“Philosophers are not normal people.”

On Saturday I was called by a friend to help his daugher with her homework, or more correct with the rectification of a test in ethics. So I was confronted with this sentence followed by the statement that they (the philosophers) think about things people normally are not concerned with. Hmmmm … I don’t really know why I still have the urge to justify what I am doing (maybe there were just to many attacks about the usefullness). Stupid thing to do and I know I shouldn’t but still … there it is …

I guess that most people know where the word philosophia/philosophos comes from: its made of philo – to love and sophia/ sophos - wisdom/sage. Meaning that those are people who love wisdom or maybe more simple: they like to know stuff. To discover why things are and what they are anyway. Following this description everybody or at least most people would be a philosopher to a more or less degree.

Also, for solving a problem – any kind of problem which concerns human life – you have at first to find out what it is. Let me give you an example with the french philosopher Simone Weil of how this works for real life.

Probably the best example are her works about malheur (I guess balefullness in English would be the most adequate translation) – in my eyes one of the best descriptions of depressions given outside the psychological fields and a purly phenomenological approach to the subject – even the solutions. But let me see what you think: For Weil, malheur is characterized by certain characteristics which manifest themselves in three categories: psychologically, physically and socially. The physical and the psychological part are closely linked, I guess there is no real need for a description: that feelings of sadness and desperation often embody themeslves in headaches, sickness, not being able to breath etc is not really a secret. For Weil nonetheless important, because they make the suffering real. I have to say that I never really understood why people talk of “drowning in desperation” (At least in german its a popular saying). But if you think about it, it is really an accurate picture: The feeling of not being able to breath freely and to lose all grounds from beneath the feet. (From this point of view making oneself hurt might not only be a cry for help – as purly psycological analyses would suggest, but also a way of finding a way back to “real life” through making the body being felt.)

The most important part though is the social part: For Simone Weil people who are struck by malheur “lose” their language, their ability to talk about how they feel. Outsiders on the other hand are not capable to understand these persons anymore. You can normally tell the latter case when people tend to say that there is actually no real reason to feel depressed. Even when this is said out of the ambition to help it still makes everything worse because one is actually being told that one is not capable of dealing with life just as others do. But being plain compassionate (“poor you”) doesn’t seem to help either since it very probably just leads the person deeper into wallowing in self-pity.
So, we can ask with Simone Weil what can one do about it?

If you also remember that for Weil the worst thing for humans is to loose their dignity, then from the outside there is only one thing you can do – to take the other person serious in their suffering – even though one doesn’t understand what’s it all about. And for the person itelself? Simone Weil had the very interesting formulation of “loving into the emptiness” – okay this is her religous interpretation. But I think it can be translated quite good into secular terms: it would just mean holding on and keep going – even though one might not know what for at that time.

So – what have we proven here? Philosophy is more than just a bauble for the mind. Its useful.

q.e.d.