8 ms·

Why Are Tenured Philosophy Professors Unhappy?

35 points by luu 11y ago

carsongross 11y ago
Most are atheists, which denies them access to one of the few institutions shown to promote happiness and sociability and provide meaning and consolation once life's major goals/distractions are past, and you have to stop and look existence in the face. Downboat away, HN, but it's a major cause of unhappiness: "He doesn't exist, the bastard." Eventually, your choices are nihilism or God. Everything else is hysterics.
- pkaye 11y ago
  What about the ones who are not atheists?
- Others 11y ago
  I think the entire existentialist movement would strongly disagree with your last point. (To say nothing of Absurdists and their ilk.)
- elliotec 11y ago
  What? That is an absurdly binary thought. You're saying that you either have to believe in God or be nihilistic to be happy? Give me a break.
  - humanrebar 11y ago
    I think the argument is that nihilism follows from atheism and that nihilism is depressing.
    - toolz 11y ago
      Seems like a very hard thing to suggest, really. I'm an atheist and nihilist and I've actually found myself to be _much_ less depressed than I was when I was an academically studied and strong christian. I've baptized, preached, converted, etc. I was like a superstar christian and now I'm an atheist and much much less prone to depression. I feel like I don't attribute the depression as much to my religious affiliations or lack thereof as I do to my hormone levels settling down due to older age, but my specific experiences of religion did a lot to promote the idea that it's healthy to acknowledge your guilt in all things.
      - hinkley 11y ago
        I was super religious as a kid. When I bump into people who spend all day fretting that their best friends are going to be tortured for all eternity for their poor life choices I feel pity. How do you breathe with that clear and present danger in the corner of your mind all day every day?
        humanrebar 11y ago
        You trust that an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving, but ultimately fair God knows what He's doing better than we do. It's called faith for a reason. On the flip side, how does a physicalist tell victims of atrocities like rape warfare? That life is random, so don't take it so hard? While glossing over the fact that the evil people will probably never be brought to justice? But, really, how do you pity the religious when it's all involuntary chemicals and electrical impulses in their brains? It's not like they have a choice anyway. And many of them like it.
        eli_gottlieb 11y ago
        >On the flip side, how does a physicalist tell victims of atrocities like rape warfare? That life is random, so don't take it so hard? While glossing over the fact that the evil people will probably never be brought to justice? Well, mostly, we try to bring the perpetrators to justice and provide rehabilitation for the victims. >But, really, how do you pity the religious when it's all involuntary chemicals and electrical impulses in their brains? Who said we pity them? Besides which, "involuntarily" doesn't mean that. Some of those chemicals and impulses are under conscious control, because they're the ones that implement conscious self-control. You are in fact affected by your experiences and can in fact change your beliefs, should you choose to.
        toolz 11y ago
        I live in the middle of one of the most highly concentrated christian areas in the south of the US (at one point we were the most concentrated christian area in the world a few years back). I've baptized more people than probably 99% of the christians you know. I've done mission work in probably more countries than 99% of the people you know have even visited. I was exactly what the church wanted me to be and that didn't make me happy. I believed in God with such a strong conviction and faith that I took it by his words to test the spirits and that's the only reason I allowed the thought into my mind that God might not be real because I decided to test the spirits like instructed in 1 John 4:1. Only outside of this self persecution of faith that tells everyone they aren't worthy and they should relinquish all ideas that they could ever handle something on their own just builds guilt upon guilt. Jesus take the wheel? Oops I drove my own car today, I guess that's just one more subtle way I didn't have faith, because remember just a small amount of faith can move mountains but I don't have even enough for God to drive my car. Luckily, I'm outside of that now and it's pretty easy to see all the subtle emotional warfare the church perpetuates regularly and without shame. "You're useless without me"..."If you don't love me I'll allow you to suffer (in hell none the less)"..."You need to understand how stupid you are and how the beginning of you ever knowing anything is to accept how insignificant you are and that I'm all that matters" Sound like church or an abusive psychopath? Hard to tell the difference when you put all these subtle common church teachings side by side. So forgive me when I call total bullshit on you for suggesting that faith is a sure way to find happiness, because I had more faith that anyone I know and I can say that while being surrounded by more christians than you know (likely, statistically speaking). edit: also, what do you tell rape victims? God wanted that to happen to you? Do you tell them he knew it was going to happen before they were even born and that it was part of his plan? Do you tell them that he was capable of preventing that kid from being born with a disease that killed him slowly and painfully, but he allowed it to happen? I'm not interested in your opinions. I'm interested in what you actually tell the victims, because I'm confident you apologize and console them and say that was bad while fully acknowledging your God knew that would happen before he even created mankind. Your idea of God is portrayed in many places as making/allowing good people to suffer because that's part of his plan - but yet you never tell rape victims to chin up because maybe that was supposed to happen, do you?
- seomis 11y ago
  So then nihilism or hysterics? I guess, with few exceptions, everyone choose hysterics.
- norswap 11y ago
  You don't really provide an argument in favour of your point. I, for one, question the notion that life must have a "meaning". Life is action, a sequence of distractions, one after the other. If your meaning leads to you to the "praise the lord" course of action, I'll contend that other course of actions are not worse, nor devoid of "sense" (however you define it). Spending your life building things, immersed in a study of some sort, or simply enjoying time with your family and friends doesn't seem like a bad deal to me.
  - humanrebar 11y ago
    > Spending your life building things, immersed in a study of some sort, or simply enjoying time with your family and friends doesn't seem like a bad deal to me. Well, at least your brain chemistry thinks so. And eventually some mixture of idiots and bullies will be in charge of the people you love and things you created. And, if not, there's always the heat death of the universe to look forward to. Or the next supervirus if you're impatient.
- eli_gottlieb 11y ago
  >Eventually, your choices are nihilism or God. Everything else is hysterics. Nope. You can't base a sound theory of value in mere supernatural human-like minds.
- aab0 11y ago
  Philosophy of religion departments are mostly staffed by theists, so there's an easy check on that hypothesis. I've never heard any of my philosopher acquaintances offline or online mention that the philosophers of religion seemed especially happy.
- SilasX 11y ago
  You're getting downvoted, but I think you're at least correct that it would make sense to control for the usual correlates of happiness and see if tenured philosophy professor happiness isn't already explained by those factors. Religiosity might be the big one.
  - jessriedel 11y ago
    This is the most productive response. However, if we're granting the OP's premise that his N=8 sample needs explanation, then it doesn't seem that anything so simple as religiosity can explain the allegedly dramatic data. Anyways, the grandparent comment ought to be downvoted because his minor contribution does not nearly make up for the damage it does to the tenor of the conversation. If you want to save his contribution, repeat it in a top level comment and link to him for attribution.
  - CamperBob2 11y ago
    I didn't downvote him until I read the last line of his post ("Eventually, your choices are nihilism or God. Everything else is hysterics.") He doesn't need a God, because he obviously carries an omniscient one with him in his own mind.
- al452 11y ago
  Atheists aren't especially unhappy, so this completely fails as an explanation.
  - toolz 11y ago
    Yeah, I'd love to see some data to support that theory. I know atheists are much less representative of the prison population and things like teen pregnancy - all things I would think would be strongly correlated with an unhappy population.
- lisper 11y ago
  > Eventually, your choices are nihilism or God Why are those my only choices? I am neither a nihilist nor a theist. I'm just kind of enjoying being alive while it lasts. Do you think I'm doing it wrong?
  - aninhumer 11y ago
    You're not a philosophy professor though. To steelman the OP a little, it's possible that spending your entire life grappling with seemingly unanswerable questions and not really getting anywhere could be pretty depressing. Absurdism is great if you've got something to distract you from it...
    - eli_gottlieb 11y ago
      > You're not a philosophy professor though. To steelman the OP a little, it's possible that spending your entire life grappling with seemingly unanswerable questions and not really getting anywhere could be pretty depressing. I would expect philosophy professors not to believe such questions are unanswerable, and in fact to believe that they possess, at the very least, a solid start on coherent and true answers.
  - rgbrenner 11y ago
    No, you're doing just fine. You see, some theists cling to their religion so strongly, that they have difficulty imagining how they would interpret the world without god. So right and wrong, come from god. Meaning of life comes from god. etc, etc. The op even imagines happiness requires god. So they take that point of view, remove god from it, and then apply what they imagine to atheists. And it's never good. You get these ridiculous ideas like atheists must all be nihilists; must be immoral; etc.
    - hinkley 11y ago
      The people who actually know better are too busy doing other things to piss in the wind by arguing with a theist. Absence of disproof in this case doesn't equate to proof. It may just mean that nobody is willing to give you constructive criticism.
- cbd1984 11y ago
  Aside from the fear and trembling eventuated by religion, we have happy atheistic philosophies. This just came up from the fortune program, for example: If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life. -- Albert Camus That pretty well describes my philosophy, and I'm reasonably happy.
- EdHominem 11y ago
  Yeah, when reality gets depressing you should retreat to insanity... If you're that desperate, try meth; it's less harmful to society.
wmil 11y ago
My suspicion is that philosophy is a dead field. Psychology and neuroscience are coming out with fascinating new results backed up by facts and studies. For instance Jonathan Haidt comes from social psychology, and his work on moral foundations is far more interesting than anything that's come out of philosophy departments this century. Even though morality is supposed to be on of their core issues. Once they get tenure they're forced to face the fact that they have no more career goals and can't do any meaningful work.
- bobcostas55 11y ago
  There are philosophers doing experimental work in conjunction with neuroscientists, e.g. the Churchlands and Metzinger.
- jtth 11y ago
  There's a lot of work done in analytical philosophy. There's still good work being done in all different kinds of philosophy. See Thomas Nagel.
  - Maarten88 11y ago
    I did not know who Thomas Nagel is so I looked him up and read about his philosophy work. I'm not deep into philosophy, but to me that backed up the argument of the grandparent: it would certainly make me depressed if this was regarded as very prominent progress in my science discipline. Maybe I missed it, but I did not read anything on the connection between his philosophical theories and reality, using experiments or neuro-scientific analysis as proof. It seems neuroscience and evolutionary biology give much better insights what things like self-consciousness, morals, subjectivity, spirit really are, and not much has been added to philosophy since what philosophers like Daniel Dennet wrote 20 years ago.
  - WaltPurvis 11y ago
    I don't mean to slight Nagel's recent work, which I haven't read, but (honest question here, because I don't have a clue) would you say that Nagel's recent work is generally considered as important or groundbreaking as what he did 30 and 40 years ago? Because my impression is that Nagel's most impressive work was done decades ago, which, if true, doesn't support the idea that philosophy is currently a vibrant field with lots of groundbreaking work going on.
luketych 11y ago
Because they're philosophy professors..
whateveridunno 11y ago
I have to wonder if tenured philosophy professors are any more or less unhappy than, say, newly tenured literature professors or economists or chemists. I ask because 1, 3, 4, and 5 seem like the most persuasive reasons, but they're also the ones that aren't specific to philosophy.
miles 11y ago
Perhaps Thoreau can shed some light[1]: "Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor. ... There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically." [1] http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/walden/hdt01.html http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/walden/hdt01.html
- hinkley 11y ago
  Thoreau called out eastern philosophy in that book at several points. Even Baudrillard isn't that original from this standpoint. Shoulders of giants to be sure.
deleted 11y ago
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fizixer 11y ago
To all kinds of philosophers. It might sound pep-talk+patronizing but hear me out: - What is science? natural philosophy! - What is mathematics/computer-science? modern philosophy! The journey from continental to analytic philosophy didn't end there. Today natural philosophy and modern philosophy are reaping the rewards of 'the culture of thinking' promulgated by the untiring work of philosophers of history and present. If you feel any emptiness in your life, please consider spending time learning mathematics and/or programming. IMO it's the highest form of exploration of abstractions and information-structures. You might ask? "but what's the point? and how does it help with unhappiness". Well, here's the rub. The holy grail of computer-science is artificial intelligence! There is a mad rush to achieve it from all walks of life and I believe it's going to happen very soon (within the next 10 to 30 years). You might want to be part of that! What's the other big thing? biological longevity! There's an equally mad rush about to begin to extend healthy human lifespan to 100, 150, 200 years (and beyond) if possible. AI and longevity don't end the existential gloom, but they change the game of which existential questions are asked. There is another connection. The way math and CS is the natural continuation to analytic philosophy, transhumanism is the natural continuation to atheism! There is a connection because AI and longevity are exactly the two issues that are front and center in transhumanist thought. Why transhumanism? Because once you're an atheist and an existentialist, and you realize there is no purpose in life, and that we make our own purpose, there are a few possible outcomes: - nihilism/suicidal thinking (screw everything) - religion (you go back to "thinking-less" life) - absurdism (just accept the status-quo) - superficialism (you give yourself some purpose just for the heck of it) All four are unsatisfying. Well guess what, transhumanism is the fifth option. It challenges you that the drudgery of work (to make a living) and the thought of inevitable impending death (not to mention sickness and frailty) are at least as existentially significant as the meaning-of-life question (probably more so in the current state of human progress). It doesn't promise to answer the last one but it encourages to reach a life that is free of the first two. Even if all of this is not convincing enough, consider one final thought. If we humans are biological machines programmed to have certain feelings and emotions which result in the existential gloom, and if we conquer our biology to get rid of sickness and death, what makes you think we would still be unable to switch off our feelings of existential gloom? feelings of boredom? What makes you think we won't be able to sleep as long as we want, instead of ending our life, and still have a shot at enjoying life when we wake up? (P.S.: One parting word, space (the final frontier)!)
rdiddly 11y ago
He makes 8 points, but the last 7 are all things that are presumably true throughout a person's career in philosophy/academia. The only condition that changes when one gets tenure is #1, and I believe that's the root of it. But I don't look at it in terms of freedom, but rather of adversity -- adversity as a BENEFIT, that the tenured faculty (or the miserable lottery winner) abruptly LOSES. Adversity is what gives life meaning, improves us as people, and (paradoxically) creates happiness. You are a knife and adversity is the rock against which you sharpen yourself. Not necessarily because you need a sharp knife, but because a knife is best when it's at its most knife-like. Heirs, except when they reject or are excommunicated from the family fortune, usually have no concept of adversity and grow up to be shitty, weak people. They never have to strive and hence never learn what they're made of. Once you get tenure, that is what you lose.
- joe_the_user 11y ago
  It's not really true that the only thing that changes once you get tenure is decompression. The other thing that changes is that your workload switches from lots of tenure-qualifying stuff to lots of administrative stuff. As his other point highlights, you still have an unreasonable workload, it's just that now you aren't directly fighting for your job. You can slack off, meaning do a mediocre job at the many, many tasks assigned to you. And that goes to problem #3, especially the impossibility of teaching well when a huge load of administrative BS is required and great teaching isn't required.
  - WaltPurvis 11y ago
    I think talk about "the impossibility of teaching well" is stretching things a bit. In my own experience, I had some philosophy professors who were phenomenally great teachers and some others who were downright awful. Some of the difference might have come down to innate talent for teaching, but I'm quite sure that none of the difference was attributable to the amount of non-teaching duties they had. The best teachers I had were professors with heavy administrative and advisory duties, while the two worst had comparatively little non-teaching work to do. The main reason they were terrible teachers is because they just didn't give a shit; they were clearly just phoning it in.
CamperBob2 11y ago
Funny thing about this "God" concept of yours. If I take two people from the same church -- even if they're sitting next to each other in the same pew, singing from the same songbook and sharing the same Bible -- and interrogate them in two separate rooms, their accounts of who God is and what God wants will eventually diverge. That's a bit awkward for those who find pleasure and comfort in rigorous thinking, isn't it?
- carsongross 11y ago
  I didn't say you had to pick God, bro. I didn't say I did.
  - CamperBob2 11y ago
    I didn't say you had to pick God, bro. I didn't say I did. Well, you've said elsewhere you're a "conservative." That suggests you're not a nihilist, since it implies that order and tradition are touchstones of your personal value system. That leaves doors #2 and #3, God and hysterics. Like everyone else, you know nothing about God that you didn't hear from other men... but by all accounts, one thing most Gods have in common is that they don't like people who waffle about standing up for their beliefs. So, hysterics it is, I guess. That's believable.
- dang 11y ago
  We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11651711 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11651711 and marked it off-topic.
mizzao 11y ago
I don't think this is specific to philosophy, or even to academia in general. Trying to get tenure isn't all that different from trying to get rich, famous, powerful, or so on. If you see tenure (or any of those other things) as a goal in itself rather than the product of doing meaningful work and living a purposeful life, then you may have just climbed to the top of the ladder and realized that it was against the wrong wall.
Overtonwindow 11y ago
Sounds like a great philosophy class.
jhanschoo 11y ago
At least 2 other top-level posters here have suggested that philosophy might be dying due to their relevance being superceded by fields like physics and neuroscience. I have a similar notion. But what I feel most lacking in philosophy are not its everyday relevance, but its methods. Mathematics has communicated with the natural sciences and continues to contribute by providing a watertight framework. The natural sciences have had empiricism and the scientific method; and most academic fields are today exploring new data-driven methods and computational analysis to develop new insights. Much work that I've seen in analytic philosophy, on the other hand, continue the tradition of thought experiments and simple classical logic, rarely venturing into more expressive models and arguments, perhaps computational. I personally think that the strong reliance on inexpressive logic rather than creating more expressive mathematical models of philosophical frameworks actively hinders it. Philosophers should be actively and profusely creating metaphysical and ethical frameworks in mathematics, not unlike physicists and economists.

35 points by luu 11y ago

Most are atheists, which denies them access to one of the few institutions shown to promote happiness and sociability and provide meaning and consolation once life's major goals/distractions are past, and you have to stop and look existence in the face. Downboat away, HN, but it's a major cause of unhappiness: "He doesn't exist, the bastard." Eventually, your choices are nihilism or God. Everything else is hysterics.

pkaye 11y ago
What about the ones who are not atheists?
Others 11y ago
I think the entire existentialist movement would strongly disagree with your last point. (To say nothing of Absurdists and their ilk.)
elliotec 11y ago
What? That is an absurdly binary thought. You're saying that you either have to believe in God or be nihilistic to be happy? Give me a break.
- humanrebar 11y ago
  I think the argument is that nihilism follows from atheism and that nihilism is depressing.
  - toolz 11y ago
    Seems like a very hard thing to suggest, really. I'm an atheist and nihilist and I've actually found myself to be _much_ less depressed than I was when I was an academically studied and strong christian. I've baptized, preached, converted, etc. I was like a superstar christian and now I'm an atheist and much much less prone to depression. I feel like I don't attribute the depression as much to my religious affiliations or lack thereof as I do to my hormone levels settling down due to older age, but my specific experiences of religion did a lot to promote the idea that it's healthy to acknowledge your guilt in all things.
    - hinkley 11y ago
      I was super religious as a kid. When I bump into people who spend all day fretting that their best friends are going to be tortured for all eternity for their poor life choices I feel pity. How do you breathe with that clear and present danger in the corner of your mind all day every day?
      - humanrebar 11y ago
        You trust that an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving, but ultimately fair God knows what He's doing better than we do. It's called faith for a reason. On the flip side, how does a physicalist tell victims of atrocities like rape warfare? That life is random, so don't take it so hard? While glossing over the fact that the evil people will probably never be brought to justice? But, really, how do you pity the religious when it's all involuntary chemicals and electrical impulses in their brains? It's not like they have a choice anyway. And many of them like it.
        eli_gottlieb 11y ago
        >On the flip side, how does a physicalist tell victims of atrocities like rape warfare? That life is random, so don't take it so hard? While glossing over the fact that the evil people will probably never be brought to justice? Well, mostly, we try to bring the perpetrators to justice and provide rehabilitation for the victims. >But, really, how do you pity the religious when it's all involuntary chemicals and electrical impulses in their brains? Who said we pity them? Besides which, "involuntarily" doesn't mean that. Some of those chemicals and impulses are under conscious control, because they're the ones that implement conscious self-control. You are in fact affected by your experiences and can in fact change your beliefs, should you choose to.
        toolz 11y ago
        I live in the middle of one of the most highly concentrated christian areas in the south of the US (at one point we were the most concentrated christian area in the world a few years back). I've baptized more people than probably 99% of the christians you know. I've done mission work in probably more countries than 99% of the people you know have even visited. I was exactly what the church wanted me to be and that didn't make me happy. I believed in God with such a strong conviction and faith that I took it by his words to test the spirits and that's the only reason I allowed the thought into my mind that God might not be real because I decided to test the spirits like instructed in 1 John 4:1. Only outside of this self persecution of faith that tells everyone they aren't worthy and they should relinquish all ideas that they could ever handle something on their own just builds guilt upon guilt. Jesus take the wheel? Oops I drove my own car today, I guess that's just one more subtle way I didn't have faith, because remember just a small amount of faith can move mountains but I don't have even enough for God to drive my car. Luckily, I'm outside of that now and it's pretty easy to see all the subtle emotional warfare the church perpetuates regularly and without shame. "You're useless without me"..."If you don't love me I'll allow you to suffer (in hell none the less)"..."You need to understand how stupid you are and how the beginning of you ever knowing anything is to accept how insignificant you are and that I'm all that matters" Sound like church or an abusive psychopath? Hard to tell the difference when you put all these subtle common church teachings side by side. So forgive me when I call total bullshit on you for suggesting that faith is a sure way to find happiness, because I had more faith that anyone I know and I can say that while being surrounded by more christians than you know (likely, statistically speaking). edit: also, what do you tell rape victims? God wanted that to happen to you? Do you tell them he knew it was going to happen before they were even born and that it was part of his plan? Do you tell them that he was capable of preventing that kid from being born with a disease that killed him slowly and painfully, but he allowed it to happen? I'm not interested in your opinions. I'm interested in what you actually tell the victims, because I'm confident you apologize and console them and say that was bad while fully acknowledging your God knew that would happen before he even created mankind. Your idea of God is portrayed in many places as making/allowing good people to suffer because that's part of his plan - but yet you never tell rape victims to chin up because maybe that was supposed to happen, do you?
seomis 11y ago
So then nihilism or hysterics? I guess, with few exceptions, everyone choose hysterics.
norswap 11y ago
You don't really provide an argument in favour of your point. I, for one, question the notion that life must have a "meaning". Life is action, a sequence of distractions, one after the other. If your meaning leads to you to the "praise the lord" course of action, I'll contend that other course of actions are not worse, nor devoid of "sense" (however you define it). Spending your life building things, immersed in a study of some sort, or simply enjoying time with your family and friends doesn't seem like a bad deal to me.
- humanrebar 11y ago
  > Spending your life building things, immersed in a study of some sort, or simply enjoying time with your family and friends doesn't seem like a bad deal to me. Well, at least your brain chemistry thinks so. And eventually some mixture of idiots and bullies will be in charge of the people you love and things you created. And, if not, there's always the heat death of the universe to look forward to. Or the next supervirus if you're impatient.
eli_gottlieb 11y ago
>Eventually, your choices are nihilism or God. Everything else is hysterics. Nope. You can't base a sound theory of value in mere supernatural human-like minds.
aab0 11y ago
Philosophy of religion departments are mostly staffed by theists, so there's an easy check on that hypothesis. I've never heard any of my philosopher acquaintances offline or online mention that the philosophers of religion seemed especially happy.
SilasX 11y ago
You're getting downvoted, but I think you're at least correct that it would make sense to control for the usual correlates of happiness and see if tenured philosophy professor happiness isn't already explained by those factors. Religiosity might be the big one.
- jessriedel 11y ago
  This is the most productive response. However, if we're granting the OP's premise that his N=8 sample needs explanation, then it doesn't seem that anything so simple as religiosity can explain the allegedly dramatic data. Anyways, the grandparent comment ought to be downvoted because his minor contribution does not nearly make up for the damage it does to the tenor of the conversation. If you want to save his contribution, repeat it in a top level comment and link to him for attribution.
- CamperBob2 11y ago
  I didn't downvote him until I read the last line of his post ("Eventually, your choices are nihilism or God. Everything else is hysterics.") He doesn't need a God, because he obviously carries an omniscient one with him in his own mind.
al452 11y ago
Atheists aren't especially unhappy, so this completely fails as an explanation.
- toolz 11y ago
  Yeah, I'd love to see some data to support that theory. I know atheists are much less representative of the prison population and things like teen pregnancy - all things I would think would be strongly correlated with an unhappy population.
lisper 11y ago
> Eventually, your choices are nihilism or God Why are those my only choices? I am neither a nihilist nor a theist. I'm just kind of enjoying being alive while it lasts. Do you think I'm doing it wrong?
- aninhumer 11y ago
  You're not a philosophy professor though. To steelman the OP a little, it's possible that spending your entire life grappling with seemingly unanswerable questions and not really getting anywhere could be pretty depressing. Absurdism is great if you've got something to distract you from it...
  - eli_gottlieb 11y ago
    > You're not a philosophy professor though. To steelman the OP a little, it's possible that spending your entire life grappling with seemingly unanswerable questions and not really getting anywhere could be pretty depressing. I would expect philosophy professors not to believe such questions are unanswerable, and in fact to believe that they possess, at the very least, a solid start on coherent and true answers.
- rgbrenner 11y ago
  No, you're doing just fine. You see, some theists cling to their religion so strongly, that they have difficulty imagining how they would interpret the world without god. So right and wrong, come from god. Meaning of life comes from god. etc, etc. The op even imagines happiness requires god. So they take that point of view, remove god from it, and then apply what they imagine to atheists. And it's never good. You get these ridiculous ideas like atheists must all be nihilists; must be immoral; etc.
  - hinkley 11y ago
    The people who actually know better are too busy doing other things to piss in the wind by arguing with a theist. Absence of disproof in this case doesn't equate to proof. It may just mean that nobody is willing to give you constructive criticism.
cbd1984 11y ago
Aside from the fear and trembling eventuated by religion, we have happy atheistic philosophies. This just came up from the fortune program, for example: If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life. -- Albert Camus That pretty well describes my philosophy, and I'm reasonably happy.
EdHominem 11y ago
Yeah, when reality gets depressing you should retreat to insanity... If you're that desperate, try meth; it's less harmful to society.

wmil 11y ago

My suspicion is that philosophy is a dead field. Psychology and neuroscience are coming out with fascinating new results backed up by facts and studies. For instance Jonathan Haidt comes from social psychology, and his work on moral foundations is far more interesting than anything that's come out of philosophy departments this century. Even though morality is supposed to be on of their core issues. Once they get tenure they're forced to face the fact that they have no more career goals and can't do any meaningful work.

bobcostas55 11y ago
There are philosophers doing experimental work in conjunction with neuroscientists, e.g. the Churchlands and Metzinger.
jtth 11y ago
There's a lot of work done in analytical philosophy. There's still good work being done in all different kinds of philosophy. See Thomas Nagel.
- Maarten88 11y ago
  I did not know who Thomas Nagel is so I looked him up and read about his philosophy work. I'm not deep into philosophy, but to me that backed up the argument of the grandparent: it would certainly make me depressed if this was regarded as very prominent progress in my science discipline. Maybe I missed it, but I did not read anything on the connection between his philosophical theories and reality, using experiments or neuro-scientific analysis as proof. It seems neuroscience and evolutionary biology give much better insights what things like self-consciousness, morals, subjectivity, spirit really are, and not much has been added to philosophy since what philosophers like Daniel Dennet wrote 20 years ago.
- WaltPurvis 11y ago
  I don't mean to slight Nagel's recent work, which I haven't read, but (honest question here, because I don't have a clue) would you say that Nagel's recent work is generally considered as important or groundbreaking as what he did 30 and 40 years ago? Because my impression is that Nagel's most impressive work was done decades ago, which, if true, doesn't support the idea that philosophy is currently a vibrant field with lots of groundbreaking work going on.

luketych 11y ago

Because they're philosophy professors..

whateveridunno 11y ago

I have to wonder if tenured philosophy professors are any more or less unhappy than, say, newly tenured literature professors or economists or chemists. I ask because 1, 3, 4, and 5 seem like the most persuasive reasons, but they're also the ones that aren't specific to philosophy.

miles 11y ago

Perhaps Thoreau can shed some light[1]: "Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor. ... There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically." [1] http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/walden/hdt01.html http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/walden/hdt01.html

hinkley 11y ago
Thoreau called out eastern philosophy in that book at several points. Even Baudrillard isn't that original from this standpoint. Shoulders of giants to be sure.

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fizixer 11y ago

To all kinds of philosophers. It might sound pep-talk+patronizing but hear me out: - What is science? natural philosophy! - What is mathematics/computer-science? modern philosophy! The journey from continental to analytic philosophy didn't end there. Today natural philosophy and modern philosophy are reaping the rewards of 'the culture of thinking' promulgated by the untiring work of philosophers of history and present. If you feel any emptiness in your life, please consider spending time learning mathematics and/or programming. IMO it's the highest form of exploration of abstractions and information-structures. You might ask? "but what's the point? and how does it help with unhappiness". Well, here's the rub. The holy grail of computer-science is artificial intelligence! There is a mad rush to achieve it from all walks of life and I believe it's going to happen very soon (within the next 10 to 30 years). You might want to be part of that! What's the other big thing? biological longevity! There's an equally mad rush about to begin to extend healthy human lifespan to 100, 150, 200 years (and beyond) if possible. AI and longevity don't end the existential gloom, but they change the game of which existential questions are asked. There is another connection. The way math and CS is the natural continuation to analytic philosophy, transhumanism is the natural continuation to atheism! There is a connection because AI and longevity are exactly the two issues that are front and center in transhumanist thought. Why transhumanism? Because once you're an atheist and an existentialist, and you realize there is no purpose in life, and that we make our own purpose, there are a few possible outcomes: - nihilism/suicidal thinking (screw everything) - religion (you go back to "thinking-less" life) - absurdism (just accept the status-quo) - superficialism (you give yourself some purpose just for the heck of it) All four are unsatisfying. Well guess what, transhumanism is the fifth option. It challenges you that the drudgery of work (to make a living) and the thought of inevitable impending death (not to mention sickness and frailty) are at least as existentially significant as the meaning-of-life question (probably more so in the current state of human progress). It doesn't promise to answer the last one but it encourages to reach a life that is free of the first two. Even if all of this is not convincing enough, consider one final thought. If we humans are biological machines programmed to have certain feelings and emotions which result in the existential gloom, and if we conquer our biology to get rid of sickness and death, what makes you think we would still be unable to switch off our feelings of existential gloom? feelings of boredom? What makes you think we won't be able to sleep as long as we want, instead of ending our life, and still have a shot at enjoying life when we wake up? (P.S.: One parting word, space (the final frontier)!)

rdiddly 11y ago

He makes 8 points, but the last 7 are all things that are presumably true throughout a person's career in philosophy/academia. The only condition that changes when one gets tenure is #1, and I believe that's the root of it. But I don't look at it in terms of freedom, but rather of adversity -- adversity as a BENEFIT, that the tenured faculty (or the miserable lottery winner) abruptly LOSES. Adversity is what gives life meaning, improves us as people, and (paradoxically) creates happiness. You are a knife and adversity is the rock against which you sharpen yourself. Not necessarily because you need a sharp knife, but because a knife is best when it's at its most knife-like. Heirs, except when they reject or are excommunicated from the family fortune, usually have no concept of adversity and grow up to be shitty, weak people. They never have to strive and hence never learn what they're made of. Once you get tenure, that is what you lose.

joe_the_user 11y ago
It's not really true that the only thing that changes once you get tenure is decompression. The other thing that changes is that your workload switches from lots of tenure-qualifying stuff to lots of administrative stuff. As his other point highlights, you still have an unreasonable workload, it's just that now you aren't directly fighting for your job. You can slack off, meaning do a mediocre job at the many, many tasks assigned to you. And that goes to problem #3, especially the impossibility of teaching well when a huge load of administrative BS is required and great teaching isn't required.
- WaltPurvis 11y ago
  I think talk about "the impossibility of teaching well" is stretching things a bit. In my own experience, I had some philosophy professors who were phenomenally great teachers and some others who were downright awful. Some of the difference might have come down to innate talent for teaching, but I'm quite sure that none of the difference was attributable to the amount of non-teaching duties they had. The best teachers I had were professors with heavy administrative and advisory duties, while the two worst had comparatively little non-teaching work to do. The main reason they were terrible teachers is because they just didn't give a shit; they were clearly just phoning it in.

CamperBob2 11y ago

Funny thing about this "God" concept of yours. If I take two people from the same church -- even if they're sitting next to each other in the same pew, singing from the same songbook and sharing the same Bible -- and interrogate them in two separate rooms, their accounts of who God is and what God wants will eventually diverge. That's a bit awkward for those who find pleasure and comfort in rigorous thinking, isn't it?

carsongross 11y ago
I didn't say you had to pick God, bro. I didn't say I did.
- CamperBob2 11y ago
  I didn't say you had to pick God, bro. I didn't say I did. Well, you've said elsewhere you're a "conservative." That suggests you're not a nihilist, since it implies that order and tradition are touchstones of your personal value system. That leaves doors #2 and #3, God and hysterics. Like everyone else, you know nothing about God that you didn't hear from other men... but by all accounts, one thing most Gods have in common is that they don't like people who waffle about standing up for their beliefs. So, hysterics it is, I guess. That's believable.
dang 11y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11651711 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11651711 and marked it off-topic.

mizzao 11y ago

I don't think this is specific to philosophy, or even to academia in general. Trying to get tenure isn't all that different from trying to get rich, famous, powerful, or so on. If you see tenure (or any of those other things) as a goal in itself rather than the product of doing meaningful work and living a purposeful life, then you may have just climbed to the top of the ladder and realized that it was against the wrong wall.

Overtonwindow 11y ago

Sounds like a great philosophy class.

jhanschoo 11y ago

At least 2 other top-level posters here have suggested that philosophy might be dying due to their relevance being superceded by fields like physics and neuroscience. I have a similar notion. But what I feel most lacking in philosophy are not its everyday relevance, but its methods. Mathematics has communicated with the natural sciences and continues to contribute by providing a watertight framework. The natural sciences have had empiricism and the scientific method; and most academic fields are today exploring new data-driven methods and computational analysis to develop new insights. Much work that I've seen in analytic philosophy, on the other hand, continue the tradition of thought experiments and simple classical logic, rarely venturing into more expressive models and arguments, perhaps computational. I personally think that the strong reliance on inexpressive logic rather than creating more expressive mathematical models of philosophical frameworks actively hinders it. Philosophers should be actively and profusely creating metaphysical and ethical frameworks in mathematics, not unlike physicists and economists.