In 2023, Sidra Shahid, Katherine Cassese, and I finished our joint project, Into Philosophy. It was a series of mini-series, with each of us taking the helm of some of them. One of mine was Philosophy as a Way of Life. The idea behind that mini-series was partially to expand the conventional understanding of that tradition unofficially begun by Pierre Hadot so that it included, for instance, anti-colonial work, institutional change in our profession, non-academic community engagement by artists, and outdoor philosophy. At the same time, I wanted to relay some of the more traditional work in the area as expressed through the University of Notre Dame project on philosophy as a way of life during those years including its religious and non-Western dimensions.
The wider context for Philosophy as a Way of Life was Into Philosophy, and its main preoccupation, if I may summarize my interpretation of the joint endeavor, was to thicken philosophical discourse interpersonally so that we conveyed practices of philosophy that involve the whole person and adult relationships. None of us shied away from intellectual rigor, but each of us sought philosophy that is not gimmicky, not exclusively theoretical, and that has its place in reflection on how to live well. Conversation, not theory, was our preferred manner—everyday talk involving challenging ideas.
Now, about eighteen months after Into Philosophy’s conclusion, I take up Philosophy as a Way of Life again on the other side of that project. My goal here is to continue to emphasize the broadening of that tradition to include ordinary and lived dimensions of philosophy. I want to thicken the tradition and make it almost unrecognizable from people extending philosophy into the daily walks of their lives.
Election Year
I am a U.S. citizen. Being in an election year is stressful. There is a constant barrage of policy debates, personal feelings, and dirt-digging conveyed by the news and across social media. It can be hard to find one’s way when one agrees with some aspect of a politician’s platform but not others, even when one vehemently opposes some stance or record of the politician. Moreover, society has many issues involved in it. If being a single-issue voter involves a failure of social imagination, how should I orient my voting? Can philosophy offer me any guidance?
Since its origins in Ionia (now Western Turkey) roughly 2600 years ago, the main thing that has characterized what Pythagoras anachronistically called the “philosophical” tradition is a commitment to reasoning between projected equals rather than oracular authority. I follow Kojin Karatani’s work on isonomy in this view of things. Reasoning projects equality in that it presupposes that both oneself and another have the right to consider things independently and see what makes sense. The equality here is one in what Rancière called “equality of intelligence,” that is, equality in the bare power of mental self-determination to think for oneself if one wills to do so. This equality is projected in that another may not want to think for themselves, but providing justifications for one’s views presumes that the other can make up their own mind if they choose to listen. This also applies to oneself as another. Practicing reasoning projects oneself as autonomous, even if one chooses or backslides into unreasoning behavior.
Oracular authority, by contrast, presumes a form of mental obedience. Even if the oracle does not make sense, one must treat it as authoritative. In so far as the oracular pronouncement is meant to guide action or thought, obeying it means acting as oneself by committing to something that does not make sense to oneself, and this is to contradict being oneself. In other words, oracular authority projects being alienated from ourselves by obeying another. It thus produces heteronomy to philosophy’s autonomy, where autonomy is understood as living by what makes sense to oneself upon reflection. In so far, too, as being interpellated as heteronomous when one could be autonomous prefigures or constitutes domination, then oracular authority leans toward, if not is, domination. In Philip Pettit’s old lingo from the late 1990s, one does not look the oracular speaker “in the eye” and have the right to demand a justification.
Thinking about what philosophy originally involved in its most basic distinctness from oracular social practices roughly 2600 years ago gives me, I think, a guide to how to vote in this election year. It also helps me think about how to be political and philosophical at once when I live in my community and interact with my neighbors.
The Adult Talk Test
This year, I watched both major party conventions—the one in Milwaukee and the other in Chicago—and watched both major party debates—the one for presidential candidates, and the other for the vice-presidential candidates. I have major disagreements with the positions of both parties and with the presidential and vice-presidential candidates from each. Not one party or one candidate for them represents my viewpoints on all issues that are morally important to address. This means that neither party and no candidate sits easily within my conscience. Basically, it sucks to vote right now.
That said, over time, it became clear to me how I should approach the election of my representatives. They should represent me and others and be able, as such, to offer extensive justification in principle that responds to our concerns. Such justification, too, must involve truthfulness or else we can never make headway with reasoning. In other words, the core criterion of their trustworthiness as potential political authorities is whether they are in principle equals through projected reasoning. It struck me that this is an ancient philosophical position appearing in ordinary life today.
However, all four candidates for the parties are not consistently truthful. Like Bernard Williams, I take truthfulness to involve honesty as well as accuracy. On the one hand, all four candidates sometimes dodge questions and do not answer them. However, some of the candidates seem to wish to hold themselves responsible regarding what is or was the case, while others do not seem to care. Perhaps some candidates are more truthful than others, without being fully truthful, and perhaps that should guide me.
But there are practical reasons why politicians can be cagey in the media environment in which U.S. politics occurs. Their speech gets fragmented, cherry-picked, recontextualized, and telegraphed to the point of inanity. Charity of interpretation is rarely the operative form of reproduction when conveying their views across platforms and within quick conversations amid people’s busy days. As a form of preemptive damage control, politicians become adept at anticipating and hemming misinterpretations of their claims, and as a result they are not entirely forthcoming.
So, I conceded that truthfulness still matters but will be abused in existing U.S. democracy. Certainly, degrees of truthfulness matter as do the severity of untruths and withholdings, whether these concern matters fundamental to the practice of democracy as opposed to a particular policy domain or whether they involve the rejection of epistemic norms rather than particular epistemic matters. But what came to matter more to me was conversation, the process whereby one can come to truthfulness and eventually give room for justification. I began to see that conversational ability in a normatively loaded sense should help me orient my views of politicians.
This is how I came to the adult talk test. The adult talk test asks whether a politician could conceivably have an adult conversation with you. If they could, they are serious contenders for a democratic office, and if they could not, they are disqualified from democratic office. Obviously a lot hangs on the “could” and “could not,” as well as on the meaning of “adult conversation.”
Relational and Rational Abilities: Accountability and Wonder
By “adult conversation,” I mean one where the people involved present several mature abilities needed for a reasonable conversation: relatability and rationality. Moreover, these two abilities presuppose two others, accountability and wonder. By “rationality,” I mean the ability to consider the truth, falsity, goodness, badness, rightness, wrongness, beauty, ugliness, etc., of things and to attempt to respond logically to them based on the other things that the person assumes. By “relatability,” I mean the ability to consider the inner lives of others, their striving and emotions, and the world from their points of view. Moreover, this ability involves a concomitant practice of acknowledging one’s own inner life and subjectivity.
Each of these abilities in turn involves accountability. I understand “accountability” to mean the disposition to square up with things that matter and to face others, including being vulnerable enough to be faced by them and to explain the reasoning of one’s world to them. One cannot be rational in the moment if one avoids the truth, falsity, goodness, badness, rightness, wrongness, beauty, ugliness, etc., of things. Moreover, if one typically avoids these things, one’s rationality is flawed. At the same time, one cannot be relatable with others if one fails to consider the inner lives of others, that they have their own view of the world, or if one fails to acknowledge that one also has an inner life and some subjectivity. Accountability shapes the juncture of relatability and rationality by producing the demand for justification. We should be able to provide reasoning about why we live as we do and seek to understand why others live as they do. The process of sharing our justifications in a thoroughly relatable way makes us reasonable.
Wonder is also presupposed in reasonableness. By “wonder,” I mean the mind’s excitement—it’s “positive anxiety“—in considering the possibilities and impossibilities surrounding the sense and the meaning of things about which one is (somewhat) lost. Wonder is not an emotion but a condition of the mind by degrees. According to this post-Kantian tradition, wonder is basic to the mind’s search for understanding and is not simply, as Hume would have it, an emotional upsurge that occasionally occurs. If I minimize my wondering in the presence of others, I minimize my relatability by closing down their otherness. I may also suppress my own inner life and its mysteries and unclarities. If I neglect to wonder about what others believe, I disadvantage my ability to understand their reasoning. If I similarly neglect wondering about my own beliefs, I narrow the extent to which reasoning is a sustained act of consideration in a world of possibilities and impossibilities.
Political capabilities
The adult talk test comes down to whether a politician could have an adult conversation. This means that I have to wonder about what I’ve heard from and seen of them, attempt to give room for their inner life and view of the world, and discern whether they seem disposed to be accountable and capable, when it is reasonably needed, to wonder about themselves and in the presence of others. Is it a high bar for politicians? I don’t know. No, I don’t think so. In any case, it’s a pretty human criterion.
Politicians in a democracy are tasked with getting things done, and that no doubt takes a hell of a lot of cunning and willpower as well as a heck of a lot of trading and dealing. But they are to be our representatives and are subject to basic democratic norms. If they are not relatable or rational, they cannot hold what Hannah Arendt called the “plurality” that is a presumption of democracy today. Nor can they engage in democratic discourse to share common life. If they are not accountable or lack the power of wonder, they foreclose that democracy is the will of the people, not just some people.
My political capability these days is to take the adult talk test around with me. It’s how I have begun to live my life in my nation’s fraught political context and it has, surprisingly, ended up being continuous with aspects of the origins of philosophy. Philosophy can be part of a way of life even during election season.
