CHAPTER 1

The Purpose of Philosophy

What is the subject matter of philosophy? There is nouniversally accepted answer to this question. Opinions differ,from those who regard it as contemplation of all time and allexistence – the queen of the sciences, the keystone of the entirearch of human knowledge – to those who wish to dismiss it asa pseudo-science exploiting verbal confusions, a symptom ofintellectual immaturity, due to be consigned together with theologyand other speculative disciplines to the museum of curiousantiquities, as astrology and alchemy have long ago been relegatedby the victorious march of the natural sciences.

Perhaps the best way of approaching this topic is to ask whatconstitutes the field of other disciplines. How do we demarcatethe province of, say, chemistry or history or anthropology? Hereit seems clear that subjects or fields of study are determinedby the kind of questions to which they have been invented toprovide the answers. The questions themselves are intelligible if,and only if, we know where to look for the answers.

If you ask someone an ordinary question, say 'Where is mycoat?', 'Why was Kennedy elected President of the UnitedStates?', 'What is the Soviet system of criminal law?', he wouldnormally know how to set about finding an answer. We may notknow the answers ourselves, but we know that, in the case of thequestion about the coat, the proper procedure is to look on thechair, in the cupboard, and so forth. In the case of Kennedy'selection or the Soviet system of law we consult writings orspecialists for the kind of empirical evidence which leads to therelevant conclusions and renders them, if not certain, at any rateprobable.

In other words, we know where to look for the answer: weknow what makes some answers plausible and others not. Whatmakes this type of question intelligible in the first place is thatwe think that the answer can be discovered by empirical means,that is, by orderly observation or experiment, or methods compoundedof these, namely those of common sense or the naturalsciences.

There is another class of questions where we are no less clearabout the proper route by which the answers are to be sought,namely the formal disciplines: mathematics, for example, orlogic, or grammar, or chess or heraldry, defined in terms of certainfixed axioms and certain rules of deduction and so on, wherethe answer to problems is to be found by applying these rules inthe manner prescribed as correct.

We do not know the correct proof of Fermat's Theorem, forexample – no one is known to have found it – but we knowalong what lines to proceed; we know what kind of methods will,and what kind of methods will not, be relevant to the answer.If anyone thinks that answers to mathematical problems canbe obtained by looking at green fields or the behaviour of bees,or that answers to empirical problems can be obtained by purecalculation without any factual content at all, we would todaythink them mistaken to the point of insanity. Each of thesemajor types of question – the factual and the formal – possessesits own special ised techniques: discoveries by men of genius inthese fields, once they are established, can be used by men of nogenius at all in a semi-mechanical manner in order to obtain correctresults.

The hallmark of these provinces of human thought is that oncethe question is put we know in which direction to proceed to tryto obtain the answer. The history of systematic human thought islargely a sustained effort to formulate all the questions that occurto mankind in such a way that the answers to them will fall intoone or other of two great baskets: the empirical, that is, questionswhose answers depend, in the end, on the data of observation;and the formal, that is, questions whose answers depend on purecalculation, untrammelled by factual knowledge. This dichotomyis a drastically over-simple formulation – empirical and formalelements are not so easily disentangled – but it contains enoughtruth not to be seriously misleading. The distinction betweenthese two great sources of human knowledge has been recognisedsince the first beginnings of self-conscious thinking.

Yet there are certain questions that do not easily fit intothis simple classification. 'What is an okapi?' is answered easilyenough by an act of empirical observation. Similarly 'What isthe cube root of 729?' is settled by a piece of calculation in accordancewith accepted rules. But if I ask 'What is time?', 'Are allmen truly brothers?', how do I set about looking for the answer?If I ask 'Where is my coat?' a possible answer (whether correct ornot) would be 'In the cupboard', and we would all know where tolook. But if a child asked me 'Where is the image in the mirror?'it would be little use to invite it to look inside the mirror, whichit would find to consist of solid glass; or on the surface of themirror, for the image is certainly not on its surface in the sensein which a postage stamp stuck on it might be; or behind themirror (which is where the image looks as if it were), for if youlook behind the mirror you will find no image there – and so on.

Many who think long enough, and intensely enough, aboutsuch questions as 'What is time?' or 'Can time stand still?', 'WhenI see double, what is there two of?', 'How do I know that otherhuman beings (or material objects) are not mere figments of myown mind?' get into a state of hopeless frustration. 'What is themeaning of "the future tense"?' can be answered by grammariansby mechanically applying formal rules; but if I ask 'What is themeaning of "the future"?', where are we to look for the answer?

There seems to be something queer about all these questions– as wide apart as those about double vision, or number, or thebrotherhood of men, or the purposes of life; they differ from thequestions in the two baskets in that the question itself does notseem to contain a pointer to the way in which the answer to itis to be found. The other, more ordinary, questions contain preciselysuch pointers – built-in techniques for finding the answersto them. The questions about time, the existence of others andso on reduce the questioner to perplexity, and annoy practicalpeople precisely because they do not seem to lead to clear answersor useful knowledge of any kind.

This shows that between the two original baskets, the empiricaland the formal, there is at least one intermediate basket, inwhich all those questions live which cannot easily be fitted intothe other two. These questions are of the most diverse nature;some appear to be questions of fact, others of value; some arequestions about words and a few symbols; others are aboutmethods pursued by those who use them – scientists, artists,critics, common men in the ordinary affairs of life; still othersare about the relations between various provinces of knowledge;some deal with the presuppositions of thinking, some with thenature and ends of moral or social or political action.

The only common characteristic which all these questions appearto have is that they cannot be answered by either observationor calculation, by either inductive methods or deductive; and, asa crucial corollary of this, that those who ask them are faced witha perplexity from the very beginning – they do not know whereto look for the answers; there are no dictionaries, encyclopedias,compendia of knowledge, no experts, no orthodoxies whichcan be referred to with confidence as possessing unquestionableauthority or knowledge in these matters. Moreover some of thesequestions are distinguished by being general and by dealing withmatters of principle; and others, while not themselves general,very readily raise or lead to questions of principle.

Such questions tend to be called philosophical. Ordinary menregard them with contempt, or awe, or suspicion, according totheir temperaments. For this reason, if for no other, there is anatural tendency to try to reformulate these questions in such away that all or at any rate parts of them can be answered either byempirical or formal statements; that is to say, efforts, sometimesvery desperate ones, are made to fit them into either the empiricalor the formal basket, where agreed methods, elaborated overthe centuries, yield dependable results whose truth can be testedby accepted means.

The history of human knowledge is, to a large degree, asustained attempt to shuffle all questions into one of the two'viable' categories; for as soon as a puzzling, 'queer' questioncan be translated into one that can be treated by an empiricalor a formal discipline, it ceases to be philosophical and becomespart of a recognised science. Thus it was no mistake to regardastronomy in, say, the early Middle Ages as a 'philosophical'discipline: so long as answers to questions about stars andplanets were not determined by observation or experiment andcalculation, but were dominated by such non-empirical notionsas those, for example, of perfect bodies determined to pursue circularpaths by their goals or inner essences, with which they wereendowed by God or nature, even if this was rendered improbableby empirical observation, it was not clear how astronomicalquestions could be settled: that is, what part was to be played byobserving actual heavenly bodies, and what part by theological ormetaphysical assertions which were not capable of being testedeither by empirical or by formal means.

Only when questions in astronomy were formulated in sucha manner that clear answers could be discovered by using anddepending on the methods of observation and experiment, andthese in their turn could be connected in a systematic structurethe coherence of which could be tested by purely logical or mathematicalmeans, was the modern science of astronomy created,leaving behind it a cloud of obscure metaphysical notions unconnectedwith empirical tests and consequently no longer relevantto the new science, and so gradually relegated and forgotten.

So, too, in our own time, such disciplines as economics, psychology,semantics, logic itself, are gradually shaking themselvesfree from everything that is neither dependent on observationnor formal; if and when they have successfully completed thisprocess they will be finally launched on independent careers oftheir own as natural or formal sciences, with a rich philosophicalpast, but an empirical and/or formal present and future. Thehistory of thought is thus a long series of parricides, in whichnew disciplines seek to achieve their freedom by killing off theparent subjects and eradicating from within themselves whatevertraces still linger there of 'philosophical' problems, that is, thekind of questions that do not carry within their own structureclear indications of the techniques of their own solution.

That, at any rate, is the ideal of such sciences; in so far assome of their problems (for example, in modern cosmology)are not formulated in purely empirical or mathematical terms,their field necessarily overlaps with that of philosophy. Indeed,it would be rash to say of any developed high-level science that ithas finally eradicated its philosophical problems. In physics, forinstance, fundamental questions exist at the present time whichin many ways seem philosophical – questions that concern thevery framework of concepts in terms of which hypotheses are tobe formed and observations interpreted. How are wave-modelsand particle-models related to one another? Is indeterminacy anultimate feature of sub-atomic theory? Such questions are of aphilosophical type; in particular, no deductive or observationalprogramme leads at all directly to their solution. On the otherhand, it is of course true that those who try to answer such questionsneed to be trained and gifted in physics, and that any answersto these questions would constitute advances in the scienceof physics itself. Although, with the progressive separation of thepositive sciences, no philosophers' questions are physical, somephysicists' questions are still philosophical.

This is one reason, but only one, why the scope and contentof philosophy does not seem greatly diminished by this processof attrition. For no matter how many questions can be sotransformed as to be capable of empirical or formal treatment,the number of questions that seem incapable of being so treateddoes not appear to grow less. This fact would have distressed thephilosophers of the Enlightenment, who were convinced thatall genuine questions could be solved by the methods that hadachieved so magnificent a triumph in the hands of the naturalscientists of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

It is true that even in that clear day men still appeared nonearer to the solution of such central, indubitably philosophicalbecause apparently unanswerable, questions as whether men andthings had been created to fulfil a purpose by God or by nature,and if so what purpose; whether men were free to choose betweenalternatives, or on the contrary were rigorously determined bythe causal laws that governed inanimate nature; whether ethicaland aesthetic truths were universal and objective or relative andsubjective; whether men were only bundles of flesh and bloodand bone and nervous tissue, or the earthly habitations of immortalsouls; whether human history had a discernible pattern,or was a repetitive causal sequence or a succession of casual andunintelligible accidents. These ancient questions tormented themas they had their ancestors in Greece and Rome and Palestineand the medieval West.

Physics and chemistry did not tell one why some men wereobliged to obey other men and under what circumstances, andwhat was the nature of such obligations; what was good and whatwas evil; whether happiness and knowledge, justice and mercy,liberty and equality, efficiency and individual independence wereequally valid goals of human action, and, if so, whether they werecompatible with one another, and if not, which of them were tobe chosen, and what were valid criteria for such choices, and howwe could be certain about their validity, and what was meant bythe notion of validity itself; and many more questions of thistype.

Yet – so a good many eighteenth-century philosophers argued– a similar state of chaos and doubt had once prevailed in therealm of the natural sciences too; yet there human genius hadfinally prevailed and created order.

Nature, and Nature's laws lay hid in night.God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.

If Newton could, with a small number of basic laws, enableus, at least in theory, to determine the position and motion ofevery physical entity in the universe, and in this way abolish atone blow a vast, shapeless mass of conflicting, obscure and onlyhalf-intelligible rules of thumb which had hitherto passed fornatural knowledge, was it not reasonable to expect that, by applyingsimilar principles to human conduct and the analysis of thenature of man, we should be able to obtain similar clarificationand establish the human sciences upon equally firm foundations?

Philosophy fed on the muddles and obscurities of language; ifthese were cleared away, it would surely be found that the onlyquestions left would be concerned with testable human beliefs,or expressions of identifiable, everyday human needs or hopes orfears or interests. These were the proper study of psychologists,anthropologists, sociologists, economists; all that was needed wasa Newton, or series of Newtons, for the sciences of man; in thisway the perplexities of metaphysics could once and for all be removed,the idle tribe of philosophical speculators eradicated and,on the ground thus cleared, a clear and firm edifice of naturalscience built.

This was the hope of all the best-known philosophers of theEnlightenment, from Hobbes and Hume to Helvétius, Holbach,Condorcet, Bentham, Saint-Simon, Comte and their successors.Yet this programme was doomed to failure. The realm of philosophywas not partitioned into a series of scientific successor States.Philosophical questions continued (and continue) to fascinateand torment enquiring minds.