I’m reading “The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World” (Owen Flanagan) for my program’s bookclub. The book rolls around what strikes me as a fruitful intersection of pseudo-science and pseudo-philosophy (“neurophilosophy” and “eudaimonics”), and I don’t want to critique the value of this project. But the book presents itself as a rigorous philosophical inquiry, and this I struggled with. The author is a naturalist (“The world is material; we are social animals; meaning is to be found in human ‘spaces'”), which would be fine if he didn’t make such a shoddy attempt to argue against other philosophies.

I’m a agnostic mysticist– I believe that the material world is a consequence of a non-material existence from which consciousness derives. But I’m interested in other philosophies on their own terms, and open to discovering that the mystic world is an illusion. But neither mysticism nor naturalism seem capable of proving the other wrong, so intelligent people become comfortable with the unresolvability.

From his naturalist stance, Owen points out that people’s first aim is to survive, and have basic needs met. With this, they feel a drive toward the good, true, and beautiful. Here, “meaningful human lives… involve being moral, having true friends, and having opportunities to express our talents, to find meaningful work, to create and live among beautiful things, and to live cooperatively in social environments where we trust each other”. But in the rich world, most of us (or at least most of us educated, white males), we have all those things. We are happy. So then, do we strive for contentment or nirvana?

I claim that at this point, people turn to, and develop, a philosophy. This helps them decide how to employ happiness and navigate meaning, and a philosophy is a wonderful thing. Unfortunately, many of them then imagine that “a philosophy” is “the philosophy”– that is, the right one– and strive refine their philosophy to try to make it that right one, and then argue for it and against others. This path is useful to a point, and there is great progress that can be made refining one’s philosophy. But if there is a path toward “true philosophy”, I don’t think this is it. As much as the modern approach to philosophy involves refining “a philosophy”, it is psychologically fruitful. When it attempts to exclude other philosophies, it is a source of unhappiness and bigotry.

If these practices constitute philosophy, and we would rightly all call ourselves philosophers, then we need a new word for the work of Plato and other ancient philosophers. I call this line of inquiry “philosophology”. Plato asked, “What does it mean to be a philosopher?” That is, what ties all of these philosophies together and what distinguishes them? How do we shape a philosophy, and how are we shaped by it? What are they reaching toward, and how is it attempted to be grasped?

These are not quite psychological questions, though they aren’t too far from them. They are questions about the nature of meaning and existence, the relationship between human and universe, and the potential for right action– but instead of philosophies, which are about answering these questions, philosophology asks questions about those answers and the questions that resulted in them. It recognizes that all of these questions have many and ambiguous answers, and takes that as a natural state worth studying. I believe that if there is a path to truer philosophy, it must be from this basis.