PHILOSOPHY WORKS IN PRACTICE, BUT NOT IN THEORY is my basic response to this discussion of “Great Books” propaganda. In theory yes, Great Booksiness is cultural relativism in cultural conservative wool. In practice, if you have a nexus of friendships and a structure for leadership, you can come to understand philosophy as eros, the self-changing love of truth. It’s a practice which requires humility and desire and the longing for the glimpsed but (for an atheist) unnamed Beloved.

I still think this is the best way to understand me and how I think and what I care about. This and maybe even this might also be relevant.

I’m thinking a lot, right now, about the fact that philosophy requires both heightened arrogance and heightened humility. On the one hand you have to be willing to spout off about everything! You have to be willing to talk about subjects in which you have all the expertise of a journalist, i.e. a professional dilettante. If you won’t argue about subjects beyond your knowledge, you can’t lead and you can’t grow. But at the same time you need to be radically aware of your own incapacities, willing to be utterly reshaped by other people and their descriptions of their experiences and the conclusions they draw from that experience. I don’t have any especial formula for resolving this dilemma; I just think it’s important that philosophers understand that their practice has spiritual downsides of pride and vanity as well as the perhaps more obvious spiritual upside of Socratean “I know nothing” humility.

I very much welcome you all’s comments since I have no idea how to formulate general advice here, and while I accept that maybe there is no general advice to give, I’d still like a sense of how actual humans who aren’t me attempt to negotiate the arrogance/humility aspect of philosophy.

Original link via PES.