[Serious] Generally speaking, is philosophy a worthwhile subject of study?

[polymath257]

Can you clarify this point further? 

Uh oh. Money where my mouth is time.

Specifically, how ethics and aesthetics are methods of knowing oneself. But more broadly, how you would apply this argument with a branch of science like psychology as opposed to physics?

In physics and the other so-called "hard" sciences, knowledge has to be as far away from personal experience as possible. In fact personal experience doesn't count as knowledge in those fields. 

Knowledge in physics is detached from the individual experiencer, interpreted through the lens of theory (which is a historical group project, contingent on its own genealogy and institutional approval) and expressed as abstractly as possible. Ideally in the abstract language of mathematics. It is a fiction, or an image, made to refer in some abstract way to the real world. 

(Blake called the knowledge that science abstracts from experience the "Spectre," because it is dead, unexperienced. He thought that the only reality is what we experience. This is sort of what Romanticism is, in a nutshell.) 

Ethics and aesthetics and phenomenology take as their subjects real people's real experiences. 

In this sense there is a great deal of overlap with psychology, as well as with anthropology, sociology, all kinds of cultural and emotional fields. 

Once we start talking about psychology as a real field of research (pure and applied) then you'll know more about it than I do. I'm thinking that when we stay in philosophy, as opposed to psychology as science, then part of what's different is the is/ought distinction. It is part of a philosopher's job to talk about the oughts. 

Psychology, on the other hand, limits its oughts to two types: 1) professional ethics (you ought not sleep with your clients) or 2) utilitarian means toward decided ends -- that is, IF you want to relieve this guy's agoraphobia, you ought to use these methods. But deciding whether agoraphobia is a good life to have or not is a value judgment, and in my view philosophical -- part of the question: what is a good life?  

Maybe an example is in order. The trend in aesthetic philosophy these days is what they call "Environmental Aesthetics." The people who work with this want to think about how we experience the world around us. Obviously, no one has direct experience of the noumena -- everything is filtered, interpreted, and judged already before it appears to us as phenomena. Aesthetic philosophers want to examine those filters. 

Recently they are talking about how we tend to experience nature as if it were art. When we look out the car window and say, "oh, that's beautiful," what we mean is "that looks like a painting." We enjoy the environment (both natural and built) as if it were something else -- as if it were made by an artist. Japanese people are particularly susceptible to this, since just about all of Chinese and Japanese literature uses items from the natural world for symbolic meaning. Japanese appreciation of nature consists largely of matching a natural object with its literary meaning. There is even a famous haiku against this: something like "How fortunate is he who can see the cherry blossoms and not think 'life is fleeting.'"

I know this is beside the point, but this whole analysis confuses me. I don't say ;that is beautiful' because 'that looks like a painting'. I say it is beautiful if I think it is beautiful. And I *don't* look at it as if there was an artist (unless, of course, I know it was made by an artist). The filters are certainly there: we can only see part of the spectrum of light, we have per-conceptions that affect what we notice, we are subject to illusions, etc.

But I never look at cherry blossoms and think about how life is fleeting.

But then, I have never quite grasped why the difference between metaphor and simile is supposed to be important. Why is the use (or lack of use) of 'as' or 'like' such a big deal?

So if you're so masochistic as to go to the International Conference of Aesthetics, you can hear a hundred papers on how to get away from traditional judgments. 

Some people suggest that experiencing the natural world without the lens of art means understanding it as science. Then a walk in the woods becomes a science field trip, and we experience things more greatly by citing the Latin names of the plants.

So art is the Scylla and scientism is the Charybdis, and aesthetic philosophers are thinking how we can get the most out of our experience of nature without going to ground on either extreme. 

How we know ourselves, given this problem, means deepening our understanding of how we interface, appreciate, judge, our environments, and how we select what we give our attention to. 

Verbosity, c'est moi.

Strange. I find knowing the science of the rainbow enhances my aesthetic enjoyment of it. It's similar (but not the same) to knowing how the biography of an author can affect the enjoyment of their literature.