Mary Midgley - What Is Philosophy For?

WHAT IS
PHILOSOPHY FOR?

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WHAT IS
PHILOSOPHY FOR?

BY MARY MIDGLEY

What is the aim, the proper object of philosophizing? What are we trying to do?

We are not, of course, starting from nowhere, nor are we just riffling through ideas at random. We are always looking for something particular a link, a connection, a context that will make sense of our present muddled notions. Thoughts that are now blundering around loose and detached need somehow to be drawn into a pattern perhaps eventually into a single pattern, an all-explaining design. And when one of these patterns seems to be becoming more complete, we approve, and begin to speak of it hopefully as a philosophy.

But this doesnt always work.

Often we seem to be trying to resolve a complex jigsaw, one which has mistakenly brought together parts of several different pictures; trying to give a single shape to a manifold vision. Indeed, we are bound to keep doing this, because our minds are never quite empty at the start. They always contain incomplete world-pictures, frameworks to which loose scraps of experience and of various studies, such as geology, history, mathematics, astronomy and so forth, can be attached. And these various frameworks do not fit together spontaneously. They have usually grown from different sources, sometimes from distinct social groups which seem to us to be alien, even hostile to one another.

In this way people educated as Muslim or Christian literalists may not be able to find any place in their minds for the theories of modern physics, although those theories were devised in the first place by people who were devout believers. And up-to-date physicists may be just as mystified about where to put other peoples religious ideas Moreover, even within our own branch of religion or of science, each of us can be confronted once more by division by the need to choose. Quite possibly, indeed, what made us start our questioning in the first place was a contemporary debate, a puzzle which offers only two alternative solutions. And, since we know that scientists are meant to make Discoveries, we want to arrive now at a Discovery, a single final answer.

The quest for quanta

Thus (again) the standing difficulty about quantum theory arises from the clash between two different ways of interpreting it. Should we think in terms of waves or particles? We ask, which of these images is the better? The reply to this is not simple. It depends on a mass of wider calculations, among which we need to choose not just a single preferred language, but a whole wider background, a world-picture.

This trouble arises even if we only ask modest questions, such as: is the world flat or round? Though today we are supposed to know that it is round, we never see it that way. And if we accept that it actually is round, we have to ask endless further questions about why it is so, which involve the nature and position of the rest of the universe, indeed of Nature itself. Since we cannot isolate any one of these questions, we are not just choosing between the two alternatives envisaged by todays disputants. Instead, we are trying to discover the nature of the earth as a whole this multiformed planet, including all its insects, its birds, its fish, its humans and the secrets of its core. And we are not just asking about these things from outside, as mere neutral observers, but as creatures concerned about them because we are included within them. In particular today, we have to find the right place for scientific suggestions about all this on the larger map of life as a whole.

This is why philosophy does not progress in a straight line, adding one discovery to another in a fixed order, as the sciences are often supposed to do. Instead, it has to manoeuvre somewhat unpredictably to meet the varying emergencies of a changing pattern of life.

Philosophizing, in fact, is not a matter of solving one fixed set of puzzles. Instead, it involves finding the many particular ways of thinking that will be most helpful as we try to explore this constantly changing world. Because the world including human life does constantly change, philosophical thoughts are never final. Their aim is always to help us through the present difficulty. They do not compete with the sciences, which at present supply most of our dominant visions of reality. Instead, philosophy tries to work out the ways of thinking that will best connect these various visions including the scientific ones with each other and with the rest of life. So do these visions themselves need to keep changing in order to be always up to date?

Abolishing the past

I started to wonder whether ideas get out of date some time back when I heard that, in certain universities, no philosophy was being taught except what had been published in the past twenty years. These rumours were hard to check and clearly practice varies. It seems that bumper stickers have been seen on cars in the States bearing the message Just Say No to History of Philosophy. And Gilbert Harman at Princeton had a notice to that effect outside his office door. It also emerged that the term history of philosophy has changed its meaning. It is now being used to describe all study of older writers, not just study with a historical angle. So Harmans idea is that you shouldnt read them at all and should certainly not take them seriously. Similar ideas evidently circulate at Oxford. Friends of mine at Cambridge say the situation there is less extreme, but still rather alarming. A student recently told one of them that he had spent his whole undergraduate career without reading a word of Aristotle, Descartes or Kant. At this, said my informant, My heart sank.

Well, so does mine. But we need to ask just why our hearts sink, and ask too just what the people who make these changes are aiming at. Have they got a new notion of how thought works? Would they, for instance, be equally hostile to studying the history of mathematics, or indeed the history of history? Would the rise of Whig history the triumphalist view that the past has been merely a preparation for the splendid present, a view which caught on sharply after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 seem to them a trivial matter?

Wondering about this, I remembered some things that happened in the Thatcher years (197590), when the recent storm of cuts first threatened British universities. Administrators, sternly told to economize, saw that the quickest way to do it was simply to abolish some subjects altogether. This would save them from awkward conflicts with more powerful empires and would harmonize with the mystique of centres of excellence which were then in fashion. These centres were supposed to be big schools in which the study of a given subject would be so well covered that no other departments would be needed at all. Thus, ideally, in Britain, all the physics could be done at Manchester, all the economics at the London School of Economics, and all the philosophy (if any was still needed) at Oxford.

Down with philosophy?

This idea caught on and, since philosophy departments were usually small, universities did indeed start to close them. Eight of them in Britain went in the end. (When our department in Newcastle went in 1986 it was accompanied on the butterslide by metallurgy and all the Scandinavian languages.) As one consignment of philosophy after another went overboard, it struck me that nobody was saying that this ought not to happen. Nobody was suggesting that the subject was important in itself that universities needed to teach it; that, if they stopped doing so, they would become, in some sense, hardly universities at all. I will try to explain what this means in the course of this book.