When Philosophy Leaves the World Behind
A recent Medium essay (linked below) nominates two candidates for the title of the stupidest ideas in philosophy: that there is no self and that there is no free will. There is certainly plenty to attack in both propositions, particularly when sophisticated qualifications disappear and the claims are presented in the startling form that ordinary people do not really exist as continuing selves and never really choose anything. But philosophy has been in business for about two and a half millennia, and it seems unfair to award the gold and silver medals before examining some of the other competitors.
Indeed, denying the self and free will almost looks pedestrian beside Gorgias. The fifth-century BC sophist is traditionally associated with an extraordinary three-stage argument in On Not-Being: nothing exists; even if something exists, it cannot be known; and even if it could be known, that knowledge could not be communicated. The surviving evidence is indirect because the original work has been lost, and scholars dispute whether Gorgias was seriously advancing metaphysical nihilism, constructing an elaborate reductio of Eleatic philosophy, or demonstrating the powers and limitations of argument. Nevertheless, the arguments preserved under his name really do proceed through the extraordinary territory of non-existence, unknowability and incommunicability.
There is something wonderfully philosophical about arguing that nothing exists. The first difficulty is that Gorgias apparently existed long enough to tell us that nothing did! He presumably ate, slept, walked around, encountered other people and developed sufficient confidence in their existence to address arguments to them. If absolutely nothing existed, it is difficult to see what exactly was doing the arguing, what the argument was about, or to whom it was supposedly addressed. The doctrine seems to consume the philosopher along with everything else. Some materialist philosophers today deny the existence of mind, whilebeing quite comfortable arguing this, and collecting a salary, and a good one at that: a current 2026 Melbourne job advertisement gives the Level E professorial salary as A$236,824 per year, plus 17% employer superannuation!
The sceptic can perform a similar disappearing act with knowledge. Radical scepticism asks whether we can know anything at all. Perhaps our senses deceive us. Perhaps memory is unreliable. Perhaps the external world is an illusion. Perhaps everything we experience is a dream, simulation or Cartesian deception. These are legitimate philosophical devices when used to investigate what counts as knowledge and how beliefs can be justified. They become rather stranger when the methodological doubt hardens into the proposition that nothing can actually be known.
For how does the sceptic know that nothing can be known? If he knows it, then at least one thing can be known and the proposition is false. If he does not know it, there seems little reason for anyone else to believe him. Radical scepticism repeatedly encounters this self-referential trap. As an intellectual solvent applied carefully to overconfident claims, scepticism is invaluable. Poured over everything, including itself, it eventually dissolves the container.
Then there are the great metaphysical systems in which the familiar world survives but is demoted to something considerably less than reality. F. H. Bradley provides a magnificent example. Bradley was no fool; he was one of the most important British philosophers of his generation, and Appearance and Reality profoundly influenced the philosophical environment from which Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore emerged. Yet Bradley's metaphysics takes us an astonishing distance from the world as ordinarily encountered.
For Bradley, things and properties, relations, space and time, selves and much else belonging to common experience ultimately fall within the realm of appearance rather than ultimate reality. Reality is the Absolute, an all-inclusive unity which cannot ultimately possess the divisions and independent objects that ordinary thought discovers everywhere. As the Stanford account summarises his position, the Absolute is not a collection of independent realities but an all-encompassing system of sentient experience.
That is serious philosophy, supported by serious arguments about relations, contradiction and the inadequacy of conceptual thought. It is also an excellent illustration of philosophy's recurring ability to reason itself out of the world in which everybody actually lives. I see a table, place my coffee on it and discover rather quickly that the table possesses sufficient reality to support the cup. Bradley tells me that tables, relations, space, time and the conceptual distinctions through which I understand this little event do not possess ultimate reality in the form common sense attributes to them. Oxford's account of Bradley aptly describes his system as involving the rejection of the whole world of common-sense experience and reflection as ultimate reality.
The Absolute Idealists were once enormously important. Bradley was regarded as a major philosophical figure, and idealism dominated significant portions of British academic philosophy around the end of the nineteenth century. Then the intellectual weather changed. Moore defended common sense, Russell attacked idealist doctrines of relations, analytic philosophy emerged, and what had seemed like the commanding heights of philosophy became largely historical territory. Bradley has undergone serious scholarly reassessment and should not simply be caricatured as an intellectual curiosity, but nobody could plausibly describe Absolute Idealism as occupying its former position in Anglophone philosophy.
This historical cycle should make us cautious about today's fashionable philosophical impossibilities. Every generation of intellectuals is tempted to believe that it has finally acquired concepts sophisticated enough to overturn what ordinary human beings have believed since prehistoric times. There is no enduring self. Free will is an illusion. Objects are constructions. Reality is information. Consciousness is computation. The universe may be mathematical structure. Perhaps everything is consciousness. Perhaps consciousness itself does not really exist in anything like the form we imagine. Who knows?
Some of these propositions may contain important truths, and common sense certainly isn't infallible. Common sense once accommodated witches, spontaneous generation and an immovable Earth at the centre of the cosmos. Science advances precisely because reality does not have to conform to our intuitions. Any argument that merely says "that sounds ridiculous" and stops there is not much of an argument.
But there is an important difference between scientific discoveries that contradict common sense and philosophical systems that redefine ordinary experience out of existence. When physics tells us that a solid table consists overwhelmingly of what, in everyday terms, we would call empty space, physics can demonstrate why the table nevertheless resists my hand. It explains the surprising appearance while preserving and deepening our understanding of the phenomenon. The table does not vanish because atomic theory arrived.
Philosophy sometimes proceeds differently. It begins with conceptual difficulties concerning the self and concludes that there is no self. It discovers difficulties explaining free choice and concludes that nobody chooses. It discovers problems concerning relations and decides that relations cannot belong to ultimate reality. It raises legitimate questions about knowledge and ends with the conclusion that knowledge is impossible. Instead of explaining the life-world, the theory begins abolishing its furniture. That should set off an epistemological alarm.
The life-world is not philosophically sacred, but it is where philosophy starts. There appear to be persons. They experience themselves as persisting through time. They deliberate between alternatives. They distinguish what they know from what they merely suspect. They encounter other people and physical objects. They communicate propositions about a shared world and frequently agree sufficiently well about those propositions to build bridges, perform heart surgery and land spacecraft on other planets. Any philosophy announcing that some substantial portion of this is fundamentally unreal assumes a formidable explanatory burden.
The correct response cannot simply be that ordinary people have failed to understand the technical argument. Perhaps they have. But the further a philosophical system moves from ordinary reality, the greater the obligation to explain why ordinary reality so stubbornly behaves as though it exists.
This is where denying the self becomes interesting. There is a perfectly respectable argument that what we casually call "the self" is not a little Cartesian spectator sitting somewhere behind the eyes. Contemporary philosophers and researchers such as Thomas Metzinger, Susan Blackmore and others have developed sophisticated versions of this position. Even Daniel Dennett rejected the idea of a Cartesian central observer without thereby claiming that human beings simply disappear. The contemporary debate is considerably subtler than "you think you exist, but philosophy says you don't."
Free will is similar. There are formidable problems surrounding causation, determinism, randomness and responsibility. If every event in the brain is determined by antecedent physical conditions, where does libertarian freedom enter? If an action instead results partly from quantum randomness, randomness hardly seems equivalent to freedom. These are genuine puzzles, and philosophers have been wrestling with them for centuries.
Yet there remains something peculiar about constructing a philosophical theory according to which the deliberation involved in constructing that very theory was never genuinely free. The philosopher spends thirty years weighing arguments and then publishes a book informing everyone that weighing alternatives never involved the freedom they thought it did. Perhaps that conclusion is correct, but it deserves considerably more than the confidence with which it is sometimes announced.
The recurring mistake is not having strange ideas. Philosophy needs strange ideas. Its value partly consists in questioning assumptions so deeply embedded that nobody else notices them. Gorgias remains interesting precisely because his arguments push reasoning towards its breaking point. Bradley remains worth reading because he exposes genuine difficulties concerning relations, properties, experience and conceptual division. Radical scepticism remains one of philosophy's indispensable tools because it forces us to explain why we are entitled to claim knowledge rather than merely possession of comfortable beliefs. The mistake comes when the philosophical apparatus becomes more authoritative than the reality it was invented to explain.
There is a useful historical warning here. Philosophical systems rise with astonishing confidence and then decline. Their technical vocabulary, once unavoidable in every serious discussion, becomes something graduate students encounter in histories of philosophy. Problems that seemed capable of overturning the intellectual world are redescribed under a new vocabulary. Yesterday's unavoidable framework becomes today's specialist research interest, while tables, people, choices, arguments, mistakes, knowledge and ordinary life continue much as before.
That doesn't prove common sense correct. It suggests something more modest and more important: philosophy should maintain some humility when its conclusions radically contradict the life-world from which philosophical inquiry itself arises.
The two stupidest ideas in philosophy therefore face ferocious competition. Nothing exists. Nothing can be known. Nothing can be communicated. The ordinary world is mere appearance before an all-embracing Absolute. The self does not exist. Free choice is an illusion. One could compile quite a league table, although philosophers would immediately spend several centuries arguing about the ranking criteria.
Perhaps the real candidate for philosophy's stupidest idea is not any one of these doctrines. It is the recurring belief that when an ingenious philosophical construction collides violently with the common world of human experience, it must be the world that has made the mistake, not philosophy.
https://medium.com/original-philosophy/the-two-stupidest-ideas-in-philosophy-2393e23d2d52
