Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions Book 55)

by Edward Craig

So most of us, even those who don’t think about it at all, have something like answers to the two basic philosophical questions, namely: what should we do? and, what is there?

And there’s a third basic question, to which again most of us have some kind of an answer, which kicks in the moment we get self-conscious about either of the first two questions, namely: how do we know, or if we don’t know how should we set about finding out – use our eyes, think, consult an oracle, ask a scientist? Philosophy, thought of as a subject that you can study, be ignorant of, get better at, even be an expert on, simply means being rather more reflective about some of these questions and their interrelations, learning what has already been said about them and why.

That how people think alters things, and that how lots of people think alters things for nearly everyone, is undeniable.

That’s because the best philosophy doesn’t just come up with a few new facts that we can simply add to our stock of information, or a few new maxims to extend our list of dos and don’ts, but embodies a picture of the world and/or a set of values; and unless these happen to be yours already (remember that in a vague and unreflective way we all have them) it is bound to seem very peculiar – if it doesn’t seem peculiar you haven’t understood it.

Good philosophy expands your imagination. Some philosophy is close to us, whoever we are.

Think of philosophy as the sound of humanity trying to recover from this crisis.

This book is called a very short introduction to philosophy. But, as I hope is now becoming clear, I can’t exactly introduce you to philosophy, because you are already there. Nor can I exactly introduce you to philosophy, because there is far too much of it.

Whatever you do, don’t get hooked up on that laziest, most complacent of sayings, that ‘everyone has a right to their own opinion’. Acquiring rights isn’t that simple. Rather, keep in mind the wry comment of George Berkeley (1685–1753): ‘Few men think, yet all will have opinions.’

Where to draw the line isn’t always obvious, but scholars seem now broadly agreed that the real Socrates concentrated on ethical questions about justice and virtue (‘How should I live?’ is sometimes called ‘the Socratic question’); and that he constantly probed whether his fellow Athenians really understood what was involved in these matters anything like as well as they claimed to.

Socrates responds by saying that one shouldn’t bother about what ‘people’ think; the opinion that should matter to us is that of reasonable people with a clear view of the facts.

This of course quite neutralizes Crito’s argument: no point in appealing to the bad effects on your friends if you don’t do something, when the effects on them if you do are likely to be at least as bad.

Crito doesn’t tell us whether he thinks that for Socrates to give up his life when he could save it would be wrong just because it means success for his enemies, or whether it is an intrinsically wrong thing to do – as some have thought suicide intrinsically wrong – or for some other reason again.

He returns to the first point Crito made – the one about reputation – and asks whose opinion we should respect, those of the wise or the foolish, those of the many or those of the expert?

The crucial question is whether it is right for Socrates to try to escape – all this stuff about money, reputations, and bringing up children is of no real consequence (48c).

Let’s just pause for a moment. One thing we should not do is read philosophy uncritically.

First he asks Crito to agree that doing someone a wrong is always wrong, even when done in response to a wrong done to you (49a–49e). Revenge may be sweet but it is not permissible.

The strategic importance of this is easy to see: if it is accepted, then whether anyone has wronged Socrates – the State, the jurors, his accusers – becomes irrelevant; the only question is whether he himself would be doing a wrong in following Crito’s plan.

Socrates now puts forward two much less controversial premisses: doing harm to people is wrong (49c), and breaking a fair agreement is wrong (49e).

When I do something, it is as if I were giving everyone else my permission to do the same, and I have to consider the consequences of that, not just of my individual action.

We have seen a little of why this should be: so many factors, of so many different types, are involved. Should you do A or not? Well, what will the consequences be if you do? There may be consequences for your friends, your family, and others, as well as those for you yourself. And what if you don’t? How do the consequences compare? Alternatively, never mind the consequences for a moment, just ask whether you can do A consistently with your own view of yourself – would it involve betraying ideals that till then you had valued and tried to live up to? How will you feel about having done it? Or again, however pleasant the consequences may be, would it run contrary to some duty, or some obligations you have incurred? Obligations to whom?

Remember that most great philosophy doesn’t just add/subtract one or two facts to/from our previous beliefs; it removes a whole way of thinking and replaces it with another.

Hume wanted to move it: we are not inferior little gods but somewhat superior middle-sized animals.

Notice that ‘why they made it’ means two things, both important: their reasons for thinking it true – and their motives for being interested in it, what they are aiming at.

When someone presents a point as if it were pretty obvious when it doesn’t seem obvious to you at all, it is good tactics to look for something unspoken lying behind it.

This is not about the conventionality of language; it is about wholes and their parts, and the point is that wholes are in a sense less real, less objective, and more a matter of convention, than are the parts that compose them.

(As the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) said much later, wholes have only a ‘borrowed’ reality – borrowed from the reality of their parts.)

To use the jargon: our metaphysics (what we think reality is fundamentally like) can affect our ethics.

Now on the Buddhist view the purpose of philosophy (indeed the purpose of Buddhism) is to alleviate suffering; there is no point in it if it doesn’t. And a major cause of suffering is overestimation of the importance of the self, its needs, and its goals: ‘clinging to self’, as Buddhists say.

I suggested at the end of that chapter that if philosophers were going to solve our moral problems they were first going to have to convince us that moral matters are really less complicated than they appear to be. One such attempt is consequentialism: no moral reasons are backward-looking; proper moral reasons all look to the consequences of our actions.

So the idea is that something is good if it has good consequences, bad if it has bad ones. But, you will immediately notice, that doesn’t tell us much; we still need to be told which consequences are good ones, which are bad ones. Just repeating the formula (saying: consequences are good when they themselves have good consequences) gets us no further.

A consequentialist must be willing to recommend certain things, or states of affairs, as...

In their case, goodness does not consist in having good consequences – they just are good. Other things are good only to the extent that they lead to the...

Once we agree to take more than one basic value into account we will inevitably find that our values sometimes come into conflict.

Integrity means wholeness, unity; the idea of integrity as a value is the idea of a life lived as a whole rather than as a series of disconnected episodes.

Unless we allow that superior force makes authority legitimate (‘might is right’), or that God has granted authority to certain persons or institutions (the ‘divine right of kings’), it isn’t easy to avoid the contract theory in some form or other.

The famous contract theory of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), which we shall return to in Chapter 8, has it that the sole benefit that the contracting individual can rightfully demand is the preservation of their life: the sovereign puts up a stop to the murderous, thieving lawlessness of the pre-contractual situation, and organizes defence against attack from without. If that fails, all bets are off; otherwise, complete obedience.

Rationality is what you’ve got if you have some capacity to reason: to work out, given certain truths, what else is likely to be true if they are; perhaps also (though you need rather more rationality for this) how likely.

We want our beliefs to be true, because we use them to direct our actions, and actions directed by true beliefs are on the whole far more successful.

But it remains the case that human powers of reasoning, acquiring beliefs by inferring them from previous beliefs, are more than just important to us. Without them there would be nothing recognizably human left except the shape of our bodies, and the average chimp would run rings round us, literally and figuratively.

There is also another, huge, difference. When presented with a philosophical doctrine it is always a good idea to ask what happens next – that is to say, what its proponents want to do with it.

is it legitimate to treat the thought of someone long since dead as a contribution to a present debate, as if it were being put to us, here and now?

I hope that you are now beginning to notice something rather encouraging. The literature of philosophy may be intimidatingly vast, but the number of genuinely distinct philosophical themes is not.

The problem lies not in becoming familiar with the recurrent themes, but in being sensitive to the variations as different thinkers play them again in their own way for their own purposes.

Most philosophical ‘ism’ words are (like ‘consequentialism’) quite broad terms designating a certain general type of doctrine.

‘empiricism’ is a very general word for doctrines that favour perceiving over thinking, ‘rationalism’ for doctrines that favour thinking over perceiving.

When sceptics succeed they cease to look like sceptics; they look like critics who were right.

And it can only be a few. But be assured that there are plenty more, indeed that however much you read, there will still be plenty more.

So set aside a couple of hours – easily enough – and begin by sympathizing with Descartes’s frustration when formal education left him feeling that ‘I had gained nothing … but increasing recognition of my ignorance’ and that there was ‘no such knowledge in the world as I had previously been led to hope for’.

As for philosophy, its chief ‘advantage’ is that it enables us to ‘speak plausibly about any subject and win the admiration of the less learned’ – so much for scholastic Aristotelianism.

Descartes’s reaction is that if he is to avoid living under the misguidance of false opinions then once in his life he should dismantle his entire belief-system and construct it anew.