(This post is from a letter to a friend.)
I am re-reading Cornel West’s “The American Evasion of Philosophy” since I’m giving a talk on it this Sunday at the Unitarian Fellowship. In reading what Dewey had to say about philosophy, I was motivated to respond to your comment awhile back that you weren’t much interested in philosophy.
To me, philosophy is a way of organizing my life experiences. I must be a through-and-through American (not really so surprising, I suppose): to me what’s important in philosophy is how it helps you make sense of your life and fit it into a broader context. Both of these things. Like Peirce, I agree that questions where different answers have no discernible impact on the world are not meaningful questions. They might sharpen argumentative skills but are otherwise essentially pointless. Philosophy to me is not values-neutral but is instead very much tied into values since I cannot make sense of my life or fit it into any non-solipsistic context without incorporating my values. The epistemology of philosophy is interesting only insofar as it regards communicating with others and has implications for the clarity of my own thought. The “philosophical” how-we-know-what-we-know question of “Is reality real?” is one of those pointless questions. How I can best clarify my own thinking and, secondarily except when teaching, how best to communicate with others through the medium of language is the only epistemological question of merit/interest.
I now forget who said that it’s a typically European philosophical position to privilege the question of “Being” and ignore “Becoming.” To me, though (and I assume to these other American pragmatists if they address the issue), the essence of “being human” is the “becoming.” I find that particularly true as I watch my grandboys grow and change so rapidly at the age 15 months. How and in what sense a table exists is of much less interest to me than how I as a person exist. Or how you as a person exist. In both the latter cases, we are constantly becoming. Even my 83-year-old mother is still “becoming.” Having breakfast these days with her every week, I see an evolution in her political thought, for instance, that I didn’t before. Perhaps getting out and having breakfast with me makes her more mentally and socially acute. Who knows?
So, evading (as West puts it) or putting to the side (as I would say) some of the traditional European concerns of philosophy seems to me to be a great way to get back to its root: love of wisdom, in the sense of how to be as fully human as possible, and away from the sterile concerns about “reality”, whatever that is.