On My Book, "What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory" Part I

My best case for why you should read this book if you want to understand the crises enveloping Western civilization.

Author’s note: this essay got away from me, lengthwise. So I’ve broken it into three parts. Part I is below; Parts II and III will appear here in a few days.

Almost two years ago (July 21, 2021, to be exact), my book, What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory came out from theologically-oriented, Oregon-based publisher Wipf and Stock. Given the ensuing silence, I can relate to Scottish philosopher David Hume’s wry observation that his Treatise of Human Nature (published in the 1730s) “fell stillborn from the press.”

Why am I writing about it here? Because it’s the book’s second birthday? To sell copies (may I?). It’s overpriced, but that was outside my control. But in fairness, nearly everything today is “overpriced” by the standards that preceded our New Normal.

When I wrote it, I believed its messages mattered, and I still do — even given the utter absence of reviews (even on Amazon!). We’re not going to effectively address the problems of Western civilization if the issues What Should Philosophy Do? discusses aren’t engaged at some level. Will I be thought arrogant or narcissistic for saying that? I’ll run that risk.

What’s the book about?

It argues that professional philosophers — a field that (like most academic disciplines) has been in tatters for a very long time — ought to begin a new conversation about worldviews.

What philosophy should do is identify, clarify, and critically evaluate worldviews. This is the book’s first message.

Worldviews.

What’s a worldview? Once we have a definition, even if somewhat imprecise, hopefully you’ll see why the subject is important — possibly too important to be left to the professionals who dropped this ball long ago.

The idea isn’t new. Worldviews are at least similar to what Stephen Pepper called world hypotheses in a book of that title, published back in the 1940s.

Like the term implies, a worldview is a kind of lens through which a society or culture sees the world, or reality as a whole. Every society or culture has a worldview, and a complex and diverse civilization may have several in competition. For most of a society’s members worldviews work automatically, organizing basic beliefs, telling adherents what is real as well as what is right or permissible, suggesting workable courses of action leading to the good life as the worldview defines it. People just grow up with this, and it might not occur to them to question these basic beliefs. They’re organic, integrated seamlessly into the warp and woof of daily living, and into institutions (what rituals are practiced, what governing authorities prioritize, and so on).

More formally: a worldview (1) informs those “immersed in it” an account of what is real or most real, e.g., whether a God exists, whether there is a transcendent order in some other sense, or if we inhabit a universe of “blind matter” obeying laws of physics and chemistry, nothing more; (2) offers a narrative of who we are, where we came from, and what (if anything) makes us special in a moral sense; (3) infers ideals about the “good society” in some sense of this term; (4) diagnoses the difference between the ideal and the real; and finally (5) prescribes action, be it a set of policies to make things better, or advising how to live with what we cannot change.

Thus a philosopher’s reconstruction of a worldview. Part of my argument is that today we have good reason to think about worldviews. Different worldviews will emphasize different things, but those I examined when researching What Should Philosophy Do? all contain those five components in some form. Religions involve worldviews to the extent their doctrines permeate a culture; so does irreligiosity, if its premises do the same. Christendom is a worldview. What I call materialism (or materialist naturalism) is another.

That brings me to the second message of What Should Philosophy Do? We are in the late stages of a long, ongoing replacement of one worldview (Christendom) with another (materialism), and the consequences of the latter lie behind many if not most of our present ills. The proper course of action might be to reject materialism as neither intellectually tenable nor sociologically viable. Can philosophers advise this? Especially if those behind “settled science” (or The Science) are materialists in some sense of this term? Philosophers have been bowing before “settled science” for well over a hundred years now. One of my convictions, perhaps surprising, is that the time has come to question this arrangement.

Questioning the arrangement has been done before, when there was less at stake. If you want an illustration, consider that a hundred years ago, Christian theology was in the midst of a low-grade civil war. Two incompatible philosophies both claimed the mantle of Christianity for the future. This is clear from Presbyterian theologian J. Gresham Machen’s Christianity & Liberalism (orig. 1923). What bothered Machen came down to the challenge of the materialist worldview to traditional church teachings, and the church’s willingness to compromise them to accommodate The Science (which relinquished the supernatural, which Machen argued was essential to any worldview claiming to be Christian even if so-called “higher criticism” of the Bible repudiated it).

In sum: a hundred years have passed, and this battle not only remains unresolved but has broadened well beyond any specific institutions. Materialism has overwhelmed Western civilization. We will not resolve the dilemmas it poses unless we face the specific issues it raises and which need to be resolved. That won’t happen if philosophers do not address them, as trained philosophers are best qualified to do so. Trained philosophers will not address the dilemmas posed by materialism if they aren’t aware of them in these terms.

The purpose of What Should Philosophy Do? is to draw philosophers’ attention to them. They will continue to flounder amidst the culture wars, and probably most will side with what I’ve come to call the death culture. So how will What Should Philosophy Do? change the equation. I can’t know that. What philosophers should do is one thing; what they actually do is another, and entirely up to them. I have no control over whether they choose to act, which will mean stepping out of their comfort zones, or if they continue to ignore these “big questions” of life and society in favor of continued analyses of “ordinary language,” struggling with the seemingly inexplicable (on materialist terms) nature of conscious self-awareness (or debating whether artificial intelligence will “get smart” and take over the world), or what is magnitudes worse: falling prey to the latest forms of gender-fluidity and ideological fashionability.

Materialism and the Origin of the Culture Wars.

There is a significant difference between the materialism that rose out of the Enlightenment (its starting point the mechanistic and mathematizable view of nature that began with Descartes, Galileo, and Newton) and Marxism (Karl Marx combining the dialectic of German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel with the materialism of another German philosopher, Ludwig Feuerbach). Marxism divided further between classical economics-first Marxists who emphasized class and class struggle and those who embraced the cultural Marxism of the Frankfurt School starting in the 1920s (no, cultural Marxism is not a “conspiracy theory”).

Frankfurt School philosophers believed economic Marxism was failing, that for reasons not economic but cultural, the proletariat wanted to join rather than overthrow the bourgeoisie. So their thinkers (Max Horkheimer, Gyorgy Lukácz, Theodor Adorno, eventually Herbert Marcuse) set about “capturing the culture”: undermining the Christian worldview wherever possible by undermining its institutions (Christian-based beliefs about family, sexuality, free speech, etc.). They learned to use media and the arts, and began exploiting existing ethnic/racial and sexual grievances, elevating these above the class distinctions classical Marxism had emphasized. This meant eventually kicking the working class to the curb. The American working class was too white, too male, and above all, too Christian even if in a very broad sense, to serve cultural Marxist purposes.  

The Frankfurt School’s American base was the New School for Social Research, and its most influential protégé became Marcuse, whose 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance” is required reading for anyone who wants to know how we moved from nondiscrimination to affirmative action understood as preferences, and then from those to censorship and today’s ideologies of gender and wokeness. Or why the 1960s New Left celebrated free speech and the 2020s Left rejects it.

Do people without formal training need all these details? Possibly not; I leave that choice to them. But I do not see how to understand the cultural clashes tearing at our civilization without understanding that at the foundations of each side are sets of basic beliefs about the world. Worldview beliefs again tell us (1) what is real, including which social forces are most real and strongest; (2) who we are and how we arrived in our present condition; (3) what is right, or just socially; (4) how we fell into our present state; and (5) what to do about it. Cultural Marxism is very much a worldview, and at its base: a form of materialism even if it differs from the materialism of someone such as, say, Richard Dawkins.

If we understand what worldviews are and how they affect the mindsets of their adherents, we might come to understand why multiculturalism, which so many academics have advocated as a “strength,” has failed. Worldviews may compete for the allegiance of the majority of a population, but at the end of the day, they are incompatible. They do not agree on solutions, because they do not agree on what the problems are. These disagreements are rooted in different and incompatible values. In the meantime, the values and policies — based ultimately on beliefs about what is most real — which actually led to the successes Western civilization enjoyed, are lost in the mists of time amidst the confusion of the present.

Part II in three days.