Our Main Question

Our main issue is: What is Philosophy?

What is interesting about it is that the question cannot be answered without already knowing. There are no anti-philosophers out there that have wisdom to share about the field. There are plenty that complain, but share nothing of substance.

Can a non-philosopher (if there is such a thing) answer serious questions?

If they attempt to do it, will it just be inane American drivel?

Let's look at a problem below and while we do, think to yourself how this question might be answered outside of philosophy, in the streets or in the sciences, in particular, in academia. How is this question handled and what does it mean to ask and answer a question without process thinking tools.

Has the fundamental business of thinking been hijacked by white males sitting in armchairs thinking they alone have solved the greatest problems of the world?

There are entire academic projects devoted to uncovering how philosophy and Liberal Arts has been poisoned by white male narcissism. There are movements targeting "whites" for using their privilege as an agenda for creating false truth. Many academics on the Right see male domination as a way of skewing the results of thinking in academia. This kind of criticism does not really start at the beginning, which is to say, though it sees itself as truly critical, it does not go deep enough. It is not philosophy. In order to inform the latter disciplines (maybe feminist) one needs to understand philosophy. If one of the goals is to transcend white male narcissism ... so be it!

It is true that Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant and the legacy of (HC) analytics was white males sitting alone in their rooms imagining that they had invented, on their own, the answers to our greatest questions.

This is not the entirety of the business. As Billig points out in his book (Hidden Roots) there is another side to the "accepted" tradition. There were others (though mostly white males) that were pushing for another, more social side, to learning. He describes this side as more Stoic. It emphasized social learning, an emphasis on history, and the sharing of knowledge rather than the achievement of solitary minds. He wants, in his book, to point out how Shaftesbury and Reid pushed against this very problem (solitary learning).

One of the paradigmatic thinkers in the unfolding of commonsense is Ayn Rand. Even though most people, men and women alike, vilify her for her politics and her social/moral critique they don't fully understand, she was a woman writing about this issue in a new way. As a thinker influenced by Nietzsche, she did not see truth as belonging to anyone, armchair or not, but as a product of the objective world. Nietzsche, above all things, thought truth was to be uncovered, not invented. To think despite the passion, your own passions above all things, your feelings about immortality and despair and temporality, were to be surmounted by cold reason. Rand believed, above all, that all people could come to these truths. Her constant assertion that nobody owns truth and that the answer to the question "who decides?" is ultimately "whoever has the ability to get there." This "there" is the objective cold reason of her mentor (who she ultimately through off and called a "brute.")

Let's try to sum this up:

Truth may be any number of things in its whole, but when I am confident in my belief it is because I know, over the years, that truth is not a "monad," it is not a particle, it is not an atom; I know it does not come from one man's invention. Truth is a history, it is something I come upon when I spent countless hours learning from the thinkers before me. If they were men or women, black or white, is irrelevant because it is not their truth. It is an ever-unfolding thread of commonsense that all serious thinkers have been working on for millennia. It is not mine. I am a participant in an ever-flowing history, perhaps even a game, a comedy, in which truth plays it's role, as comedian, as ironic shape-shifter, as artist, and as teacher. No man invents truth, it is an explosion of reality itself, brought forth by all of the people, philosophers and non-philosophers, who have actually live these real truths, in those moments when simple life falls away and choices have to be made. Those white males who saw themselves inventing were not wrong, they made their contribution, but in seeing themselves as isolated they were just uncritical and unwise. In the sense that they saw themselves as "spinning ideas out of their own mind," (paraphrase from Locke in Billig's book), they over-estimated their contribution and their ability. Our job is to participate in a great thread of critical commonsense that pervades existence and allows us to see through gender and color to a (Platonic?) world of ideas created by the whole history of man.

PS: Nietzsche and I both believe that philosophy is possible only because of the individual, and that individual invention and energy is the art of possibility and the enemy of the sacrificial language-games of our history. Rand believed this perhaps more fervently that do I. The individual carves out his or her place, but his position, if truth is to be found, must be within the history of the world of our common sense.