Philosophy: what is it?

Front matter

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Preface

One of the branches of the Workers' Educational Association expressed a desire to know what Philosophy is; thereby assuming that Philosophy is a concern of the average man and of practical life, and should not be the monopoly of the professed student. Of the truth of this view there can be no doubt, and this book consists of the five lectures which were given by way of an attempt, not so much to answer their question as to bring out the meaning of the question. Hence the interrogative form of the title — Philosophy: what is it ?

The attempt was necessarily made, in the discussion of the question, to avoid technical terms as far as possible. Without technical terms it is impossible, it may be said, to go very far in the discussion. But it should be possible, without them,

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to go far enough to open the discussion, and to indicate both the nature of answers which have been given to the question, and the reasons why some of the answers are less satisfactory than others. Indeed, each of the lectures was followed by an hour's discussion in class, which served to show that working men and women found the question to be interesting and the answers to admit of debate. The lectures are, therefore, now printed, on the chance that others also, as well as those who heard them, may find the question attractive and the answer worth discussing.

F. B. Jevons.

Hatfield Hall

Durham 5 th March, 19 14

Chapter I

In the lives of most, and perhaps of all, of us there come moments of dejection, or even of despair, when the burden and the mystery of this unintelligible world come with such crushing weight upon us that, in spite even of religion itself, we ask, "What does it all mean? What is the good of it all?" The questions are asked in a despair which implies that there is no meaning in it all, and no good in life; or that, if there is, at any rate we cannot see it.

But though the questions may be asked, and in moments of personal despair are asked, in a tone which implies that no satisfactory answer is, or can be forthcoming, they may also be considered, in a calmer mood, as questions which call for a reasoned answer, and with regard to which we must ask, as a matter of deliberation rather than of despair, whether an answer is possible at all. Now, it is the calm consideration of these questions in a reflective mood, and of the answers that are to be given to them — if any answer can be given — that constitutes philosophy.

Let us look, therefore, once more at the questions, "What does it all mean? What is the good of it all?" and let us see what is implied by the questions. The "it" in "What does it all mean? What is the good of it all?" evidently refers to the experience we have of the world and life. Obviously, therefore, it is with experience that philosophy has to do — with our experience in life; it is from experience, therefore, that philosophy has to start, and it is on experience, and the things experienced, that philosophy has to reflect.

Next, the questions are put not about this or that particular experience, this or that particular phase of experience, this or that particular department of knowledge, or of life; or of experience, but about it all — what does it all mean? It is, therefore, all experience, experience as a whole, being and knowledge as a whole, that philosophy has to contemplate.

Further, the tone in which the questions are put, "What does it all mean? What is the good of it all?" implies that the person who puts these questions despairingly to the universe, took it for granted, once upon a time, that life was worth living, that there was some good in it and that it had some meaning; but that now he is beginning to wonder whether there is any meaning in it all, whether the universe is rational and intelligible, and whether there is any good in it. He is beginning to be sceptical and doubtful on these points.

Now, you and I may be convinced in the bottom of our hearts that the world is run on rational and intelligible principles, and that there is some good in life, and might be more if only men would think and act reasonably. But, if we are convinced of this, we ought to be able to give some answer to the man who is doubtful and sceptical about it. And if you are to understand his difficulties, you must put yourself in his position. You must put yourself in his place so far as to ask whether there is any meaning in life, any good in it all. And you must ask the question fairly and squarely, Is there any meaning in it all? And to answer the question you must turn to experience, his experience, your experience, the experience of all of us, and you must reflect upon it as a whole — that is to say, you must become a philosopher. Each science tells us about some particular set of things; but when every science has done so, the question still remains, "What does it all mean? What does it all come to?" And any attempt to answer these questions is a philosophy. It is with the whole of experience that philosophy attempts to deal. Philosophy is the attempt to deal with the whole, and with our experience as a whole.

It is from experience we have to start, and to experience that we have to return. We start, and must start, from it, because we have nothing else we can start from. We reflect upon it — and the reflection upon it is philosophy — in the hope that having done so we may understand it rather better when we have thought it over. If that should be the fortunate result, then we shall find that we understand our experience better than we did, and that there is more in it than we thought at first, and even that it is in some respects really different from what at first we took it to be.

Of course there is also the possibility — even if it be but a bare possibility — that the more we reflect upon experience, the more difficult it will be to discover any meaning in it, or to make any sense out of it. And if we finally come to the conclusion that there is no meaning in the world, or none discoverable by us, the conclusion will still be a philosophical conclusion, because it is the conclusion to which we are brought by reflection upon experience, but it will be a sceptical philosophy.

In philosophy, as in other departments of inquiry, scepticism is the revolt against dogmatism; that is to say, philosophical scepticism, or scepticism in philosophy, is the revolt against the notion that there are some conclusions which we may not question, but must accept without inquiry or reason. But it is the very breath and being of philosophy that it should at all times be ready to reconsider its conclusions in the light of new evidence and fresh facts. Only by doing so can philosophy either grow or live at all. The dogmatism which forbids it to readjust itself to the growth of knowledge is a dead hand laid upon philosophy and fatal to it. So far, then, as scepticism is a revolt against dogmatism and destructive of it, it is an essential condition of the growth of philosophy.

But destruction, necessary though it often is, in philosophy as elsewhere, is not construction. It may be necessary to pull down an old building before we can build a new one on the site. But if we destroy, it is only in order that we may reconstruct. And that is why scepticism never in the course of philosophy has been, and never in the course of things can be, final. But that is just the important fact which is overlooked by those who consider that scepticism is the last word in philosophy. The truth is that philosophy is a living, growing study; and that, so long as it lives and grows, the last word has not yet been said.

The reason why philosophy is a living, growing, department of inquiry and thought, is, as has already been said, that it is with experience that philosophy has to do: it is from experience that philosophy has to start. Philosophy is reflection upon experience and the things experienced; and it is on the whole of experience that it must be based, if it is to have any value. But experience is continually increasing; the world is growing older and riper in experience every day. That is to say, the whole of experience never is or can be before us. Finality in philosophy, therefore, is for ever beyond our reach, if by finality we imagine, with the dogmatist, that it is possible to say to the free spirit of philosophy, "Thus far shalt thou go, and no further. " Philosophy, therefore, can never recognise finality in this shape, but must ever pass forwards and onwards. We may take stock of our experience and its results up to the moment when we take stock of it; we may even form some notion of whether the business is going up or down. But the business of experience is a going concern; we are acquiring experience every day, and we do not know how it will stand a year or a century hence. To say or imagine that we do know is simply the dogmatism which is fatal to the development of philosophy. What we can do is to form some notion of how it is going. We can say how things look now. To say how they will look a century hence is simply dogmatism, and simple folly. The philosophy of a century hence must do that. What we have to start from is experience as far as it has already gone. That is the experience which philosophy has to reflect upon, and about which it has to inquire whether it has any meaning, and what is the good of it all.

But if we say this, perhaps we shall be understood to mean that philosophy, being concerned with experience, is concerned only with what is past. That however would be to misunderstand us. As philosophers we are not concerned with the past, or rather are not concerned to write a history of the things that are past and done for. With the past we are only concerned so far as it is related to the io Philosophy

present and the future. If experience has any meaning, if any meaning runs through it, then that meaning has run through all the successive moments of the past, or has been displayed in them, and has been displayed as binding them together into one whole. Those successive moments of the past were each of them at one time future, then present, and then past. Now, we look back upon them and see them forming one whole — a whole of which we have had and still have experience. In the same way, the successive moments, which are not yet past, but are running by us now, are each of them in turn first future, then present, and then past. And if we look upon them, and reflect, we shall see that they, too, are forming one whole; the future moment, ere I can get the words out of my mouth, has become present and has fallen back into the past. But if the past and future moments are thus related, if they are thus indeed inseparable, then they form one whole. We may, indeed,

Philosophy and Science n

distinguish one moment from another, but we cannot separate them, just as we can distinguish the sides of a straight line, though we cannot put one side of the line here and the other somewhere else. The past moment and the future are, like the sides of the line, related and inseparable: they are related in the present, when we are continually passing through the one into the other; and they are, though distinguishable, inseparable, because they are parts of one whole. That, then, is the nature of our experience and of its successive moments, which we may distinguish, but cannot possibly separate, from one another. Experience is a whole, and it is that whole which philosophy has to contemplate and on which it reflects. But to say that experience is a whole is to make a statement which is dogmatic; and which, being dogmatic, necessarily provokes scepticism — that is to say, invites inquiry and requires explanation. To say that experience is a whole is to make a statement which especially requires explanation, because, as we have already seen, philosophy — that is to say, the explanation of experience — never can be final, for the simple rea^pn that experience itself is continually increasing: it never is, but always is to be, completed. If, then, experience never is complete, if philosophy accordingly never can be final, how, the sceptical philosopher may inquire, how can experience ever be a whole?

The difficulty thus raised can be met to some extent by means of an analogy. Thus, a circle, for instance, is a whole. Yet we can understand what is meant if any one speaks of an expanding circle. Experience, on this analogy, may be spoken of as a circle continually expanding. The analogy, however, is obviously imperfect, because knowledge not only increases in extent and in amount, but grows richer and more diversified in its quality and content. We may then, perhaps, find a closer analogy, if we compare experience to an organism. A living organism is a whole, having its parts, each one of which is different from every other, and no one of which can live apart from the others. And yet the organism, though it is a whole, and because it is a living organism, is continually growing. At no moment in the process of its growth has the organism attained its final shape. And at no moment in its growth has experience, either, attained finality; yet at every moment it is a whole, even though it has the capacity always of further growth.

We may then fairly say there is nothing unreasonable in supposing that experience may be a whole and a growing whole ; and that though it grows, or rather because it grows, it has not attained finality. But though there seems to be nothing unreasonable in supposing, to start with, that experience may form a whole, still we can put it forward only as a supposition or hypothesis. To put it forward as a fact would be to commit the error of dogmatising. We should be forgetting the very point from which we started in this lecture. We started with the question which some men ask about life and experience, "What does it all mean? What is the good of it all?" And that is precisely the question which philosophy is continually attempting to answer. We must assume either that there is an answer to it, or that there is not. And whether we assume, to begin with, that there is or is not an answer, we have in the end to show that our assumption fits in with the facts. We may, indeed, assume that there is an answer, and we may put forward what we consider to be the answer. If we do, then it is the business of other philosophers to show how far the answer we give fails to be satisfactory; and then it becomes our business to re-shape the answer so that it will fit the facts. And this process goes on and will go on, just so long as fresh facts turn up, or so long as our answers fail to account for all the old facts.

Now, this, which is the process of philosophy, is, of course, the process of science also. Science, like philosophy, has continually to re-shape itself in order to find place — and to find the proper place — for all the facts. That is the way, and the only way, in which either science or philosophy can advance.

And here the question may reasonably be asked, since we have science, What is the need or the use of philosophy? What is philosophy, anyhow? Well, I repeat, philosophy is the attempt to answer the question which some men ask about life and experience, "What does it all mean? What is the good of it all?" Now, there are many sciences — mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, physiology, geology, and hosts of others — but not one of them even asks, much less answers, the question which is the most interesting question of all — ■ What does our experience come to? What does it all mean? What is the good of it all? It is philosophy and philosophy alone which puts that question and attempts to answer it.

Each of the particular sciences deals with one particular set of facts. Philosophy, on the other hand, is the attempt to contemplate all experience and all being, not to deal with any one particular set of facts but to regard them as forming one whole, and to ask what is the meaning of the whole. No science does that. No science faces all the facts. In war successful strategy often consists in taking the enemy in detail and in beating one division of the hostile army after the other. And that is the kind of strategy that science employs. Instead of attacking the problems presented by nature all at once, science takes the problems singly and deals with them one at a time. That is why there are so many sciences; each is told off to do its special work and deal with its own particular problems. Each, therefore, can give us information about its own particular department of knowledge, while none can tell us anything about the work of any other science. Still less can any one science undertake to sum up all the work of all the other sciences.

As I have said, no science faces all the facts. The strategy of science — the uniform method of all the sciences — consists in dividing the enemy's forces, as it were, and so beating them in detail. Every object has a host of various qualities, and each of those qualities is dealt with separately by a separate science — its colour by optics, its weight by physics, its chemical constitution by chemistry, its organism by physiology, and so on. Of course, the colour of a thing does not exist separately from the thing; nor can you take the weight out of a thing, and carry off the weight into one room whilst you leave the thing without any weight in the other. All you can really do is to concentrate your attention on one of the many qualities that a thing possesses, and dismiss from attention all the other qualities. And when we do this, we are said to abstract that particular quality from the thing; and the quality itself is called an abstraction. These qualities— these abstract qualities — can be studied by themselves in one way only, and that is by pretending that they exist by themselves. And the study of such abstractions is what is called science.

All sciences are abstract sciences. No one of them deals with things as w r holes; every science deals with some one quality of things — that is to say, with some abstraction. Every science studies some one aspect of reality separately; no one science studies all the aspects of reality together. And yet it is very necessary that all the aspects of reality — that is to say, the whole of our experience should be studied together, because the question will arise, What does it all come to? What is the meaning of it all? And that is just the question which no science undertakes to answer. And the reason why no science even attempts to answer the question is that every science is abstract; every science deals with this or that abstract quality of things. No one science deals with all the qualities of any single thing. Much less does any science deal with all things together, and ask, What do they all come to? What is the meaning of them as a whole?

Science, then, is abstract and studies abstractions, not things as wholes. It takes things to pieces, as it were, and studies the pieces separately. Or rather it pretends to take them to pieces, and to take the weight of a thing, or the colour of a thing, and to study these abstractions. But of course it is impossible to separate the weight from a material thing, just as it is impossible for the thing to exist without weight. And science does not imagine that a material thing can exist without weight, or that weight exists apart from material things. Science knows that these are abstractions, and that the abstract sciences deal with abstractions and not with wholes. Science then is abstract in this way.

But science is doubly abstract, for it is abstract in another way also. The man of science concentrates his attention on some one of the many qualities that a thing possesses, and studies it, and gains some knowledge of it. The thing could not be studied unless it were there; nor could it be studied unless the student were there to study it and gain some knowledge about it. If the thing did not exist it could not be known to the student; and neither could it be known to the student if the student did not exist. Both must be there — the student and the thing. But though both must be there, science does not attend to both. The thing has many qualities — weight, size, colour, and so on — but any particular science attends to only one particular quality, and dismisses the other qualities from attention. So, too, though both the student and the thing studied must be present, if any scientific knowledge of the thing is to be attained, science attends only to the thing studied, and pays no attention to the student. His hopes and fears, his feelings of triumph or of disappointment, as his experiment succeeds or fails, matter no more to science than the clothes he wears or the cut of his hair. Science is concerned only with the thing — or rather the abstraction — studied, not with the student or his indigestion or the dirtiness of his hands. All those things — real though they may be — science dismisses from attention. It is not the student that science is attending to or cares about, but the experiment. The student may be dismissed from attention, just as all the other qualities of the thing, except the one quality that is under examination, may be dismissed. And science does dismiss the student from attention.

Hence it is that science is doubly abstract. It is abstract in the first place because it dismisses from attention all qualities except the one under investigation, and pretends that that one alone exists ; and it is abstract in the next place because it dismisses the student from attention and pretends that the thing under investigation alone exists.

Now, so long as every one remembers that the thing under investigation does not exist by itself, and could not be under investigation and could not be known, unless there were some one there by whom it was investigated and to whom it was known, so long no harm is done. But this simple fact is not always remembered; it is sometimes forgotten, and then those who forget it imagine that the thing under investigation can exist all by itself. Yet the notion that the thing exists all by itself is an abstraction of just the same kind as the notion that weight can exist by itself apart from material things, or matter exist without weight. We never find matter apart from weight, or weight apart from matter. And we never find ourselves apart from everything we know. Neither do we ever find the things we know apart from ourselves. How can we? If we find them, we know them; and if we find and know them, we of course must be there and they, too, must be there. We can pretend, by abstraction, that they alone are there; we can concentrate our attention upon our work or upon some scene of beauty or of horror, and become so absorbed in it as to forget ourselves and our own existence. But we are there all the same. If we forget our own existence, we must be there to do so.

Just then as weight by itself is an abstraction, and not a reality, so, too, things by themselves are an abstraction and not a reality. Weight is never found in the abstract, but always in combination with many other qualities. And so, too, things are never found in the abstract and by themselves; they are always found by somebody — or else they are not found at all. We never find the things we know, apart from ourselves. Neither do we ever find ourselves apart from all that we know.

We can think of ourselves apart from things, just as we can think of things apart from ourselves. But in both cases we are thinking of abstractions and not of realities. Things apart from us are unreal abstractions; and we, apart from things, are equally abstract and unreal.

No one would maintain that the inside of a curve could be found without the outside, or could exist without it. You can, of course, concentrate your attention on what is inside and dismiss what is outside from attention. But the one side cannot exist without the other; they cannot be divorced. And science, which deals with one quality apart from others, or things apart from the mind that studies them, does not really divorce them; it simply considers the inside of the curve by itself or the outside by itself. It cannot separate them, for the simple reason that they are inseparable.

But though the inside and the outside of a curve cannot be separated, they are quite distinguishable, and, in a way, opposed to each other. So, too, the person or subject who attends to something is quite distinguishable from the object to which he attends, and is, in a way, opposed to it.

Perhaps, however, you will feel that the subject or person who attends to things is not always attending to the same thing. And that is undeniable. But if you are not attending to one thing, you are to another; so long as you are conscious at all, you are conscious of something. You are always aware of some object or other. You — the subject — can't get on without some object. You are, let us say, the outside of the curve. Well ! you can't get on without an inside.

But what about things? Well! are they things that anybody knows, or things that nobody knows? If they are things nobody knows, no one need pay any attention to them — indeed, nobody can. And if they are things that are known, why! then they are objects of attention, the inside of that curve of which the mind is the outside — or, if you like it better, they are the outside of that curve of which the mind is the inside.

But the root of the whole matter and the key to all philosophy is that the two sides of the curve, though distinguishable, are inseparable. Subject and object cannot be divorced. We may consider the one apart from the other. But if we do so, we are considering an abstraction and not a reality. We may consider matter apart from mind, or mind apart from matter; we may consider the subject apart from the object, or the object apart from the subject. But in either case we are starting from an abstraction and not from a reality.

We may put our backs to the inside of the curve and walk away from it, or we may put our backs to the outside of the curve and walk away in the opposite direction. And, whichever we do, the further we go, the further away we get from reality. On one side of the curve lies matter and the world of material objects; on the other lies mind and its various manifestations. Whether we go forward into the world of material objects or into, the sphere of mind and its manifestations, we are plunging deeper and deeper into a collection of abstractions, and getting further and further away from reality.

If we go in the one direction we find nothing but matter and motion; and then we shall be tempted to proclaim that there is no reality but matter in motion. If we go in the other direction we shall find nothing but mental states and mental processes; and then we shall be tempted to proclaim that there is no such thing as matter, but only mental processes and mental states. But the truth is that matter apart from mind, or mind apart from objects, is a mere abstraction, an unreality. This I shall dwell on at greater length in the next chapter. For the moment I wish to consider an argument that may already have suggested itself to your minds.