A Short History of Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Wittgenstein, Second Edition (2 page)

At every point we find that science generates questions which pass beyond its own ability to solve them. Such questions have been called metaphysical: they form a distinctive and inescapable part of the subject matter of philosophy. Now, in considering the particular metaphysical problem that I have mentioned, people might have recourse to an authoritative system of theology. They might find their answer in the invocation of God, as the first cause and final aim of everything. But if this invocation is founded merely on faith, then it claims no rational authority beyond that which can be attributed to revelation. Anyone who lets the matter rest in faith, and enquires no further into its validity, has, in a sense, a philosophy. He has staked his claim in a metaphysical doctrine, but has affirmed that doctrine
dogmatically:
it is, for him, neither the conclusion of reasoned argument, nor the result of metaphysical speculation. It is simply a received idea, which has the intellectual merit of generating answers to metaphysical puzzles, but with the singular disadvantage of adding no authority to those answers that is not contained in the original dogmatic assumption.

Any attempt to give a rational grounding for theology will, for the very reason that theology provides answers to metaphysical questions, itself constitute a form of philosophical thought. It is not surprising, therefore, that, while theology alone is not philosophy, the question of the
possibility
of theology has been, and to some extent still is, the principal philosophical question.

In addition to metaphysical questions of the kind I have referred to, there are other questions that have some
prima facie
right to be considered philosophical. In particular there are questions of method, typified by the two studies of epistemology (the theory of knowledge) and logic. Just as scientific investigation may be pushed back to the point where it becomes metaphysics, so may its own method be thrown in question by repeatedly asking for the grounds for each particular assertion. In this way science inevitably gives rise to the studies of logic and epistemology, and if there is a temptation to say that the conclusions of these studies are empty or meaningless, or that their questions are unanswerable, that in itself is a philosophical opinion, as much in need of argument as the less sceptical alternatives.

To the studies of metaphysics, logic and epistemology one must add those of ethics, aesthetics and political philosophy, since here too, as soon as we are led to enquire into the basis of our thought, we find ourselves pushed to levels of abstraction where no empirical enquiry can provide a satisfactory answer. For example, while everybody will realise that a commitment to a moral principle forbidding theft involves an abstention from theft on any particular occasion, everybody also recognises that a starving man’s theft of bread from one who has no need of it is an act which must be considered differently from a rich man’s theft of another’s most precious possession. But why do we regard these acts differently, how do we reconcile this attitude, if at all, with adherence to the original principle, and how do we justify the principle itself? All these questions lead us towards distinctively philosophical regions; the purviews of morality, of law, of politics themselves will be left behind, and we find ourselves reaching out for abstractions, often with little conviction that they might suffice to uphold a system of beliefs, and often with a renewed desire to take refuge in the dogmas of theology.

What, then, distinguishes philosophical thought? The questions that philosophers ask have two distinguishing features from which we might begin to characterise them: abstraction, and concern for truth. By abstraction I mean roughly this: that philosophical questions arise at the end of all other enquiries, when questions about particular things, events and practical difficulties have been solved according to the methods available, and when either those methods themselves, or some metaphysical doctrine which they seem to presuppose, are put in question. Hence the problems of philosophy and the systems designed to solve them are formulated in terms which tend to refer, not to the realm of actuality, but to the realms of possibility and necessity: to what might be and what must be, rather than to what is.

The second feature—the concern with truth—is one that might seem too obvious to be worth mentioning. But in fact it is easily forgotten, and when it is forgotten philosophy is in danger of degenerating into rhetoric. The questions that philosophy asks may be peculiar in that they have no answer—some philosophers have been driven to think so. But they are nevertheless questions, so that any answer is to be evaluated by giving reasons for thinking it to be true or false. If there are no answers, then all putative answers are false. But if someone proposes an answer, he must give reasons for believing it.

During the course of this work we shall come across several writers and schools of thought which have been founded in what one might call ‘meta-philosophy’—that is, in some theory as to the nature of philosophical thought, designed to explain how there can be an intellectual-discipline that is both wholly abstract and yet dedicated to the pursuit of truth. Such meta-philosophies tend to belong to one of two kinds, according as they uphold speculation or analysis as the aim of philosophical thinking.

Some say—following in the tradition of Pythagoras and Plato—that philosophy gains its abstract quality because it consists in the speculative study of abstract things, in particular of certain objects, or certain worlds, which are inaccessible to experience. Such philosophies are likely to denigrate empirical investigation, saying that it yields only half-truths, since it studies appearance alone, whereas speculative philosophy has the superior virtue of attaining to the realm of necessity, where the true contents of the world (or the contents of the true world) are revealed. Others regard philosophy as reaching to abstraction not because it speculates about some other more elevated world, but because it occupies itself with the more mundane task of intellectual criticism, studying the methods and aims of our specific forms of thought, in order to reach conclusions concerning their limits and validity. According to this second approach, abstraction is merely abstraction
from
the particular; it is not abstraction
towards
something else, in particular not towards some other realm of being. As for the pursuit of truth, that is explained immediately as an offshoot of the desire to settle what can be known, what can be proved—philosophical truth is simply truth about the limits of human understanding.

This analytical or critical philosophy, manifested at its most magisterial in the writings of Kant, has also dominated Anglo-American philosophy during this century, in the special form of ‘conceptual’ or ‘linguistic’ analysis. But the history of the subject suggests that, in questions of philosophy, analysis, in whatever high respect it may be held, always creates a desire for synthesis and speculation. However narrow a particular philosophy may look at first sight, however much it may seem to be mere verbal play or logic-chopping, it will in all probability lead by persuasive steps to conclusions, the metaphysical implications of which are as far-reaching as those of any of the grand speculative systems.

I have said that it is an essential feature of philosophical thought that it should have truth as its aim. But, faced with the bewildering variety of the conclusions, the contradictions of the methods, and the darkness of the premises of philosophers, the lay reader might well feel that this aim is either unfulfillable, or at best a pious hope rather than a serious intention. Surely, the reader will say, if there is such a thing as philosophical enquiry, which aims at and generates truth, then there ought to be philosophical progress, received premises, established conclusions; in short there ought to be the kind of steady obsolescence of successive systems that we observe in natural science, as new results are established and old ones overthrown. And yet we find no such thing; the works of Plato and Aristotle are studied as seriously now as they ever were, and it is as much the business of a modern philosopher, as it was the business of their philosophical contemporaries, to be familiar with their arguments. A scientist, by contrast, while he may have an interest in the history of his subject, can often ignore it with impunity, and usually does so. A modern physicist who had never heard of Archimedes may yet have a complete knowledge of the accepted conclusions of his subject.

It would be an answer to this scepticism to argue that there
is
progress in philosophy, but that the subject is peculiarly difficult. It lies at the limit of human understanding; therefore its progress is slow. It would also be an answer to argue that the nature of the subject is such that each attempt is a new beginning, which can take nothing for granted, and only rarely reach conclusions that have not been already stated in some other form, clothed in the language of some other system. It is useful here to contrast philosophy with science on the one hand, and literature on the other. As I have suggested, a scientist may with impunity ignore all but the recent history of his subject and be none the less expert for that. Conversely, someone with only a very inadequate grasp of physics (of the system of physics which is currently accepted as true) may nevertheless prove to be a competent historian of the subject, able to explore and expound the intellectual presuppositions and historical significance of many a dead hypothesis, and many an outmoded form of thought. (Thus we find that science and the history of science are beginning to be separable academic disciplines, with little or no overlap in questions or results.)

When we turn to literature, however, we find a completely different state of affairs. First, it is implausible to suggest that there is an innate tendency of literature to progress—since there is nothing
towards
which it is progressing. Science, which moves towards truth, builds always on what has been established, and has an inalienable right to overthrow and demolish the most ingenious, satisfying and beautiful of its established systems, as Copernicus and Galileo overthrew the Ptolemaic and Aristotelian cosmology. It follows that someone who had never heard of Ptolemy or even of Aristotle might still be the greatest living cosmologist. Literature, by contrast, has its high points and its low points, but no semblance of a necessary progression from one to the other. The perspective across this landscape will change with time: what had appeared towering will in time be diminished, and (more rarely) what now appears insignificant will from a distance appear great. But there is no
progress
beyond Homer or Shakespeare, no necessary expectation that a person, however talented, who has stuffed his brain with all the literature produced before him must therefore be in a position to do as well or better, or even in a position to understand what he has read.

Associated with this evident lack of a determinate direction are two important features of literary scholarship: first, it is impossible to engage in literary history without a full understanding of literature, and secondly, we cannot assume that a full understanding of literature will come from the study of contemporary works alone. History and criticism here penetrate and depend on each other; in science they are independent.

Philosophy seems to occupy some intermediate place between science and literature. On the one hand, it is possible to approach it in a completely unhistorical spirit, as Wittgenstein did, ignoring the achievements of previous philosophers and presenting philosophical problems in terms that bear no self-confessed relation to the tradition of the subject. Much contemporary philosophy is in this way unhistorical, and often none the worse for it. Philosophers have succeeded in isolating a series of questions to which they address themselves in a manner that increasingly concerns itself with what has been most recently thought, and with the intention of improving on that recent thought. The image is generated of ‘established results’, and of a movement which, because it is progressive, can afford to be unhistorical. But with the help of a little ingenuity, it is usually possible to discover, concealed in the writings of some historical philosopher, not only the most recent received opinion, but also some astonishing replica of the arguments used to support it. The discovery that the latest results have been anticipated by Aristotle, for example, has occurred many times during the history of philosophy, and always in such a way as to lead to the recognition of new arguments, new difficulties, and new objections surrounding the position adopted, whether that position be the scholastic theology of Aquinas, the romantic metaphysics of Hegel, or the dry analysis of the contemporary linguistic school.

Moreover, it is an undoubted fact that to approach the works of historical philosophers without the acquisition of some independent philosophical competence leads to misunderstanding. A purely ‘historical’ approach as much misrepresents the philosophy of Descartes or Leibniz as it misrepresents the plays of Shakespeare or the poetry of Dante. To understand the thought of these philosophers is to wrestle with the problems to which they addressed themselves, problems which are usually still as much the subject of philosophical enquiry as they ever were. It seems to be almost a precondition of entering the thought of traditional philosophers that one does not regard the issues which they discussed as ‘closed’, or their results as superseded. To the extent that one does so regard them, to that extent has one removed them from any central place in the history of the subject. (Just as a poet drops from the corpus of our literature to the extent that his concerns seem merely personal to him.) Pursuing this thought, one comes very soon to the conclusion that two philosophers may arrive at similar results, but present those results so differently as to deserve equal place in philosophical history. This is the case with William of Ockham and Hume, with Hegel and Sartre. We will come across this phenomenon repeatedly in what follows.