CHAPTER XV
THE VALUE OF
PHILOSOPHY
Note 1: HAVING now come to
the end of our brief and very incomplete
review of the problems of philosophy, it will
be well to consider, in conclusion, what is
the value of philosophy and why it ought to be
studied. It is the more necessary to consider
this question, in view of the fact that many
men, under the influence of science or of
practical affairs, are inclined to doubt
whether philosophy is anything better than
innocent but useless trifling, hair-splitting
distinctions, and controversies on matters
concerning which knowledge is impossible.
It is a bit odd not
to have started with an answer to this question.
But I can be fairly brief about why
philosophy ought to be studied in some sense
and why the opinion that it is useless trifling,
hair-splitting or in search of unobtainable
knowledge is inappropriate.
All human beings
orient their lives around ideas about what reality
is like, that they believe explain their
experiences, and ideas about what reality and
human beings should be like, that they use to
guide their behaviour. The first of these kinds of
ideas is a metaphysical theory, the second an
ethical or moral theory.
Human beings seem to
need metaphysical and moral ideas because they are
not born with instincts that determine for them
what they should think and want, and are born with
the capacities to make up their own minds and to
question any belief they have or meet.
It is evident that
most of the ideas in history that people have used
to explain human experiences have been false or
unfounded in many respects, and it is also evident
that most of the ideas in history or direct human
behaviour have been harmful to other human beings
or to themselves.
On the other hand, it
is also evident that whatever adequate
understanding people have of themselves, of
others, and of their environments and
possibilities, is based on the asking and
answering of the type of general questions that
are philosophical and scientific, and that there
seems to be no way of being human without trying
to ask and answer such questions.
All ideas about
philosophy or science, including those that
ridicule or condemn philosophy or science, are
themselves philosophical ideas, and such as
declare all philosophy useless, trifling, or
impossible are little better than a refusal to do
any serious philosophical or scientific reasoning.
Finally, there is
another important reason to study philosophy that
is related to the points I have just made, and
that Russell fails to mention: the ideas people
live and die for, go to war for and kill each
other for, or let themselves be inspired to the
making of great art or science, are all
philosophical ideas. Back.
Note 2: This utility does
not belong to philosophy. If the study of
philosophy has any value at all for others
than students of philosophy, it must be only
indirectly, through its effects upon the lives
of those who study it. It is in these effects,
therefore, if anywhere, that the value of
philosophy must be primarily sought.
This is not true. The
lives people lead and the choices they make are
the result of the philosophies they hold,
whether they are conscious of this fact or not.
Much of the history of the 20th century - "The
Century of Total War", in Raymond Aron's apt
phrase, which is the title of one of his books -
is the more or less direct product of a small
number of philosophical ideas and the philosophers
who made them up: Marxism ruled the lives of more
than a 1000 million people; Fascism destroyed the
lives of millions of people and caused a World
War; both Marxism and Fascism were opposed by men
in the name of Liberalism, Democracy, Catholicism,
Protestantism, or Science, each of which are
themselves either specific philosophies or derived
from more comprehensive philosophical systems.
So philosophy, or
more precisely, philosophy's everyday appearance,
which is a political or religious
ideology, guides and misguides the lives of
human beings, and every human being meets daily
with many philosophical ideas, and makes or avoids
many of his daily choices by appealing to and
relying on philosophical considerations. Back.
Note 3: It is exclusively among the
goods of the mind that the value of philosophy
is to be found; and only those who are not
indifferent to these goods can be persuaded that
the study of philosophy is not a waste of time.
As pointed out in my
previous notes to this chapter, this is a mistake.
Literally millions of people have been
murdered in the 20th century and other millions of
people have been sent to concentration camps for
what were, in the end, crude philosophical ideas
(of the Marxist or Fascist variety, often).
The 'practical' men
Russell mentions in his paragraph, whether they
did the killing in the name of a philosophy or
were the victims of men acting out a philosophy or
stood at the side gawking, while declaring all
philosophy useless or nonsense, were as
philosophical - in the sense of being moved by
general arguments about what the world is and
should be and how human beings should behave - as
any man, except that they were less conscious of
that fact.
In any case, it is an
illusion to believe that philosophy only pertains
to the goods of the mind or only is of importance
to a few intellectually gifted and curious
individuals: whatever happens in society and
whatever human beings consciously do and do not do
to others and for themselves is based on general
ideas and values that are very properly speaking
philosophical, and this has been so since human
beings started to think. Back.
Note 4: Philosophy, like
all other studies, aims primarily at
knowledge. The knowledge it aims at is the
kind of knowledge which gives unity and system
to the body of the sciences, and the kind
which results from a critical examination of
the grounds of our convictions, prejudices,
and beliefs.
Russell's present
passage is a fair description of philosophy of
science, but not of philosophy,
about which it may be claimed (and has been
claimed by many philosophers) that it aims at a
way of life, namely one based on reason based on
natural and moral knowledge. Back.
Note 5: But it cannot be
maintained that philosophy has had any very
great measure of success in its attempts to
provide definite answers to its questions. If
you ask a mathematician, a mineralogist, a
historian, or any other man of learning, what
definite body of truths has been ascertained
by his science, his answer will last as long
as you are willing to listen. But if you put
the same question to a philosopher, he will,
if he is candid, have to confess that his
study has not achieved positive results such
as have been achieved by other sciences.
This is also largely
mistaken. Philosophical studies of men like Marx
and Nietzsche,
as practically applied by their self-proclaimed
followers, have in this century created and
destroyed civilisations and the lives of millions
of human beings. Back.
Note 6: The whole study of
the heavens, which now belongs to astronomy,
was once included in philosophy; Newton's
great work was called 'the mathematical
principles of natural philosophy'. Similarly,
the study of the human mind, which was a part
of philosophy, has now been separated from
philosophy and has become the science of
psychology.
This is true: many of
the questions properly raised within philosophy
so-called in earlier days are now raised and
answered by special sciences.
But this changes
nothing about the fact that human beings are such
as to lead themselves by general ideas and values,
while one of the tasks that remains philosophical,
however many of earlier philosophical questions
have now turned into problems of some specific
science, is to try to integrate whatever
specialised knowledge different sciences produce
into one comprehensive view of reality and
humanity. Back.
Note 7: There are many
questions -- and among them those that are of
the profoundest interest to our spiritual life
-- which, so far as we can see, must remain
insoluble to the human intellect unless its
powers become of quite a different order from
what they are now.
This is also mainly
misleading: 'the human mind' is not so much a
individual human's mind, though this must always
be the foundation, as the coordinated product of
the ideas human minds have produced in the past,
and at least many of the questions no human
individual can reasonably hope to solve himself
can be solved by the efforts of many individuals
through the course of time. Back.
Note 8: (..) if the investigations of
our previous chapters have not led us astray, we
shall be compelled to renounce the hope of
finding philosophical proofs of religious
beliefs.
To put it otherwise:
It is Russell's opinion that the assumption of a God and
whatever comes with that assumption is almost
certainly false. I agree. (What is curious is
that, 'in this day and age', the great majority of
men still believes in a God in some way,
and that the ways these beliefs are held are
nearly always irrational and fanatical, and very
dangerous for those of a different belief. This
last fact should give people pause who believe in
an all powerful and benevolent deity. It seems to
me that the most a believer in God is entitled to
claim, within reason, if this is possible, is that
he believes in something that is totally beyond
human understanding.) Back.
Note 9: The value of
philosophy is, in fact, to be sought largely
in its very uncertainty. The man who has no
tincture of philosophy goes through life
imprisoned in the prejudices derived from
common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his
age or his nation, and from convictions which
have grown up in his mind without the
co-operation or consent of his deliberate
reason.
No. The value of
philosophy is the scope and clarity of mind
it provides, especially as regards the fundamental
general questions every human being somehow must
answer, if only by tacit and blind consent to
previous answers. (Incidentally, the value of any
specific science, likewise, is the scope and
clarity of mind it provides as regards the special
questions the science aims to answer.) Back.
Note 10: In contemplation, on the
contrary, we start from the not-Self, and
through its greatness the boundaries of Self are
enlarged; through the infinity of the universe
the mind which contemplates it achieves some
share in infinity.
I suppose these are
noble sentiments, such as Baden-Powell would
approve of. Personally, I am especially struck by
the frequency of the capitalised term 'Self'. Back.
Note 11: There is a
widespread philosophical tendency towards the
view which tells us that Man is the measure of
all things, that truth is man-made, that space
and time and the world of universals are
properties of the mind, and that, if there be
anything not created by the mind, it is
unknowable and of no account for us. This
view, if our previous discussions were
correct, is untrue;
And it may be well to
insist why such an account is untrue: because for
a statement to be a truth involves that there is
something the statement is true of, and this is
normally independent from what human beings think
or want. Man may be the measurer of all things,
and a judge of all things by means of theories
based on his own guesses, but whatever men think
that goes beyond their own experience is true or
false apart from their experience. Back.
Note 12: The true philosophic
contemplation, on the contrary, finds its
satisfaction in every enlargement of the
not-Self
Perhaps, sometimes.
But Russell is in this chapter very freely
indulging his proclivity for purple prose. My case
for philosophical contemplation is simply that it
aims at answering the questions that lie at the
foundation of all societies and all human
communication and interaction, and that all human
beings must answer in some fashion and , if only
by unthinkingly following someone else's
philosophy of life. Back.
Note 13: The free intellect
will see as God might see, without a here
and now, without hopes and fears,
without the trammels of customary beliefs and
traditional prejudices, calmly,
dispassionately, in the sole and exclusive
desire of knowledge -- knowledge as
impersonal, as purely contemplative, as it is
possible for man to attain.
This too is a
misstatement of what philosophy aims at and may
bring. Those who want to acquire the state of mind
described in this Russellian passage are well
advised to specialise in some branch of very pure
mathematics, not in philosophy, that is apt to
find fault in many human endeavours, and to get
into trouble with others for that reason.
And it may be well to
remind the reader at this point that many of the
persons known to later times as great
philosophers, were, in their own time, persecuted,
discriminated, killed, or removed from
society.(This applies i.a. to Heraclite, Buddha,
Socrates, Aristotle, Epicure, Lucretius,
Abélard, Bacon, Ockham, Galileo, Descartes,
Spinoza, Hume, Rousseau, Marx, Nietzsche, Peirce
and Russell himself, to name some.The great
philosophers have been the creators of the ideas
and values many people oriented their lives
around, but during their own lifes they were
generally silent or in trouble, for they dared to
say what their contemporaries did not want to
hear, to discuss what they did not want to face,
and to study and write what very few took interest
in or understood.) Back.
Note 14:
The impartiality which, in
contemplation, is the unalloyed desire for
truth, is the very same quality of mind which,
in action, is justice, and in emotion is that
universal love which can be given to all, and
not only to those who are judged useful or
admirable.
The whole paragraph
the passage is selected from sounds more like bad
religion than good philosophy, and strongly
suggests that Russell suddenly has given up most
of the lessons he tried to instil.
As to the specific
selected passage: I do not see why one should seek
the truth with impartiality or without
self-interest; I do not believe justice - the
quality of giving each his due merit - can be
impartial; while a universal love that is extended
to the useless and contemptible seems too good, or
too hypocritical, to be true.
And to add some
perspective to this last paragraph: My point is
mostly that (1) one should try to have motives
that are humanly feasible, and few human beings
are capable of complete impartiality, no
self-interest, or loving all while (2) this also
is not at all required and that one can make do
with less, such as good will and the sincere
attempt to be fair in dealing with others and
rational in one's own judgements to the best of
one's abilities. Back.
Note 15: Thus, to sum up
our discussion of the value of philosophy;
Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake
of any definite answers to its questions since
no definite answers can, as a rule, be known
to be true, but rather for the sake of the
questions themselves; (..)
This sounds just as
history appeared to Henry Ford, and there seems to
be no sense in studying a subject if all one cares
for are the questions it poses. I have given my
own reasons for studying philosophy in Note 1-10,
but I would not recommend its academic study to
anyone, for by and large academic philosophy is
related to philosophy as is literary criticism to
literature, which in turn are related as the
oldest professionals are to real love. Back
Note 16: (..) because, through the greatness
of the universe which philosophy contemplates,
the mind also is rendered great, and becomes
capable of that union with the universe which
constitutes its highest good.
It seems to me that
the size of the human mind has little to do with
the size of the universe it finds itself in, and
that the union Russell speaks of is hard to make
sense of.
Having come to the
end of this short book of Russell, that is an
introduction to philosophy, I should mention a
number of topics that do belong to philosophy that
Russell has not touched at all or only very
briefly:
-
logic:
what are the foundations and principles of
sound reasoning
-
language:
what does language have to do with human
thought
-
meaning:
what is meaning and how do we succeed in
representing one thing by another
-
ethics:
what are the foundations of the judgments
that acts or the men who commit them are
good or bad, and in what sense are such
judgments true or different from mere
matters of taste
-
aesthetics:
what makes beautiful things appear
beautiful or ugly, and what is the use of
having an aesthetical capacity
-
self:
whether there is a self, and if so, what
it is and what is its foundation, or, if
not, what is the reason for this popular
delusion
-
free will:
whether human beings are in any sense free
to act as they please and responsible for
the consequences, or only determined to
falsely believe they are free to believe
as they please
-
death:
whether death indeed is final, what is the
point of fearing something one will never
experience, and whether there is anything
else than self-contradiction in the belief
in a life or a judgment after death
-
happiness:
what is happiness; how does one find it;
and why should one look for it, especially
if everyone seems naturally to know what
feels good and what does not feel good
-
the good
life: what a human individual should
and should not do, believe and desire to
lead a good life
-
the good
society: what relations between
human individuals contribute to the good
life
I merely indicate the
questions, many of which Russell himself has tried
to answer in some of his many other books.
And I should end with
explaining why Russell did not take them up in his
"Problems of Philosophy": Because that was meant
to deal mostly with epistemological questions i.e.
questions about the nature, extent and certainty
of human claims to knowledge.
But indeed it would
have been better if he said so more clearly,
either at the beginning or the end of his book, if
only to guard agains misunderstandings. Back.
