Why Not Just Weigh the Fish?

Morale these days has fallen pretty low along the corridors of philosophy departments. From one side, we get the mockery of the scientists. Freeman Dyson calls philosophy today “a toothless relic of past glories.” According to Neil deGrasse Tyson, majoring in philosophy “can really mess you up.” Stephen Hawking declares that “philosophy is dead.” From another side, we have to cope with the apostasy of our own leading figures. John Searle describes the field as being in “terrible shape.” Peter Unger says that philosophers are “under the impression that they’re saying something new and interesting about how it is about the world, when in fact this is all an illusion.” What’s going on? Has philosophy gone horribly amiss? Or are there broader cultural factors at work, perhaps something to do with a general decline in respect for the humanities?

Philosophers have always been the subject of ridicule, both from within and without. René Descartes thought the entire discipline — up until his arrival, at least — had failed to make any important progress. A century later, David Hume wanted to take most of what philosophers had written and “commit it to the flames.” Such scorn goes all the way back to the origins of the subject. Thales, who many consider the first Western philosopher, was reputed to have been so distracted while out on his evening walk that he once fell into a well. Falling to the bottom of a well is presumably no laughing matter, even when it happens to a philosopher. But the Thracian servant girl who discovered him is said to have reacted not with concern but scorn; she ridiculed him for being so oblivious.
Thales, as it happens, was a founding figure not just for philosophy but also for science. Indeed, the usual reason given for his fall is not that he was ogling the girl (as some readers today might suspect of a philosopher) but that he was studying the stars.

For the next 2,000 years, the sciences were assumed to be a part of philosophy — indeed, what the philosopher mainly did was to pursue science. And that is precisely what they were mocked for: always pursuing and never attaining. Pietro Pomponazzi, a Renaissance philosopher, cautioned his students that their field would be the greatest of careers but for two things. One, of course, was that philosophy did not pay. The other was that it constantly failed to achieve results, and so rather than being a serious discipline, it was more like “playing with toys.” Several centuries later, Charles II is said to have himself toyed with the philosophers, asking them to explain why a fish weighs more after it has died. Upon receiving various ingenious answers, he pointed out that in fact a dead fish does not weigh anything more.

So it has always been. The essence of philosophy is abstract reasoning – not because the philosopher is too lazy to attempt a more hands-on approach, but because the subjects at issue do not readily submit to it. If we could simply weigh the fish, we gladly would. In recent centuries, philosophers in fact have discovered how to weigh that allegorical fish, in various fields, and on each occasion a new discipline has been born: physics in the 17th century; chemistry in the 18th; biology in the 19^th and psychology in the 20th. The scientists, short on history but flush with their government grants and Nobel Prizes, cast an eye back on what remains of philosophy and skeptically ask: Why don’t you stop wasting your time and just weigh that fish?

It’s a question philosophers ask themselves all the time, and sometimes they despair. The remaining problems of philosophy today concern issues like justice, morality, free will, knowledge and the origins of the universe. In dismissing philosophy as an antiquated relic of our prescientific past, the scientist is making a very large and dubious assumption: that the abstract methods of philosophy, despite the discipline’s string of successes over recent centuries, have nothing more to contribute to our developing understanding of the world. Perhaps scientists think they already have the answers to all these philosophical questions. Maybe, but if so they certainly keep them well hidden. Or perhaps they judge these remaining questions to be simply unanswerable. Possibly they are, but it seems wildly premature to give up hope.

Giving up means more, however, than foreclosing the possibility of new, unthought-of sciences. Philosophy today continues to rest, albeit somewhat precariously, at the center of human inquiry, continuous at one end with the sciences to which it gave rise, and at the other end with history and literature. Professional philosophers tend to crowd around the scientific end of that spectrum, busily looking for new ways to weigh their fish. But much of what gives philosophy its continuing fascination is its connection with the humanities. To weigh the fish is doubtless desirable, but there is just as much to be learned in understanding where that fish came from, and in telling stories about where it might go.

If even philosophy is dismissed as a waste of time for being insufficiently scientific, where does that leave those other modes of humanistic inquiry? Reading Plato or Chekhov may not stop the planet from warming or cure a disease – or help build more accurate missiles – and it may not point the way toward a new science of ethics or will. Yet what of it? Does such inquiry not have a value of its own? That is of course itself a philosophical question.

Robert Pasnau is a professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the Isaiah Berlin visiting professor in the history of ideas at Oxford University.