Philosophy's Shortcomings

Why thinking, on its own, is never enough.

This section has spent several pages making the case for philosophy: as scaffolding for clearer thinking, as the inheritance of humanity’s best attempts at the questions that will not go away, as a set of frameworks for navigating paradox and suffering. All of that stands. But a discipline that taught you to question everything except itself would be a poor advertisement for its own method, and philosophy, turned on itself, has limits.

I. When Reason Floats Free of Reality

The first and oldest shortcoming was diagnosed back in A Brief History of Philosophy: reason, left to itself and unhooked from evidence, can build magnificent structures that happen to be false. The ancient Greeks demonstrated this at the very birth of the discipline. Working largely from first principles and the force of argument, they produced systems of extraordinary internal coherence, Aristotle’s physics chief among them, that were also substantially wrong, and that, because of their sheer intellectual elegance and authority, held back understanding for the better part of two thousand years. Pure thought is very good at producing conclusions that follow validly from their premises. It is much worse at checking whether the premises were true to begin with, and a flawless chain of reasoning from a false starting point arrives at a false destination with total confidence.

Philosophy can tell you what follows from what, and can clarify what your concepts even mean, but on questions about what reality is, reasoning unconstrained by observation is a notoriously unreliable guide. The history of philosophy is littered with confident, beautiful, rigorously argued claims about the nature of reality that turned out not to match what is there, because no one had yet thought to look, or because looking was treated as beneath the dignity of pure reason. The lesson is not that philosophical reasoning is worthless, but that it has a domain: it is powerful for clarifying, analysing, and drawing out implications, and it is not, by itself, a way of finding out empirical facts about the world.

II. When the Problem Is Made of Words

The second shortcoming was the great theme of Language & Meaning: philosophy has a pronounced tendency to generate its own problems out of linguistic confusion, and then to spend centuries trying to solve puzzles that are semantic in nature. When language idles out of its ordinary working context, it can produce sentences that have the grammatical shape of profound questions while being, on inspection, malformed, questions that feel deep precisely because they cannot be answered, when the reason they cannot be answered is that they were never coherent questions to begin with. Questions like “Is water wet?” “What existed before time?” or “What is the meaning of life?” In fact, it could be argued that most disagreements are due to a misunderstanding of how the opposing party defines certain words. This is partly why we still have political polarisation. The weasels begging for your support are experts at wrangling words that suit your perspective, that have no intention (nor the skills for that matter) of doing what you think they are saying they will do.   

This does not dissolve all of philosophy, but an uncomfortable amount of traditional philosophical dispute does seem to evaporate, or at least transform, the moment the participants are forced to say clearly and precisely what they mean by their key terms. Long-running debates can turn out to be two people using the same word for different things, or arguing about which definition to adopt while believing they are arguing about reality. The shortcoming here is that philosophy, the discipline supposedly devoted to clarity, is unusually prone to mistaking the texture of its own vocabulary for the texture of the world, and to dignifying with centuries of attention questions that a little hard thinking about language would have dissolved.

III. The Awkward Question of Progress

Philosophy does not obviously make progress the way science does. On the big questions, the nature of consciousness, the grounds of morality, the existence of free will, the relationship between mind and body, philosophy has been arguing, with “sophistication”, for thousands of years, and has reached nothing like the convergence that science reaches on its questions. The major positions staked out by the ancient Greeks are, in recognisable form, still live options today. The philosopher David Chalmers has put the worry candidly: there has been remarkably little large-scale agreement on the big questions, and the field lacks the kind of method that reliably moves practitioners toward consensus. The discipline has never possessed a reliable way to distinguish philosophical truths from philosophical falsehoods that people would simply like to be true.

In fairness, philosophy may not converge on final answers to the big questions, but it progresses in other ways: by inventing concepts and distinctions that become permanent intellectual tools, by clarifying exactly what the options are and what each would cost, by ruling out positions that turn out to be incoherent, and by handing questions, once they become tractable, over to the sciences. On this view, philosophy is partly the discipline that works on questions before we know how to answer them, and its apparent lack of progress is really the residue left behind after each genuinely solvable piece has been handed off to a special science. But it also concedes that philosophy clarifies far better than it concludes, and anyone expecting it to deliver final answers to how they should live or what is real will be waiting a very long time. Typically, philosophers are thinkers, not doers. 

IV. The Gap Between Knowing and Doing

Even when philosophy gets something right, even when it hands you a true and useful insight about how to live, knowing it does almost nothing on its own. There is a vast gap between understanding a principle and being able to embody it.

You can read the Stoics, understand their core teaching completely, grasp with total clarity that you should concern yourself only with what is in your control and accept what is not, be able to explain it, defend it, and teach it, and then lose your composure entirely the moment someone cuts you off in traffic or sends a curt email. You may understand the concepts, but in a heated moment, absolutely lose your rag, because knowing a principle intellectually and having it available to you under stress are two completely different achievements. Psychologists draw the distinction as declarative knowledge (knowing that) versus procedural knowledge (knowing how). Philosophy is superb at delivering the first and largely silent on the second. The insight has to be practised repeatedly, under real conditions, until it moves from something you know into something you do. It is closer to training, and it happens in the body in the form of habits.

This is the major reason the manual is structured the way it is, leading with Breathing, Sleep, Nutrition, Movement, Connection, Purpose, and the maintenance of your local Environment long before it arrives at frameworks and worldviews. A dysregulated body does not care how good your philosophy is. Someone in the grip of a panic response, or chronic sleep deprivation, or an overwhelmed stress system, cannot think their way to calm with even the finest Stoic argument, because they are ruled by their sympathetic nervous system. Philosophy addresses the rider; a great deal of what moves us is the horse. This is why, as the manual insists throughout, the body comes first and the worldview second: not because thinking does not matter, but because thinking is the last thing to come online and the first thing to go offline, and an insight you cannot access when you are dysregulated is not yet doing you any good. The work of turning philosophy from something you know into something you can live is the work of Habit, practice, and embodiment, and it is not work that reading can do for you. If reading were all it took, I’d be an immortal billionaire.  

V. When Thinking Becomes the Trap

Thinking can substitute for living. It is entirely possible to use philosophy as a sophisticated form of avoidance, to retreat into analysis precisely because analysis is safer than action, to endlessly examine a life rather than risk living one. The examined life is worth living, as Socrates had it, but examination was supposed to serve the living, and a life spent entirely in the examination is its own kind of failure. The same faculty that produces insight produces rumination when it loops without resolution, and the same disposition that lets a person question their assumptions can, overdone, dissolve the ground they need to stand on to act at all. Analysis can become paralysis: the person who sees every side of every question so clearly that they can commit to none of them, whose sophistication has cost them the capacity to choose. And there is a particular trap in over-intellectualising lived experience, in insisting on understanding an emotion rather than feeling it, on theorising a relationship rather than being in it, on holding all of life at the cool distance of analysis until the living itself becomes ignored. The richest parts of a human life, love, grief, awe, play, the felt sense of being alive, are not primarily intellectual, and a person who has trained themselves to meet everything with thought can find they have lost the ability to meet anything with anything else.

This is not necessarily an argument against reflection. It is a recognition that reflection is a tool with a proper use and a characteristic way of going wrong, and that the going-wrong looks like thinking that has detached from the life it was meant to serve. Philosophy is a superb servant and a poor master. Held in its place, it clarifies and steadies a life. Allowed to take over, it can quietly replace life with a commentary on it. On the opposing end, living a life of uninhibited stupor is a recipe for disaster.  

VI. What Philosophy Is For, Given All This

Philosophy clarifies what your concepts mean and helps you to predict what comes next; it cannot, by itself, tell you how the world is, which needs observation, or settle its own deepest questions, which it has not in two and a half thousand years. It can hand you an insight about how to live; it cannot install that insight in your nervous system, which takes practice and time. It is a magnificent instrument of reflection that becomes a trap the moment reflection detaches from living. Used with awareness, philosophy is a scaffolding for a freer and more autonomous life. Used without that awareness, it becomes free-floating speculation, verbal confusion, endless inconclusive debate, inert knowledge that changes nothing, or a sophisticated hiding place from the life it was supposed to illuminate. The difference, as ever in this manual, is not in the tool but in how it is held. Think as clearly as you possibly can, and then close the book, and go and live, and let the living have the last word.

VII. Cross-Links

• Philosophy for the section overview
• A Brief History of Philosophy for the reason-unhooked-from-reality lesson at the discipline’s birth
• The Religiosity Cup for wisdom that survived by being practised, not just argued
• Language & Meaning for problems made of words
• Life Lessons for philosophy turned back into something livable
• Resources for the reading list