Philosophy, Doubt, and Value
Imagine a planet on the far side of the galaxy, one we will never interact with, blocked by the galactic core so we will never see it. What do you hope for this planet? Do you hope that it’s a sterile rock, or do you hope that it hosts life?
I think most readers will join me in hoping that it hosts life. And not just bacterial life, but even better, plants and animals. Not just plants and animals, but even better, intelligent creatures capable of abstract thought and long-term social cooperation, capable of love and art and science and philosophy. That would be an amazing, wonderful, awesome planet!
Earth, for the same reasons, is an amazing, wonderful, and awesome planet. Among the most awesome things about Earth is this: There are moments when certain complex bags of mostly water can pause to contemplate profound and difficult questions about the fundamental nature of things, their position in the universe, the grounds of their values, the limits of their own knowledge. A world in which no one ever did this would be an impoverished world. The ability to ask these questions, to reflect on them in a serious way, is already a cause for pride and celebration, a reason to write and read books, and basis for an important academic discipline. This is so even if we can't find our way to the answers.
Philosophical doubt arises when we've hit and recognized the limits of our philosophical knowledge. Of course we have limits. To ask only questions we can answer is a failure of imagination.
But doubt need not be simple and unstructured. We can wonder constructively. We can consider possibilities, weighing them uncertainly against each other. We can speculate about what might be the case. We can learn something by doing so, about the structure of our ignorance and hopefully also about how things might be. We can try to shed some of our narrowness, our provincialism, and our inherited presuppositions. In exploring our philosophical doubts, we recognize and expand the cognitive horizon of our species.
Exploring the biggest philosophical questions, even when -- no, especially when -- one can’t know the answers, ranks among the most intrinsically valuable human activities.
[image adapted from here]