Philosophy an Introduction to the Art of Wondering Chapter 22 Self Summary
Unit one: What Is Philosophy?
3 The Value of Philosophy
Bertrand Russell
We need to consider what is the value of philosophy and why it ought to exist studied. It is the more necessary to consider this question, in view of the fact that many people, nether the influence of science or of practical affairs, are inclined to doubt whether philosophy is anything better than innocent but useless trifling, hairsplitting 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 accomplish. Physical scientific discipline, through the medium of inventions, is useful to innumerable people who are wholly ignorant of information technology; thus the study of physical science is to be recommended, non simply, or primarily, because of the event on the student, simply rather because of the result on flesh in full general. This utility does not vest to philosophy. If the report of philosophy has any value at all for others than students of philosophy, it must exist merely indirectly, through its furnishings upon the lives of those who study it. It is in these furnishings, therefore, if anywhere, that the value of philosophy must exist primarily sought.
Just further, if nosotros are not to neglect in our endeavor to decide the value of philosophy, we must first free our minds from the prejudices of what are wrongly called "practical" people. The "practical" person, as this word is oft used, is one who recognizes only material needs, who realizes that people must have food for the body, but is oblivious of the necessity of providing food for the mind. If all people were well off, if poverty and disease had been reduced to their lowest possible betoken, there would still remain much to exist done to produce a valuable order; and even in the existing earth the appurtenances of the mind are at least every bit important as the appurtenances of the trunk. It is exclusively amidst the goods of the mind that the value of philosophy is to be found; and only those who are not indifferent to these goods tin can exist persuaded that the study of philosophy is not a waste of time.
Philosophy, similar all other studies, aims primarily at knowledge. The knowledge information technology aims it is the kind of cognition which gives unity and organization 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 information technology cannot be maintained that philosophy has had any very peachy measure of success in its attempts to provide definite answers to its questions. If you ask a mathematician, a mineralogist, a historian, or whatsoever other person of learning, what definite trunk of truths has been ascertained by his scientific discipline, his answer will last equally long as you are willing to listen. But if y'all put the aforementioned question to a philosopher, he will, if he is candid, have to confess that his study has not achieved positive results such as take been achieved past other sciences. Information technology is true that this is partly accounted for past the fact that, as presently as definite knowledge apropos whatsoever discipline becomes possible, this subject ceases to be called philosophy, and becomes a split science. The whole study of the heavens, which now belongs to astronomy, was once included in philosophy; Newton's corking work was chosen "the mathematical principles of natural philosophy." Similarly, the written report of the human listen, which was, until very lately, a function of philosophy, has now been separated from philosophy and has go the science of psychology. Thus, to a neat extent, the doubt 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 respond can be given, remain to form the residue which is chosen philosophy.
This is, nevertheless, only a function 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 nosotros can see, must remain insoluble to the human intellect unless its powers become of quite a different order from what they are now. Has the universe whatsoever unity of programme 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 information technology a transitory accident on a pocket-size planet on which life must ultimately get impossible? Are good and evil of importance to the universe or only to humanity? Such questions are asked by philosophy, and variously answered past various philosophers. Only it would seem that, whether answers exist otherwise discoverable or not, the answers suggested by philosophy are none of them demonstrably truthful. Notwithstanding, however slight may exist the hope of discovering an respond, information technology is role of the business organisation 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 go on live 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 primal questions. They have supposed that what is of most importance in religious beliefs could be proved by strict demonstration to exist true. In order to guess of such attempts, it is necessary to accept a survey of homo knowledge, and to form an opinion as to its methods and its limitations. On such a subject it would be unwise to pronounce dogmatically; simply if the investigations of our previous capacity have not led us astray, nosotros 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 gear up of answers to such questions. Hence, once more, the value of philosophy must not depend upon whatsoever supposed trunk of definitely attestable knowledge to be acquired by those who study information technology.
The value of philosophy is, in fact, to be sought largely in its very uncertainty. The person 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 upwards in his mind without the cooperation or consent of his deliberate reason. To such a person the world tends to get definite, finite, obvious; mutual objects rouse no questions, and unfamiliar possibilities are contemptuously rejected. As soon every bit we begin to philosophize, on the contrary, we find, equally we saw in our opening chapters, that even the most everyday things atomic number 82 to bug to which just very incomplete answers can exist 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 gratis them from the tyranny of custom. Thus, while diminishing our feeling of certainty every bit to what things are, it greatly increases our knowledge as to what they may exist; it removes the somewhat arrogant dogmatism of those who have never traveled into the region of liberating dubiousness, and information technology 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—mayhap its master 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 person is shut up within the circumvolve of his private interests: family and friends may exist included, but the outer globe is not regarded except as it may assist or hinder what comes inside the circle of instinctive wishes. In such a life there is something feverish and confined, in comparing with which the philosophic life is calm and gratis. The individual world of instinctive interests is a pocket-size one, set in the midst of a great and powerful world which must, sooner or after, lay our private world in ruins. Unless we can so enlarge our interests as to include the whole outer world, we remain similar 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, simply a constant strife between the insistence of want and the powerlessness of will. In one way or another, if our life is to be great and gratis, we must escape this prison and this strife.
One way of escape is by philosophic contemplation. Philosophic contemplation does non, in its widest survey, divide the universe into two hostile camps—friends and foes, helpful and hostile, skilful and bad—it views the whole impartially. Philosophic contemplation, when it is unalloyed, does not aim at proving that the balance of the universe is alike to humanity. All acquisition of noesis is an enlargement of the Self, but this enlargement is all-time attained when information technology is non directly sought. It is obtained when the desire for knowledge is lone operative, past a study which does not wish in accelerate that its objects should have this or that character, but adapts the Self to the characters which information technology finds in its objects. This enlargement of Self is not obtained when, taking the Self equally it is, nosotros try to testify that the world is and then like to this Self that cognition of it is possible without whatever admission of what seems alien. The desire to evidence this is a form of cocky-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 information technology 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 business relationship than Self, and the Self sets bounds to the greatness of its appurtenances. In contemplation, on the contrary, nosotros 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 non fostered by those philosophies which assimilate the universe to Humanity. Noesis is a grade of marriage of Self and non-Self; like all spousal relationship, it is impaired by dominion, and therefore past any attempt to strength the universe into conformity with what we find in ourselves. In that location is a widespread philosophical trend towards the view which tells us that humanity is the measure of all things, that truth is person-made, that infinite and time and the world of universals are properties of the listen, 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 right, is untrue; only in addition to being untrue, it has the outcome of robbing philosophic contemplation of all that gives it value, since information technology fetters contemplation to Self. What it calls knowledge is not a union with the not-Cocky, simply a ready of prejudices, habits, and desires, making an impenetrable veil between usa and the world beyond. The person who finds pleasure in such a theory of knowledge is like the person who never leaves the domestic circle for fright his word might not be constabulary.
The true philosophic contemplation, on the reverse, 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 individual, everything that depends upon habit, self-interest, or want, 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 go a prison to the intellect. The free intellect will see as God might meet, 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 cognition—noesis as impersonal, as purely contemplative, as information technology is possible for humanity to achieve. Hence besides the costless intellect will value more than the abstruse and universal cognition into which the accidents of private history exercise non enter, than the noesis brought by the senses, and dependent, as such knowledge must be, upon an sectional and personal point of view and a trunk whose sense-organs misconstrue as much as they reveal.
The mind which has become accustomed to the liberty and impartiality of philosophic contemplation will preserve something of the same liberty and impartiality in the globe of activity and emotion. It will view its purposes and desires as parts of the whole, with the absenteeism of insistence that results from seeing them every bit infinitesimal fragments in a world of which all the rest is unaffected by whatsoever one person's deeds. The impartiality which, in contemplation, is the unalloyed desire for truth, is the very aforementioned quality of listen which, in action, is justice, and in emotion is that universal dear which tin exist given to all, and non only to those who are judged useful or admirable. Thus, contemplation enlarges non but the objects of our thoughts, but also the objects of our actions and our affections: it makes usa citizens of the universe, not simply of i walled city at war with all the residuum. In this citizenship of the universe consists humanity'south true freedom, and his liberation from the thralldom of narrow hopes and fears.
Thus, to sum upwards our discussion of the value of philosophy: Philosophy is to be studied, non for the sake of whatsoever definite answers to its questions, since no definite answers can, equally a rule, be known to be true, simply 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 confronting speculation; but higher up all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind likewise is rendered bang-up, and becomes capable of that matrimony with the universe which constitutes its highest proficient.
Citation and Utilize
The text was taken from the post-obit piece of work.
Bertrand Russell, The Issues of Philosophy (Urbana, IL: Project Gutenberg, 2004), http://world wide web.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5827.
The apply of this piece of work is governed past the Public Domain.
Source: https://open.library.okstate.edu/introphilosophy/chapter/russell-bertrand-the-value-of-philosophy/
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