“angrymadsygin replied to your post “Some Nietzsche quotes that express my thoughts on The Tumblr Consensus”

@philosopherking1887​ What about those who refuse to determinedly adopt anything and keep their thoughts to themselves? Those who sift everything and keep only what they wish to? Those who hover about like a silent blimp? Is there an answer? Just wondering. I told you some time ago that I dislike reading philosophy because I find it subjective, that’s why I’m asking. You are learned in this field and I wanted to know if you read something about that kind of person.

@angrymadsygin this criticism is certainly not aimed at “those who refuse to determinedly adopt anything” and “who sift everything and keep only what they wish to.” There is definitely a philosophical term for people who continually weigh considerations and never come down on one side of an issue or the other: Pyrrhonian skeptics. A common interpretation of this late Hellenistic school is that they had a quasi-dogmatic policy of avoiding “dogmatism,” which is to say, of suspending judgment on every question and ginning up arguments on both sides of any issue until they achieved “equipollence,” i.e., until the considerations on each side appeared to have equal weight. The goal of this policy, according to this interpretation, was ataraxia, non-disturbance or peace of mind: if you never commit yourself to a position, you won’t be bothered about working to defend it, and you won’t be troubled by arguments or evidence that appear to show that you are wrong. However, the Pyrrhonian skeptics themselves (including their most prolific spokesman, Sextus Empiricus) denied that this was a policy, and said that suspension of judgment was simply the natural result of continued inquiry and ataraxia a fortunate side effect. The name itself, skeptikos, means “thoughtful, inquisitive [person]” and is derived from the verb skeptesthai, “to consider, reflect, look into.” I am a fan of the Pyrrhonian skeptics; I think they were cool. Clearly I am not one, however, because I do have strong opinions and I express them… but I make sure that I am always able to defend them with reasons. And I also (try to) remain open to changing my view when presented with sufficient reason to do so.

The people I was criticizing in the post you replied to are the people who unthinkingly parrot a party line and/or defend that party line with half-baked “arguments” that are easily pulled apart and debunked with just a slightly closer look at the issue in question. Obviously, I was talking about the person in the post I’d just reblogged who claimed – with no evidence other than the things Thor* says in Ragnarok (or that Taika Waititi has said in interviews) and in direct contradiction to what we saw in previous movies – that Loki has been trying to kill Thor for their whole lives and enjoys hurting and betraying Thor, and Thor showed the patience of a saint in putting up with him for so long. (So much for “show, don’t tell,” right? Apparently the things Thor*, TR, and TW just tell people take precedence over the things they’ve been shown for 3 movies.) I’m talking about the post that claims that Taika Waititi characterizes Thor and Loki much better than Joss Whedon because Waititi has a better understanding of Norse mythology and Whedon sees everything through the lens of Christianity, while Waititi remains unsullied by the influence of Christian culture (indigeneity fetishism, anyone?). I’m talking about the post that says “honestly the only way to explain joss’s loki is to say he was strung out on torture and space meth the whole time” when yes that is actually the explanation Joss was telegraphing (well, maybe not the space meth part, but Loki has definitely been through some shit). I’m talking about the post with a gif of Steve saying “son of a gun” next to a gif of Steve saying “son of a bitch” that claims that this shows the difference between Whedon’s inept good ol’ boy from Kansas characterization of Steve and actual Brooklyn army vet Steve… when the second gif is from Age of Ultron, which was *written by Joss Whedon*. And I’m talking about the people who thoughtlessly reblog these posts without disputing these claims even in the tags, thereby endorsing the view that they’re seeing coming from everyone else around them.

As to the view that philosophy is “subjective”: it is, like most things, a blend of subjectivity and objectivity. Unlike empirical sciences, philosophy doesn’t rest on experimental data that can be quantified – and that which is measurable or quantifiable is, these days, the paradigm of objectivity… to the extent that you can give just about anything an aura of objectivity if you put some numbers in. Numbers are only objective if everyone knows exactly what’s being measured and how. But philosophy is NOT, contrary to the picture in the popular imagination, simply a matter of some mystical guru types – or white men speaking from the authority of their whiteness and maleness – pronouncing some unsupported doctrines and expecting other people to take their word for it.

What sets philosophy apart from, e.g., religion, or ideology, or just plain making shit up, is that philosophers present reasons for their views: they defend them with arguments and with appeals to some commonly available evidence, such as general observations about everyday life, or history, or human nature. If you disagree with the philosopher’s conclusion, it’s then on you, the reader/interlocutor, to determine what part of the argument didn’t work. Was the reasoning invalid – i.e., did the conclusion not follow logically from the premises – or was one of the premises false? Figuring out what you think was wrong with the argument makes disagreement more than just a matter of people shouting contrary views at each other. If you can show that the argument was invalid, you force the philosopher (or their followers) to rethink the conclusion; maybe they can come up with a valid argument, but it puts the onus back on them to produce one. If you can point to empirical evidence that one of the premises is false, again, they need to rethink the conclusion. Often the disagreement is on a premise that is utterly unprovable: something about the basic nature of humanity or of the universe (is the universe basically rational, intelligible, orderly or irrational, unintelligible, chaotic? are human beings basically good or basically evil? does the good life consist in dedicating oneself to relieving the suffering of others, or in creating something by which one will be remembered?). These very fundamental premises may rightly be called “subjective,” because they might ultimately boil down to a very general feeling, reflecting one’s own character and/or needs (Nietzsche and William James, my philosophical heroes, both emphasize that point). But it’s still helpful to distinguish the disputants’ common ground from the points on which they can’t be reconciled. This giving and demanding of reasons, the effort to find common ground and maybe even come to agreement on the basis of logic and evidence, is the objective component of philosophy.