Prof. Sean Kelly
ZG: This special, existential feeling that you talk about is something that the social scientists, the economists, study?
SK: I think that the social sciences, especially the quantitative social sciences, are not the best place to study this kind of human significance. They can be a supplement, but there is something more fundamental at stake than quantitative studies can get a grip on. To understand this, however, you have to get a better sense for the phenomenon that seems to me so crucial. It has to do with the way the whole of what is, hangs together as what is. That’s what philosophy, ultimately, is aiming to engage.
A way to approach this is to start with the question what philosophy is. To me, philosophy is the set of all those questions that are so significant, so deep, and so mysterious, that to address them properly, you also have to address the method by means of which you address them. For example, say you ask the question, what’s the significance of death? My father died in the spring, and I’ve been thinking a lot about this. It’s very hard to think about: What does this all mean? What’s the significance of this in my life, or in my
“I think that the social sciences, especially the quantitative social sciences, are not the best place to study this kind of human signif-cance. They can be a supplement, but there is something more fundamental at stake than quantitative studies can get a grip on.”
kids’ lives or in my family’s life? What does it mean, more generally, to be a being that comes to an end? To be a being that lives its life in the recognition that ultimately it will come to an end? Here, survey data isn’t the relevant approach. I feel like it requires something harder... a kind of thinking where you have to be ready to recognize that what you’re doing now just isn’t doing it somehow. And there are no general rules for this kind of thinking. There is experience, and there is a sense of what’s working or not working, when it is. But this sense isn’t captured by some range of methodological principles or quantitative measures. It happens in situ and in commune. It happens, in other words, at a time, in a place, and with others. And it goes forth in a way that depends upon what has happened before, even while it is always ready to overturn that precedent if necessary. This is what I find so exciting about philosophy—to me it’s deeply creative in the way that, perhaps, jazz improvisation is creative.
Now we can see why philosophy is so fundamentally different from social science. In my view, social science can only happen after philosophy has already done its work. There are social scientists who are interested in what makes people happy and collect all sorts of sophisticated information—but ultimately, all they can ever do is collect data about what people say and do. In comparison, philosophers are interested in asking the question: what’s the relation between your happiness and what you say and do about your happiness? I think this is something the social sciences have to take a stand on without ever
asking any deep questions about. I’m sure there are social scientists who are sophisticated and do ask that kind of question—but to the extent that they do, they’re pushing on the philosophical end of their discipline.
Rapid Fire Questions
with Prof. Sean Kelly
Favorite Poet? Auden
Favorite campus spot? Dunster House Library
Favorite philosopher you can’t stand? Martin Heidegger, because he’s clearly a deep and import- ant thinker, but he was also, equally clearly, a Nazi.
Second favorite Harvard house? Lowell House, because that’s where my advisor Hubert Dreyfus lived.
Any rising philosophical stars to look out for? Manon Garcia, Becca Roth- feld, Thomas Pendlebury—I’m leaving out a billion and more.
You always say your two favor- ite novels of the 19th century were Moby Dick and the Broth- ers Karamazov. What are they for the 20th century Infinite Jest and Ulysses.
ZG: So, if you could summarize maybe in like two sentences, why would a freshman want to major in philosophy now?
SK: Because your life will become more meaningful. The life that you’re leading will become more interesting, more potentially significant, and you’ll have a better sense for what it is that you could be aiming for, no matter what you do. I don’t care if you go on to do finance, law, nonprofit work, or become a professional football player. The idea that you have a reflective relation to the life that you’re leading seems to me, the crucial thing that distinguishes human beings from other animals, and that’s what philosophy is, and that’s why you should study it and take it seriously.