A philosophy is a boat on the ocean of thought, deeper reality, and existential experience. A philosopher is a person who is comfortable going around the high seas in a small boat--a raft, let's say--and who is trying to build that boat larger while sailing on it. She may actively be trying to convince people to join her, but the vast majority of people would rather stay huddled on the large old luxury liners, where they never have to see the water, even if there are huge holes under the waterline and the whole damn thing is slowly but inevitably sinking to the bottom.
The mystic is the person who swims.
As a philosopher, you are, by definition, someone who sees things differently than other people. You are disinclined to see things as other people see them, and other people are disinclined to see things as you do. Your perceptions are not shared.
This can make it very difficult to gain confirmation of your ideas. Your most important revelations seem either ridiculous and bizarre or trivially obvious, and sometimes even both at the same time. The same characteristics that make you a philosopher make it difficult for you to flourish as a practitioner, and so, even though your ideas have power, you find it difficult to demonstrate them in practice. Your genius is likely to be recognized only posthumously, and when you do succeed in transmitting one of your concepts to someone in your orbit, they are likely to understand it only years later, and under the impression they discovered it themselves. Even the greatest philosophers of all times are often remembered chiefly for one single, simple idea they managed to finally convince people was important, after a lifetime of work, and reams of writing. "The unexamined life is not worth living." "I think therefore I am." "The leap of faith."
Thus, the importance of universality, a concept I first encountered in James Gleick's Chaos: A New Science, one of the most formative works I encountered on my first steps towards intellectual maturity. The early theorists who developed what would become chaos theory had a similar experience to that of the philosopher. Their work was unappreciated, because it could not be understood. And so, they looked for confirmation not through the usual processes of peer review, but in the phenomenon of universality. If two people working independently on utterly different problems, using different approaches, found something identical in both places--a Mandelbrot set, for instance, a Sierpinski Gasket or a period-doubling chaos map--that confimed the reality and the importance of what they were looking at. It was not an artifact of a personal peculiarity or an idiosyncratic error.
For me, one of the most striking confirmations I received through universality was when I found an exact copy of my theory of the cycle of philosophers in the work of Franz Brentano, an obscure, long-dead German-Austrian philosopher, whose work I had never before heard of, let alone read. We both agreed that philosophy is a continual, repeating cycle of Skepticism, Mysticism, System-Building (which he called "theoretical interest") and Didacticism (which he called "practical interest"). The only place we differed is that he saw the mystical phase of philosophy as the time of its deepest decline, where as I saw that same phase as source of the cycle's strength and power.
In the modern world, the paradigm of progress is the mostly linear forward motion of science. New science builds on what came before, and supercedes and replaces it. Old science becomes a historical curiosity, and the storehouse of scientific knowledge continues to build and accumulate.
But the older world, and the natural world, run on cyclical progress. Day follows night, follows day, and summer follows spring follows winter follows fall, year after year. Philosophical progress is like that, although the cycles may be too large and to lengthy to clearly apprehend. Old philosophy can return to new relevance in ways that are rarely true for old science, and long dead philosophers can spring from their graves to debate fiercely with newly minted philosophers, as they trace out new pathways through disputes that were already ancient when Aristotle quarreled with Plato.
So why go through it all? From the scientific, linear standpoint, it looks like useless noodling, lost wandering in the wilderness, never getting any closer to the destination, or further from the origin. How can philosophy be important if it does not progress? In order to answer that, let's look at the phases of philosophy, and the corresponding roles.
Who are the skeptics? Everyone's favorite ancient Greek
philosopher, Socrates, and his soul-brother over in ancient China, Zhuangzi. Your cousin, who keeps telling you to "wake up," and the annoying guy who sits behind you in your "History of Religion" class. David Hume (although he makes for a special case that I'll discuss later). Socrates described himself as a "gadfly." He kept on stinging the comfortable fat cattle of Athens in their oversized rumps, until he finally got swatted.
Skeptics are the people who question everything and everyone, who refuse to accept even the most commonplace wisdom without a disbelieving smirk, who poke holes in your pet theory and everyone else's. You love them and hate them. It's love when they're poking holes in someone else's balloon, and hate when they're puncturing yours.
They play an important and crucial role in the cycle, because they come along when ideas and institutions are becoming old and corrupt. They act as the trash collectors, sweeping the old structures into the garbage bin of history. To return to the metaphor of the boat on the ocean, the skeptic is the one who travels below decks, and points out the big gaping holes in the side of the ship where the iceberg hit it. Even when people don't want to hear it. Especially when people don't want to hear it. Skeptics are the most timeless and universal of philosophers, because their annoying and disruptive questions are always relevant (and they provide no answers vulnerable to going stale).
The role of the skeptic in the social order is deconstruction. But in the cycle of philosophers, they have another key task, which is to turn people away from the corrupted ordinary world, and to reorient them towards mysticism, as Socrates did for Plato. That outcome, however, is not secure, and when it goes awry, skeptics can instead turn people towards nihilism, a belief in nothing, a disbelief in everything.
And then there's David Hume, who belongs in a category of his own, the chief villian in my my narrative history of philosophy. By deploying his powerful skepticism directly against mysticism itself, he reversed the skeptic's role, returning those who fell under his sway into the materialist complacency he was supposed to usher them away from. In doing so, he placed an impediment to the progression and completion of the cycle that has not been cleared to this day.
Who are the mystics? Villains to Hume and Brentano, but the heros of my narrative. Plato, the greatest philosopher in Western history, and Lao Tzu in China, Plotinus of Ancient Rome and Kierkegaard in more modern times. Descartes, at perhaps the most significant moment of his extraordinary one-man trip around the entire complete cycle that is the Meditations.
The key insight of any mystic is that ordinary reality as we experience it on a day-to-day basis is not the most true, most fundamental level of reality. This world looks, smells, sounds, tastes and feels real, but that seeming solidity is an illusion. Descartes compared it to a dream, and Plato called it shadows on a cave wall. In more recent years, the transhumanists and the movie The Matrix have conceptualized it as a simulation on a computer, a comparison that will become harder and harder to brush off as simulations continue to grow more and more realistic.
And what is True Reality? The reason that mystics for thousands of years have been dismissed as charletans and cheats is that they cannot tell you. They glimpse but dimly, as in a mirror, and what they see there cannot be placed in ordinary words. Mystics across the gulf of centuries have recognized themselves as kindred spirits, united by a common experience, but their description of what that is will never satisfy the skeptics. And so, the most effective mystics have been the ones who have found creative ways to at least hint at what they've seen.
The way to understand the otherwise baffling work of any mystic is to realize that it's best understood as endlessly elaborated metaphors for a Reality that cannot actually be expressed. All the many dialogs of Plato were metaphors, couched in different language to reach different audiences. To artists, he spoke of art, to lawyers he spoke of law, and to politicians he spoke of politics, but ultimately he wasn't talking about art, law or politics at all. He was using those subjects as metaphors for higher truths. And when Aristotle came after Plato, and pointed out that he was wrong in all of his particulars, he was correct, but missing the point.
So too, is the Realm of the Forms a metaphor, is Yin and Yang a metaphor, is the leap of faith a metaphor, is the Kabbalah a metaphor, is theosophy a metaphor, is Narnia a metaphor. When Bishop Berkeley speaks of the mind of God, that too is a metaphor. Mystics, like the skeptics, are timeless, in as much as they are equally out of place in all times, and that their true home is somewhere eternal, although their chosen metaphors can grow starnger and harder to understand as existential drift robs them of their context.
The folk-anthropologist Joseph Campbell analyzed the myths of endless numbers of cultures, and isolated a common story structure that reoccurred again and again, that he called the Hero's Journey. In this storyline, the hero, living in a diseased and decayed wasteland, receives a call to adventure, that he first resists. He finally accepts it, and enters a strange underworld where he battles unexpected dangers, and eventually finds his way to the Elixir of Life, which he brings back to the surface, where it renews and restores the wasteland into a fertile valley.
This too is a metaphor, and what it describes is the Cycle of Philosophers. The wasteland is the world of thoughts and ideas as they become old and decayed, and unable to support a functioning society. This is the state we are currently in now in the world. The call to adventure is the encounter with the skeptic, and the entry into the underworld is the transition to an encounter with Ultimate Reality (what Plato described instead as an ascent, out of the cave, and into the light of the Form of the Good). The newly minted mystical philosopher fights their way past the dangers of a realm antithetical to ordinary physical existence, and, if successful, brings a little bit of the Elixir back, which is to say, new wisdom.
Who are the system-builders? Aristotle, of course, Newton, and Hegel, and many others. Anyone whose orientation is towards the world, and whose view of it is encompassing, or in other words, anyone with a Theory of Everything.
The reason we need the system-builders is because few people can drink the Elixir straight. The system-builder has the rare mind to be able to see what the mystic is seeing through the left eye, and what the world sees through the right eye. The mystic rarely effects large-scale change directly, but the system-builder moves mountains. In the metaphor of the ocean, the system-builder builds boats. And system-builders are what we need at this moment, because the shop we are on is rapidly sinking.
Who are the Didacts? Confucius, and Hammurabi, as well as all the self-help gurus on the bookshelves, and all the self-actualization influencers on the internet. A didact doesn't waste time on the big ideas and abstract concepts. They give you a practical guide on the details of what to do, and exactly when and how to do it. You don't have to understand an didactic philosophy for it to work for you, you only have to follow it.
In this world, in this time, we have plenty of didacts, but we need to reorient them towards philosophies that make sense for the world that we need to create, instead of philosophies that accelerate the destruction of the world in which we currently live.
What is the need for philosophy? In practical terms, philosophy is a vital and necessary part of human social organization. The actions of individuals cannot be coordinated unless they share values and beliefs. If they are not coordinated, they will work at cross-purposes. At best their efforts will be chaotic and innefective, at worst, they will lead to mutually destructive behaviors. We see both at work today. The conservatives are holding onto old philosophies that were once vital and new, but have been reduced by existential drift into to corruption and decay. They are effective, but in ways that are increasingly destructive and dangerous. On the other hand, the liberals have discarded the old philosophies, but with no unified new vision to lead them forward, so their actions end in confusion and ineffective disorder.
The blockage on the cycle of philosophy must be removed, so it can once again progress forward, flushing the toxins, and ushering in a time of renewal. But the window of opportunity to do so is short.
The world stands on the brink of three linked and existential crises: Global war, environmental collapse, and the rise of artifical intelligence. And the most necessary activism to address any and all of these is philosophical.
Philosophers of all four kinds must come together and to pump the healing elixir out on all channels of media, to counter the tide of poison. This, and only this, can create the change we need.