On Purpose

Raising the status of teaching/learning philosophy

I didn’t start writing in earnest until my mid 30s. By then I was a married father of three boys, one of them with severe special needs. I’d plodded my way through the Naval Academy and been off to war in fantastical far off places. I’d crammed a lot of life into a little bit of time. But I hadn’t spent a whole lot of time thinking about it. I thought writing about it would be a productive way to process.

As I wrote, I developed a suspicion that the cost of so much kinetic movement and so little reflection was that I’d really had no idea who I was. Or more specifically what I was about. I felt as though I’d wandered through towering historical events of the early 21st Century as a sort of Forest Gump like character; a mostly empty plot vehicle to tell the story of a time or a place in history. The deepest, most profound observation I could muster is that one can see the sorts of things I did and still find a way to stand for “good” through all of it. Yet I had no recorded idea what good meant.

My essays were a way to build my understanding of that good, and therefore myself, from the bottom up. Like the autistic Temple Grandin describes understanding her world by memorizing enough details of it to fill the database. We both lacked a “big idea” framework to organize things. Hers is due to her disability. Mine to ignorance. But I never really got away from the feeling that even the writing was just another experience without meaning; something to do for stimulation. When I read Agnes Callard’s article on Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities this week, it shook me out of my seasonal writing slumber. The concern front and center again.

The gist of the article is that the main character of Musil’s books, Ulrich and therefore Musil himself, live lives of novel observation, looking at the world in pieces in an attempt to be stimulated by discrete discoveries. They seek not understanding but novelty, untethered to any philosophical framework. Callard believes that the impact Musil’s work had on her was some part of how she chose to pursue philosophy as her field of eventual study. “…what The Man Without Qualities gave me was a vivid and terrifying glimpse of the life of thoughtful observations; Musil was my ghost of Christmas future.”

I felt like she was describing the experience I had on the other end, in reverse. Callard’s description of Musil was more my ghost of Christmas past.

They don’t teach philosophy at Annapolis. There is no philosophy major. Somehow there is at West Point and Air Force, but not at Navy where I went. There were also no philosophy requirements for the MBA I completed in between deployments to Iraq. I was given nearly endless scenarios in both undergrad and graduate coursework designed to test my business acumen, problem solving or ethical character. But the tools in the tool box that I had were limited; a cocktail of honor, courage, commitment, data and financials. But what was missing was a fundamental framework built around the shape of the mental processes. Or as what Callard says of the study of philosophy, “a safe space for the unfettered operation of mind.”

When given the metaphorical scenario of my metaphorical unit coming upon the metaphorical shepherd boy outside the metaphorical targeted location and given the choice between eliminating the child or putting the unit at risk of giving away our position, my answer was always the same. I’m not killing any kids. And I’m not doing a job where I have to. I’m not killing baby Hitler either…my reasoning…I don’t kill kids.

As strong a foundational justification as that sounds, anchored in principle, it’s also the sort of answer that gets you killed by your own men when invariably you come across a situation where you can’t articulate why you are going to put them at risk to ensure you don’t harm innocent people who are not them.

It's hard to imagine a collective understanding of something like Kant’s Categorical Imperative wouldn’t have benefitted me. Moreover, nearly everything I do today as a tech professional, a father, a husband or what I did as a special operations unit commander in the past would benefit from a deeper understanding of philosophical framework. Something about a life without being able to explain itself beyond discreetly felt emotion has driven me to try to find it through hundreds of thousands of written words. And I still didn’t get there. The block of philosophical ignorance is real. Yet, a man seeking philosophy is different than a man without it. I’m not doomed to a life of torturous churn. There’s still time…

Not surprisingly, the AI driven large language models are remarkably good at applying the philosophical frameworks to most things that can be put into text. I’m not sure exactly how the academic world feels about that but I suspect there’s no way to avoid its application from here on out. I asked Claude to tell me what the few hundred essays that I’ve written say about my own philosophical bent. It turns out I am not the man without philosophy Agnes Callard warns of; just the man without the words to describe the philosophies I adhere to. I write repeatedly in the tension between rationalist insistence of truth and Kant’s Universal Law Foundation.

In laymen’s terms, I seek the truth, but I believe there’s things that we just shouldn’t do even if they provide us with marginal gains because of their effect on our humanity. Like I said, I’m not killing any shepherd boys.

There’s a very good chance someone with much more depth than I can correct the machine. I’m just a beginner here after all. But the beginning is the point. And in a world where we’re about to have an exponential explosion in our ability to attain knowledge through the articulation of AI, the status of understanding needs to be elevated. And the cost of a man without philosophy will be higher.