Today, you can learn much more about phenomenology than I could tell you by checking with Encyclopædia Britannica. EB describes the genre as “a 20th-century philosophical movement, the primary objective of which is the direct investigation and description of phenomena as consciously experienced, without theories about their causal explanation and as free as possible from unexamined preconceptions and presuppositions.”

Intuitively, I like the ring of that. Sounds right down to earth, phenomenology does. Understands, it would appear, that there is that pesky brain interlocking and interceding and intervening and interfering with our understanding of phenomena. Or at least I suppose the phenomenologist first posits a brain before she or he posits a consciousness, although I don’t really know that. It’s probably much over my head and beyond my ken. In fact, our graduate school friend told me as much one day when I sought to question him about what he was an expert in—said it was much too complicated to try to explain. At that point his wife hurried to agree that this was the case. So that’s where we left it.

The taste of that conversation has endured all these years, and it is a bad taste. From that point forward, I’ve been skeptical of philosophy and philosophers. Not to the extent that Edward Abbey, the author of The Monkey Wrench Gang, was. Abbey intended to be a professor of philosopher but two weeks of wrestling with symbolic logic in graduate school at Yale ended those hopes. He would later write a friend, “When I hear the word ‘phenomenology,’ I reach for my revolver.”

I’ve gone a different route. I seldom spot a book on philosophy that I don’t open. Often, I acquire the book for our online bookstore after thumbing through it and reading for a while. Not infrequently I get a perverse pleasure out of seeing how quickly the philosophical mind can induce numbness in my own. For example, the other day I spotted a copy of the late Jean E. Hampton’s The Authority of Reason. Dr. Hampton set a new record. She required only 25 words to do me in. “Although this book seeks to show that the naturalists are wrong to criticize the normativity in moral theory, nonetheless in Part I, I shall be…” she wrote. That did it. If you want to know what happened in Part I, you’ll have to buy her book. I was already moving on.

On as it turned out to W.B. Macomber’s The Anatomy of Disillusion; Martin Heidegger’s Notion of Truth. This time, unwilling to again risk the onset of numbness so quickly, instead of starting at the front of the book, I went to the back. And found myself reading about Nietzsche, not Heidegger. Macomber, himself a philosopher, has a nice style. I suspect I could have a conversation with him about phenomenology and not come away thinking I’m mentally deficient. He explained, for example, that Nietzsche prescribed not partial nihilism but “complete nihilism” as needed to purge Western society of the damage done to it by its history. “There is no curing cancer with Noxema,” writes Macomber. Now, I strongly suspect that this is one of the few instances in the history of philosophical writing that the word “Noxema” has appeared in a scholarly work, and perhaps the only time. And I just find that phenomenological!

What I’ve concluded after all these years and all these brief encounters with philosophical prose is that philosophers are actually incomplete or failed novelists. They can plot but they can’t entertain. They can write dialogue but only if it is themselves they are engaging in conversation. It is only once in a blue moon that any of the lot says anything of importance, and it is usually a century or two before anyone can look at history and tell how much damage the idea did.

Harboring such thoughts, you can imagine my glee at picking up the October 16 issue of Newsweek at the doctor’s office and finding a young Indiana philosopher trying to explain his career choice in an article plaintively titled, “I Think, Therefore I Am Misunderstood.”

Young Erik Wielenberg was disarmingly straightforward about what he does for a living: “What I do, in a nutshell, is this: I find a question or puzzle that interests me. I try to figure out a solution, usually reading what others have had to say about it along the way. If I come up with anything good, I write it down and see if anyone is interested in publishing it.”

Well, now. If that’s what a professional philosopher does, maybe I have something in common with such dudes after all. I’d like to think that someone such as I who is attentive to how the mind influences what questions or puzzles a philosopher chooses to work on, who he reads after once he’s selected one and how he goes about explaining what he thinks about it all is himself raising very important philosophical issues.

In fact, just the other day I was reading Abraham Kaplan’s The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodology for Behavioral Science, and realized that he certainly understood that kinds of minds—and the choices they make—are all important to the philosophical inquiry. One type of philosopher, he argues, will look at a statement and ask, “What would the world be like if it were true?” A philosopher with another cast of mind will ask, “What would we have had to do to come to believe it?” Yet another will ask, “What would we do if we did believe it?”

All of which makes one of young Wielenberg’s closing observations make a great deal of sense. “Philosophy,” he said, “is an inefficient activity: much of it is useless.”

The saving grace is that there’s always another philosopher around to try and help make it less useless than it would otherwise be. You may find this hard to believe but I swear on the writings of Socrates that it’s true. A few moments after reading, with considerable puzzlement except for the Noxema thing, W.B. Macomber’s comments about Nietzsche and nihilism, I came across a book called What Nietzsche Really Said. I bought it in a heartbeat. Now, if only I had young Wielenberg to tell me what it means. It is, in finality, this endless circularity that both makes philosophy and philosophers attractive and repulsive to me.

There are many reasons to read philosophy, and one very good one not to bother reading very much of it. The anti-reason is that if you sample the writings of philosophers to any extent at all, especially from the past 300 or 400 years, you can’t help but suspect that knowledge among philosophers is simply getting broader, not deeper.

Read about the author of The Monkey Wrench Gang here: “Where have you gone, Edward Abbey?”

Order Jean Hampton’s book here: “The Authority of Reason”

Order W.B. Macomber’s book here: “The Anatomy of Disillusion: Martin Heidegger’s Notion of Truth ”

Order Abraham Kaplan’s book here: “ The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodology for Behavioral Science ”

Order Robert C. Solomon’s and Kathleen M. Higgins’ book here: “ What Nietzsche Really Said ”

Read Erik Wielenberg’s Newsweek article (you’ll need to register): “ I Think, Therefore I Am Misunderstood ”

This has always been the question. Every advance in tool capability and efficiency has resulted because someone either imagined another way to do or explain something, or else simply stumbled onto it. The same is to be said for progress in religious thought. And in philosophy. And medicine. And all else.

At the biological level, if it has been a way better suited to delivering a result more useful or powerful or adaptive to general circumstances, or often to very specific circumstances, then the result has not infrequently been a reordering or a reconstitution of the biological pecking order or the biological mechanics.

Adroit handling of the question—is there another way to explain or do this?—seems not to come naturally to us humans. It is, for most of us, an acquired taste at best. What we think of the question, if we think of it at all, is most often a consequence of whether we were born to parents who were products of a culture that welcomed the question. Most cultures, and most parents, have not encouraged the question. So unless you found yourself living in a democracy, there has usually been a risk at asking the question. And even in a democracy as formally devoted to the idea that it is always permissible to ask “Is there another way to explain or do this?” as the United States of America, it can be sometimes dangerous to ask the question. It was pervasively so during the Civil War years, during the McCarthy Era, during the reign of Jim Crow in the South and can still be, to a disturbing extent, so in today’s obsessed-with-terrorism political environment.

We have spent years at Brain Technologies developing and perfecting, often assisted by the trenchant and imaginative work of others, ways to forecast how a given brain may handle the question.

Generally, or so it is our experience, the brain will react in one of four ways:

1) In most circumstances, it will reject the idea that there is anything to be gained in asking the question. Thus it will defend, sometimes to the death or to others’ dying, the explanations it already has.

2) It will accept the idea that the question is a good one, but typically be indiscriminate in seeking, judging and acting on answers to the question. The first answer that happens by that seems to work is, for this category of brain functioning, accepted and acted on, whatever the outcomes.

3) It will see the creation of hypotheses and the investigation of them as “end all and be all” of the process. So that the challenge becomes understanding a set of answers in great detail but not necessarily the efficient and imaginative use of any of them.

4) It will automatically assume that there is an infinite variety of ways to explain almost anything and will work to experience as many varieties of ways as possible, giving precedence to the newest and most novel.

Of course, the human brain being what it is, most any healthy and especially fully formed (adults over 30, for the most part) brain can and does move between these four approaches if coached, encouraged and provided with a safe haven for doing so. However, such safe havens, such encouragement and such coaching are in extremely short supply. It is so today, and it has always been so.

This is one way to explain why the world has recently been treated to the 9/11 tragedy, the Iraqi tragedy, the Lebanon tragedy and the Katrina tragedy, and if the trail of bad policies and decisions continues up the mountain of disastrous consequences why the world may soon be treated to the Iranian tragedy, the Israeli tragedy, the Islamic tragedy, the North Korean tragedy and ultimately, perhaps, the American tragedy.

So nothing approaches in importance how human brains handle the question, “Is there another way to explain or do this?” At this stage in our development as a species, handling the question well and effectively and with political astuteness requires unusual pluck, luck and maturity. It is a most intriguing reality that while our species often seems to take three steps backwards for every half-step forward, we do seem to be making some progress in handling the question.

Now explaining the reasons for that has come close to antiquating virtually all foundations of religion and philosophy. Nor are suitable answers in immediate prospect. It may first be necessary to have some good explanations for such questions as what is the world made of (we still don’t know) and what happened before anything happened (we don’t have a clue) and is there conceivably any point or place or combination of circumstances in the universe when it will cease to make sense to ask the question, “Is there another way to explain or do this?”

Stay tuned as long and as healthily as you can. It has really begun to get interesting in these recent times.

I’ll admit that this notion is off-putting to more than a few philosophers, most notably those who seem to think, or so it appears to me, that philosophical and ethical truths are “out there,” and that it is the philosopher’s task to sniff them out, sort them out and then weigh the merits of it all, not to get caught up in the messy task of explaining how they have evolved and are evolving.

British philosopher Charlie Broad comes to mind. He was of the opinion that what goes around “out there” eventually comes around. He once wrote, “[We] can amuse ourselves, if our tastes lie in that direction, by noticing which well-worn fallacy or old familiar inadequacy is characteristic of the latest gospel, and whether it is well or ill-disguised in its new dress.”

Philosophers of such a mind strike me as being more historians of science and philosophy than philosophers. (In fact, the quote above is from a larger Broad quote at the front of Oregon State U. historian of science Paul Farber’s little book, “The Temptation of Evolutionary Ethics.” Just from that title, you can tell that Farber doesn’t have a strong regard for the idea that as human thinking systems evolve, human ethics are also evolving as, in fact, “evolutionary ethics.”)

The whole idea of evolving is to get somewhere. One philosopher who takes a charming approach to this issue is D.Z. Phillips of the University of Wales and Claremont Graduate School. In his book, Philosophy’s Cool Place, Phillips says that he’s spent the whole of his career as a philosopher seeking to get exactly nowhere. He prefers to see philosophy as contemplative, not “destructively creative” in a Joseph Schumpeter sense. He thinks philosophy is on stronger moral footing being contemplative as opposed to, say, competitive. (His book—again, a little one—is quite readable and often instructively amusing. At one point, he tells about the monastic order that, desperate to be known for something noteworthy, said, “Well, at least we’re tops in humility.”).

Personally, though, I’m much more comfortable in the hands (and with the minds) of philosophers like Tufts University’s Daniel Dennett, who just refuses to see idols or icons in much of anything, including views of ethics. In books like his Freedom Evolves, Dennett, an expert on the cognitive sciences, finds the heart of the human story anchored in an ever-evolving drama.

He writes, “[It] has taken thousands of years of communication for us to begin to find the keys to our own identities. It has been only a few hundred years that we’ve known that we are mammals, and only a few decades that we’ve understand in considerable detail how we have evolved, along with all other living things, from those simple beginnings [perhaps four billion years ago, when the first simple life-forms emerged].”

Dennis argues that it is human culture, exercising choices, that has made possible the evolution of cooperation and ethical norms of free will and freedom itself. It is an ongoing process, he says.

“My aim,” he says in the closing pages of Freedom Evolves, “has been to demonstrate that if we accept Darwin’s ‘strange inversion of reasoning’ we can build all the way up to the best and deepest human thought on questions of morality and meaning, ethics and freedom. Far from being an enemy of these traditional explorations, the evolutionary perspective is an indispensable ally. I have not sought to replace the voluminous work in ethics with some Darwinian alternative but rather to place that work on the foundation it deserves: a realistic, naturalistic, potentially unified vision of our place in nature….We are in the best position to decide what to do next, because we have the broadest knowledge and hence the best perspective [because we are the planet’s nervous system] on the future. What that future holds in store for our planet is up to all of us, reasoning together.”

May that vision, in the best sense of both words, continue to evolve, along with our ethics.

The three books mentioned above can be ordered here: “The Temptation of Evolutionary Ethics”. “Philosophy’s Cool Place”. “Freedom Evolves”