When are you a philosopher?

Baruch de Spinoza

In his book Es musste etwas besser werden …(It had to get a little better)  – in which Jürgen Habermas is interviewed by Stefan Müller Doohm and Roman Yos – Habermas tells us (p. 14): “I have always suspected myself not to be a ‘real’ philosopher; not one, if you will allow me the cliché, who starts from contemplating one’s own life situation and strives for deep, metaphysically valid insights. I recognized my motives more in Marxism and pragmatism. I consider the desire to make the world a little better or even to help stop the ever-threatening regressions to be an entirely unblemished motive. Therefore, I am quite satisfied with the term ‘philosopher and sociologist’.”
When reading this, I was a bit surprised, for Habermas started his academic career as a philosopher; that is, he wrote his PhD thesis The Absolute and History about the development of the concept of the absolute in Schelling’s work against the background of Heidegger’s Being and Time. Isn’t this a real philosophical theme? Only after having written his thesis, Habermas switched to more sociological themes. Moreover, aren’t Marxism and pragmatism philosophical movements? Or at least, aren’t they also philosophical movements? And thirdly, if you are a philosopher and a sociologist, does the fact that you are also a sociologist make you a less real philosopher? Does it make you an inferior kind of philosopher? Nevertheless, I can understand Habermas’s feeling, since I have a bit the same “problem”, but then the other way round. I studied sociology and later I switched to philosophy and then I wrote my PhD thesis on a philosophical subject (in the field of action theory). Since then, I have written mainly on philosophical subjects (although I must admit that over the years my themes have become more sociological again). So there are reasons to call myself a philosopher. Nevertheless, I hesitate to do so. Why? Actually I am a philosopher and sociologist in the sense explained by Habermas. That’s okay, isn’t it? Then why should I hesitate to apply these designations to myself?
However this may be, I think that Habermas’s words betray a German view on philosophy; a view that he wouldn’t have expressed in this way, if he were an Anglo-Saxon philosopher. In his view, a philosopher – as a philosopher! – should deal with “deeper” ideas; he or she should answer “deeper” questions; so with questions about the Absolute, the Being, the Good, Reason, etc. In this view, questions like what actions are and what makes them different from behaviour (Davidson) are not philosophical; just like questions about the right political system (Spinoza); or what meaningful language is (Dummett); what the distinction of science and non-science is (Carnap); etc.; so, questions that refer to the practice of life, methodological questions, and many more. These are questions especially studied by Anglo-Saxon philosophers. Understand me well, Habermas doesn’t object to them. Also according to him, they make sense. Even more, Habermas studied them, too, and he tried to find answers to these questions. Nevertheless, if I understand well his words quoted above, in his heart Habermas thinks that such questions are not to be studied by a Philosopher as a Philosopher (so a philosopher written with a capital P).
Apart from the question whether Habermas would defend this “German” view on philosophy – and I think that he would not and that, when asked, he would give a much broader view of what philosophy is; but here I am just interpreting the hidden view behind the quotation above – I think that many people have such a “Habermasian” view on philosophy as a vague and woolly activity. As we have seen above, this does not correspond to philosophical practice. But what then does a philosopher do? If you would ask me, I would say: A philosopher studies questions that are not empirical (or theological; but here I want to ignore the question what makes philosophy and theology different). So a philosopher studies all questions that cannot be empirically tested (and that are not theological). Okay, there are also so-called experimental philosophers, but they do not experimentally test philosophical views as such, but they test whether philosophical intuitions and justifications are generally shared. For example, if a philosopher says “This statement is intuitively true”, an experimental philosopher is interested in the question whether this intuition is generally shared and not in the truth of the statement.
Questions like the difference between action and behaviour, or what the right political system is, etc., may not be “deep” questions, but they are relevant for the practice of daily life. For example, whether we interpret a crime as an action or as a piece of behaviour makes whether we send the perpetrator to prison or to a psychiatric hospital. Such an interpretation is, at least for a part, philosophical. In case a practical question cannot be solved by an empirical test, we can try to solve it by thinking it through. And for that we need a philosopher or someone who thinks philosophically.