People often ask me, upon hearing that I am a philosophy professor, what I have learned. What wisdom have I acquired through decades of study? Are we free? What things are conscious and why? What is the divine? Perfectly reasonable questions, but I have nothing useful to say!

What is the point of studying philosophy if I can’t say what we owe to each other, how to organize society, what is ultimately real, and how we should be thinking about things and organizing systems of knowledge?

Plenty of philosophers will step up and answer each of these questions and they’ll argue their case forcefully. (My older brother is one of these, and he has a lot of good things to say, in the Thomistic tradition.) But I not one of them… and not for lack of reading/thinking.

I don’t feel comfortable pushing my views in philosophy when I know YOU might very well disagree if you’d gone through the same process I did. Why pretend we have answers where we don’t? How does that help, except stave off embarrassment?

I would much rather start where YOU are now. What do YOU think? Go ahead and tell me about it. I can probably place your take in historical context—nothing new under the sun after all—and present you some of the best arguments for and against your own stance. Maybe it’ll help.

I realize this is not what people really want. They want a dramatic take that explains everything. Something that hits. They want bangers. Well, I don’t have that. I think the bangers hide weaknesses. I see only trade offs.

This is not to say all views are on a par, or we know absolutely nothing. We definitely make progress and we hit on proofs occasionally too, like the proof that mathematics is incomplete or inconsistent. But that’s not how we should live.

I also think my awkward silence in the face of these very reasonable questions is a reflection of the abstracted and skeptical nature of philosophical education and practice. We find technical problems we can actually address only distantly related to “real” human issues.

My guess, and this is something my brother argues outright, is that if you want to pursue these questions for real you need to explicitly work within a tradition. And you need to keep your eye on the eternal questions, and life itself.

That’s not philosophy in its current form. Philosophy aspires to be math or physics. It aims for universal appeal, discounts its cultural elements. And sociologically? It’s an intense intellectual competition, a genius contest where the winners get jobs.

Genius contest != wisdom quest. People are right to ask for wisdom from those who profess to love it.

My grandpa had an 8th grade education. He was wiser than anyone I’ve met doing professional philosophy. He’s dead or I would send you his way for advice!