Philosophy Isn’t the Answer You're Looking For

But it Contains the Tools We Need to Find it

Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash

What good is philosophy? What problems does it solve?

Lately, I have been struggling a lot with the question of the value of philosophy. When you do an internet search for how philosophy can help your life, the typical answers are things like finding inner peace, being more successful, or understanding myself more.

However, none of these, or similar answers, was the reason that I fell in love with philosophy. I fell in love with philosophy because of how it changed the way that I saw the world around me and made it more interesting. In fact, philosophy has not solved many of the problems in my life but added to them, making me see issues that I was not aware of before.

The issue with thinking about the value of philosophy is that philosophy does not solve a problem in the same way that investing, exercise, or parenting tips do. In the above cases, people have often done/used some philosophy to get a solution to the problem but are not sharing with you the philosophy but rather the conclusion that philosophy helped them produce.

We can think of these different views of philosophy as being the difference between a more academic philosophy (e.g. the philosophy taught in universities) and practical philosophy (e.g. magazine articles or social commentary pieces).

Here, I want to explore this difference in more detail, that is, the difference between philosophy as the answer and philosophy as a tool. I will first go over how philosophy is usually thought of outside of academia and then contrast it with a use of philosophy that is more in line with value seen in philosophy from an academic perspective.

Philosophy as an Answer

When we think of philosophy as the answer, we treat it like many other disciplines. For example, if I want to build a house, I might study structural engineering and learn about how to build a house that won’t fall down on top of me. I might learn how to properly construct a load-bearing wall, laying a proper foundation, and ways to ensure the structure can survive earthquakes or strong winds.

When we use this approach for philosophy, we might come to philosophy when we have a question about our lives, approaching how we build a better life the same way that we approach building a better house. We want a set of instructions to follow that will guarantee a better life at the end of it.

For example, I might discover, through philosophy, that the meaning of life was to just be happy with what I have. Instead of chasing fame and fortune, I need to appreciate the value of simplicity and a few meaningful relationships. I would then declare that philosophy gave me the answer to life and share my story on social media.

However, consider the following. There are philosophies that argue for every kind of lifestyle you can imagine. Want to live a life of fame and fortune chasing down every physical pleasure? Then read hedonist philosophy. Want to forsake all earthly pleasures and shed even the concept of your own personhood? Then read Vedic and Buddhist philosophy.

The problem is that if there is a ‘philosophy’ that argues for every kind of lifestyle, how can we say that philosophy helped me find the answer to my life?

If anything, philosophy gives me a wide range of possible answers to choose from. Thus, what really gives me the answer to my life is me, when I pick one of them — perhaps because it resonates with me the most.

In the end, it is the conclusion that I reached, not philosophy. I have simply claimed that philosophy gave it to me. But this is to mistake means for ends. I certainly used philosophy to arrive at my answer. However, saying that philosophy taught me to be a hedonist is like saying that a road necessarily leads you to Rome.

It is this distinction, separating the philosophical method from any answers or solutions that it may produce, that I want to draw attention to here. This is mainly because, as both academic and popular philosophy shows, philosophy is able to produce a wide range of conflicting answers.

Just as philosophy might help me realize I should be content with my life, it can also help me understand how deeply flawed current society is and how being content with my life is only giving in to issues rather than addressing them. It all depends on how I use the tools that philosophy gives me.

Philosophy as a Tool

Thinking about philosophy as a tool, on the other hand, approaches philosophy as a basic set of practices that often get overlooked with discussions of how to solve a problem. Philosophy reminds us that even the most basic things can be questioned, analyzed, and critiqued and that getting these basics down is what is going to lead to more macro-level success.

In other words, think of philosophy as a hammer (a literal tool) we can use to drive in a nail, not a manual about how to build a house. When trying to solve life’s problems, we often don’t think about the meaning of happiness, who we are, or even the nature of existential problems. We take it for granted that you know what I mean when I say that the problem with my life is that I do not feel happy.

So why care about philosophy then? If philosophy is a tool, then what good is it? After all, you are going to have to do a lot more work to get the answers that you want such as studying other fields. The answer is that you can’t build a house without driving in a lot of nails. In fact, everything depends on your ability to drive in nails.

When I was younger, I thought I knew how to use a hammer. However, I was proven wrong when I spent a summer working on a construction site. When you only have to drive in a few nails every few months, you are not really worried about your technique. However, when you have to drive in a few hundred nails a day, you care a lot. In fact, you drive in so many nails that you construct a better hammer, a nail gun, to do it faster, longer, and better.

Philosophy is the same in our intellectual lives. It is that which all others are dependent on. In more academic language, philosophy is necessary for finding true answers but not sufficient. Philosophy helps us ensure that before we even ask the question, that we know all the details that question contains.

For example, what expectations we have or what kind of answer we want. In other words, before we start trying to build a house, we need to make sure we know how to drive in a nail. Knowing how to drive in a nail does not tell us how to build a house, but we can’t build a house without driving in a nail.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I challenge you to think of philosophy as a tool to help you solve your life problems rather than as the answer to your life’s problems. This approach is not only more in line with what philosophers see philosophy as but will also lead to a more satisfactory solution.

It's not bad to read about how to improve your life, it’s just not philosophy. In fact, I would say we need to read wide and deep in order to face the challenges of life head on. However, philosophy has a specific role to play in our intellectual lives. When philosophy plays the role it is intended to do, we get the most out of it.

If you simply copy a philosophical school — for example, stoicism, it is by definition anti-philosophical. Philosophy is about critical engagement with the world around us and trying to be just like Kant, the Stoics, or Nietzsche flies in the face of everything those people stood for.

Even asking the question, “what kind of problems does philosophy solve?” gets a major assumption wrong about philosophy. True philosophy is being critical and engaging with the questions of our life not just the answers.