How to Study Philosophy for People Who Love Rationalization and Efficiency

How to Study Philosophy for People Who Love Rationalization and Efficiency

Are human minds built to simplify?

There was a time when Homo sapiens coexisted with Neanderthals, and interbreeding likely occurred; many people today carry Neanderthal DNA. Neanderthals appear to have had larger brains—and bodies—than Homo sapiens. Whether brain size tracks intelligence is debated, but some have suggested Neanderthals may have been “smarter” in certain respects.

Why, then, did Neanderthals vanish while we survived? We don’t truly know. One hypothesis holds that not being “too smart” could be advantageous for survival, because the brain is an energy-hungry organ. In hard environments, conserving energy might have beaten raw cognitive horsepower—a kind of “fuel-efficiency advantage,” not unlike today’s global interest in compact, energy-saving cars.

Whatever their use of language or degree of cultural assimilation, Neanderthals may have possessed a richer inner life and more complex mental world than ours. Yet such richness and complexity could be inefficient or even maladaptive in terms of survival, potentially placing them at a disadvantage against Homo sapiens. By contrast, our species may have tended to simplify—grasping things without overthinking.

Even if a Neanderthal outweighed and outmuscled a Homo sapiens individual, our species may have outperformed them at teamwork and coordination, which matter in group survival.

People on the autism spectrum (often colloquially called “Asperger’s”) have, on average, been reported to have larger brains than neurotypical individuals. Autism spectrum conditions can create daily and social difficulties; yet some individuals show exceptional, circumscribed talents—so-called “savant” skills. What we call the first “rebellious phase” of childhood is framed negatively in modern life, but in slower, premodern settings it may not have been negative at all.

Some argue that autism became a “disability” largely within modern, service-heavy economies; in earlier times and places, traits like strong focus and weak sociality might have been livable—or even valued.

Modern humans have a habit of simplifying

From the foregoing comes a possibility: as modern humans, our brains habitually simplify. Put differently, humans are creatures who want closure. We tend to avoid accepting complexity as complex. In statistics, cluster analysis can tempt us to reify any visible “clump of points” as if it were a thing.

Viewed this way, the history of philosophy splits into two broad eras—two different projects.

• From antiquity through the early moderns, philosophy largely sought to simplify, regardless of whether phenomena were truly simple or complex.
• From structuralism to post-structuralism, contemporary philosophy tries—when things are complex—to leave them complex, refusing premature reduction.

If a phenomenon is simple, contemporary philosophy is happy to treat it as such—or to probe hidden complexities, as needed. The pivotal difference is this: earlier philosophy simplified even when things were complex; contemporary philosophy withholds simplification when things are complex.

Simplification is often efficient: it reduces cognitive load and helps us reason parsimoniously. Refusing to simplify, however, consumes energy—and makes communication harder. Yet it is also a form of intellectual honesty.

Many recall finding academic books or researchers’ explanations “hard to understand.” Conversely, over-clarity warrants caution in modern public life: propaganda, populism, rhetoric over logic, sophistry over sincerity, marketing over understanding. In both online and legacy media, the more we chase “easy to grasp,” the more imprecision and bad faith creep in. Accurate information is hard to convey—and the more honest we are, the more we must admit how often we cannot be certain. Worse, some actors intentionally deceive for gain, harming others; such malice makes them, frankly, adversaries.

To verbalize or theorize is a kind of digitization—and thus simplification

The world is analog—or at least we commonly treat it that way. Naming, describing, theorizing—all are simplifications. Language is symbolic; symbolization is a form of digitization, even if not binary. Theory today tends to be axiomatized and formalized; logic runs on symbols. In that sense, theorizing, too, “goes digital.”

Debates like the medieval quarrel over universals can be read as arguments over which way to simplify: by positing essences and substances, or by treating names as mere labels—both are simplifications.

So are modern philosophy and modernism. “Cogito, ergo sum” is a simplification; compressing the self into an “I” is itself a simplification. Strictly speaking, the inference from “I think” to “I am” is not purely logical without unstated premises; Descartes ultimately appeals to intuitive certainty and, at the end of his chain, to the sincerity of God.

Descartes was a great mathematician but is celebrated more as a philosopher; with Leibniz it is almost the reverse. Leibniz was a universal genius; though parts of his philosophy (e.g., monads) resonate with information and computer science, his enduring prestige is especially mathematical—calculus priority aside, his dream of a universal symbolic calculus prefigures computation.

In any case, coining new terms, erecting new theories, and naming new concepts may all be unconscious acts of simplification—a hidden habit of brain and cognition. Structuralism and post-structuralism mount a critique of that habit. In Eastern thought, Buddhism anticipated and theorized much of this; Japan, arguably more than most, implemented such insights at a societal level.

Ambiguity can be humility; blunt certainty can be arrogance

At the heart of post-structuralism lies metacognition and the capacity to stand not “neutral” but independent of any given doctrine. In Buddhism this is Madhyamaka—the Middle Way. “Any doctrine” includes religions, theories, ethics, viewpoints, ideologies.

To move among them without attachment, we must learn many frameworks, avoid imposing one upon others, keep humility, admit ignorance, forgo vanity, and cultivate healthy skepticism. Sometimes we will answer ambiguously, or refrain from speaking, or say plainly “I don’t know.” We practice not relying on words and letters (the Zen idea of furyū monji), and we refuse to coerce or exclude.

This stance is a critique—even a rebellion—against cognitive defaults that may be partly hard-wired. It also reflects on the arrogance and lack of modesty in prior philosophies and ideologies toward others.

Believing that anything can be captured simply is human hubris

A Buddhist parable—the “blind men and the elephant”—warns against premature essence-grabbing. One man feels the trunk and says “a tube,” another the tusk—“a bone,” the ear—“a fan,” the leg—“a tree.” A sighted person might say: “They’ve missed the essence.” But the deeper question is: even with sight and touch, do we really “know” the elephant? What of its voice, smell, taste? An elephant scholar might smile: don’t mistake surface acquaintance for knowledge.

Those who research anything know: the deeper you go, the less simple it becomes. Structuralism dissects internal and external structures; post-structuralism multiplies the angles—systems, networks, discourses. Buddhism speaks of dependent origination and conditions (pratītya-samutpāda), a networked view. Crucially, contemporary thought accepts that no amount of digging reaches a final “thing-in-itself.” Foucault’s archaeological genealogies and Barthes’s textualities suggest inquiry as an unending path, not a tidy shortcut to “Aha!”

Consider “What is a human being?” Medical education requires many lenses—physiology, anatomy, biochemistry, pathology, hygiene, public health—switching among them to graduate or pass boards. Beyond medicine, the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences all contribute. Even outside formal study, daily life, entertainment, hobbies, and social media teach us about humans, multiplying perspectives. None is exclusively “right” or “wrong.” Holding them together under metacognition dissolves naive notions of essence or substance. Sartre said existence precedes essence; from this vantage, even existence, as a category, comes under deconstruction.

Implementing thought: the case of Japan

Claude Lévi-Strauss—structuralism’s leading figure, who famously bested Sartre in debate—grew disenchanted with Western civilization: Nazi persecution, exile from France, and watching Amazonian communities eroded by Western expansion darkened his outlook. He saw Nazism and Western modernity as sprouts from the same root; the twentieth century’s horrors made many intellectuals pessimistic.

Late in life, he “discovered” Japan and was astonished by the coexistence of ancient mentalities with Western modernity. He reportedly felt his analysis fell short—leaving the tantalizing line: “Regrettably, Japan is unparalleled.” Perhaps lacking Japanese language, geostrategic context, and the history of Mahāyāna Buddhism hampered his analysis. Had he known Buddhist Madhyamaka and the core of post-structuralism as cognate, he might have cracked the code: under Madhyamaka, a society’s reception of ideas, technologies, and arts naturally takes a Japanese-like shape.

There are exceptions. Proselytizing that insists on exclusive truth—some missionary Christianity, or the more insistent Kamakura-period sects—sits awkwardly with metacognitive Middle-Way pluralism. Doctrines with explicit exclusion clauses (“no gods before me,” etc.) also jar with this stance, which may partly explain why Japan is often mislabeled “irreligious.”

Among continental nations, cycles of rise and fall were fierce; of the Northern Mahāyāna implementations, Japan may be the one to have left the most continuous imprint—an intriguing contrast with Theravāda’s rich archives in Sri Lanka.

Conclusion

Humans likely habituate to simplification. Contemporary philosophy—from structuralism to post-structuralism—recognized this and tried to resist it. Pre-contemporary philosophy, by contrast, often sought the newest idea with which to simplify again. Rather than adopting many views at once, it tended to exclude the very attitude of “let it be as it is,” embracing complexity without reduction.

Seen from today, earlier systems can look odd or contradictory, yet they are internally tidy—and thus easier to learn. For the future of humanity and the planet, the most needed stances may be those of contemporary thought and Buddhist Madhyamaka—structure, deconstruction, interdependence—taught not only in schools that already require philosophy (as in France’s baccalauréat), but more broadly in higher education in philosophy and ethics.