What Can Denim Philosophy Teach Me?

What is the difference between academic philosophy and denim philosophy? Philosophy isn’t just a subject—it’s a toolkit for thinking, questioning, and making sense of the world. In this episode, we break down the biggest lessons philosophy has to offer, from logic and ethics to the meaning of life itself. Whether you’re dealing with a tough decision, a moral dilemma, or just wondering what’s real, philosophy has something to say. Come find out what the great thinkers of history can teach us about living a better, wiser life.

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Transcript

Imagine you're a skilled electrician who, after years of training, finds the local market saturated with competitors. At home, your marriage has been strained ever since the wedding, due to constant miscommunication. And to top it all off, your next-door neighbor and your working-class suburban neighbors has begun dismantling the fence, separating your properties, claiming it obstructs their view of the nearby creek. This is leaving you feeling vulnerable, even on your own property. In moments like these, of personal and professional turmoil, philosophy can step in, not as an abstract academic discipline, but as a practical tool to navigate life's complexities. By applying critical thinking, and ethical reasoning, reflection, and introspection to make sense of these challenges, we can find a path forward where we can more easily navigate life's seemingly endless demands. Welcome back to American Socrates. I'm your host, Charles M. Rupert. There's a major disconnect between academic philosophy and what I'm going to call denim philosophy, the tough, worn-in, blue jeans sort of philosophy that's really meant to help you live your life. If you go to college or eat even if you study philosophy on your own, you're most likely going to get the academic sort. But working-class folks tend to find this academic philosophy useless, but philosophy isn't meant to be useless, and it should never be dull. The fact that it strikes so many people this way is a clear sign that something is very wrong with the way we teach. So in this episode, we're going to examine what you get in a philosophy course in college and how the academy has divorced the utility of such thinking from the way they teach. It's your first day of philosophy 101. You know philosophy is for smart people, and you're excited to learn what all the hype is about. Finally, the professor enters and spends the whole hour-long period going over the syllabus. Whatever interest you entered with is now dead. You find yourself on your phone trying to make weekend plans. Now, is this any way to begin the most useful class you'll ever take? No. You're just expected to learn what's expected of you, right? Right off the bat, the Academy tends to push off the philosophy part of learning philosophy. And sadly, it tends to keep pushing it off. until eventually you graduate and it just never has arrived. What could be more useless than that? As a working-class kid turned academic philosopher, my sympathies lie with these students, not my colleagues and other professionals. You know, and I hear the bemoaning among academics, mostly online and social media groups and professional journals about the lack of enthusiasm from students. Well, what have you done to make it relevant to them, Professor? This is not a boring subject, but it can be taught poorly. Philosophy doesn't need to be spiced up or made more entertaining. It needs to be direct. And that is what most academic institutions teaching philosophy ultimately fail to do. We're all conditioned by years of schooling, where indoctrination is the dominant method of transmitting information. This is true of elite private institutions, but it's especially true in public and charter schools, the kinds of places where working-class people tend to go. In those institutions, a good student is seen as one who tries to figure out what the teacher wants them to say and then repeats it back as perfectly as possible. Don't get me wrong. Indoctrin Nation is not evil. It's necessary, especially like early on when you're first starting out in your learning journey. How do you like to learn to speak a language without being first indoctrinated into the correct usage of the words? But education is not indoctrination. I'm going to try to define these terms for us pragmatically here. Indoctrination believes three things. First, that there is objective truth in the world. Second, that your teacher or professor, knows what that truth is. And third, that they're going to give it to you. And all you have to do then is memorize it correctly. Education is different. It agrees with indoctrination on the first point that there is objective truth. But in this case, the teacher, professor, doesn't claim to know what it is. Instead, they're going to teach you what they know about the subject. and then invite you to help look for that truth together. Teachers and professors must do both to some extent. That's important. And students, too, need to recognize the difference. But it is the institutions themselves that often bung up this process. Take grades, for instance, to really get what philosophy is about, you have to play around with it. You've got to question things that don't really need questioning. You have to play around with ideas, just to see what happens. I mean, you know, mess around and find out takes on a whole new meaning here, but is an appropriate approach to learning to think and develop a devotion to the pursuit of truth? I mean, for me, that is what philosophy really is. It's not a methodology. It's certainly not a body of knowledge. It is a devotion, a devotion to the truth. The truth is paramount in all pursuits.. But when we formalize philosophy, trying to turn it into something objective, measurable, governed by a set of rules, or even worse, you know, a body of knowledge, right? We treat it like a science. Then we missed the whole point. Philosophy is really about screwing around. You know, how do you put screwing around with ideas on a pop quiz or a midterm or even a paper? Right? Grades just tend to get in the way when it comes to teaching philosophy, right? They raise the stakes; grades raise the stakes in a learning environment. And so it tends to kill creativity and curiosity, the very things that philosophy needs to develop properly. Since grades are required at almost every college and university, nearly every philosophy professor ultimately defaults from teaching philosophy to teaching something like the history of philosophy, which unarguably fits better into a measurable learning rubric. It's the kind of thing that administrators like to require and helps them justify their salaries. But nobody, and I mean, nobody except academic philosophy professors, really needs a class on the history of philosophy. So the way philosophy classes often get taught is often pretty useless and by a bit boring. You know, being boring, unless you happen to be a philosophy major hoping to become a philosophy professor, most working-class kids are just going to tune it out. They have no use for it. It doesn't do anything for them. And even where it does, it tends to be incidental rather than purposeful. Formal categories, then, of teaching philosophy, in academic philosophy, that is, things like metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, you know, whatever, are often just labels for certain types of historical conversations on certain subjects, certain topics. These conversations are interesting, but only if you're really able to enter them. Now, no offense to my colleagues, but you don't need to have read Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics to contribute to a discussion on the nature of right and wrong, or on the nature of the good life. Academic philosophy is far from worthless, though, right? These subjects do matter. There are some really valuable lessons here, but they're buried. They're hidden. And it should be the professor's job to draw those lessons out and to make them accessible for their students. So I guess that's what I should try to do a little bit for you guys now. Let's focus on the parts of philosophy that really do matter to most people. Denim philosophy is about teaching you how to ask the right questions and think through complex issues. It's not about having the right answer or really any answers at all. Instead, it's about knowing how to navigate the uncertainty that life throws at all of us. One way philosophy helps with this is by challenging our assumptions. It makes us look at familiar things in life, as if we've never seen them before. I often kick off my lessons with a simple question that we all think we know the answer to, like, what is justice, what is a woman, or what is love. And then I knock away those simple answers, asking my students to dig deeper. If you do this regularly enough, you start to realize, as Socrates said, that most of us are running around convinced we know things when, in reality, we don't. This realization should lead us to what I call a healthy skepticism, not just doubting for the sake of doubting, but questioning because our justifications and reasoning are often much weaker than we really once or even believe them to be. This shift makes us less certain and more open to thinking differently than what our indoctrination has taught us. Actually, it mostly enhances what our indoctrination taught us. But so that we not only understand what we were taught, but we also start to grasp what that means, why it matters, and the context in which what we were taught is true. As we master that sort of philosophical approach to life, we begin to swim in uncertainty and ambiguity, instead of feeling we are drowning in it. Philosophy teaches us to be okay with not having all the answers and helps us to understand that not everything is straightforward or final. And you know what? That's a really grounding experience. You come to rely on yourself and to trust others because you realize you don't need all the answers. Instead, you have the tools you need to form your own judgment and the friends that you need to get a second opinion. And this is how you start to find stability within yourself. You realize you can work your way to solutions by tackling the problems instead of pretending you have the answers. You don't need to be a know-it-all or what playedatoato called a sophist. In fact, sophists are often the pseudo-intellectuals, the ones who spout popular or even controversial opinions without any real thought behind them. You see them everywhere, especially on podcasts. Confidently, they proclaim their areas of expertise as if their knowledge and know-how were infallible. Their lack of humility is a really big red flag, because just as Socrates said, the wise understand, but they know nothing. While the fools are the ones who claim to have it all figured out. As you start to form your own opinions, it's crucial to remember how easy it is to be wrong. Let me share a quick story. I was once driving on the highway, and I noticed that my car was whining. As soon as I hit 55 miles per hour, I thought, oh great. I knew that tire was low. I'm just going to have to wait till I get to work and then try to fill it up. You know, I'll get it changed as soon as I'm free. So I kept driving for about five minutes listening to my car, whine the entire time. And I happened to glance down, and I realized then that I had knocked my transmission into third gear. And I was doing 55, 65, you know, and third gear. And that's what was causing the wine. It wasn't my time tire at all. It was the transmission. So I shifted it back into drive, and everything was fine. My whining went away. Now, why didn't I figure that out sooner? Well, that's because I already had convinced myself of what the problem was. It was the tire. I stopped looking for answers the moment I thought I had an answer. Ironically, having this answer made me farther from the truth, farther from wisdom. The more you think you have it all figured out, the less you probably do. So as a general rule, philosophy encourages us to be skeptical. It pushes us to keep questioning and to stay open-minded to new possibilities. When we look for truth in other people's opinions, which you should note, is where you get 99% of the things you believe. Anyway, we generally seek truth as some sort of form of consensus. Like if other people believe this thing, then maybe we ought to believe it too. There's real comfort in this, in this idea of shared opinions. When something is strange, like some strange thing happens. Like we see something floating in the sky and we can't quite describe what it is. We might nudge the person next to us and say, do you see that? If they say, yes and nod at us, we breathe a sigh of relief, thinking, okay, well, then it must really be there. I'm not going crazy. But consensus doesn't help us when a bunch of people make the same mistake all at once. Everyone can believe something to be true, but that doesn't actually make it so. Everyone could just be wrong. Objective truth doesn't form by any kind of democratic consensus. So there must be some other way of discovering truth that isn't merely consensus opinion. Some ideas are tough to grasp, like Hegel. If you dive long enough into many different interpretations of Hegel's philosophy, you do start to get a picture of what his philosophy is like, even if you go to read it yourself and it doesn't seem to make any sense to you. So in this way, we're looking at drawing truth out in a different sense, right? We put all these unique perspectives together. It's not a consensus. It's a diversity of thought. But that does start to get us a sense of what it is we are grasping at here. The more we engage with different viewpoints, with different perspectives, the clearer our understanding actually becomes. Now, this is the argument for diversity in education. I know, you know, DEI is not very popular right now, especially among the right wing, but the reality is, is it does something for you. If you lose those voices, those other opinions, those other perspectives, you lose your understanding. You get a faulty understanding because you're operating simply on the model of consensus. We ought to teach multiple perspectives, unless that is, we can absolutely be certain of ruling some out. There is no need to teach that 1 plus one equals three, just because some people or even some math professors, might believe that it does. We often crave consensus then, because it makes us feel safe. But opposing viewpoints can deepen our understanding in complex and unfamiliar situations. Embracing a diversity of thought and an attempt to challenge our own beliefs, rather than just searching for agreement or seeking to promote our own pet theory, is a valuable tool that you can use to find insights. Of course, one has to be mentally and emotionally prepared for this. Education is an upward journey, as Plato called it, a rough and steep path to an uncertain destination. That's a road most people don't want to go down willingly. Working class folks tend to keep their heads down. They work hard, they spend little, and they try not to piss off their boss. That is the mantra by which they live and die. But that mantra is the extreme opposite of thinking for yourself. That's the opposite of freedom and prosperity. So, pursuing these things is not without fear. And we need emotional skills to hold off that craving for consensus. That is, the need to fit in, at least hold it off long enough to really consider someone else's point of view. Relatedly, this is the reason why we have diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in schools and workplaces, right? They provide students and employees with greater access to different opinions, a diversity of opinions, rather than just letting one opinion dominate that could be faulty or at the very least have flaws within it. And so, you know, if we want to have truth, we cannot have forced consensus where you just get rid of anyone who disagrees with the mainststream or the main point of view. A third point to denim philosophy comes from Aristotle's notion of Thelos. Imagine you're out stalking the woods with a bow and arrow. After more than a decade of practice, you've got the skills to hit anything you want. But when it comes time to let your arrow fly, you realize you have no idea what you're supposed to be aiming at. What are you hunting in these woods? I mean, you could hit anything, everything, with this bow, but you don't know enough about what you're doing to even know what to aim at. When we think about our primary and secondary schooling, it's pretty clear that a lot of it is designed to teach us the skills we need to achieve goals. We're trained to math and in science and in writing, skills that are like how to notch an arrow, how to pull the string, how to aim and release. But there's the trouble. Virtually, none of it actually helps us figure out what a target looks like. What are your goals? Are they, like I suggested earlier, keeping your head down and just going about your work? Is that your best life? Philosophy encourages us to ask some complex questions like, what do I really want out of life? What gives my life meaning and purpose? What kind of person do I want to be? Your life is ticking away one moment at a time. So, what do you want to do with the time that remains to you? By engaging with questions like these, we start to uncover our values and our priorities. And ultimately, who we are as a person and who we are as a people. Philosophy helps us reflect on what truly matters to us, rather than just following the social scripts that we have been laid out for us, right? It's like taking a step back to examine the entire archery range so that we can decide which targets we want to aim at before we start letting arrows fly. The beauty of it is that once we've identified our targets, those goals resonate with who we are, and we can more easily channel our skills and our efforts towards achieving them. We can become more intentional in our pursuits, aligning our actions with our aspirations. In fact, I would argue that finding the goals in life is far more difficult of attacking than deriving the skills and knowledges necessary to achieve them. So, while skills are important, philosophy is what helps us shape our understanding of what we want those skills to accomplish. Our schooling does the politically correct thing of not telling us what our goals should be. But in doing so, our schooling offers us no ability to determine those goals for ourselves. Look, the bald truth is, is that other people want to tell you what you're goals should be. There's no easier way to control a person than to tell them what they should want and then set them loose to let them go get it. You may think I'm speaking of some sort of evil government or some evil political party or even like big corporations or foreign agents or something like that, right? I am. But I'm also talking about your church, your friends, your family, your children. And most importantly, I'm really talking about you. Just think of all the people who you think you could solve problems for if they would just listen to you. You want to control other people's goals, too. We all have this tendency, but if you can focus on your own goals, then the desire to control other people's lives actually goes away. We have this desire because we believe that controlling their life somehow might allow us to control our own. But we can cut that out by simply focusing on controlling our own life. What do you want out of life and what is really going to make you happy? Of course, if you ask college-educated people generally, what do you get out of studying philosophy? They're probably going to say something like critical thinking skills. I teach whole classes with critical thinking as the title. But you know what? Everyone seems to think they have a handle on what critical thinking is. And because of that, a lot of folks feel confident that they can teach it too. English professors, anthropology, professors, math professors,, business professors, education professors, all of them think that their classes teach critical thinking skills. These professors are not malicious, but they're not really teaching critical thinking here. What their classes are doing often is using critical thinking skills. Critical thinking is a subtle concept, and it's easy to confuse using it for teaching it. Let me break down the word critical for a second. It comes from the Greek word crisis, which is, of course, the root of our word crisis. It means to put things to the test, like flexing the metal of a sword, bending it as far as you can to see if it can take the pressure or if it's going to snap. We don't want our swords to break in combat, so we test them beforehand. We put them in crisis. Critical thinking, then, is learning to test your ideas, to try and break them before you come to rely upon them. So when we talk about critical thinking, we're really talking about trying to break or our own beliefs to see if those beliefs really stand up to scrutiny. And as Kant said, if the truth can kill a thing, it deserves to die. Now, here's where the misunderstanding often lies. People tend to think that critical thinking is really about challenging other people's ideas, other people's beliefs, but that's not where the value lies. The real focus of critical thinking is on testing your own ideas. It is your beliefs, your opinions that need this piece periodic stress test. Consider it this way. What good does it do you to correct other people's false beliefs? Isn't it more useful to you to correct your own? Critical thinking is about removing our false assumptions before they trip us up in the future, before they have us make a mistake. It's about taking a long, hard look at what we think we know and figuring out where we might be harboring these false beliefs. That's the essence of critical thinking. It's an inward journey, not a debate with others, even when it takes the form of a debate with others. I want you to think about the last time you had an argument with someone. What were you trying to do? I mean, what was your real goal there? More than likely, you were probably trying to win. I mean, isn't that why we enter into arguments with other people to prove our point, to prove that we were right, to show whomever it was, that we were right and they were wrong? Isn't that what philosophy is supposed to be about? Winning arguments to get at the truth? Would it surprise you if I said the philosophers don't seek to win arguments? That's what sophists do. That's what politicians do. Philosophy is not about winning arguments. It's about losing them. That That is the true goal. I know. I know what you're thinking. No one gets into an argument to lose, but that is no one except the people who want to learn and grow. Think of it this way. If you win an argument, sure, yes, your ego gets stroked and you might walk away feeling smart, but you don't come out of that argument with any more knowledge or understanding than you went into it with. But if you lose an argument, ha ha ha, then you gain knowledge. Even when that knowledge is negative, like the realization that you were simply wrong, even though now you still don't know what's right. In the end, this might be the most important lesson philosophy teaches. We ought to just cool our jets on how right we think we are about everything we claim to know. The true lover of wisdom comes to understand that they can be wrong on anything. And so they ought to be testing everything all the time, especially their most cherished and long-standing beliefs. Practicing this leads us to become less reactive, passionate, but indifferent, willing to find follow the truth wherever it leads and humble enough to accept that will never absolutely find it. Not just the best scholars, then, are philosophers, but also the best business people, the best leaders, the best clergy, the best professionals, the best athletes, the best lovers, the best partners, the best parents, and the best friends. We become so much more tolerant and at the same time, so much more intelligent when we practice that kind of philosophy. Denim philosophy teaches us not only wisdom, but kindness, and that is why it is good and why everyone ought to study it. If there's one thing I hope you take away from today, it's this. Don't be afraid to challenge your own beliefs. Philosophy is about the journey and not the destination. So take what you've heard today and put it into practice. Question your assumptions. Ask yourself how you came to believe this notion. Dive into that uncertainty and embrace the discomfort that comes with simply not knowing. Start small. Pick one belief you hold strongly, whether it's about your life, love, work, anything. And ask yourself, what if you're wrong about it? Challenge it from different angles. Invite others to share their perspectives on it and see if what you believe still holds up or if it shifts or changes in any meaningful way. The ultimate goal here isn't to tear down everything you think, but to refine it, to get your beliefs closer to the truth, because that's where real growth happens. So, while traditional academic philosophy Profton prioritizes rigidid structures and grading systems over genuine inquiry and creativity, this ultimately can lead to a disconnect between philosophy and practical understanding. Most of the best lessons in philosophy come to us between the lines, so to speak. And this is what we're going after in this series, between the lines lessons. In the end, philosophy pushes us to consider the big picture, emphasizing the ultimate aims of meaning and knowledge. Thanks for listening toAmerican Socrates. If you found today's episode interesting, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, or share it with someone who you think might also love a little wisdom and in their life. Next time, we'll talk more about reason. Particularly, we'll examine a few ways it goes wrong, knowing that, you might be able to learn to avoid making those sorts of errors. So join me next week on American Socrates.