The garden of philosophy

Philosophers disagree on almost everything and there is no hard core of philosophical thinking. That was my conclusion last week. However, lack of consensus is one thing, lack of progress is something else. As Chalmers states in his paper quoted last week (p. 9): “Despite this lack of convergence, it is hard to deny that the insights of Plato and Aristotle, Hume and Kant, Frege and Russell, Kripke and Lewis have involved significant philosophical progress.” Now I can examine what this progress involves, but I think that the result will be anyway that there is no progress comparable with the progress made in hard sciences like physics, chemistry and biology. But is the comparison right?

***

Once upon a time there was a field behind my house. It gave me plenty of space for sitting in the sun and reading a book, but it was empty. Or so it seemed to me, for actually it was full of weeds and the insects, butterflies and birds loved it, and the mice and voles liked it, too. However, it didn’t satisfy my mind and I wanted to change it. So I bought a spade, and bags of seed and some little trees and fertilizer as well. I made a design and I started to dig and to sow, and I planted the trees, and I built also a pond. I looked how others made their gardens, and I copied them or let myself inspire by their ideas. After a few years I had a beautiful garden with a good structure and every plant had its place and everything fitted together in a harmonious way. The insects and butterflies and birds loved my garden even more than before and the mice and the voles loved it, too, as did the frogs attracted by the pond and the slugs attracted by the sappy plants. They all were very satisfied with my garden, but I wasn’t. Or rather, I thought that it wasn’t bad but it could be better, for everything that is good can be improved, and so I thought “Let’s make things better”. I restructured my garden, I removed plants and I replaced them by even more beautiful plants. I replaced the trees by yet more beautiful trees that even better fitted my garden. After some time I saw that it had really improved and that I had made a lot of progress in gardening as well. I had got a lot of knowledge how to make a garden and everybody praised my expertise. And the insects, butterflies, birds, mice and voles and also the frogs and slugs praised me by their deeds, for they came in increasingly bigger quantities to my garden and they were even more pleased with this piece of land than before.

However, better is not good enough, and although I thought that my garden was not bad and that it was even better than before, I got the idea that here a plant should be removed, there one had to be replaced; elsewhere a plant had to added, and I saw also that the structure of the paths had to be changed yet a bit. Of course, some time was spent on weeding, too. Again everyone praised my expertise and insight and the garden became better and better. And also the wild life in my garden thought so and it came there in still bigger quantities.

But each person becomes older, and after many years I sold my garden and I started to philosophize, since it takes less effort. I sold also my house and moved to the other side of the street and I saw how the new owner of the garden found it a good place for taking a sunbath and for reading. However, although he wasn’t really dissatisfied with the garden, he saw some weak points in it, and since good is not good enough, he thought “let’s make things better” and so he did and cleared the garden, built it up anew and he liked it, at least for some time, and everybody else who saw it liked it as well. The animals in the garden loved it even more than mine, or at least most of them did. But since better is not good enough ...

***

Once I wrote a blog about the relation between gardening and philosophizing. Philosophizing can be seen, I said there, as weeding the thoughts that you have developed till you have an ordered whole. It is sowing and planting the ideas in your head and structuring them in the right way. If the result is not satisfactory in some way, you try to improve it, even when others say that what you did is beautiful. But most of us – the gardeners – don’t breed the plants and seed ourselves but we leave it to specialists. And so the quality of our plants improves and they become more beautiful and they fit better our soil and they are less vulnerable to pests and weeds, and we call it plant improvement. But they who improve the plants don’t put them in a garden. That’s what the gardeners do. We the gardeners give each plant its place and puts it in the structure of the garden so that it comes out best and fits in the whole. If we are not satisfied with what we made, we try to do it better, till we become old and leave the job to young gardeners. I think that this is what philosophers do and what philosophizing involves. Philosophizing is cultivating the fields left and ignored by the branches of science and giving everything it’s meaningful place – a place that gives sense to those who see it. As long as we are pleased with it, we think that we have made things better. But people come and people go and everyone his mind, for better is not good enough.