Philosophy - for old people only?

Kids are intermittently questioned about what they want to be when they grow up. (I suspect people ask this more out of the joy of reassuring their own conceptions of kids' stupidity and lack of realism, than any real interest in what kids have to say) Of course, as everyone else, I dreamed about being a policeman or a rockstar. But when I was in 1:st grade, just having started school, the path towards enlightenment & adulthood, my mind was set on something else. I wanted to be - retired. Teachers, and others, were not taking me very seriously - I was joking, they thought, or just the moronic "kids, awww cuuute". But if I would have it my way I would say that I was, instead, expressing my budding insights about the philosophical life.

Plato argues, in The Republic, that philosophy should not be pursued when one is too young. Young people should, he recommends, hang out at the gymnasium, or cool themselves down with disciplined music (not the vulgar kind that stir up all kinds of mixed emotions). S/he must be steered away from the things - "affluence and similar resources" (Rep., 495a) that are prone to corrupt young minds. The reputation of philosophy is tarnished, Plato advocates, because philosophers live the wrong kind of life; philosophy does not have the role in it that it should have. In Gorgias, Socrates attempts to offer a satisfying reply to the accusation that philosophy is not a worthy occupation "for a grown man" (and, in particular, for a grown manly man). Socrates' interlocutor for the moment, the beastly Callicles, throws a heap of shit at poor Socrates:

When I see an older man still studying philosophy and not deserting it, that man, Socrates, is actually asking for a whipping. For as I said just now, such a man, even if exceptionally gifted, is doomed to prove less than a man, shunning the city center and market place, in which the poet said that men win distinction, and living the rest of his life sunk in a corner and whispering with three or four boys, and incapable of any utterance that is free and lofty and brilliant (Gorgias, 485 a-d).

This is slander, of course (and Socrates knows it). Hanging out with young boys is very nice, thinks Socrates (for several reasons). But isn't there a familiar ring to Callicles' rant - even applied to our own times? "Why don't you get a real job...? You can't spend your whole life on education." But philosophy is not a career, not something one pursues with the intention of increasing the odds of "success". Socrates was aware of that, too. Philosophy is no incidental occupation, Plato says, but it should be reserved for the old, for a period of life when people are "allowed to roam free and graze at will, and to concentrate on philosophy, with everything else being incidental." (Rep., 498 b-c) I am a little sympathetic to what he says here.

There is a reason why I am babbling about Plato. Y & I had lunch and our discussion was slightly bend towards melancholia. Our short life, etc. We discussed philosophers and philosophy, and we both realized that most of the philosophers from which we have actually learnt something (not merely having picked up one or two fine & dandy arguments), are all 50++. Old. The only philosophers we know, who are young and wise, are our friends... This sounds arrogant, of course. But, really, when I skim philosophical journals, I get depressed. I get the impression of 30 ++ guys who, instead of going to the gym or hitting on "the opposite sex" or building a summer house or riding on a roaring motorcycle, write technical articles with lots of technical jargon. "An analysis of Dummett's conception of mathematical infinity compared to his views on truth-conditions". "Deleuze & Aquinas - a comparative analysis". "Fifty-five Cogent Arguments for why Killing Babies Does Not Belong to the Class of Permitted Actions." "A mathematical take on the ontological proof for the existence of God." "The différance of difference - deconstructing the de- of deconstruction." "The young Wittgenstein and the later Wittgenstein - My conceptualist reading, influenced by my very radical re-reading of Frege's nachlass".

Sometimes I am afflicted by the biggest misfortune of all, according to Plato, misology. Hatred of reason. Perhaps that shows that I'm too young for this business. Take your time, the motto of the philosopher, says Wittgenstein (or something like that). But, as you also know, we have to go the bloody hard way. (LW said that, too.) But walking the bloody hard way takes a lot of time. A lot of patience. It's easier to pick up an argument, polish it a bit, and rush onwards. And it's far too easy to write sarcastic, know-it-all blog posts.

But I admonish you: don't grow too old. Towards the end of his life, David Hume was a wealthy man. He had done this and that, and his writings sold well. Hume's publisher asked him to write another book. Hume responded: “I must decline not only this offer, but all others of a literary nature for four reasons: Because I am too old, too fat, too lazy, and too rich.”