The value of philosophy

That was a crowded, exceptional, enlightening day. 

Picked up the first of our two visiting faculty candidates at the airport, in from Portland ME, and proceeded to crawl the first half of the way to campus in what I honestly assured him was an atypically-congested commute on I-24. Honestly atypical, I mean, in that direction at that hour. I don't know how drivers coming into the city and out again tolerate that volume of traffic, morning after morning and night after night. 

But the slower pace gave us plenty of time for quality conversation en route, which later continued in the office after he commenced his series of interviews with my colleagues, and then at lunch at the Boulevard. (Still recommend the Reuben, btw.) 

Mid-pm we and a small gathering of engaged students ambled over to Peck Hall to hear his take on "the value of philosophy," which he rightly said is demonstrated by the superior richness and probity of conversation it engenders in most devotees. 

Then to a pleasant dinner at Primrose Place, which demonstrated to him (he remarked on our drive to his hotel) that our crew seems compatible and  "cohesive"... a judgment it sometimes takes an outsider to observe. 

And then the less pleasant drive back to Nashville in pouring pooling gusting sheets of rain. When I finally pulled in under the carport I recalled something else he said during his "value" talk, that we all have an intrinsic and inchoate regard for the value of home, of place. Just as Wendell Berry says, as we'll explore next Fall in Environmental Ethics.

The whole exercise will be repeated next week with candidate #2. Sadly, for the sorrowful reason indicated below, I'll have to miss it. So I hope someone will ask about Bertrand Russell's take on the value of philosophy.

The philosophic mind, said Lord Russell, 

will view its purposes and desires as parts of the whole...Thus contemplation enlarges not only the objects of our thoughts, but also the objects of our actions and our affections: it makes us citizens of the universe, not only of one walled city at war with all the rest. In this citizenship of the universe consists man's true freedom, and his liberation from the thraldom of narrow hopes and fears.

Thus, to sum up our discussion of the value of philosophy; Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.

Thinking of oneself as a citizen of the universe, a true cosmopolitan, is (I've once again witnessed first-hand) one of the genuine consolations of philosophy -- particularly in times of personal loss and grief at the passing of a beloved fellow citizen. That value is priceless.