than what they should aspire to be, for their lack of telephone sanitizers?
I think that the answer is clearly ‘no’. I do not, of course, mean to suggest that the telephone sanitizers did not contribute to their society — they took care of a job that was apparently necessary for survival. And perhaps (as individuals, not as telephone sanitizers) they did other things, even more wonderful (but probably not, as you will know if you have read the book).
The same could, I think, be said of automobile mechanics in our society. They do play an important role in our society — they fix cars. But suppose that cars never needed fixing. We would clearly, then, have no mechanics; and would be we a poorer society as a result? I am inclined to say ‘no’. The kind of good that mechanics supply is one that arises only contingently; it arises because, as a matter of contingent fact, we have cars that need fixing. Send Bob the mechanic backwards in time 1000 years and he would suddenly, qua mechanic, become a useless member of society.
Consider, instead, artists, and consider a society in which there are no artists, but plenty of art. Very fine (and very awful) art just appears from the sky, washes up on the beach, turns up in the laundry, or behind couch cushions, fully formed and ready to be enjoyed (or derided). In other words, this society has the same art that we have, but no artists. I think that this society lacks something important. I believe that we are culturally richer not merely for having art, but for having people who are engaged in making art. I believe this because I believe that part of our goal as a society ought to be to create conditions where our members can, and do, engage in the variety of activities that constitute human flourishing, and those activities include the production of art, but not the sanitizing of telephones.
I want to suggest that philosophers are more like artists than like telephone sanitizers. And, as a philosopher myself, I will make this suggestion on somewhat principled grounds, as a consequence of my answer to a bigger question: what good are philosophers?
Asking this question, I am not asking ‘what is a philosopher good for?’, as in, ‘what can you do with a philosopher?’ Even less am I asking the question ‘what can philosophers do that others generally cannot?” My question, instead, is: what good to society are philosophers? Is society any better off for having philosophers, and why?
There are in fact many answers to this question. Here are two obvious ones.
1. Sometimes philosophy more or less directly informs our answers to questions whose practical import for society is clear. (Consider the paper “Why Does Facilities Management Need Philosophy?” The author, who is serious if misguided, applies lessons apparently learned from, among others, Ayn Rand, Michel Foucault, and Paul Feyerabend — a strange philosophical trio indeed — to issues in workplace management.) Similarly, philosophy can critique or comment on social policy. A group working at the University of South Carolina has done important work, both in the academy and in the public at large, commenting on social policy surrounding nano-technology. Michael Ruse and others have provided expert testimony in court cases, especially involving the status of creation science. In these cases, philosophers, as philosophers, are directly involved in the discussion of social policy.
2. Sometimes, on the other hand, philosophy defines broad ontological, or epistemological, or otherwise philosophical perspectives that somehow, in ways that I think are poorly understood, leak out into society and begin to inform the way people view themselves, the world, and their place in the world. The mechanical philosophy that partly caused, and partly emerged from, the Scientific Revolution is an example. In the 20th century, epistemological ideas from some historians and philosophers of science, especially Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper, have apparently been incorporated into many people’s picture of the world. The general views of some political philosophers, perhaps most notably John Rawls, have had some not insignificant influence on social policy. And there are many other examples.
Both of these answers to my basic question are correct, and both of them indicate some sort of social role — and consequently the possibility of social value — for philosophy. I would like to consider, however, a different answer.
I’ll come at it obliquely, by asking a different question: What good is a monk? Now, by a monk, I mean somebody who has deliberately segregated himself from society and has minimal contact with it; somebody who spends more or less as much time as possible in prayer; and somebody whose work – normally, manual labor of some sort – is done primarily for the sake of enabling the life of prayer, not for some other reason.
So what good is a monk? Traditionally, three sorts of answer have been given to this question. One is that monks — even if minimally — do contribute to society by producing goods: brewing hearty beer, or raising tasty chickens, for example. But this answer is clearly a bad one, for many reasons, not the least of which is that it is in fact an answer to a different question, namely, ‘what good is a brewer, or chicken farmer?’, which monks (as I defined them) are only accidentally, not qua monks.
A second traditional answer is that monks pray for society. The monks’ voluminous praying therefore has a more or less direct benefit to society. Assuming that one believes in the efficacy of prayer, this answer might appear to have something to recommend it, although it relies on some extra assumptions about prayer (for example, that prayers are more likely to be answered if they are prayed by many people for a long time than by one person briefly). But regardless of your views about the efficacy of prayer, this answer is also wrong, because it relies on a fundamentally mistaken understanding of what prayer is for the traditional Christian.
Correcting that misunderstanding leads to a third answer. For the traditional Christian, prayer is not just an entreaty to God; it is an activity that is a human good in its own right. Moreover, in some traditional Christian circles it is a particularly important good, not unlike what Aristotle says about contemplation (theoria) in book 10 of the Nicomachean Ethics. Indeed, it is such an important good, that society ought, at least in part, be geared towards the production of this good. For traditional Christians, society ought to be organized in such a way that substantial — even monk-like — engagement in prayer is realized by at least some members of society. For Aristotle, the state (polis) ought to be organized in such a way that at least some members can engage in theoria. The absence of monks from a traditional Christian society is a failure of the society, and the absence of contemplators from an Aristotelian polis is a failure of that polis, even if they do very little to contribute materially to the polis.
It is worth pointing out that this idea, or something like it, shows up in many places. It shows up, for example, in Hindu social thought. The first three stages of Hindu life are those of the student, householder, and forest-dweller. The fourth stage is that of the ‘homeless wanderer’, or hermit, who is on the verge of moksha (freedom from the cycle of birth and death). The hermit’s contact with society is minimal, and yet, without the hermit, what is the point of having a society? The goal of the traditional Hindu society is to produce hermits, and the good of hermits is that their very existence is the goal of society.
I suspect that many people today would say that as long as a monk is doing no harm to society, he can do whatever he likes. If he wants to spend all day praying, that’s his own business. I don’t buy this answer. I think that the monks need to justify themselves. So do the philosophers. (I am not, of course, suggesting that philosophers are monk-like in all respects.) Now, nobody will propose that contemporary society is aimed at the production of philosophers the same way that traditional Hindu society is aimed at the production of hermits. And yet, the relationship of the philosopher to society ought to be conceived, in part, in similar terms. That is, philosophical reflection is a good in itself. It is a good thing for humans to do, just as the production of art is a good thing for humans to do. And just as a society with art, but no artists, would be a shame, so also a society with no philosophers would be a shame, not only because philosophers can, and should, contribute materially to the betterment of society in the ways that I mentioned before, but also because philosophical activity is the sort of good that society ought to be enabling.
If you live in a society with philosophers, you should be glad, because something about your society is going well. If you are a philosopher, then you should, of course, not forget your responsibilities as members of a society, and you should not forget that your expertise as a philosopher gives you an opportunity to contribute to your society in a particular way. But you should also not forget that the very fact that you philosophize is already a good.