Chapter Six

In 2016 I joined a philosophy salon in New York City. Most of the participants have academic training in philosophy, and some are actual, full-time, professional philosophers. Roughly once a month, seven or eight of us meet in the salon-runner’s apartment to munch chocolate biscuits, sip wine and argue about a paper. Whatever the topic—the vagueness of knowledge, Wittgenstein’s mysticism, the dubiousness of moral rules—we often end up bickering about what philosophy is, or should be. What is its purpose? Its point?

In one session we considered “Why Isn’t There More Progress in Philosophy?” by David Chalmers. Chalmers is almost comically passive-aggressive in the paper, veering between defiance and doubt. He opens by declaring that “obviously” philosophy achieves some progress, but the rest of his paper undercuts that modest assertion. Science and philosophy have different methods and results, Chalmers notes. The former consists primarily of empirical investigations, the latter of argumentation. Science has turned out to be a much more potent method of generating truth. Whereas scientists converge on answers to questions, “there has not been large collective convergence to the truth on the big questions of philosophy.”

A survey of philosophers carried out by Chalmers and a colleague revealed deep divisions on big questions: What is the relationship between mind and body? How do we know about the external world? Does God exist? Do we have free will? Where does morality come from? Philosophers’ attempts to answer such questions, Chalmers remarks, “typically lead not to agreement but to sophisticated disagreement.” That is, progress consists less in defending truth claims than in casting doubt on them. Chalmers calls this “negative progress.”

Chalmers tries to stay upbeat. He insists that just because philosophers haven’t solved any major problems yet doesn’t mean they should stop trying. They should keep doing their best “to come up with those new insights, methods and concepts that might finally lead us to answering the questions.” This is an expression of faith. Like a valiant officer, Chalmers is exhorting his troops to keep charging forward when even he suspects the battle is unwinnable.

As if to prove Chalmers’s point about philosophy’s lack of convergence, the salon bickered bitterly over his paper. Members disagreed over his claim that methods of argumentation have improved. One was struck, reading papers from the 1960s and 1970s, by how poorly reasoned they were. Another had precisely the opposite reaction to older papers, they seemed smarter than newer ones. As the conversation unraveled, my mates seemed increasingly glum, with good reason. If philosophers can’t agree on anything after millennia of arguing, why bother?

After this session, I wrote a series of blog posts that asked: What is philosophy’s point? Sure, it can be fun, especially if you get paid to do it, but if it cannot tell us what is or ought to be, what good is it? Philosophy does the most good, I proposed, when it counters our terrible desire for certitude. Playing off Chalmers’s phrase “negative progress,” I called the kind of doubtful inquiry I had in mind negative philosophy. I also meant to evoke “negative theology,” which describes God as indescribable. After posting these thoughts on my blog, I waited for philosophers’ effusions of gratitude to come gushing in.

* * * * *

Owen Flanagan, when we first met, struck me as unusually sensible, and genial, for a philosopher. It was 1994, and we were both at the big consciousness shindig in Tucson (the same one where I first saw Koch speak). We spoke on a sun-drenched patio outside the conference center, water splashing in a nearby circular fountain. Flanagan had coined the term “mysterian” to describe those who claim consciousness will never be cracked. The term was inspired by the 60s rock group Question Mark and the Mysterians, authors of the hit song “96 Tears.”

Flanagan was not a mysterian. He thought we could understand the conscious mind by studying it from the inside as well as outside, supplementing objective investigations of brains, minds and behavior with “phenomenology.” That is philosopher-speak for the study of subjective experience.

I liked Flanagan’s approach to mind, and I liked Flanagan, maybe because we have similar backgrounds. We both came from Irish Catholic families in New York City suburbs. Making small talk, we discovered that his wife Joyce and I grew up in the same Connecticut town, and I knew her family slightly.

Flanagan is a big-picture philosopher, who has written a dozen books on consciousness, morality and the meaning of life. My favorite is The Problem of the Soul, which he intended for non-philosophers. In an autobiographical section, he traces his philosophical obsessions to his religious upbringing. By the time he was seven or eight, he was beginning to think that the Church’s moral rules were nutty. If he has a sinful thought about a girl and a car runs him over before he confesses to a priest, God will torture him eternally? That can’t be right.

After he lost his faith, Flanagan remained fascinated by morality. Where does it come from? How do we decide what’s right and wrong? On the first day of his first college philosophy course, his professor said, “Plato posits the Good.” “I did not know what ‘posited’ was,” Flanagan recalls, “and I had never heard the definite article stand before the word ‘Good’—which I rightly heard as capitalized. But I was thrilled, captivated and hooked.”

Science became Flanagan’s polestar. It hasn’t explained everything, he acknowledges in Problem of the Soul, not by a long shot, but it has explained enough to validate materialism. Everything in the universe, including us, consists of physical stuff ruled by physical forces. God didn’t design us, natural selection did. We are animated meat, and when we die we die, that’s it.

That doesn’t mean there is no morality or meaning. Yes, natural selection made us innately selfish, but it also made us loving, compassionate, empathetic and concerned with fairness, because these tendencies helped our ancestors pass on their genes. If you define morality as caring for others, we are innately moral. Reason, Flanagan says, can refine and reinforce our moral instincts. It can help us see that our wellbeing depends not only on the wellbeing of our immediate kin, who carry our genes, but of all humans and even all of nature.

If you abandon belief in God and heaven, Flanagan says, you still have a lot to live for, like love, family, friendship, beauty and the chance to make the world a better place. You can live a good, meaningful life. But “if you want more,” Flanagan warns, “if you wish that your life had prospects for transcendent meaning, for more than the personal satisfaction and contentment you can achieve while you are still alive, and more than what you will have contributed to the well-being of this world after you die, then you are still in the grip of an illusion. Trust me, you can’t get more.”

And you do trust Flanagan, because he doesn’t browbeat you the way some hard-core atheists do. He comes across as humane, modest, down-to-earth. Sensible. And yet when The Problem of the Soul was published in 2002, Flanagan’s life was a mess. He was struggling with his own private problem of the soul.

That same year, we both attended a workshop on evolution and the meaning of life at Esalen, a neo-hippy resort in California. I asked Flanagan about his wife, Joyce, just to make conversation, and he said they had split up. I expressed the obligatory sympathy. I don’t recall prying for details, but Flanagan said a brain tumor, combined with medications, had affected his behavior in ways that undermined his marriage. Here is how I recall reacting:

A philosopher who specializes in mind and morality gets a brain tumor that makes him behave badly! Owen, this is fantastic material! You can be your own experimen