A note on the insincerity of philosophers

Modern philosophy smacks of insincerity because it denies experience the depth which its proponents take for granted.

Postmodernism is, in part, a reaction to the metaphysical deficiencies in philosophy which we’ve been stuck with at least since Kant, and no doubt longer in one way or another. The modernist contention is we cannot know things (not even ourselves) directly – all experience is mediated by representation.

The reason I find myself more sympathetic to the posts than the moderns is the Kantian approach puts appearance and reality on a par, so we can only know the necessary preconditions of appearance, or mathematical truths, or abstract moral principles - because these are things which have no appearance, or are not based on appearance.

This makes our experience of the world highly insubstantial and elevates the most insubstantial of things (such as triangles) to the status of the most concrete knowledge. This alienates us from the world in which we live, distancing us from our lives as if we were watching ourselves on the screen in a cinema, a screen where suspended disbelief removes the barrier between fantasy and reality.

Ultimately, it locks us firmly in our heads and makes the world around us neither myth nor reality – instead of beating radical solipsism, modern philosophy has embraced and entrenched it, isolating the subject in a realm of appearance.

Personally, I feel that our engagement with the world is much deeper than a number of philosophers would have me believe. I also think that much modern philosophy, insofar as it implies solipsism, is deeply insincere: nobody acts as if their world is mere appearance, so to talk as if it is, or to build philosophical theories to get around this problem, more-or-less amounts to denying that the depth of experience is something which needs to be explained.

Whoever said self-publication discourages quality writing? Meh, this was rubbish. I can rescue a point though: as any newspaper knows, regularity of publishing is sometimes more important than quality (hence silly season instead of the journalists going on holiday along with the politicians and public).