The usual complaint levelled against philosophy is that its concerns are remote from everyday experience. But as I grappled with the big questions raised by the philosophers of the past, I began to understand how they thought and felt about life.
The development office of my alma mater contacted me early last March about leaving the university some money in my will. My undergraduate adventure was decades ago and I’m nearing retirement age, so this nudge towards “estate planning” — to use the genteel phrase — wasn’t unexpected. The development officer I chatted with on the phone asked me about my experiences as an undergraduate. I didn’t hesitate to say that my university years were some of the happiest — and certainly the most intellectually stimulating — of my life.
When asked why my yearly donation goes to the philosophy department, however, I didn’t have a quick answer. The deferential, sometimes hesitant tone of the development officer’s voice suggested a man far younger than I am. I pictured a dedicated fundraiser sitting at a war-era desk in a cramped university office that, in spite of its ancient radiator, is icy cold right through to the end of April. An alphabetical database might have been open on his computer screen, listing donors to the university whose surnames start with D. I imagined many other details of my phone caller’s physical circumstances, but of one thing I was sure: his relative youth.
We’ve all heard that the past is another country where they do things differently. I wasn’t yet 20 when I entered university, and I did things differently back then — before the development officer was born. Probably not much older than 20, he grew up with personal computers, the internet and social media. More likely than not, he also grew up with a different attitude than mine to a university education. In that remote past, long before the digital revolution, I was a bookish young man studying philosophy. As a university subject, philosophy attracts only slightly less scorn than Latin. They’re both derided as useless. Why waste your time with a dead language? Why bother reading dead philosophers?
Yet undergraduate philosophy led me to an important realization. On the big questions of interest to everyone — whether or not we deliberately grapple with them — I had picked up a lot of untested assumptions. The usual complaint levelled against philosophy is that its concerns are remote from everyday experience. But as I grappled with the big questions raised by the philosophers of the past, I began to understand how they thought and felt about life. All philosophy emerges from particular societies with their particular ways of understanding how the world works. Their theories on ethics and human nature, selfhood and community, the characteristics of knowledge, and the limits of our reason, among other conundrums, sparked debates among my classmates, and sharpened my own rethinking about the conventional “wisdom” that, right or wrong, I took for granted. Like the philosophies of long ago, our current understanding of human nature and how the world works — our latest and best theories — are restricted by the unquestioned assumptions embedded deep in our culture.
I found it challenging to keep up with my undergraduate reading list — even though it represented only a small survey of the works of the major Western philosophers. It was impossible for me to go the whole distance with Plato or any of the other philosophers I read. That would have required years of graduate work, maybe a lifetime. On my own, I managed to keep up with them for a short lap or two. Then guided by a good philosophy professor — and I had many — I could run a few laps more. With each new lap I acquired new questions about our claims to knowledge and the limits of human reason. Philosophy may ultimately be about trying to nail down answers to the big questions, which it has obviously failed at or philosophers wouldn’t still be publishing many books every year. But its personal importance was to make me aware of which questions are well worth asking. It was about understanding the terms of the philosophical debates.
Needless to say, I didn’t go on to earn my living as a philosopher. Clearly that isn’t the answer to my development officer’s question about why I donate a modest sum to my alma mater’s philosophy department every year. The answer is that it’s thanks to the original and inspired thinkers of the past that I learned to ask the questions that revealed some surprising fault lines in my most cherished assumptions about myself and others and about my world. Studying philosophy both ancient and modern is less about finding definitive answers than it is about opening up a more direct path to a better understanding of ourselves and our society. It was about sharpening the questions I had always asked myself and adding a few more that were even better — questions that have shaped my life.
My undergraduate education in philosophy is like a melody played in the bass notes. Sometimes it plays only faintly, as it did throughout the decades of earning a living and raising a family. Day-to-day challenges insist on being met. They can seem to drown out the tune. As I approach retirement age, I have more time on my hands for quiet reflection and doing philosophy — especially in these days of social distancing.
After our conversation, the development officer sent me a booklet to help me organize my “final affairs.” The short answer I gave him was that I’d like the philosophy department of my alma mater to keep offering the young and curious the opportunity for philosophical debate such as I had those many years ago. That’s the genuine and final good — at the risk of sounding too philosophical — that I hope will carry on after I’m gone.
One of the philosophy courses I took was on the aesthetics of music. Useless maybe — but also part of a happy and lasting inquiry. 
