An essay you can handle
Philosophy: who needs it?
Ayn Rand’s crashed astronaut, and the philosophy you’re already living by.
Tap the ship.
In 1974, Ayn Rand gave a lecture to the graduating class at West Point. It was later published as an essay called Philosophy: Who Needs It.
She begins with an astronaut whose spaceship crashes on an unfamiliar planet. The astronaut has some fairly pressing questions.
Where am I? How do I know it? What should I do?
The dials took a knock in the landing. Tap each one.
Ontology the nature of reality
Epistemology how we can know anything about it
Ethics how we ought to live
Rand uses these questions to introduce ontology, epistemology, and ethics. Questions about the nature of reality, how we can know anything about it, and how we ought to live.
Her point is that we’re all answering versions of these questions throughout our lives, whether we realise it or not.
As she puts it:
“As a human being, you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy.”
We think she’s onto something important.
People often regard philosophy as an optional intellectual interest. Something you might study at university, read about occasionally, or enjoy discussing over a drink.
But everyone develops assumptions about how the world works and what matters within it.
You already have ideas about what makes someone trustworthy. You have some understanding of what constitutes a good life. You accept certain things as evidence and dismiss others. You have beliefs about what’s possible, what’s desirable and what other people ought to do.
Where did they come from?
Tap a tag, then say where it came from. Your best guess will do.
Perhaps you’ve thought carefully about them. Perhaps they emerged through experience. Some will have been inherited from people you admire, or absorbed from the culture around you.
And some will contradict others.
Rand’s concern is that people can spend their lives operating according to principles they’ve never properly examined. She describes a mind accumulating ideas without knowing their origins or implications.
Her phrase for it is a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions
.
There’s an obvious danger in that.
Two settlements
Imagine someone who believes human beings are naturally self-interested. They might design their organisation around incentives, monitoring, and competition.
Someone who believes people are naturally inclined towards cooperation might arrange things quite differently.
Of course, neither position is as straightforward as we’ve made it sound. That’s partly the point.
What interests us is how often the assumptions themselves escape examination.
What sits underneath
People argue about organisational structures, culture, management techniques, and what should happen next. Meanwhile, fundamentally different understandings of human nature sit quietly underneath the conversation.
It’s difficult to make progress when nobody has noticed what they’re actually disagreeing about.
This is one reason we begin our work at Syntropise by exploring ontology, epistemology and axiology: what someone assumes about reality, knowledge, and value.
You don’t need to arrive knowing anything about those terms.
You’re already living with answers of some kind.
We think they’re worth examining.
Where we part company with Rand
We admire the force of Rand’s argument for philosophy. We’re considerably less persuaded by what she thinks the exercise should ultimately produce.
For Rand, philosophy involves the rational examination and integration of our fundamental principles. She wants people to develop a coherent understanding of reality and live according to it.
There’s much to admire in her insistence that beliefs should be examined and supported by reasons.
But Rand is also remarkably certain about where the inquiry ought to end.
She makes no secret of her confidence that anyone who properly examines philosophy will ultimately recognise the truth of her own system, Objectivism.
And her treatment of competing philosophers can be extraordinarily dismissive, which we again find troubling.
If philosophy matters because our assumptions might be mistaken, surely that possibility must remain open for our most cherished philosophical convictions too.
We wouldn’t want someone to spend a year with us and emerge having adopted our philosophy.
We’d want them to have encountered ideas they couldn’t previously have imagined, understood arguments they might once have dismissed, and developed the confidence to disagree with us where they think we’re wrong.
Perhaps they’ll end up with firmer convictions than they began with.
Perhaps something they’ve believed for twenty years will become much harder to defend.
Both are possible outcomes of serious philosophical inquiry.
Said and done
There’s another difference worth considering.
Rand places enormous emphasis on identifying the abstract principles governing our thinking. But we’re not convinced that our philosophy exists entirely as a collection of beliefs waiting to be brought into consciousness.
Think about someone who insists they trust their colleagues.
I trust my colleagues.
Ask them about trust and they’ll give you a perfectly reasonable explanation.
Then watch what happens when a colleague makes a decision they disagree with.
Does the person become curious about the reasoning? Do they immediately intervene? Can the colleague genuinely influence what happens next?
A colleague’s just made a decision you disagree with. What do you actually do?
Then the trust is doing some work. You’re treating their reasoning as worth understanding, even when you don’t share it.
Sometimes that’s the right call. It also says the trust has conditions: it holds while they decide the way you would.
Then their judgement really counts. That’s trust you could see from the outside.
The philosophy someone describes may differ considerably from the one expressed through their actions.
This is where thinkers such as Heidegger become particularly interesting to us.
We’re already involved in a world before we begin formulating explicit theories about it. Much of what we understand is expressed in our ordinary ways of dealing with things, the possibilities we recognise, and the practices we’ve come to take for granted.
Sometimes we discover what we believe by paying attention to how we’re living.
And occasionally, what we discover is uncomfortable.
What else might become possible?
There’s something else we think Rand’s argument leaves relatively little room for.
The sheer pleasure of philosophy.
She makes a compelling case that philosophy is practically important. That our ideas have consequences and that examining them can protect us from error.
We agree.
But we also think there’s something wonderful about encountering a philosopher whose ideas take you somewhere you hadn’t expected.
You might begin reading Heraclitus because you’re interested in how organisations change.
Six months later, you’re still thinking about what it means for anything to remain itself through time.
You might discover Simone Weil while trying to understand attention, and find yourself becoming interested in what it means to truly attend to another person.
Pick a thinker. See where you end up.
what it means for anything to remain itself through time
what it means to truly attend to another person
There doesn’t have to be an immediate problem to solve.
Sometimes an idea is worth pursuing simply because it’s fascinating.
And the experience of pursuing it can change your relationship with the world.
This is a significant part of what we want to cultivate through Syntropise.
We introduce people to thinkers and philosophical traditions they might never have encountered independently. We explain arguments, question interpretations and explore what those ideas might mean in their lives.
Over time, people develop interests they didn’t know they had.
They begin asking questions they couldn’t previously have formulated.
It’s enormously satisfying work.
And there’s no particular reason for the process to end.
The world is still open
We’re interested in what allows living things to remain capable of development, and what our participation makes possible for others.
One of the dangers of a settled worldview is that it can begin to conceal possibilities.
Someone becomes convinced that people are fundamentally lazy, and eventually designs an organisation in which initiative is difficult.
Someone believes their identity depends on a particular achievement, and gradually loses the freedom to imagine themselves doing anything else.
An understanding of the world can become so familiar that we mistake its limitations for the limitations of reality.
Philosophy can help us recognise that.
Sometimes it exposes a contradiction. Sometimes it gives us good reasons to abandon an idea. Occasionally, it introduces a possibility we didn’t know existed.
None of this requires us to give up on truth or remain permanently undecided. There are good arguments and bad ones. Some interpretations are demonstrably mistaken.
But the world remains richer than any account we give of it.
And our understanding can continue to develop.
That’s why we think wisdom matters more than simply accumulating knowledge.
You can know an extraordinary amount about something while remaining remarkably unreflective about what deserves your attention or how you ought to live.
Wisdom involves learning to exercise judgement, including recognising when your understanding might need reconsidering.
We don’t think anyone finishes that education.
Which brings us back to Rand.
For all our philosophical differences, we think she’s right about something fundamental.
Most people think philosophy is optional.
Examining it is. Having one isn’t.
You already have a philosophy. It’s involved in how you understand yourself and what you expect from the world. It influences what you notice, what you dismiss and which possibilities you take seriously.
Some of it has probably served you very well.
Some of it might deserve another look.
And there may be extraordinary ideas out there that you’ve simply never had the opportunity to encounter.
We think getting to know the philosophy you’re already living by is one of the most worthwhile things you can do.
You might be surprised by what’s in there.
Private viewings by appointment
Ring for a curator.
Tell us what’s on your mind, or what you’ve been reading. The first conversation costs nothing, and you don’t need to prepare a thing.
Or write to hello@syntropise.com