When Philosophy Tears You a New One

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Pretend it’s the 1940s or 50s and tennis is never on TV where you live. You absolutely love playing tennis—and you’re better than anyone you can find to play you. Sure, you lose some games and even sets, but you haven’t lost a match in ages. This goes on throughout high school and college. You love tennis, and it seems that it loves you back.

Then you get to play a pro—and they destroy you. Not only do you lose the match, and every set, but you don’t even win one game. The first two sets are 6-0, 6-0 and then the pro leaves, since you’re obviously not anywhere near being in his or her league.

You might have either of two reactions to this extraordinary experience. Each is totally understandable and neither is the “right” one.

First, you might feel utterly humiliated and think that tennis—at that pro level—is definitely not for you. You turn away from tennis. It’s easy to imagine reacting this way. Call it the Rejection Reaction.

On the alternative way to react, you don’t turn away from tennis. Instead, your passion for it only increases—wildly. You think to yourself “Holy shit. That’s what real tennis is. Oh my God, I’ve got to experience that. I have to become that.” You implicitly realize that as rewarding as tennis has been for you, it can be so much more fulfilling if you can play at that pro level. You now thirst for it. That’s the Excited Reaction.

A similar thing happens in philosophy. I don’t know any philosopher who hasn’t had a humbling experience analogous to the one described above.

You start out with all sorts of philosophical ideas. You have your reasons and arguments in favor of them—and you are convinced that at least some of those arguments are simply excellent. Then you get your views & arguments thoroughly evaluated by a seasoned pro and everything falls apart. Not only are those “excellent” arguments revealed to be obviously inadequate to support your view, your view itself is only borderline coherent. It’s actually a mishmash of incomplete idea fragments—so incomplete that it’s not even possible to figure out if your view is true. There’s no there there to evaluate.

This humbling experience might occur all at once or over multiple sessions, perhaps with different interlocuters. For me, it was the latter.

I have seen students have the Rejection Reaction. They sometimes go away with anger towards philosophy, or at least professional philosophy. You can see the bitterness there. Or, they don’t have any bitterness or anger but just go away from philosophy because, well, who wants humiliation or feelings of inadequacy? No thank you!

Other students have the Excited Reaction. That’s what happened to me. Yes, it was sort of humiliating to have my ideas revealed to be shit. But that feeling of humiliation was completely outshined by the brilliance of the realization that there is a way of doing philosophy that is far, far better than what I had been doing. And not only could I see that it was better, I saw that it would be a lot more fulfilling.

Make no mistake: this experience really is humiliating. I’m not exaggerating here. That’s why I like my tennis analogy: it’s easy to see how humiliating that experience could be. In the case of philosophy, I can still picture in my mind the expressions on the professor’s face as he patiently questioned my views—questions that even I could see showed that my views & reasons were shit. Thank God the teachers didn’t hold back the questions. If you’re the type of person who is going to have the Excited Reaction, the worse thing in the world is when the pro tries to spare your feelings.

Like I already said, there’s nothing wrong with the Rejection Reaction. In fact, it’s the one all of us take most of the time. We realize that we don’t have the talent or drive to become tennis players, writers, singers, photographers, influencers, entrepreneurs, and so on. Frankly, all of us suck at most things. Be thankful if you’re really good at even one thing!

It seems to me that these exercises in humiliation continue for years, even after one becomes a pro. That’s obvious in the case of sports. For instance, there were many excellent pro golfers in the early 2000s who saw young Tiger Woods play and realized that they were mere amateurs in comparison. Woods was showing them that there was another, higher, level of performance.

Some golfers took the Excited Reaction route. They doubled their training and analysis. They moved into a higher gear, in response to Tiger’s demonstration. Other golfers did not.

I know it’s depressing to think about, but I’ve noticed some philosophy professors go down something like the Rejection Reaction route in response to encountering superior philosophy. To be sure, it’s subtle. But they end up trying to discount the philosophizing that shows that their ideas aren’t very good. “Oh, the solution to that is just …” they say.

I suppose that in some sense this is the psychologically healthy response. Seriously, how healthy is it to just shrug off humiliation after humiliation after humiliation? You gotta be pretty obsessed to repeatedly shrug it off and try to up your game, so many times.