That's not philosophy.

"a personal story of philosophical peer pressure"

Dear everyone who cares about love and philosophy,

This is a letter with one simple message: We can move beyond the knee-jerk reaction in philosophy to turn our noses up.

Turn our noses up at what?

At anything that calls itself philosophy that we think isn’t philosophy.

Yes, there is a difference between academic philosophy and philosophy in practice.

Yes, there are important differences between working as a philosopher in a cognitive science department or a lab setting, and writing popular books about those subjects, or talking about them on podcasts. Sometimes, however, these can be part of the same community. And that community is able to to express itself as different layers, to different audiences, and let itself be understood through multiple lenses.

Yes, references matter.

Yes, we need to be clear about the history of our ideas and grateful to those who have had them before us, and there is always someone before us. Still, an idea is not bad or wrong just because it has patterns in common with ideas others have had—many people have had similar ideas as those found in the books we have read, even if they haven’t read those same books.

Yes, there are real differences between academic philosophy and ‘philosophy in the wild’ and we are all better off by knowing and seeing them. When we learn the skill of ‘critical thinking’—a skill at the heart of any philosophical education, no matter where one gets it—we learn to approach any philosophy with a skeptical mindset, but that can also be an open and loving mindset. These are not either/or.

After all, philosophy is not only ‘critical’. It is also about opening and learning. It is about realizing that what we thought we knew, we did not quite know, or we only knew from one stance, and there are other ways of knowing it. This openness (“I only know that I know nothing”) has always been the life and heart and power of philosophy. And it is an exciting experience, to surf such potential, because one feels the heart and power of life and mind at once; one feels more is possible.

Philosophy is a way we open to different patterns and scales, a way we can dance with our many contrasts so as to find the places of resonance. In so doing, we begin to learn a way of thinking that helps us better navigate and share our unique, winding, entangled paths. Some of these will contradict one another in some parts, and yet they will all still have something to contribute—they are all different lines to trace from different perspectives.

Still, there is no “winner” in philosophy—you can win a philosophy debate, but nobody ‘wins’ philosophy itself. That’s the point. And it matters that we remember it.

Let me illustrate this with a personal story.

When I was studying philosophy of mind, and then later, neuroscience, there were young men who were made fun of, or even cast out of the ‘cool group’, because they listened to people like Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson.

This was years ago, and these names were not household names back then.

In fact, very few people had ever heard of them, but they were emerging voices, at the growing tip of what is now our Podcast Culture, and they were controversial.

We were studying to be serious analytic philosophers, and then to be serious scientists, and because these men seemed to be saying things that were of an emotional register—or even a spiritual register—this was considered unscientific.

We knew it without saying it. Names like Harris and Peterson were off-limits—certainly in the classroom, but also in the Mensa, and the bars. It was not something stated directly except in whispers, yet I felt it everywhere, as part of that strange peer-imposed atmosphere that can make any small world seem like a big and encompassing one.

This sort of pressure literally kills some of us before we can even come of age.

I was no longer a kid, however, by the time I got my neuroscience degree. Having gone back to school in my thirties, I was in a rather strange position where I did not ‘go out’ with the others or lock-in to that atmosphere as fully as my peers. This meant some of the students came to me to talk about the tension they felt. I saw firsthand how much those early podcasts of Harris and Peterson helped some of these people. And to be honest, I also saw how some of it could be dangerous, as any philosophy can be, if taken as primary.

What struck me most, however, was the growing chasm that seemed to be at play, the chasm opening between these very smart, emotional people and other very smart, emotional people.

Today, it seems clear that this chasm was very real: The more these people were considered outcasts for finding something meaningful in ‘fringe thinkers’ like Harris and Peterson, the more those fringe thinkers grew into powerful centers in their own right, some handling it with more responsibility than others.

All these young people listening to these podcasts were hungry for the same thing, but felt they had to compete about where to find answers. This meant there was crucial dialogue that needed to happen but that seemed to be getting pushed further and further away from happening, creating very different universes of what was or was not okay.

This pattern was not only present with thinkers like Harris and Peterson. It was also present when we tried to discuss people like Nietzsche or Camus or Arendt or Alan Watts. There were strange lines about what was and was not considered legitimate, and anything ‘legitimate’ was supposed to be of a certain ‘analytic’ reference.

In those days, at least for part of them, it was also considered rather fringe to discuss cognition as embodied, for example, or to take certain thinkers in those traditions seriously in the classroom. I won’t go into all this now, and much of it has since changed dramatically, but the point is that the turning up of noses was happening in a very unordered way that was hard to pin down but felt most like peer pressure. It is a feeling that is still hard to pin down, but is now present in many other areas of society.

It would be wonderful if we could find a way to hold that tension a bit differently, and to help young people see a way they can hold it differently, without forcing them or ourselves into intellectual camps. That is extremely challenging, because it means holding contradictory ideas in mind at once, and taking a stand without thinking that means another must fall.

It is destructive when we assess one another through the silence of peer pressured judgements about the philosophy that moves us. And we don’t have to do it to be good philosophers. We just have to learn how to better hold what annoys or scares us.

Is there a way to stop making one another feel intellectually judged while at the same time remaining rigorous and holding one another to our words and references? Yes. That’s the practice of philosophy.

We can do this.

We can find ways to allow the tension to be there, and still connect beyond it. Beyond dichotomy. With Stoicism. Holding the paradox. Staying with the trouble. Way-making. Look at the history of philosophy and you find many saying this in different ways.

That is part of the motivation behind every conversation we have on Love and Philosophy, and it is also why it is so hard to put that show into a category, and why people find it hard to define me and what I do.

I’m many things, too many, and I don’t hide that tension in a tidy manner, because I can’t, but also because coming to terms with it all as my reality is part of my philosophical practice. Still, there is a very real narrative, and it is cohesive; it’s just dynamic, and it takes time to read, and it’s still being written.

Does it really matter that we learn how to hold such tensions, how to stay with the trouble? It’s worth a shot at least, as no matter who you are in the world right now, chances are you can feel some crisis of meaning and division nearby, and chances are it is linked to some sort of peer pressure, no matter your age.

Our sense of crisis seems to have accelerated alongside the growing chasm I felt as expressed above. When all this happened in my various university departments, it was happening just before, and then later just after, the first Trump presidency. In those days, there was a wave of judgement and emotionality in the air that was deeply reactionary and divisive, and we felt it in a very different form than the one we are feeling today, even if one might categorize it in the same way.

To remember those days before the 2016 election is (at least for me) to remember an entirely different emotional environment.

I was in New York City just after the election of 2016. I was also there just after the election of 2024. The stark difference in the mood between those two time periods is very hard to get an intellectual grasp on right now (Nate Silver discusses this feeling in NYC here), but this shift is still very much with me, and though I cannot describe it, it strikes me as something historic.

Getting a good idea of what that change really is could hold the key to a new understanding, something like a future codex for what has happened to us over this past decade, and what we are now moving towards, as a world. It will likely take years before we can see it clearly, but this is an attempt to feel into that space.

I mention it because I see this spirit and its shift as entangled with the same feelings I saw in those young people relative to their academic pursuits and their need for the input of someone like Harris or Peterson, men which cannot be placed in the same boat, though I seem to be doing that.

Towards that same mistake, I could also add Joe Rogan and Theo Von, though the experiences I write about above came before they were popular. Still, there are patterns: These are men who mostly talk to men and allow those men to be emotional. In the case of Rogan and Theo Von, they let them be casual and smart, too, without making them feel as if they have to live up to some sort of intellectual elite. In the case of Harris and Peterson, they allow people to indulge in dressing up and caring how they ‘look’, either with words and ideas or with fancy suits and haircuts. They let them walk around in ways that are flattering and not afraid to show off and feel the beauty of their bodies, or just the beauty of learning how to sculpt their words. This is a real embodied power that many men have not had the chance to feel, and it means something, and it does not help to dismiss how meaningful it is at some points in a person’s life.

How all this may now be hallowing itself out into the Complexity of Optics is a subject for another time, but the point here is that I want to say openly and clearly that I hope Love and Philosophy can be an attempt to try and open to everyone, and I hope people will join me in trying this. To open to the tension that I have already felt when it comes to inviting and discussing ideas with people from many diverse philosophical worlds. It is not easy, and I am thankful to every person who listens and finds the patterns that connect, and who comes to the show knowing that sometimes it will resonate deeply with what they already know or want, and sometimes it will be uncomfortable.

I open to the embarrassment possible in that, from the standpoint of someone who also holds the responsibility for it. I realize I can seem ‘too exuberant with my love’ or ‘too intellectual’; I’ve already heard both. (Even my mom says it ‘makes her brain hurt’ to try and read my posts, sorry mom!).

Still, I can only show you who I am, in full awareness that I do not know everything and that I can be as uplifting or annoying as anybody I guess. What I do try each time is to take a breath and come to you from a place of love, not sentiment and not towards any end but as living, sensual connection, shared and ongoing life that wants to better understand the things I do not understand. I’m still learning, and that’s pretty clear in the podcast. Sometimes I am too eager. Sometimes I just mess up. But sometimes there are epiphanies. Sometimes little connections open entirely new paths.

I realize it’s hard to define what I do in a blurb, but isn’t this the case for almost everyone? Why do we pretend otherwise? My story is rather unusual because I’ve taken unusual paths, but that is also why it is a good story. I’ve been holding paradox a long while now, not as a choice exactly but as the way of my motivations. I am inspired by the Computational Theory of Mind and The Embodied Mind. I truly do embrace ecological thinking and I also love the history of transportation. I’ve always been told I am ‘an old soul’, but I am also just old, and naive. I don’t know how to resolve my contradictions, nor do I want to resolve them, but I do want to get better at listening, and be better in my relations and in what I give while I am here, and I find that philosophy of all kinds and in all directions is the best way of doing this.

That’s what we’re attempting in Love & Philosophy. And so far, what I’ve seen is that thinking any philosophy is ‘better’ because it is done in this or that language or this or that place or has this or that tradition behind it is just not a very productive way to proceed in continuing to stay motivated. Because the simple fact is that this academic world and this popular commercial world and all these other worlds are not so separate, but rather are always influencing and co-creating one another at many levels, every single day.

Our philosophies are not in competition anymore than our paths are in competition for getting to different sides of the same lake, or even to the same side. Debating and disagreeing are ways we find new paths, maybe even new layers, new forms of moving, new ways we might (mentally, virtually, really) ‘swap’ bodies and minds and walk in another’s shoes. This is not about ‘winning’ but about finding meaning and connection and motivation to continue, to persist. Sometimes the motivation is to win a debate, but that’s nested within all this.

There are many forms of philosophy, and we are strong enough to allow them all to make their way, and to give us their gifts without trying to collapse them into one another, or think any one person or intellectual has ‘the right way’ of interpreting or understanding any of it absolutely. This is challenging, and worth it. Always opening and always skeptical, able to embrace without becoming what we embrace, dancing at the portal of this seeming paradox, we find life and the strength to discern paths and understand them as different ways up the many mountains of our lives—as real experiences that we are all trying to survive and share.

Philosophy is about opening our minds, not closing them by deciding ‘that guy is a joke’ or ‘this kind of philosophy isn’t real philosophy’ because such up-turned noses only makes ‘that guy’ into an even bigger and more influential and powerful ‘joke’, and it only opens the chasm that could eventually swallow us. When we turn away, we take our voice away from the process, and it might be exactly that voice that would have bridged something unexpected and made something better in the world. Or pointed out a mistake before it hurt someone, especially the person making it.

There are many paths to the same lake, and the joy and delight of life and intellectual debate is in opening the layers of these paths, finding new fractal multiplicities and trails, and discovering and exploring their many surfaces and depths.

Photo by Jon Cro on Unsplash