David B. Calhoun’s Blog

I’ve been puzzled by this for a while now as a sort of philosophical problem, and I may be blowing it out of proportion, but it just fascinates me: to what extent does a person’s life nullify their opinions? I used this analogy in Literature class last Wednesday: people think Nietzsche (who, by the way, has the craziest name in the history of philosophy) told some truths, yet he lived the last decade or so of his life in a syphillis-induced insanity. There seems to be a disconnect from the great life he was teaching and the life he was living, in other words. But does his life make his view null and void? A while back I wrote “Beware of philosophers who don’t live what they teach/preach”, and this is still appealing to me today, but it seems there are different things going on here.

The first, the doctrine/teaching is stated by the philosopher. That is, some fact is thrown into the open air and presented as fact. If the doctrine is useful to us, then this will be presented with a life application to this fact. For instance, it is all well and good that a race of Hapropianides live on the planet Zong at the other corner of the galaxy, but if there is no application then the fact becomes useless to us. However, it doesn’t cease to be a fact! This is the key point.

Therefore, if a philosopher presents a truth (or what is taken to be truth) and gives a method of living this truth, then we would expect the philosopher to live by this method. However, if the philosopher completely contradicts the method of living the truth, the truth claim itself remains untouched (unless we are to assume that the philosopher wasn’t as smart as we once thought, and possibly made an error as to the truth itself). Therefore, the truth claim and the application are completely different things. Yet what I wrote still stands - beware of the philosopher who doesn’t follow his own doctrines, because obviously his method of living those doctrines is flawed. It would be wise to follow a philosopher who gives us a method for following a truth and is able to live that truth, and that the method isn’t completely incapable of being followed.

For when a person explains that the Earth is spherical and yet refuses to travel across the Atlantic for fear of falling off the edge, we ought to avoid only the person and the method, and only follow the truth claim itself (assuming that it is really a truth).

This entry was posted on Monday, December 6th, 2004 at 11:06 am and is filed under Philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.