A Philosophy Must Be Tolerable to Your Wife to Be True

The necessary burden of contextual intuition.

Say, you go to a plantation in South Louisiana, where the only open coffee shop in town is. In the parking lot there’s a sign that says, “Do not park to the right of this sign. Violators will be towed.”

You would immediately understand that the sign meant your right given the vantage from which you can read the sign. This is left unexplained. Confidence in this interpretation is high enough that you don’t notice the actually quite labyrinthian web of assumptions that go into the the placement and the meaning of the sign: the first-person concept of right-handedness in relationship to where you can read the English words, the concept of free parking, the threat of tow trucks, and so on.

That’s an easy one.

Say you’re walking around this plantation, and you notice a pond with a small bridge to an island in the center. There are a bunch of Southern-Homes looking cypress knees and hanging moss to entice you over. You walk across the bridge. You sit in a chair, reading. To your left you notice that there’s an egg. There are several scattered feathers around it. You wonder if a damn duck left that egg there. There are ducks in the water over there. It looks exactly like a chicken egg, but that would mean someone bought an egg from the store and left it on the ground because there are no chickens for miles. That’s implausible, besides, because what about all the scattered feathers? Did a fox kill the mother or are they just from nesting? There is no visible nest, come to think of it. The egg is just laying on the open dirt. You don’t really know what a duck egg looks like in relation to a chicken egg, anyway. Is a duck egg shell leathery or is that a turtle? The questions keep coming.

You walk over and touch the egg with your shoe. It’s heavy and a little see-through like it might hatch. No ducks attack you. You remember that near the entrance there was a giant turkey (he has a name that everyone who works there knows, but you can’t remember [it’s Ivan]), who is about three feet tall and ancient and reminds you that dinosaurs certainly did exist. Wouldn’t his (her?) egg be the size of a softball? You then look around for maintenance staff or tour guides who might know about the origin of this egg, who perhaps have left it there intentionally, who might be ready to scold you for disrupting a protected bird or something.

My question to you: Is it OK to pick up the egg?

The expectation that was clear-cut for the sign is much more nuanced now. If you’re a certain kind of guy, you might reach down and pick up the egg. Or you might be afraid of germs on it. Or if you’re a compassionate type, you might worry that the mother won’t come back if you touch it. If you’re high in conscientiousness, you might avoid touching it for fear of breaking the social contract, as you keenly feel a duty to not being too odd or disruptive. All of these calculations and many more are done in an instant, all the time. You might have a discussion with your wife about if it’s cool or not. Cool meaning kosher, copacetic, you see.

All cognition exists on this gigantic interpersonal, intersocial, contextual landscape. A certain kind of analytic philosopher wants to believe that everything could be understood like the parking sign, but themselves fail to notice that even in the case of the sign there is a sort of bizarre and intuitive social underground. They might have it to place a sign next to every rogue egg saying, “Please only touch if you are reasonably sure it’s a loose chicken egg. Otherwise, contact your local forester.”

It’s easy to have high confidence in plain instructions when and where they are possible. The very practice of thinking that everything could work that way makes you less well equipped to handle it when you have to rely on a vast array of hypercontextual cues to know what to do, which is almost always. When it’s okay to read a magazine that’s been left in a chair, or when it’s okay to try on a hat in a store, how far to stand from someone you’ve just met vs. known for ten years, and so on.

The masculine principle tends to take these common sense sort of wisdoms for granted (if at all) and seeks to find new and more asymmetrical sources of information. The feminine principle tends to play by the rules of the existing context and will only instantiate asymmetrical information of the men she most trusts and depends on. The masculine without the feminine tends towards a technical sort of social autism, and the feminine without the masculine tends toward rule by committee and sometimes mob.

Nietzsche said that if wisdom was a woman, and it is, then philosophers have failed in their task because none of them have understood women, which is true and hilarious. The task of the good philosopher is sort of like a more detailed poet. The metaphysics have been already established by nature and in our behavior. They are true as far as they have worked. Our intuitions are, by and large, correct, insofar as people who have followed the wrong ones destroyed their society, or the people who followed the right ones poorly also destroyed their society. The job of the philosopher is to give those intuitions credence with the sort of more precise semi-poetry to fortify it against regression. If philosophy is not doing its job to justify good, prudent, practical, pragmatic, and long-term intuitions (read: religious), then it is failing.

Occasionally, it finds something counter-intuitive and also true, but that is rare. Even when we all think we know the ideas that sound wrong but are actually right, we’re still usually wrong. Specifically, philosophy begins to radically fail when it is only done by increasingly odd guys who remain isolated by their inability to understand women. What we get without them is a metaphysic that provocatively seeks to systematically undermine our intuitions, and therefore implicitly hates the women who are the best at abiding by those intuitions, for better and worse. Women usually avoid this sort of thought by nature, unless they are trying to impress a certain type of boy. They are, for the most part, completely disgusted by the vibes of most philosophers, which Nietzsche also knew well.

But philosophy is not useless. Philosophy is best when it’s something you do with your family. Walker Percy said that the greatest advice he would give a kid is to learn to love to read before it’s too late. If you don’t, you will have missed out. Learning how to read good philosophy and good fiction, after all, is the only thing that will protect you and your family from the onslaught of the waves of dynamic cultural vampirism that try to eat them at every turn, through their phones and through the TV, through social media, and whatever.

They’re coming for your kids. Without a robust, serious, thoughtful, playful, fun philosophy that, importantly, passes the smell test of your wife, you will lose them, and you will lose them badly. They will lack a way to connect their rational faculties with the sacramental and intuitive rituals. They will play out dark pagan patterns that have been repeatedly shown to lead to death and infertility. To the extent that you fail at that, your family line will die. That is a practical failure of your working philosophy.

A rule of thumb: If, for example, you attend a philosophical summit where there are no women (which my wife and I did a few weeks ago), the men will tend to revel too much in their anti-social conceptual purity. If you go to places where there are no men around, the women will revel in what sounds nice over what’s true, as they tend to want to maintain a safe space.

What we need is the masculine faculty to pierce into discomfort where necessary (which, to varying degrees, is found in both men and women). That drive wants to go out into the unknown specifically to bring forth treasure to impress a woman. She is then able to place it in just the right spot in the contextual home (or not), which is to capitulate that new information into the existing structure of the family.

If my wife happened to be with me, I would have looked at her and asked “Should I pick up the egg?” I honestly don’t know what she would’ve said.