In the days when I worked in the financial services industry, from time to time someone would discover that my academic background was neither in economics nor finance (nor mathematics, nor physics) and would ask me whether I thought my training in philosophy was of benefit or of hindrance to my work. This question was usually asked in such a tone as to suggest that studying philosophy would – rather obviously - be inadequate as a preparation for a successful career in finance. I tried my best to make the contrary case.
First, I would reply, studying philosophy has taught be me to be sceptical about widely held assumptions that are often accepted as common sense; and taught me not to be afraid of challenging consensus views about the world. There is a great deal of groupthink in the financial markets, often manifesting itself in the propensity to accept causal explanations for changes in market valuations that do not stand up to rigorous scrutiny. Being willing to question widely held assumptions, I would say, can be an advantage, especially when it comes to avoiding asset price bubbles.
A second benefit, I would continue, was that studying philosophy taught me to create some distance between my immediate day-to-day preoccupations and my longer-term goals in life. After a bad day at work – when some unexpected event led to trading losses, or a problem with an IT system led to errors in a report for a major client – it is helpful to be able to put work into a wider perspective, and not to become too disheartened by a short-term setback.
A third benefit, I would conclude, was that studying philosophy had given me the confidence I needed to deal with new and complex financial instruments. When starting to read a 150-page legal document for a securitisation deal, which included a complicated collateralisation arrangement, rather than be daunted by the arcane technical terminology, I simply reminded myself that I had read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason when I was an undergraduate. From this experience I had learned that however long, complex and full of obscure technical language, all texts can be understood, given time, focus and determination.
Looking back, I now wonder that I ever thought these suitable answers to the question, since not one of my three claims is compelling. It is quite possible to avoid the pitfalls of groupthink, to maintain a good sense of what really matters in life, and to have the confidence to absorb new and complex information, without ever attending a philosophy lecture or reading a philosophy book. And many people who attend philosophy lectures and read philosophy books are prone to groupthink, are easily disheartened by minor problems in life, and are unwilling to invest time mastering complex ideas outside of their comfort zone. In short, studying philosophy is neither necessary nor sufficient for a successful career in the financial services industry.
Why did I imagine that my responses provided an enlightening answer to the question? I can only speculate that I mistook what was true for me to be true in some general sense, that is to make a logical inference from my case to the more general case, when such an inference was plainly unwarranted. One problem with induction is that humans are not very good at it. (There are other problems too, I seem to remember.) Fortunately for me, not being as good at philosophy as once I thought did not preclude me from being successful at finance, at least for a while. Better to be lucky than to be clever.
There is, nonetheless, a value in telling stories – to ourselves and to others – about the connection between what we believe and what we do; that is, the application of thinking to being. My main idea, which I will write about in this and subsequent texts, is that our satisfaction with life is largely independent of visible achievements – the accumulation of wealth or status, for example – and is much more dependent on our ability to connect our best thinking about what matters in life to the day-to-day decisions we make about our lives. A happy life is the goal; a considered life is the method.
Before I go further, I want to recount a story about one of the earliest philosophers in the Western tradition, Thales of Miletus (who was Greek by ethnicity and language, but who lived in what is now Turkey). Aristotle recounts that Thales was criticised by his contemporaries for being poor, which showed, they said, that studying philosophy was pointless. By way of reply, Thales used his knowledge of weather forecasting (meteorology being a key skill of the Pre-Socratics) to predict a good olive harvest the following year. During the winter he rented all the olive presses quite cheaply because no-one else wanted use of them out of season; but later that year, when a bumper olive crop appeared, Thales was able to sub-let the olive presses at extortionate rates and made a great deal of money.
Aristotle’s purpose in telling this story was to illustrate the point that creating a monopoly is an effective way to capture wealth; but his subsidiary point, which he delights in drawing attention to, was that Thales had demonstrated that “philosophers can easily be rich if they like, but that their ambition is of another sort” (Politics, I:xi). It is tempting to generalise from the case of Thales, as Aristotle does, but there really is no good reason to think that most philosophers – then or now – have the commercial acumen that Thales demonstrated.
I like this story, not just because I am comforted to know that even the greatest of philosophers can make the same simple error of inductive logic that I made; but also because I enjoy the idea of Thales successfully cornering the principal agricultural commodity market of his day and there being no regulator to punish him for it.
What conclusion do I draw at this point? That what is true for one is not true for all, but what is true for one matters a great deal to that one. Thales made his point: he was not poor because he was a philosopher, rather he was primarily interested in acquiring knowledge rather than wealth; and I made my point: that I am the sort of person who takes pleasure both in studying philosophy and in working in the financial markets. Success at one was not the cause of success at the other; however, both activities, in their rather different ways, provided challenges that I enjoyed and required me to think and work in ways that suited my character. There are no general life lessons to be drawn from the specifics of someone else’s life, but there is nonetheless a general principle, which my examples illustrate: do what makes you happy, live the life which makes the best of your character, your personality and your circumstances.
Calling this a philosophy does sound a little grandiose, a touch pretentious. But that is, I think, more a problem with our language than with the idea itself. One of the things you learn to do when you study philosophy is to distinguish the meaning of words, and the concepts they represent, in the hope of bringing some precision to speech and writing, and some clarity to thought. Some philosophers seem never to move beyond the making of definitions, attempting to conduct their arguments by stipulation rather than reasoning; others seem wilful in their use of neologisms, which obfuscate rather than clarify their claims. There is, however, value in noting a few distinctions at this point, namely between “studying philosophy”, “being a philosopher”, “being philosophical” and “having a philosophy”.
Studying philosophy is comparable to studying science, history or economics: there is a syllabus, books and journal articles to read, lectures to attend and essays to write. The subject matter is different from other subjects in various ways, but the learning process is mostly identical. Studying philosophy is just one route among many to taking and passing examinations, which establish one’s credentials in the employment market. Potential employers might reasonably expect philosophy graduates to be better able than other graduates to provide examples of moral reasoning; they don’t expect philosophy graduates to be better people because of what they have learned.
Teaching philosophy at a university is, likewise, comparable as a career to teaching science, history or economics. There are lectures to offer, seminars and conferences to attend, books and articles to read and review, research projects which lead eventually to the publication of articles and books, just like in any other subject. There is career progression from research fellow to lecturer and, perhaps, to professor, just as in other disciplines. Success may or may not be deserved, reputations may rise and fall, but no-one expects a professional philosopher to be a better person that a scientist, an historian or an economist.
My point here is not to dismiss the study and teaching of philosophy, but to recognise it for what it is: an academic training and an academic job just like any other. We do not expect the subject matter itself to change the student or the teacher for the better. It is a training of the mind, not a discipline for the improvement of character. For which reason, we also have no reason to expect that philosophy students or teachers will be happier, or more at peace, or better equipped to face death. Nor do we expect them to be more successful in worldly terms, by, for example, building a monopoly in the market for olive presses, or by managing investment funds for institutional clients. Studying and teaching philosophy will appeal to some and not others, but they are not special.
What does it mean to be philosophical? In common parlance this has nothing to do with the academic subject of philosophy, just as being economical has nothing much to do with the academic study of economics. In Western culture, calling someone philosophical is much the same as calling them stoical, where this is taken to mean that the person has a calm, measured approach to life, and is not easily distressed even when bad luck occurs. For some reason we don’t use the term philosophical to apply to people whose characters are predominantly sceptical, or cynical, or epicurean, despite the influence of these classical traditions on the development of the subject. Common parlance disguises as much as it reveals.
Being philosophical is also rather different from having a philosophy. In modern management theory, this simply means organising a set of ideas or plans into a coherent statement. It is an inflated term for a strategy: football coaches have a philosophy, chains of coffee shops have a philosophy, social care homes have a philosophy. While we expect businesses to have a philosophy, we don’t think that the business with the best philosophy will be the best business; nor that its customers will be the happiest, nor that their products will deliver the most value or meaning. In these cases, it is the form that matters – the method by which a diverse set of activities are connected to each other – not the content. Having a philosophy is about imposing structure rather than substance.
In this and subsequent texts I will write about “my philosophy”. I do not intend to reminisce about my studies in my late teens and early twenties; nor to promote the work I have had published in books and journals; nor demonstrate my admiration for the Stoics; nor to devise some coherent message about my life as a project. None of these uses of the word philosophy captures what I want to write about, none addresses what I think matters. Any yet, it remains the most appropriate word for what I want to write about.
During his trial – as recorded by Plato in The Apology – Socrates famously said that the unexamined life was not worth living. Equally famously, Socrates was found guilty and condemned to death. Despite these inauspicious origins, the phrase “the examined life” captures a conviction – not universally shared but nonetheless widespread – that it matters to think, reflect and talk about those things that make life precious and meaningful. Further, that these processes of reflection, sometimes conducted in solitude and at other times among sympathetic friends, are the best hope of making sense of our place in the world, both our objective insignificance and our subjective uniqueness and importance.
Having fretted over the use of the word philosophy but decided to retain it, I dislike and have decided to disown the phrase “examined life”. Contemporary uses of the word examination tend to emphasise either a medical process or the taking of a test. I do not propose to examine my life in the way that a doctor might examine my body; and I do not think that an examined life is a life that can be scored and graded. The binary concepts of health/sickness and pass/fail, both suggest winners and losers; and if there’s one key idea in my philosophy it is that life is not a game.
I will write about my philosophy, by which I mean, I will write about what it means for me to try lead a considered life. I do not claim that I am wholly successful, nor that my considerations will apply to others. I am certainly not seeking converts or disciples. All I hope is that by describing my philosophy, I might encourage readers to consider their own lives, to try to find a philosophy that works for them. My life has been better lived when I have lived it with consideration; this might also be true for some others.
End of the prolegomenon.