An unexpected use of philosophy (how to speak six languages… and counting)

It is frequently argued that we live in distinctly unphilosophical times: Our attention spans have been shortened by the deluge of messages we receive 24 hours a day through our hyper-connected existences, making it difficult to engage with the long (like really, really long!) texts that dominate the field. Having been habituated to almost instant gratification in most areas of life (from super tasty food to exercise “regimes” where electro-stimulation supposedly does all the hard work so you don’t have to exert yourself too much) we disdain any discipline that requires many years of patient study to bear its fruits. Being reared in a dominantly audiovisual culture we find it alien and uncomfortable to have to resort to that quaint contraption, a written text, to find you bearings (I suppose you can find the Nicomachean Ethic in audiobook format, or have Siri read it to you if you are too lazy to do it yourself, but I wonder how much mileage you may extract from that).

But the main problem seems to be the utilitarian, pragmatic nature of our era, in which time has so many alternative uses (the opportunity costs have grown so big) that we expect an immediate, measurable payback from every activity we engage in, and in that department the study of philosophy comes woefully short: you devote countless hours to read abstruse books, and what do you have to show for it? A hunch that being… is? The revolutionary idea that you shouldn’t do unto others what you don’t want done unto you? The nagging suspicion that what you thought you knew is a social construction so you can not be entirely sure of anything anymore? I can understand the potential disappointment of parents that have invested a few thousand quids in the education of their progeny (sorry mates, been in the UK these days, picked some lingo, ya’ know) if they see those answers coming from their kid’s mouth after a few years of grad school on their dime.

I will not enter in a more nuanced discussion into the truth of the previous assertion, as I’m not entirely convinced that these times are indeed more materialist, or obsessed with the practicality of the endeavors it celebrates than other times in our history (somehow, I can’t see wealthy parents in classical Greece being any less disappointed with their children coming out of Socrates’ school and spouting some gibberish not so distinct from the one I just spoofed… well, that probably explains how good ol’ Socrates ended), but I leave such discussion to Pitirim Sorokin and the like (latest iteration of the like being Peter Turchin and  Sergey Nefedov, whose Secular Cycles I read this summer, and although mainly deals with the correlations between the material aspects of agricultural societies quiet nicely dovetails with my own construction of socioeconomic dimensions that in turn determine the evolution of the ideological ones… like the amount of idealism vs. materialism prevailing in a given society at a given time; but I digress). The previous unusually long-winded sentence (even for my admittedly ultra-lax own standards) was my way of saying that however our own epoch compares with other past times regarding its distaste for abstract thinking, that would be immaterial to the argument of it being distinctly unwelcoming of the pursuit of philosophy.

A symptom of such lack of congeniality would be the continuous and seemingly unstoppable diminution of the time devoted to the study of the topic in most countries scholarly curricula. A diminution, in turn, systematically and frequently decried by any self-respecting member of the cultured classes and the ruling intelligentsia. Every review of what we should teach the poor kids in the last half century has seen a further extension of what could roughly be called STEM disciplines, at the expense of the humanities, and typically philosophy (or history of Western thought and its correlates) has been first in line for seeing the weekly hours devoted to it reduced, and the number of courses on which it is taught at all further shrunk. I can understand that the philosophy professors at every level protest and complain of such societal choices: the work prospects of the kids’ teachers-to-be are significantly curtailed, and as forming teachers-to-be is the main purpose of the university departments of philosophy, the mighty professors join the chorus and decry the short-sightedness of the politicians that are contributing to the nurturing of future generations of uncritical asses, oblivious to the greatness of their own cultural tradition, which counts between its biggest contributors the revered figures (Plato! Aristotle! Kant! Hegel! And lets rather stop there, as when we reach more recent ages the subject becomes irredeemably ideological and murky) that poor little children will have to grow in abject ignorance of.

As bashing politicians is a nice and almost risk-free activity, most self-appointed “public intellectuals” also join enthusiastically in the denunciation, but in another sign of their own diminishing relevance, as far as I know they have been pathetically ineffective to stem the tide, and in one country after another (Germany, the UK, France, the USA to name but a few) the curriculum has been more and more lightened of “classic” humanities, substituted by some easy science and math, some pop sociology and watered-down history and, in some cases, eve some more modern-sounding alternatives which are truly the same stuff repackaged (so the International Baccalaureate program does not offer philosophy as an option, but it does offer “theory of knowledge”, which is but the old epistemology renamed as to be consumed without alarming the picky parents that mostly want their boys and girls to be well-prepared to pursue successful careers in economics in prestigious international universities, and mostly do not have the slightest interest in them being exposed to old, mushy stuff with Greek names).

As regular readers well know, joining any kind of tribe or clique or group is not my cup of tea, so far from my intention to extoll the virtues of old-fashioned philosophy, as it is taught both at school and university level. Rather, I’ll play the contrarian again and declare that most of the defenses I’ve seen in all of these years leave me pretty cold. Before moving to the main subject of this post, I’ll briefly recapitulate them (and spice them with some critique of my own, as critiquing things is one of my most well-known weaknesses):

·         The teaching of philosophy helps the children (or the young) to develop critical thinking abilities, and is fundamental to them being well-rounded citizens, able to rationally judge the actions of its government and thus collaborate in the construction of a more perfect polity. Let us leave apart for a moment the fact that 99% of the thinkers included in the typical philosophy course were a bunch of scoundrels that devoted their best efforts to justify the society of their own times, presenting it as the pinnacle of human perfection and the most conductive to the happiness of its members. I just can’t see what social interest (or individual interest, for what it’s worth) is served by enhancing the capability for criticizing and judging harshly of the citizenry. That would make sense if we conceded that the current social arrangement was somehow “wrong” and needed urgently to be amended, which in theory is what the critiquing ability should establish in the first place…

·         The teaching of philosophy is distinctly “useful”, as in a “knowledge economy” our reasoning ability and our capacity to manipulate symbols is more important than our ability to perform mechanical, repetitive tasks (as such tasks will be performed, supposedly, by robots or algorithms any day now). Such argument probably presupposes that such ability and capacity are best trained by the study of what (mostly) dead white males wrote a bunch of centuries ago, rather than (say) by actually manipulating symbols (what mathematics teaches) or learning and practicing the rules for communicating them (linguistic and presumably literature). I’ll just dwell for a moment in the incompatibility of this argument with the previous one. If philosophy succeeds in developing the critical faculties of the alumni, they may very well realize that the definition of a live well lived that society is presenting them with (earn as much money as possible so you can rise in a social hierarchy determined exclusively by how much of it you possess) is not that attractive to begin with, so excelling at it (by mastering a “useful” ability) is meaningless.

·         The teaching of philosophy is necessary so we can have a sufficiently big pool from which to draw great thinkers that help us understand the human condition, as it is particularly expressed in our peculiar historical circumstances, and that can offer wise guidance on how to best deal with the hand we have been dealt. As much as I would love, really, really love to sympathize with this one, it reminds me of the old definition Einstein gave of insanity (doing the same thing over and over again but somehow expecting to obtain a different result). It is not as if in the last half century the old system has been very successful at producing powerful, original, persuasive thinkers that have helped steer society away from its current, destructive, dominant reason. So I’ve just given up any hope that the current educational establishment, which has been tasked to process a raw amount of potential talent unrivalled in all of our species history (if only because the total number of pupils sent to school and higher education has been the greater one, plus thanks to the Flynn effect and the universal spread of literacy those pupils have been probably the brightest ones ever), may able to somehow extract from that enormous pool even a tiny fraction of the intellectual daring and verve and sheer energy you could find in a tiny (for modern standards) town in Attica 2,500 years ago (What made Athens so great?)     

In summary, my thought until very recently is that philosophy is almost entirely useless, both from the individual perspective and from the societal one. Just to make things clear, that doesn’t mean it lacks any value. Rather the opposite, it is precisely because it has no use that its value is not only unmeasurable, but also extremely high. So high, indeed, that I would concur with Socrates that the non-reflective life is not worth living, and to properly reflect on it (i.e. to be able to have a life worth living) it is absolutely essential to have a quite extensive exposure to philosophy. But, but… such exposure doesn’t necessarily has to happen at the earliest age, and almost certainly there are better ways to make it fruitful than to have it unenthusiastically explained to you by a poorly paid, unmotivated teacher that would like to do almost any other thing rather than droning about Aristotle’s works in front of a class of uninterested children. Which is an again probably unnecessarily long and circuitous way of saying that I’m perfectly OK with philosophy being entirely taken out of education, and all the faculties and schools of philosophy being closed (remember I already proposed the same fate, albeit for entirely different reasons, for the schools of Economics: Modest proposal ), and its learning, its research and its development being entirely left in the hands of private citizens so inclined, unaffiliated with any formal institution.

But, for the sake of honesty, I have to confess to my readers that I’ve recently found a (totally unexpected, as I openly declared in the title) practical, utilitarian, honest-to-God useful application of the study of philosophy, which somehow shames me, as it tarnishes the selflessness and just-doin’-it-for-the-heck-of-it shtick of the whole endeavor. It is an application that helps explain why so many noted philosophers were polymaths, and spoke a multitude of languages: what philosophy really enables you to do is to read unbelievable amounts of crapload, and retain substantial amounts of it. Let me explain: any student of humanistic disciplines will develop good, sophisticated reading skills. In fields like history, law, or literature you have to read many, many pages, but they normally… make sense. Not so in philosophy, when you may discover long after the fact that whole tracts you have duly digested and mulled over for a good long time (and that you considered very thoughtful and deep and profound at the time of reading them) doesn’t really make any sense at all.

Now I recognize that this may sound a tad extreme, a bit nonchalant and surprising (although I claim no originality, this line of thought was awakened in me by a reporter in the Spanish journal “El País”), so I’ll expand a bit, with a dab of personal experience. I’ve always been quite a bookish person, and I read more than my share of history and philosophy when young, but after my (first) university career, finding my bearings in a very demanding job and founding a family I really eased off for some years. I tried to sneak one or two “serious” books every now and then, but it was difficult to give them the attention span they required, so although I always had six or seven books I was reading more or less simultaneously (poetry, fiction, politics, history, some social commentary… what I’ve never been a fan of were “management” and “self-help” books, then as now I avoided them like the plague), the more abstruse ones could sit in the table besides my bed for months on end until I found the willpower to have a go at them.

However, the tug of devoting more time to philosophical pursuits was definitely there, the impetus to put my thoughts on paper to clarify them and sharpen them and see where they took me never entirely dried, and the satisfaction every time I managed to finish a more philosophically bent text was so marked (the mental equivalent to finishing a grueling workout… you feel you are a better person for having put yourself through such an ordeal and having survived) that I never entirely stopped buying that kind of books. I remember having a breakthrough (but I would only recognize it as such many years later) reading the Critique of Cynical Reason by Peter Sloterdijk: I was working something like 100 hours a week, my wife and very young kid had just moved with me into Brasilia (where we knew absolutely nobody) and all the strength I could muster allowed me to read something like ten minutes per day, just before going to sleep, normally at about 1:00 or 2:00 AM, knowing I had to wake up in 5 or 6 hours to go back to work, Saturdays and Sundays included. You may guess I was not in top intellectual form, and my eyes typically glazed over in the second or third word (I had originally written in the second or third sentence but Sloterdijk style is not that different from my own, and his sentences may go no for one or two pages, so it was not uncommon for me not to be able to finish a single one). I usually fell asleep in the middle of long-winded, convoluted and highly self-referential paragraphs, and if the next morning you asked me to summarize what what I had read the night before was about, I would have been grossly unable to give even a hint of an explanation. So I wondered why on God’s green earth I was putting myself through such a misery, and if there could not be some less absurd way of passing my preciously few leisure minutes. I can’t say I had an epiphany, or I came to some sort of redemptive answer, I just trundled along until I finished the danged book, after which I picked another one of a similar tone…

If you are waiting for some clear-cut moral I’m sorry to disappoint (but bear with me a bit longer -although certainly much less than a full-Sloterdijk length, do not panic! and I still think you may draw some useful lesson). The thing is, by dutifully, stubbornly, joylessly reading almost unintelligible books (without expecting to obtain any utility from them), I slowly developed an ability to, wait for this… read almost unintelligible books. Indeed, I ended up enjoying them so much that they become my almost only source of reading material. I abandoned my old habit of reading six or seven books simultaneously. I started one and didn’t start the next one until I had finished it. And finished meant finished: footnotes, notes at the end, bibliography (I still spare myself the index when there is one, though). I allowed myself to order a new batch from Amazon only when I cracked the spine and started the first page of the last exemplar of the previous batch. Now, I know what some of you are thinking: “nothing new here. Pierre Bourdieu already described it. The poor guy was just accruing tons of symbolic power which he then could translate into an enhanced status within his social milieu. The old trick of acquiring high culture as a surefire status-marker”. Bollocks. I was working in a consulting firm, so the amount of status I got from telling my peers I had read Hegel was exactly zilch. It is not just they could care less (they could not), it’s that such conceit was actively frowned upon, as the time devoted to such patently fruitless pursuit was time detracted from more useful applications, like playing golf with would-be clients or, if some reading had to be involved, memorizing the WSJ, “Forbes” and, for some extra intellectual stimulation, who ate my cheese.

But again, it was strangely fulfilling to be able to read what I knew nobody else around me would be able to read, and to see how it more or less helped create a complex, sophisticated, reasonably coherent understanding of what this thing called life was about in a “deep” sense. I know a lot of people don’t need to read much philosophy to reach that point, just a chapter by Paulo Coelho takes them to the same point. Good for them (for the record, I hate Paulo Coelho, but that is besides our current argument). However, what I was able to extract from so much idiosyncratic reading is beside the point, what I discovered is that reading without much understanding, without much seeing the point of it (without caring if there is a point to it after all) is in itself a skill that, through constant practice, can be improved. And man, did I practice and improve it! OK, so at this point you may legitimately wonder: so what? So philosophy is likely to help develop the skill to read boring books that nobody cares a rat’s ass about… how is that supposed to be useful at all? We’ll get to it in a moment.

But before I have to continue with my little story. Just for funsies I decided that knowing so much philosophy I may as well get some official recognition for it, and I embarked in a doctoral program to obtain a PhD. I thought I could be done with the mandatory credits in a year, and have a dissertation written in two more. It finally took me seven in all, which was a superb enticement to amp up my reading habits even more, as suddenly all that seemingly pointless exposure to the thoughts of long-dead guys may had a use after all (to be regurgitated in a document -the PhD dissertation- that most likely not even the members of the tribunal tasked with judging it would read in its entirety). So the dissertation was written, defended and lauded, and it all was great fun. After having completed that milestone I wanted to do other things, and something that weighed on me was having to rely on translation for so many of the works I was interested in. So having a bit more time learning additional languages seemed a sensible investment, and that’s what I did. At the beginning of 2016 I could fluently speak Spanish, English and Portuguese, and had the joyful experience of having devoted all of four weeks to learn French (plus read the collected works of St. John Persee in a bilingual edition), so French seemed a reasonably easy place to start expanding my language base.

So I just started buying books in French (heeeeello Amazon.fr! a new compulsive client has arrived!) and reading them. The first ones were somewhat disappointing, as I didn’t understand much. Just like with Sloterdijk’s Critique back in Brazil, I told myself. I googled the declinations of 20-30 common verbs, plus some adverbs and prepositions (so I could get an inkling of how the elements of meaning I could gleam connected with one another) and I just trundled along. After having read 10 books it all was easier and clearer (let’s say I felt I understood 85-90% of what the writer was trying to convey). After 20 books (that’s more or less where I’m now) It really doesn’t make a difference if the book I’m reading is in English, in Spanish, in Portuguese or in French, and it doesn’t matter how abstruse or abstract it is (I just finished L’art de penser, a treatise on logic by XVIIIth century Antoine Arnauld, and am currently reading Matière et mémoire by Bergson… both a piece of cake). Seeing how easy it was to “learn” French (I still have to get practice in writing it to consider myself truly tetralingual, but I’ll get there soon) I started in January this year applying the same approach to Italian. With similar results, although the learning curve was steeper (Italian is really very close to Spanish, and the few words that are more different are normally very similar to a French one, so you can pick it up really fast knowing already another three Romance languages). Almost pentalingual then.

Time, then, to push it a little further, and go for a non-Romance tongue. German was the almost unavoidable option, as I have always wanted to master the German language to be able to read Kant’s works in its original form. So I’ve started reading in German, and am pretty stoked by how easy it seems to pick it up.

Only a couple books so far, and I’ve tweaked my method a bit: with French and Italian I focused on reading philosophical work, and that has created certain lacunae in my vocabulary. I can draw on an ample panoply of words to describe mental events (memories, opinions, intentions, emotions and the like) but I’m at a loss if I have to describe everyday objects like clothes, furniture, foodstuffs and the like. With Romance languages that is not an unsurmountable problem, as the words are normally very similar to the Spanish equivalent, but with German that’s not the case. So instead of jumping directly into philosophy (and man, do they have a rich philosophical tradition to draw from!) I’ll read some fiction, starting with children books (I’ve found that many of the books I read translated as a kid were from German authors, so am delighted to revisit them in their original form), then up to YA, and finally some hefty XIX and XX century classics (Hesse, Mann, Gräss -all of which I’ve read in translation, but also Döblin, Kraus and Müsil, and Holderlin, Rilke and Trakl). I intend to spend a little more time consolidating the German language acquisition (2-3 years, and about 50-60 books read before I finally order Kant’s Gesammelte Werke… the Academia version, if I can, although I’ll need to sell a kidney and an eye to afford it), but after that the sky is the limit (my current plan: who cares about living languages? Next three are Latin, Classical Greek and Hebrew).

So there you are: without the ability to read through books I barely understood (but keep on reading anyway, and retaining more of them than what initially meets the eye) I’m sure I wouldn’t have been able to apply this idiosyncratic method of learning, and this is the only method, given my time commitments, that I can afford. And I owe that ability entirely to my training in philosophy, as I’m also pretty sure there isn’t any other subject that forces its practitioners to go through such unappetizing reads. But, Alas! That is not what the current academic climate prepares you for. The way philosophy is currently taught it has to be pre-masticated, pre-digested so it “easy” for the poor fellas that have to learn it. It has to be presented excitingly and energetically so it seems attractive and “fun”. Well, you know what? I don’t think the Nicomachean Ethic can ever be made exciting, or fun, ditto for the Critique of Pure Reason, as much as I have enjoyed reading both (and for what it’s worth, if I were asked if I would rather read the Critique for the first time again or relive the most pleasurable orgasm I’ve ever experienced, I would go with the Critique without hesitation, but please don’t tell my wife). That’s why most standard arguments for teaching philosophy ring hollow to me, as the single real benefit I can see coming from the conscientious pursuit of the field can only come from doing it in isolation, and requires a certain level of seclusion that the current aversion to demanding effort from the students can only curtail, rather than incentivize.

And yes, I know in a few years we will have AI’s translating online any text in any language directly in our ears, so learning another language is a big waste of time and effort (but if you believe that is really going to happen, and that the jumbled translations of Google, as much as they may improve, somehow compare with understanding a foreign text or foreign speech yourself, I still have my proverbial bridge in Brooklyn which I’m willing to sell).