What is the point of philosophy? (Text of a talk given to Kingston Philosopy Cafe May 2011)
I was very pleased to get the opportunity to introduce a session on “what is the point of philosophy?” because I think it’s a very important question which many contemporary philosophers neglect to ask, together with another closely related question, “what actually is philosophy?”
In the modern view – and by that I mean roughly since Descartes, in the last 500 years or so – philosophy is actually a pretty pointless excercise. Contemporary philosophy no longer believes in the truth, and if philosophy is love of truth, then it doesn’t believe in its own purpose This may sound like a rude thing to say about an entire academic discipline, and it is, but it’s not really controversial and in my experience most contemporary philosophers are quite comfortable with this point of view. They think that belief in the truth, and with it the idea that philosophy can throw light on deep questions about the meaning of life, the good and so on, is an archaic idea and that we now know better than to expect that philosophy can provide us with answers. At best philosophy is a kind of mental gymnastics, a training in abstract thinking that may help us to achieve clarity in argument, but cannot take us any closer to truth. Fundamentally it has about as much point as doing crossword puzzles.
Although this is the orthodox view, I don’t agree with it and instead hold to the more old fashioned view that philosophy is ultimately about the “meaning of life” and that there is a fundamental truth that philosophy can help us to understand and that’s why I thought it would be fun to have a go at this topic. This view goes back two and a half thousand years to the foundation of the discipline of philosophy in ancient Greece.
What I want to do this evening is simply to contrast the classical and modern views of the truth (i.e. the point of philosophy) and to show how deeply opposed to each other they are. I’m going to do this under six headings: Truth, Illusion, Experience, Reason, Recollection, and Initiation.
Truth
In the classical view (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle) truth is something real and independent. It exists, much like a person exists, and deserves the same kind of respect, and can be loved. In the modern view truth is not independent. It’s a property of statements which are either true or false. This is generally not a position that is argued for or consciously held in contrast to other possible views such as the classical one. It is just taken as self-evident. And who would want to quibble with such a straightforward point of view? But I want to argue not only that it is wrong, but that finding a valid purpose for philosophy depends on understanding that this position is wrong.
The first thing I want to note is that reading classical philosophy, one does get, or at least I do, a feeling that one is being treated with respect by the author, a feeling of being invited to participate on equal terms, and this seems consistent with the view that our object, the truth, is real and independent and that we share the aim of getting better acquainted with it. With most modern philosophers, and all those operating within the empiricist/rationalist paradigm (as nearly all are), I get a different feeling. Their aim seems to be to produce arguments that brook no opposition, and to put any such opposition in place by superior reasoning. As a reader you can feel like a schoolchild, being beaten about the head for daring to question teacher’s authority. This may be because the modern philosopher does not respect the independence of the truth as an object. On the contrary, he thinks it depends on human qualities such as reason and perception and that with good reasoning it can be dominated and controlled. It could be correct (I am going to argue it’s not) but if the relationship to truth were a human relationship, and the use of the term “love” suggest it might be something like this, then you could say that the ancient version of philosophy represents a healthy relationship between free equals while the modern version represents a dysfunctional relationship where one party doesn’t respect or trust the other and tries instead to dominate or control.
Now, for modern philosophy, if truth is self-evidently a property of statements, further analysis shows that statements are of two kinds, analytic or synthetic, or as David Hume said, they are either relations of ideas, or matters of fact. Nothing else is permissible and any statement that is neither a relation of ideas, that is purely rational and independent of any outside influence, nor a statement of fact based on observation, is metaphysical and meaningless. Rationalism and empiricism, the cornerstones of contemporary philosophy at least in Britain, develop from this distinction, rationalism believing that truth is to be found in pure reason (which in this conception of reason boils down to mathematics) and empiricism believing that it is found in observation. There’s no problem in holding both positions together – except that as I will argue both turn out to be profoundly wrong.
Illusion
Plato thought that the world of appearance was illusory. It is constantly changing, as the term “appearance” suggests. Things appear, then disappear. But where do they appear from? The classical view says that they appear from the world of forms, a third place where ideas exist independently of phenomena. This is reality, and the embodiment of an idea in a particular experience is just appearance, an example or instance of the idea but not its reality.
Modern philosophy rejects this view, or rather it puts forward another, that appearance is reality. Ideas don’t come from a third place but straight from appearance. So, either Plato was wrong (in which case you would expect to find some critique which explained what his mistake was), or modern philosophy has just fallen for the illusion that appearance is reality and failed to notice what Plato pointed out, which is that this view doesn’t bear scrutiny and that reflection shows that ideas come from somewhere else. So now I want to go on to look at this from two points of view, the empiricist and the rationalist, under the headings of Experience and Reason.
Experience
For modern philosophy, experience is really the same as sensation, that is, it’s what we get from our senses. As Locke put it, our mind is like an empty house which we fill with furniture, and all the furniture comes from experience. The idea here is that we get ideas by generalising from things we experience and an idea is a universal which we find common to several experiences. We learn or are taught the meaning of terms as we learn to use language. But as Plato realised two and a half thousand years ago, there’s a problem with this common sense approach. Locke confuses sensation with experience. Sensation just gives us raw data. It’s true that Locke understands that perception is more than sensation; it is sensation ordered by ideas. This however just begs the question, as in Locke’s view the ideas were abstracted from sense-data. The problem is that there are no ideas in data. They are just numbers with no meaning. If in the data we sense we find an idea, say beauty, where does that come from? If we fall for the Platonic illusion, we say that it is out there in the world we experience and we just recognise it and classify that experience together with other experiences we have found to have the similar quality. But what really is the thing that beautiful experiences have in common? What links a beautiful day with a beautiful theorem and a beautiful picture? It can’t be a physical property. The point to grasp is this: we cannot have an experience of beauty unless we first have the idea of beauty. My dog, for example, doesn’t so far as I can tell have any notion of beauty. She seems to have many ideas but this is not one of them, and I will never be able to teach it to her, because she doesn’t have the idea in the first place. For her, beauty doesn’t exist. It exists for us only because we have the notion of beauty and are therefore able to recognise it. The idea is logically prior to the experience.
This can be expressed in general terms as the eristic paradox, which asks the question not of beauty but of all knowledge, if we agree that it is a good thing worth pursuing, how are we going to recognise it when we find it? If we recognise it because we know what it is, then there is no point looking for it because we have it already, while if we don’t, there is still no point looking because we will never recognise it. This paradox is no word game and if you take the empiricist view that ideas come from experience there is no way to resolve it. To go back to the example of beauty, it means either you go to experience equipped with the notion of beauty, which allows you to experience it, or you go without it in which case you will never find it. It’s impossible to “build” the notion of beauty from experiences because if you don’t have the notion you can never have the experience.
Experience then in the common sense or modern view comes to us through our senses. In the classical view this is mistaken and experience is constituted by ideas. Sense data have no meaning and meaning only comes through us asking questions of the data, which means applying ideas to them. The ideas cannot originate in the data. They must come from somewhere else.
If we take this back to David Hume’s proposition that one half of truth is matters of fact, we have to reply “no it’s not”. The idea that matters of fact are true collapses under its own weight, as do all sophist arguments (a sophist argument is one that claims to possess the truth, in contrast to a philosophical view that seeks the truth but does not claim to possess it). A matter of fact in this view is just a datum that has no significance at all, and the idea associated with it that gives it meaning and significance comes from somewhere else, not from the data. In the classical view the idea that matters of fact are true is the exact opposite of the truth, and it is understanding that ideas cannot come from sensation that makes possible the philosophical attitude.
This may seem to defy common sense, but it is a view also supported by natural science, which is the body of knowledge based on “matters of fact”. Science cannot prove anything, it can only disprove. Science proceeds by making conjectures or hypotheses, which it then tests by experiment. The experiment may show the conjecture to be wrong in which case we can say that we know something but only in the negative sense that we know for sure that a conjecture is false. If the experiment doesn’t show the conjecture is wrong we say that it is consistent with our conjecture and the entire body of scientific “knowledge” consists of conjectures that have not yet been disproven, so we believe that they must be true. This may be very useful and valuable information, but to call it knowledge is incorrect. It is belief, and it’s wrong to use the word truth in connection with it. Nor is this just semantics. Not only does the whole body of scientific knowledge depend on this view, but also it is littered with conjectures once thought unassailable that have now been shown to be false or inadequate – Newton’s laws of motion for example. If we are looking for truth, we can’t find it here.
Reason
Let’s turn then and look at the other pillar of Hume’s theory of knowledge, the relations of ideas. Here we seem on more certain ground. Philosophers have always distrusted experience anyway as our senses can always be mistaken and this is no good if we are looking for truth. The realm of pure reason seems surer ground. Here we can find certainty at least. Two and three are five and always will be and we don’t need any experience to check this. If follows directly from the meaning of the numbers themselves. But is this true? For Descartes it is, and he is quite explicit in identifying truth and certainty, but there’s a simple problem. A mathematical certainty may not be false, but it is pure abstraction and has no content. If truth is limited to mathematics, is it telling us anything at all? It seems that pure reason just because it is pure, and therefore capable of being certain and correct is for the same reason incapable of being true because it cannot express anything in particular. Descartes wrestled with this problem and produced the ontological proof whereby he claimed to have derived the existence of God from pure reason alone and thus escaped the pure abstraction of the system of mathematical reason. Certainly something like this is needed if there is to be any place for truth within the rationalist paradigm, but the ontological proof is scarcely convincing. You can argue that all modern philosophies are based on some kind of device for connecting the certainty of pure reason to reality through some kind of judgement which though not purely rational, seems so certain that it would be churlish to disagree with it. And example would be the utilitarian idea that pleasure or happiness are ends in themselves always worth pursuing so we can base a rational philosophy on one or other of these goals. There is nothing irrational about pursuing unhappiness, so there is no necessity or certainly that happiness must be our goal, but if we accept what seems an innocuous suggestion we can start making rational generalisations based on it.
This Plato had also thought about two and a half thousand years ago, and his view is clear. Reason cannot create truth. Reason is a tool, a useful one and one of the three component parts of the soul. It can help us to look for truth, but it cannot create it. And this seems clearly to be true because reason, where it is pure and capable of certainty, is at the same time empty and incapable of expressing any concrete truth.
Recollection
So in David Hume’s scheme, which represents most of modern philosophy and certainly all of the analytic tradition that is dominant in British universities, the truth has evaporated. Neither matters of fact nor relations of ideas are capable of producing truth, and he says that these are the only possible places it could be found. Modern philosophy is left without any notion of truth at all and if truth is its purpose, then modern philosophy has no purpose. Although this might seem a disappointing conclusion, in general contemporary philosophy takes in on the chin and agrees that the notion that philosophy has any grand purpose has gone by the board. It is seen now as just an academic exercise, which won’t lead to any grand conclusions but might help you to think more clearly, a kind of mental PE. Most students of philosophy now feel quite comfortable rejecting the notion of “absolute truth” (as if the idea of relative truth made any kind of sense) and if they talk about truth at all they talk about many individual truths that may conflict (as if a truth that conflicted with another could still be true). In view of the history of the 20th century and the triumph of pluralist politics over absolutist totalitarian regimes, a pluralist approach to philosophy may be comforting, but that doesn’t mean that it makes sense. Many talk of truth as a social construct, which just the same as saying that it doesn’t exist, is not real.
The classical view is quite different. It takes off from the understanding that truth cannot come from either of the two places common sense looks for it, reason and experience. Instead it says that it can’t come from experience, because our ideas are logically prior to experience. They make experience possible, but they don’t come from it. And ideas can’t come from reason because reason is empty. You can’t deduce the notion of beauty from reason for example. It follows that since ideas exist, they must come from somewhere else, and Plato calls this the world of forms. So how do we access the ideas? Plato’s answer is that we remember them. We may not always be conscious of them and are not born knowing everything, but we carry them within us and what we call learning, which seems to us to be the addition of new knowledge, is in fact just remembering, becoming conscious of what we already know implicitly.
Initiation.
Now, all of the classical ideas I have discussed here are profoundly counterintuitive and seem to defy common sense. I have argued.
1. 1 Truth is not a property of statements but a real independent existence
2. 2 Neither analytic nor synthetic judgements are capable of producing truth and though these seem to common sense to be the only things capable of expressing truth, the reality is that truth exists in a third place separate from experience and reason which Plato called the world of forms.
3. 3 The phenomenal world we experience is illusion and only the ideal is real and true
4. 4 Experience does not lead to ideas. It’s the other way round, ideas make experience possible and are logically prior to experience
5. 5 Reason is empty and while it has certainty, it can’t express truth.
6. 6 Perhaps most confounding of all, we can’t learn anything new. All learning is remembering and we can only become aware of what already exists in the world of the ideal
The good news is that if you accept these apparently bizarre ideas, then truth exists and philosophy
has a purpose after all. The bad news is that because they are so contrary to common sense, you have to go through a process of initiation to understand them. It’s not completely impossible to get there on your own. By Plato’s account Socrates did, but for the rest of us it is unlikely that we are going to get there without some prompting and guidance. And you need to go through such an initiation to become a philosopher. Only someone who understands that ideas are real can be a lover of truth. All philosophy is idealism, and a materialist philosopher is a contradiction in terms.
Modern philosophy is founded on rejection of this view. It’s rarely a conscious rejection however. For the most part modern philosophers start from scratch, thinking in isolation, like Descartes in his “stove”, and they simply never get to the realisation (that it is the ideal that is real) that is necessary if you are going to become a philosopher, a lover of wisdom. They call this “Enlightenment” which is perhaps the most perversely named intellectual movement ever as it is precisely the opposite of what it calls itself. It’s a retreat from the great insight that founded philosophy as a worthwhile discipline in Ancient Greece into the prephilosophical darkness of sophism. Nothing could be more natural than the assumption that as time passes our knowledge increases, but in the case of philosophy “modern” enlightenment style thinking is a huge backwards step and enlightenment thinkers know much less than the founders of philosophy, and arguably know nothing at all. Socrates was at least aware of his own ignorance, but the thinkers of the enlightenment have not achieved this level of awareness, and naively believe that “common sense” is true. If it were so, then there would be no need for or purpose to philosophy, but it is not and that is why philosophy is a noble and valuable pursuit. And because so much of contemporary thinking especially in political life consciously or more often unconsciously adopts the Enlightenment or common sense paradigm, this is not just an academic matter and there is immense practical value to understanding why this paradigm is wrong.
