An Intelligent Person's Guide to Philosophy Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  PREFACE

  Chapter 1 - WHY?

  Chapter 2 - TRUTH

  Chapter 3 - THE DEMON

  Chapter 4 - SUBJECT AND OBJECT

  Chapter 5 - PERSONS

  Chapter 6 - TIME

  Chapter 7 - GOD

  Chapter 8 - FREEDOM

  Chapter 9 - MORALITY

  Chapter 10 - SEX

  Chapter 11 - MUSIC

  Chapter 12 - HISTORY

  FURTHER READING

  Praise for An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Philosophy

  "Roger Scruton has two extraordinary gifts. He writes completely luminously about difficult concepts; secondly, he explains why we need philosophers to help us make sense of the mess we are in. With the generous skill of the populist, he makes available linguistic and metaphysical skills to help us think: not just about those problems beloved of philosophers such as The Problem of Knowledge’ but also about sex, politics, and music.”

  — A. N. Wilson, Evening Standard

  “Scruton’s forthrightness is exemplary: it teaches, implicitly, how to express disputes as well as seeking to resolve them. He is cogent without being coercive and his brevity does not wholly conceal his wit, which is considerable, and mordant.”

  — The Sunday Times (London)

  “An invigorating and compelling essay ... It displays an elegance of thought, a depth and sophistication.”

  — Financial Times

  “A vital, scholarly, fascinating book.”

  — The Times Educational Supplement (London)

  “Brilliant, pithy ... A readable tract that should gather no dust.” — Booklist

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  AN INTELLIGENT PERSON’S GUIDE TO PHILOSOPHY

  Roger Scruton is the author of a number of books, including works of criticism and fiction, as well as Modern Philosophy (available from Penguin), A Short History of Philosophy, and The Aesthetics of Music. Formerly Professor of Aesthetics at Birkbeck College, London University, and a visiting professor at Boston University, he is well known as a critic and television and radio personality. He lives in Wiltshire, England.

  PENGUIN BOOKS Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pry Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand la division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pry) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices, 80 Strand. London WC2R 0RI , England

  First published in Great Britain by Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd. 1996 First published in the United States of America by Allen Lane The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc., 1998 Published in Penguin Books 1999

  Copyright © Roger Scruton, 1996

  All rights reserved

  THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGUED THE ALLEN LANE EDITION AS FOLLOWS: Scruton, Roger. An intelligent person’s guide to philosophy / Roger Scruton. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-17405-0

  1. Philosophy — Introductions. 1. Title BD21.S — dc21 97-39594

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  PREFACE

  This book tries to make philosophy interesting; I have therefore focused on ideas which make philosophy interesting to me. From the academic point of view the result is far from orthodox; but my hope is that the reader will leave this book with a sense of philosophy’s relevance, not just to intellectual questions, but to life in the modem world.

  I refer here and there to the great philosophers, and in particular to Kant and Wittgenstein, who have been the most important influences on my thinking. But I make no attempt to give either a history or a survey of the subject. This book offers itself as a guide to the reader who is prepared to venture into philosophy, and presupposes no knowledge other than that which an intelligent person is likely to possess already.

  Such a person will want to know, nevertheless, how the book relates to other productions in the field, and whether it belongs to a school of thought that is larger than itself - to some ‘ology’ or ’ism’ which would serve to file it away in the ever-growing archive of the great unread. Suffice it to say that I came to philosophy as an undergraduate, being dissatisfied with a scientific education, and suspecting that there might be deep and serious questions to which science has no answer. But I encountered, in the academic subject of philosophy, reams of pseudo-science against which my conscience rebelled. Consequently I set out in search of a literary philosophy - not an ism but a prism, through which intellectual light would shine in many colours.

  Philosophy is not the only subject that has been ‘scientized’ by the modern university: literature has been shrunk to ‘literary theory‘, music has been colonized by set theory, Schenkerian analysis, and generative linguistics, and architecture has been all but abolished by engineering. Pretended science has driven honest speculation from the intellectual economy, just as bad money drives out good. This Gresham’s law of the intellect operates wherever university teachers in the humanities exchange knowledge and imagination for the chimera of scientific ‘research’. A philosopher should certainly make room for scholarship: but scholarship has no ‘results‘, no explanatory ’theories’, no methods of experimentation. It is, at best, a spiritual discipline, and what will emerge from scholarship depends intimately on the soul of the person who engages in it. When academic philosophers disguise their writings as scientific reports, and cultivate the fiction of step by step advances to a theory, we can be sure that something has gone wrong with their conception of the subject. The result is tedious to the student, partly because it is born of tedium - the tedium that comes when our world is surrendered to science. If this book has a message, it is that scientific truth has human illusion as its regular by-product, and that philosophy is our surest weapon in the attempt to rescue truth from this predicament.

  We should not expect philosophy to be easy; nor can it be free from technicalities. For philosophical questions arise at the periphery of ordinary thinking, when words fail, and we address the unknown with an invented discourse. For this very reason the reader of philosophy must beware of frauds, who exploit the known difficulty of the subject in order to disguise unexamined premises as hard-won conclusions. One such fraud - Michel Foucault - features in what follows; but my intention is not to create a sottiserie for our times, however much this might be needed. It is to mount a philosophical argument, which will show philosophy to be a natural extension of our interest in truth, and a therapy for our modern confusions.

  I am grateful to Robin Baird-Smith, who encouraged me to write this book, and to David Wiggins, whose painstaking attempt to dissuade me from errors of logic and style absolves him from all responsib
ility for the many that remain. I am also grateful to Fiona Ellis and Sophie Jeffreys, the two intelligent women upon whom the book was first tried out, and who suggested vital improvements.

  Malmesbury, Spring 1996

  1

  WHY?

  Philosophy — the ‘love of wisdom’ — can be approached in two ways: by doing it, or by studying how it has been done. The second way is familiar to university students, who find themselves confronted by the largest body of literature that has ever been devoted to a single subject. This book follows a more ancient pattern. It attempts to teach philosophy by doing it. Although I refer to the great philosophers, I give no reliable guide to their ideas. To expound their arguments in full dress would be to frustrate my chief purpose, which is to bring philosophy to life.

  Life as we know it is not much like the life from which our philosophical tradition arose. Plato and Socrates were citizens of a small and intimate city state, with publicly accepted standards of virtue and taste, in which the educated class derived its outlook from a single collection of incomparable poetry, but in which all other forms of knowledge were rare and precious. The intellectual realm had not yet been divided into sovereign territories, and thought was an adventure which ranged freely in all directions, pausing in wonder before those chasms of the mind which we now know as philosophy. Unlike the great Athenians, we live in a crowded world of strangers, from which standards of taste have all but disappeared, in which the educated class retains no common culture, and in which knowledge has been parcelled out into specialisms, each asserting its monopoly interest against the waves of migrant ideas. Nothing in this world is fixed: intellectual life is one vast commotion, in which a myriad voices strive to be heard above the din. But as the quantity of communication increases, so does its quality decline; and the most important sign of this is that it is no longer acceptable to say so. To criticize popular taste is to invite the charge of élitism, and to defend distinctions of value - between the virtuous and the vicious, the beautiful and the ugly, the sacred and the profane, the true and the false - is to offend against the only value-judgement that is widely accepted, the judgement that judgements are wrong. In such circumstances the task of philosophy must change. Philosophy, for Plato, undermined the certainties of a common culture, and led, through doubt and wonder, to a realm of truth. Now there are no certainties, and no common culture worth the name. Doubt is the refrain of popular communication, scepticism extends in all directions, and philosophy has been deprived of its traditional starting point in the faith of a stable community. A philosophy that begins in doubt assails what no-one believes, and invites us to nothing believable. However important its achievement, in describing the nature and limits of rational thinking, such a philosophy now runs the risk of being disengaged from the life surrounding it, and of forswearing the ancient promise of philosophy, which is to help us, however indirectly, to live wisely and well.

  In his justly celebrated book, The Problems of Philosophy, Bertrand Russell described philosophy in the terms implied in his title: as a series of problems. ‘Philosophy is to be studied,’ he wrote, ‘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.’ But what, we might ask, is the point of such a study? Why should we, who have so few answers, devote our energies to questions which have none? For Russell, the purpose is to become a ‘free intellect, an intellect that 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’. It is easy to be tempted by this vision of a purely abstract study, which is at the same time an exercise of the highest freedom, and a liberation from custom, prejudice and the here and now. But the mask of rhetoric is thin, and Russell’s anxiety shines through it. He knows that we must live in the here and now, and that the difficulty of doing so arises precisely because the ‘customary beliefs and traditional prejudices’ have lost their credibility. We are hoping, fearing creatures, and without our hopes and fears we should be loveless and unlovable. To see calmly and dispassionately is right - but only sometimes, and only in respect of some subjects. Besides, Russell published those words in 1912, when scepticism was the luxury of a ruling class, and not the daily diet of humanity.

  In emphasizing abstract questions, Russell is true to the history of philosophy. The virtue of such questions is in freeing us from self-interested illusions; they set us at a distance from the world of emotion, and enable us to see it for a moment as though we ourselves were not involved. But philosophers, like other human beings, have a tendency to represent their own way of life as the best way - perhaps as the sole way to redemption. Freeing themselves from one set of illusions, they fall prey to others, every bit as self-interested, and with the added advantage of ennobling the person who promotes them. They extol the ‘dispassionate’ and ‘contemplative’ life, since it is the life that they have chosen. They tell us, like Plato, that this life leads to a vision of a higher world, or like Spinoza, that it shows our world in another light, ‘under the aspect of eternity’. They reproach us for our sensuous ways, and gently remind us, in the words of Socrates, that ‘the unexamined life is not a life for a human being’. It is tempting to agree with Nietzsche, that the philosopher is not interested in truth, but only in my truth, and that the thing which masquerades as truth for him, is no more than the residue of his own emotions.

  The judgement is not fair: none of Nietzsche’s are. But it has a point. Philosophy in our tradition has assumed the existence of a plain, common-sense approach to things, which is the property of ordinary people, and which it is the business of philosophy to question. The result might be to subvert the normal view, as in Nietzsche himself; or it might be to question the question, as in Wittgenstein, and return us to our shared ‘form of life’ as the only thing we have. Nevertheless, without the background assumption, there is no normality to subvert or reaffirm, and philosophy finds it hard to begin. The peculiarity of our condition is that the assumption can no longer be made. Faced with the ruin of folkways, traditions, conventions, customs and dogmas, we can only feel a helpless tenderness for these things which have proved, like everything human, so much easier to destroy than to create. But what has philosophy to say in the face of this momentous change - the change, as some have described it, from modern scepticism, to the postmodern condition, in which all beliefs are simultaneously both doubted and affirmed, though in inverted commas?

  The Czech philosopher T.G. Masaryk (1850-1937) ascribed many of the ills of the modern world to ‘half-education’. It was the prominence in public life of the semi-educated, he suggested, that stirred up the hopes and destroyed the certainties of mankind. All faith was cast in doubt, all morality relativized, and all simple contentment destroyed, by the sarcastic criticism of those who could see just so far as to question the foundations of social order, but not so far as to uphold them.

  Masaryk’s complaint, like Russell’s declaration of faith in abstract thought, belongs to another world - a world that was shortly to disappear in the turmoil of the Great War, from which Masaryk emerged as President of the newly formed state of Czechoslovakia. Nevertheless, it has a deep relevance for us, whose world has been rotted by scepticism, and who wish to know how to proceed, when no one offers guidance save those who are mocked for doing so. If half-education undermines our certainties, is there a whole education that restores them? Or does nothing remain at the end of all our thinking, save a handful of dust?

  In this book I try to show what philosophy has to offer in this new condition. Its task, as I envisage it, is thoughtfully to restore what has been thoughtlessly damaged. This damaged thing is not religion, morality or culture, but the ordinary human world: the world in its innocence, the world in spite of science. Russell is s
urely right in his assumption that philosophy begins from questions; he is right too that it seeks for answers in a realm of abstraction, where ordinary interests recede, and contemplation comes in place of them. But its task does not end in this endless seeking. There is a way back to the human world, through the very abstract thinking which corrodes it.

  We are rational beings, and it is in our nature to ask questions. Dogs and cats live in ‘a world of perception’, to use Schopenhauer’s phrase. For them the present experience is everything, and thought no more than a fragile bridge of anticipation, which leads from this experience to the next one. We, however, are beset by the need to explain. Faced with something unusual, our thought is not ‘What next?’ but Why?’ By answering the second of those questions, we can answer the first. And this, in brief, is the scientific method. So where does the difference lie, between science and philosophy? Or is philosophy just a kind of generalised science, as it was for its first practitioners - those Titanic figures like Thales and Heraclitus, who emerge from the prehistoric darkness to tell us that ’All is water,’ or ‘There is only fire,’ and whose enigmatic words resound down the centuries like mysterious primeval cries? This question is of the first importance, since nothing has changed the position of philosophy so much as the success of modern science.

  Scientific explanations give the causes of what we observe. But scientific knowledge would be far less useful than it is - no more useful than historical knowledge - if it could not be translated into predictions. The device whereby diagnosis becomes prediction is the ‘causal law’, the law which tells us not just that one event is the effect of another, but that events of the second kind make events of the first kind more likely. Feeling ill after drinking water from Alfred’s tap, I may suspect that the water caused my illness. As yet this is only a hypothesis; it is confirmed when I discover that other people too, drinking from that tap, have contracted a similar illness. I venture the law that drinking from Alfred’s tap makes illness likely. This statement is interesting for two reasons: first, it is open-ended: it does not refer only to cases so far observed, but universally. It has established its power as a diagnosis by becoming a prediction. Secondly, it is phrased in terms of probability: it does not say that everyone who drinks from Alfred’s tap will become ill, but only that such an effect is likely. Likelihood, or probability, is measurable. If 60 per cent of observed cases have produced the given result, then we conclude that, on the evidence, there is a 60 per cent probability of the next case doing so as well.