An Intelligent Person's Guide to Philosophy Read online

  That is a very rough piece of science. To the question ‘Why was I ill?’ it offers the answer ‘Because I drank from Alfred’s tap.’ But this answer invites a further question: ‘Why does drinking from Alfred’s tap cause illness?’ Such questions are pursued to the point where causal laws become ‘laws of nature’ — laws which do not merely record our observations, but which describe the underlying mechanism. We discover that an organism lives in Alfred’s water tank, and that this organism can live also in the human digestive system, causing inflammation. It is a law of nature that organisms of this kind live in this way, and a law of nature that the human digestive system reacts as it does to their presence. This is not a statement of what we observe merely, but a statement of how things are. We can go deeper into the matter, discovering the precise chemical reaction which precipitates the inflammation, and so on. And the deeper we go, the firmer handle we acquire on the disease, the more likely we are to find a cure for it, and the more able are we to prevent it from spreading.

  The nature and limits of scientific method are hotly debated among academic philosophers. But this much, at least, is suggested by my example. First, that the search for causes involves a search for laws; secondly, that laws are statements of probability; thirdly, that laws are themselves explained through wider and more general laws; fourthly, that however far we investigate the causes of something, we can always go further; and finally, that the further we go, the more remote we find ourselves from the world of observation. At the end of our enquiry we may be describing processes which are not observable at all - even processes, like those of quantum mechanics, which we could not observe, and which we can hardly describe in the language of observation. As quantum mechanics shows, the concept of probability, which features in our very first hypothesis, reappears in the final diagnosis: the world of nature is governed by laws, but no scientific law, however deep, is more than a statement of probability. Of nothing in the natural world can it be said that it must be so, but at best that it is highly likely to be so.

  At a certain stage in its recent history, philosophy was dominated by the ‘logical positivists’, whose school originated in Vienna between the wars and whose ideas were brought to the English-reading public by A.J. Ayer, in his famous book, Language, Truth and Logic (1936). The positivists were fascinated by science, the results and methods of which seemed so clear and indisputable when set beside the pompous nonsense of philosophy. They sought to explain why people can argue fruitfully over scientific questions, from a common understanding of their meaning; whereas philosophical dispute seems endless, with each participant inventing the rules. They concluded that the mass of philosophical propositions are meaningless, and proposed, by way of clinching the matter, a criterion of meaning, called the ‘verification principle’. This says that the meaning of a sentence is given by the method of its verification — by the procedure for determining whether it is true or false. Scientific propositions are meaningful, since they are tested by observation. No observation, experiment or analysis can settle whether ‘The Absolute is One and All-embracing’ is true; we should therefore dismiss the sentence as meaningless.

  Logical positivism no longer has a following, and it is easy to see why. The verification principle cannot be verified: it therefore condemns itself as meaningless. Still, the positivists’ view of science remains highly influential. Many philosophers regard observation not merely as the route to scientific truth but also as the true subject-matter of science. Laws and theories generalize from observations, and weave them into a seamless tapestry. In the last analysis, that is what they mean. Reality is systematic appearance, and theories are summaries of observations.

  Look back at my example, and you will see how strange that picture is. Science may start from observation. Its purpose, however, is not to summarize appearance, but to distinguish appearance from reality. Science is a voyage of discovery, which passes from the observed to the unobserved, and thence to the unobservable. Its concepts and theories describe a reality so remote from the world of appearance that we can hardly envisage it, and while its findings are tested through observation, this is no more than a trivial consequence of the fact that observation is what ‘testing’ means. Science explains the appearance of the world, but does not describe it.

  This means that the claim so often made on behalf of philosophy, that it shows the reality behind appearances, could equally, and more plausibly, be made on behalf of science. And if the methods of science are agreed, certain, and indisputable, while those of philosophy obscure, controversial and vague, what need have we of philosophy? What is the contribution that philosophy could make, to our vision of the world?

  Here is one response to those questions. Science begins when we ask the question ‘Why?’ It leads us from the observed event to the laws which govern it, and onwards to higher and more general laws. But where does the process end? If each new answer prompts another question, then scientific explanations are either incomplete or endless (which is another way of being incomplete). But in that case science leaves at least one question unanswered. We still don’t know why the series of causes exists: the why of this event may be found in that; but what of the why of the world? Cosmologists dispute over the ‘origins of the universe’, some arguing for a Big Bang, others for a slow condensation. But in the nature of the case, such theories leave a crucial question unanswered. Even if we conclude that the universe began at a certain time from nothing, there is something else that needs to be explained, namely, the ‘initial conditions’ which then obtained. Something was true of the universe at time zero, namely, that this great event was about to erupt into being, and to generate effects in accordance with laws that were already, at this initial instant, sovereign. And what is the why of that?

  A positivist would dismiss such a question as meaningless. So too would many scientists. But if the only grounds for doing so is that science cannot answer it, then the response is self-serving. Of course the question has no scientific answer: it is the question beyond science, the question left over when all of science has been written down. It is a philosophical question.

  Well yes, the sceptic will say; but it does not follow that it has an answer. Maybe philosophical questions arise at the margin of our thinking, where the writ of reason ceases to run, and no more answers are forthcoming. Kant, in the Critique of Pure Reason, tried to show that this might be so. But it required a philosopher to argue the point, and if Kant is right, then at least one philosophical question has an answer. For it is a philosophical and not a scientific question, whether the question as to the explanation of the universe has an answer; and the answer, according to Kant, is no.

  Not all philosophers have agreed with him. There is an argument, known by the name bestowed on it by Kant, but due to St Anselm, eleventh-century archbishop of Canterbury, which offers the complete and final explanation of everything, by showing that at least one thing exists of necessity. The ‘ontological argument’ is normally offered as a proof of the existence of God. But it is capable of a wider interpretation, and reappears in Spinoza and Hegel as the final answer to every ‘Why?’ It tells us that God is, by definition, the sum of all perfections, so that existence, which is part of perfection, belongs to his essence. He must exist, and the question why he exists answers itself. Since God’s existence explains everything else, no ‘Why?’ is without an answer, not even the why of the world.

  Stated thus briefly and bluntly, the argument has the appearance of a sophism. Hence it is never stated briefly or bluntly, but wrapped in artful subtleties. Indeed, it is the one argument for God’s existence that is still alive, and which perhaps always was alive, even before St Anselm gave explicit voice to it. For what is really meant by the sublime words which open the Gospel according to St John? In the beginning, writes the evangelist, was the word, the logos. In Greek philosophy logos means not only word, but reason, argument, account: any answer to the question ‘Why?’ In other words, or rather, in the same words
if you stick to the Greek: In the beginning was the why which answers itself.

  Goethe’s Faust, meditating on this passage, offers an improvement: not words but deeds begin things, and if the world has sense for us, it is because im Anfang war die Tat: in the beginning was the deed. Let us not ask ‘Whose deed?’, for such a question merely plunges us again into the endless stream of causes. Let us ask instead how the ‘Why?’ of things is changed, when we see them not merely as events but as actions. When the judge asks me why I put arsenic in my wife’s tea, he will not be satisfied by my saying ‘Because electrical impulses from my brain caused my hand to reach for the bottle and tip it into the waiting teacup’ — although that may be a true answer to the question ‘Why?’ construed as scientists construe it, as a request for the cause. For it is an answer of the wrong kind.

  It seems, then, that the question ‘Why?’ is ambiguous. Sometimes it is answered by pointing to a cause, sometimes by pointing to a reason. The judge is asking what I was aiming at. If I reply that I had mistaken the bottle for that which contained the whisky, that I had intended to administer only a small dose of arsenic as a warning shot, or that I had intended to kill her since quite frankly enough was enough - then I have in each case offered a reason for my action, and the reply is pertinent. There are philosophers who say that reasons are causes, though causes of a special kind. For the three replies that I have sketched are valid explanations, and what is an explanation, if it does not mention a cause? But this does not get to the heart of the matter. The peculiarity of reasons is that you can argue with them; you can accept them or reject them; you can offer counter-reasons, and praise or condemn the agent on account of them. Even if reasons are causes, they have been lifted from the neutral realm of scientific theory, and endowed with a moral sense.

  The ambiguity here can be phrased in another way. Sometimes we explain our actions; sometimes we justify them. And while explanations are either true or false, reasons can be good or bad. They belong to the endless moral dialogue whereby people relate to one another and to the world, and it is not surprising if they have an entirely different structure, and make use of entirely different concepts, from the explanations offered by the science of behaviour. My original answer to the judge was absurd not because it was false, but because it removed my action from the sphere of judgement, and described it in terms that make no reference to it as mine. Yet these are precisely the terms that we should expect the science of behaviour to employ: for they identify the underlying mechanism that explains what we observe.

  We encounter here, and not for the first time in this work, an enduring paradox. It seems that we describe the world in two quite different ways - as the world which contains us, and as the world on which we act. We are part of nature, obedient to natural laws. But we also stand back from nature, and make choices which we believe to be free. Nature has a meaning for us - many meanings - and we classify it in ways which could find no place in scientific theory. When we see another’s smile we see human flesh moving in obedience to impulses in the nerves. No law of nature is suspended in this process; we smile not in spite of, but because of, nature. Nevertheless, we understand a smile in quite another way: not as flesh, but as spirit, freely revealed. A smile is always more than flesh for us, even if it is only flesh.

  The question ‘Why?’, when asked of a smile, is seeking a meaning. Perhaps you are smiling for a reason; but even if you have no reason, there may be a why to your smile. I may understand it as a gesture of serene acceptance. And that answers the question why you smile, even though it names neither justification nor cause. The description makes the smile intelligible. So here is another ‘Why?’, and one that can be applied more widely than to human beings. The why of a note in music, or a line in a painting, is like this. We understand why the opening chord of Tristan resolves onto the dominant seventh of A minor, not by learning Wagner’s reason for writing this, still less by looking for a cause, but by grasping the weight of these two chords as they balance against each other, by hearing the voice-leading which moves between them, and by pausing with the music, in the expectation of another resolution that never comes. Criticism describes the why of this music; but you do not need the description in order to understand what you hear, any more than you need a description to understand a smile. Understanding is sui generis, part of our way of relating to the world, when we relate to it as free beings.

  And here we encounter another task for philosophy, and perhaps its most important task in our conditions. When we respond to the world as free beings, we look for meanings and reasons, and divide the world according to our interests, and not according to its inner nature, as this is revealed to science. Indeed, the meaning of the world is enshrined in conceptions which, while indispensable to the ‘Why?’ of freedom, find no place in the language of science: conceptions like beauty, goodness and spirit which grow in the thin topsoil of human discourse. This topsoil is quickly eroded when the flora are cleared from it, and there is a risk that nothing will ever grow thereafter. You can see the process at work in the matter of sex. Human sexuality has usually been understood through ideas of love and belonging. An enchanted grove of literary ideas and images protected those conceptions, and man and woman lived within it happily, or at any rate, with a manageable unhappiness. The sexologist clears all this tangled undergrowth away, to reveal the scientific truth of things: the animal organs, the unmoralized impulses, and the tingling sensations that figure in those grim reports on the behaviour of American humanoids. The meaning of the experience plays no part in the scientific description. Since science has, or at any rate assumes, absolute sovereignty over what is true, the meaning comes to be viewed as a fiction. People may briefly try to reinvent it, sometimes even hoping to do a better job. Failing, however, they lapse into a state of cynical hedonism, scoffing at the fogeys who believe there is more to sex than biology.

  That is an example of a process which the great sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920) called Entzauberung — disenchantment. Philosophy is useful to us, precisely because it, and it alone, can vindicate the concepts through which we understand and act on the world: concepts like that of the person, which have no place in science but which describe what we understand, when we relate to the world as it truly is for us. The scientific attempt to explore the ‘depth’ of human things is accompanied by a singular danger. For it threatens to destroy our response to the surface. Yet it is on the surface that we live and act: it is there that we are created, as complex appearances sustained by the social interaction which we, as appearances, also create. It is in this thin topsoil that the seeds of human happiness are sown, and the reckless desire to scrape it away - a desire which has inspired all those ‘sciences of man‘, from Marx and Freud to sociobiology - deprives us of our consolation. Philosophy is important, therefore, as an exercise in conceptual ecology. It is a last-ditch attempt to re-enchant the world, and thereby ‘save the appearances’. And as Oscar Wilde said, it is only a very shallow person who does not judge by appearances.

  Philosophy arises, therefore, in two contrasted ways: first, in attempting to complete the ‘Why?’ of explanation; secondly in attempting to justify the other kinds of ‘Why?’ — the ‘Why?’ which looks for a reason, and the ‘Why?’ which looks for a meaning. Most of the traditional branches of the subject stem from these two attempts, the first of which is hopeless, the second of which is our best source of hope.

  2

  TRUTH

  Most, but not all. For there is another and vital task for philosophy, which is pertinent in all times and places, and no less urgent for us than it was for Plato. This is the task of criticism. In seeking ultimate explanations, and durable meanings, philosophy is engaged in constructive tasks. It is explaining the world, and telling us how to live in it. But philosophy also has a negative task, which is to analyse and criticize human thinking, to ask awkward questions like ‘How do you know?’ and What do you mean?’ Two branches of the subject - epistemology (the th
eory of knowledge) and logic - have grown in answer to these questions, and they will guide us through the next two brief, but necessary, chapters.

  There are no truths, said Nietzsche, only interpretations. Logic cries out against this remark. For is it true? Well, only if there are no truths. In other words, only if it is not true. Nietzsche is widely revered for his ‘iconoclastic’ epistemology, and cited as an authority by modernists, structuralists, postmodernists, poststructuralists, postpostmodernists ... indeed, just about anyone who has no patience with the idea of authority. Certainly, Nietzsche was a genius, a great writer, and one of the few who have peered into the abyss and recorded, in the brief moment of sanity that then remains, just how it looks. We should be grateful to him, since real warnings are rare. But we should also be warned. Don’t come down this path, his writings tell us, for this way madness lies.