There Is No "Right" Way to Do Philosophy — Find Your Own Way!
As philosophy instructors, we sometimes present a too-narrow vision for what it means to do philosophy, what it means to be a philosopher. We focus on argument analysis and paper-writing in a very formulaic way, all while forgetting that the major figures in the history of philosophy themselves, quite often, didn’t think of philosophy in that way, and themselves didn’t follow most of the advice about philosophical writing that we commonly give to undergraduate—and even graduate-level—students in philosophy.
The philosophers in the history of philosophy to whom I now find myself gravitating are the philosophers that not only have written philosophy, but either broke all the rules of what philosophy meant and had been up until that point or actually lived their philosophies to the best of their ability—lived as a stoic or as an existentialist, for example. It’s not that pure analytic or abstract philosophy isn’t valuable for its own sake (it is!). But there are other ways of doing philosophy besides the historically accepted way, other forms of writing besides argument analysis that properly could as philosophy (or should properly count as philosophy), other paths for being a philosopher besides the typical academic path toward which so many students are steered, often before they have enough life experience to know whether that path is really for them.
My own journey as a philosopher has been anything but typical. Yes, I went to college and got a Bachelor’s degree in philosophy. Yes, I went to grad school and got a Master’s degree after that, and even advanced to Ph.D. candidacy after that. Yes, I’ve taught philosophy at the community college and university levels. But that’s where my own philosophical journey diverges. My professional career as a philosopher diverged from the norm when I was hired by Aplia, an educational technology company that had been recently acquired by Cengage Learning, to create and author (and program) online learning materials and online assignments for college-level logic and critical thinking courses. I worked on Aplia (now MindTap) content for Cengage Learning for eight years, eventually also working on some highly creative and interactive content for other course areas in philosophy, such as Introduction to Philosophy and Introductory Ethics, as well. The content I wrote and created along with my collaboration partners (Rick Meyers, Brian Prosser, Jessica Samuels, Beth Ann Allen), is now used by tens of thousands of logic and philosophy students around the country. Needless to say, it was immensely satisfying to make such an impact on the way that logic and the more qualitative areas of philosophy are now commonly taught and learned across the entire spectrum of colleges and universities in the United States and, indeed, around the world.
But my atypical journey as a philosopher doesn’t end there. Since I was a teenager I have also been a poet (read my poetry here), largely because of the influence of the many Rod McKuen poetry books that filled the bookshelves of Caffe Dolce, the coffeehouse I worked at as a teenager from 1994 through 1995 in my hometown of Vacaville, California. From reading and writing poetry I learned that poetry is every bit as good a way of exploring and evaluating the human condition as academic philosophy or psychology, a fact which 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche also knew and understood insofar as he was both a philosopher and a poet, a fact about Nietzsche that remains underappreciated by most academic philosophers to this day, if they even read Nietzsche at all. (If you’re reading this and don’t read Nietzsche, or even if you do read Nietzsche and don’t also read Nietzsche’s poetry, shame on you!). To me, reading and writing poetry is philosophical; it is a perfectly valid way to do philosophy, to be a philosopher.
I came to realize, at a certain point, that it’s not enough merely to do philosophy in the traditional or academic way. It’s not enough even to live your life as a philosopher in the same way that others before you lived their lives as philosophers. To be the fullest and most authentic, the most novel and unique and creative philosopher you can be, you must find your own way of doing philosophy, your own way of being a philosopher, and forge your own path along your philosophical journey and in your own exploration of the human condition. For me this has meant things like podcasting, such as in my podcast on Star Trek and philosophy, Meta Treks: A Star Trek Philosophy Podcast on the Trek.fm podcast network. It has meant choosing to write journal-style philosophical blog posts instead of articles for academic philosophy journals that (almost) no one will ever read. It has meant using my media design and instructional design skills to bring philosophical concepts to life in ways that bare words on the page rarely (but sometimes) do. It has meant showing my students that philosophy isn’t just something you read or learn about, not even something that you merely do (or happen to do), but instead something that you should live, something that should burrow its way into the very marrow of your soul and being. But it also means emphasizing the way in which each philosopher in the history of philosophy is a rebel in his or her own way, breaking with tradition for the sake of his or her own philosophical uniqueness, whether that means inventing an entirely new philosophical vocabulary as in the case of the 20th-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger or whether that means writing a philosophical journal while living alone in the woods next to Walden Pond as in the case of the 19th-century American Transcendentalist philosopher Henry David Thoreau, and countless other ways of breaking the mold as a thinker, writer, and philosopher.
I worry greatly that the advice we give to undergraduate and graduate students in philosophy is deeply flawed. Yes, we can teach them argument analysis and to respond to possible objections to their own arguments. Yes, we can teach them about the structure of a typical philosophy journal article or doctoral dissertation. Yes, we can teach them everything there is to know about the history of philosophy and the minutiae of every sub-genre of philosophical thinking and writing. Yes, we can get them ready to publish by focusing on style guides and contemporary standards of professional writing. But we fail students greatly if we don’t also teach them to be unique and authentic, if we don’t teach them to be creative thinkers and not merely critical thinkers, if we don’t teach them to break the rules and forge their own path academically or otherwise, if we don’t teach them to pursue experiments in living and not merely thought experiments, if we don’t help them find their own unique voice in their writing and in reflecting on this too-brief human life. Human life, including doing philosophy and being a philosopher, can be so much more than it is commonly presented, but it takes teachers and mentors who already have a higher and broader vision of what philosophy is and could be to light the way for their students, to show them how to break with tradition and forge their own path as thinkers and writers while also doing justice to the best and most unique ways of doing philosophy that have come before them.
This is our time in the sun, we thinkers, writers, and philosophers of today, our moment to make a dent in future history, in the history of philosophy or otherwise. And we are doing a disservice to the history of philosophy and to the thinkers and philosophers of tomorrow if we aren’t doing our part to break with tradition and find our own philosophical voices, our own unique ways of being and our own unique things to say about them, the thoughts and concepts and ideas that flow from our own experiences and values, individually or culturally. Soon, however, our time will fade, and it will be our students’ time in the sun. We must help our students and the thinkers of tomorrow to carry us into the future with all the unique ways of being that they have yet to discover.
