One of the most captivating intellectual experiences I’ve had was in the summer after high school, when I was attending a talk by a math professor. It was an orientation talk meant to help students decide which among the various calculus courses they could take in their first year. The options, for our present purposes, were the “easy,” “medium,” and “hard” class. The moment that stuck out to me was when the professor described the differences between the classes like this: the “easy” class is if you just want to learn how to do derivatives and apply them; the “medium” class is if you want to go deeper and ask, “what is a derivative?”; and the “hard” class is if you want to go even deeper and ask, “what is a number?”
I had spent years learning math until that point, and I had never really bothered to ask: what even is a number? What even is the word “is”? This was the beginning of a rabbithole that spanned my first few years of college and involved encounters with real analysis, formal logic, Wittgenstein, and postmodernism. But it was a rabbithole that never ended in a satisfying way, and instead puttered out in a feeling of disillusionment. The entire journey centered around a question that has animated much of my life: how far can you get—or how powerful can you become—simply by sitting and thinking really hard about the most fundamental questions?
When I was starting out in college, I had this belief that on the other side of a deep engagement with the most fundamental philosophical questions is…something important. I wasn’t sure exactly what that something was. Enlightenment? A world-transforming insight? An end to all my suffering and even the suffering of everyone else in the world? A glitch in the very fabric of reality revealing itself and God bursting into the room and saying you found it, you found the secret to the puzzle!! ? I didn’t know what was on the other side of deep, intellectual engagement with the deepest questions, but what I knew was that every time I explored such questions (what am I? what is time? what is truth?), my sense of reality was expanded, and I somehow felt more powerful. A deep hunger was being quenched. A hunger to find the question at the root of all other questions, to find the answer that supersedes all other answers.
A decade later, I look at all of this differently. Today I’d say: if you spend long periods of time deep in thought about hard philosophical questions, what you get is…nothing worthwhile. It’s not a complete waste of time per se—you’ll certainly learn interesting things. But it’s not going to solve life in the way that you expect it to. It won’t be an end to your suffering. It won’t make you all-powerful. And you won’t come to some insight that will feel like a discrete “before” and “after” moment in your entire life story.
You might call the transition I’m describing the young philosopher’s disenchantment. The moment when you are no longer convinced that the most worthwhile thing you could do is go into deep thought about the most profound-looking questions. I have written elsewhere about why it is that philosophical inquiry can lead to this kind of disappointment, which essentially has to do with the limits of thought and language as a tool in solving problems (others have also expanded on this). But what I don’t see described as much is the first-person experience of undergoing this shift.
There are both benefits and drawbacks to a philosopher’s disenchantment. On the one hand, it entails coming into greater contact with reality.1 It is sort of like breaking out of a slumber you have been in your whole life, where you saw everything through the lens of abstraction, where you couldn’t appreciate things for what they were and instead always had to ask “but what does this imply about reality as a whole?” When I posted about “suddenly losing an interest in philosophical problems,” the comment from one of my best friends was “finally bro damn 💀”. It felt like finally seeing why everyone else kept rolling their eyes at my philosophical explorations, which always seemed to me to be the most pressing questions imaginable.
As much as it feels like a growth in maturity, though, the disenchantment has its drawbacks. It is, fundamentally, a loss of ambition. I am no longer working as hard to find The Ultimate Truth. When I read extremely abstract philosophy papers, my eyes gloss over, and any time I run into someone proclaiming their new fundamental ontology of reality, rather than getting excited, I get annoyed.
What’s strange about it, though, is that it actually feels exciting to contemplate that I could be wrong. It would somehow be satisfying to discover that some twenty-five year old philosopher actually did discover the real truth of the world just by sitting and thinking hard, and God actually did pop in out of nowhere and say, you did it, you won the prize!! (Or perhaps less supernaturally, we can imagine that said philosopher publishes their manuscript, and in short order science is solved, diseases are eradicated, and world peace is achieved.2) In such a situation I would be mildly upset that I wasn’t the one who saved the world by philosophizing, but I would also be happy that my childhood self was actually onto something, that philosophy really can change everything, and we actually did solve the riddle in the end.
I don’t expect I will ever fully let go of this philosophical compulsion – this desire to systematize every aspect of experience and try to extract fundamental truths from it.3 I still read various kinds of philosophy, or things that are close enough to it. But for the time being it feels like a relief to let go of that all-consuming search for a totalizing answer. My intellectual explorations now feel somehow more intimate and alive, even if I’m not pursuing them with as much urgency. I still study all these books and ask all these questions, but not because I think they will get me somewhere. I study them because they are beautiful.
If I didn’t believe this, I would’ve never become disenchanted! But I expect others (philosophers) will disagree with this view.
There are still arguably routes other than philosophy which could lead to this outcome, e.g. tHe SiNgUlaRiTy.
Describing it as a compulsion may make it seem like a bad thing, but it’s actually not. There is something valuable in this way of approaching the world; it is a gift you can offer your friends who don’t spend as much time thinking.