assignment

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THE VALUE OF PHILOSOPHY

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.

This view of philosophy appears to result, partly from a wrong conception of

the ends of life, partly from a wrong conception of the kind of goods which

philosophy strives to achieve. Physical science, through the medium of inventions,

is useful to innumerable people who are wholly ignorant of it; thus the study of

physical science is to be recommended, not only, or primarily, because of the

effect on the student, but rather because of the effect on mankind in general.

Thus 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.

But further, if we are not to fail in our endeavor to determine the value of

philosophy, we must first free our minds from the prejudices of what are wrongly

called 'practical' men. The 'practical' man, as this word is often used, is one who

recognizes only material needs, who realizes that men must have food for the

body, but is oblivious of the necessity of providing food for the mind. If all men

were well off, if poverty and disease had been reduced to their lowest possible

point, there would still remain much to be done to produce a valuable society; and

even in the existing world the goods of the mind are at least as important as the

goods of the body. It is exclusively among the goods of the mind that the value of

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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.

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. 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. It is true that this is partly accounted for

by the fact that, as soon as definite knowledge concerning any subject becomes

possible, this subject ceases to be called philosophy, and becomes a separate

science. 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.

Thus, to a great extent, the uncertainty of philosophy is more apparent than real:

those questions which are already capable of definite answers are placed in the

sciences, while those only to which, at present, no definite answer can be given,

remain to form the residue which is called philosophy.

This is, however, only a part of the truth concerning the uncertainty of

philosophy. 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

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from what they are now. Has the universe any unity of plan or purpose, or is it a

fortuitous concourse of atoms? Is consciousness a permanent part of the

universe, giving hope of indefinite growth in wisdom, or is it a transitory accident

on a small planet on which life must ultimately become impossible? Are good and

evil of importance to the universe or only to man? Such questions are asked by

philosophy, and variously answered by various philosophers. But it would seem

that, whether answers be otherwise discoverable or not, the answers suggested by

philosophy are none of them demonstrably true. Yet, however slight may be the

hope of discovering an answer, it is part of the business of philosophy to continue

the consideration of such questions, to make us aware of their importance, to

examine all the approaches to them, and to keep alive that speculative interest in

the universe which is apt to be killed by confining ourselves to definitely

ascertainable knowledge.

Many philosophers, it is true, have held that philosophy could establish the

truth of certain answers to such fundamental questions. They have supposed that

what is of most importance in religious beliefs could be proved by strict

demonstration to be true. In order to judge of such attempts, it is necessary to

take a survey of human knowledge, and to form an opinion as to its methods and

its limitations. On such a subject it would be unwise to pronounce dogmatically;

but 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. We cannot, therefore, include as part of the value of philosophy any

definite set of answers to such questions. Hence, once more, the value of

philosophy must not depend upon any supposed body of definitely ascertainable

knowledge to be acquired by those who study it.

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

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without the co-operation or consent of his deliberate reason. To such a man the

world tends to become definite, finite, obvious; common objects rouse no

questions, and unfamiliar possibilities are contemptuously rejected. As soon as we

begin to philosophize, on the contrary, we find, as we saw in our opening

chapters, that even the most everyday things lead to problems to which only very

incomplete answers can be given. Philosophy, though unable to tell us with

certainty what is the true answer to the doubts which it raises, is able to suggest

many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of

custom. Thus, while diminishing our feeling of certainty as to what things are, it

greatly increases our knowledge as to what they may be; it removes the

somewhat arrogant dogmatism of those who have never travelled into the region

of liberating doubt, and it keeps alive our sense of wonder by showing familiar

things in an unfamiliar aspect.

Apart from its utility in showing unsuspected possibilities, philosophy has a

value, perhaps its chief value, through the greatness of the objects which it

contemplates, and the freedom from narrow and personal aims resulting from this

contemplation. The life of the instinctive man is shut up within the circle of his

private interests: family and friends may be included, but the outer world is not

regarded except as it may help or hinder what comes within the circle of instinctive

wishes. In such a life there is something feverish and confined, in comparison

with which the philosophic life is calm and free. The private world of instinctive

interests is a small one, set in the midst of a great and powerful world which must,

sooner or later, lay our private world in ruins. Unless we can so enlarge our

interests as to include the whole outer world, we remain like a garrison in a

beleaguered fortress, knowing that the enemy prevents escape and that ultimate

surrender is inevitable. In such a life there is no peace, but a constant strife

between the insistence of desire and the powerlessness of will. In one way or

another, if our life is to be great and free, we must escape this prison and this

strife.

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One way of escape is by philosophic contemplation. Philosophic

contemplation does not, in its widest survey, divide the universe into two hostile

camps, friends and foes, helpful and hostile, good and bad, it views the whole

impartially. Philosophic contemplation, when it is unalloyed, does not aim at

proving that the rest of the universe is akin to man. All acquisition of knowledge is

an enlargement of the Self, but this enlargement is best attained when it is not

directly sought. It is obtained when the desire for knowledge is alone operative,

by a study which does not wish in advance that its objects should have this or that

character, but adapts the Self to the characters which it finds in its objects. This

enlargement of Self is not obtained when, taking the Self as it is, we try to show

that the world is so similar to this Self that knowledge of it is possible without any

admission of what seems alien. The desire to prove this is a form of self-assertion

and, like all self-assertion, it is an obstacle to the growth of Self which it desires,

and of which the Self knows that it is capable. Self-assertion, in philosophic

speculation as elsewhere, views the world as a means to its own ends; thus it

makes the world of less account than Self, and the Self sets bounds to the

greatness of its goods. 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.

For this reason greatness of soul is not fostered by those philosophies which

assimilate the universe to Man. Knowledge is a form of union of Self and not-Self;

like all union, it is impaired by dominion, and therefore by any attempt to force the

universe into conformity with what we find in ourselves. 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; but in addition to being untrue, it has the effect of robbing

philosophic contemplation of all that gives it value, since it fetters contemplation to

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Self. What it calls knowledge is not a union with the not-Self, but a set of

prejudices, habits, and desires, making an impenetrable veil between us and the

world beyond. The man who finds pleasure in such a theory of knowledge is like

the man who never leaves the domestic circle for fear his word might not be law.

The true philosophic contemplation, on the contrary, finds its satisfaction in

every enlargement of the not-Self, in everything that magnifies the objects

contemplated, and thereby the subject contemplating. Everything, in

contemplation, that is personal or private, everything that depends upon habit,

self-interest, or desire, distorts the object, and hence impairs the union which the

intellect seeks. By thus making a barrier between subject and object, such

personal and private things become a prison to the intellect. 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. Hence also

the free intellect will value more the abstract and universal knowledge into which

the accidents of private history do not enter, than the knowledge brought by the

senses, and dependent, as such knowledge must be, upon an exclusive and

personal point of view and a body whose sense-organs distort as much as they

reveal.

The mind which has become accustomed to the freedom and impartiality of

philosophic contemplation will preserve something of the same freedom and

impartiality in the world of action and emotion. It will view its purposes and

desires as parts of the whole, with the absence of insistence that results from

seeing them as infinitesimal fragments in a world of which all the rest is unaffected

by any one man's deeds. 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. Thus contemplation enlarges not only the objects

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of our thoughts, but also the objects of our actions and our affections: it makes us

citizens of the universe, not only of one walled city at war with all the rest. In this

citizenship of the universe consists man's true freedom, and his liberation from the

thraldom of narrow hopes and fears.

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; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is

possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance

which closes the mind against speculation; but above all 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.