Stanley Rosen (ed.) - The Philosophers Handbook: Essential Readings from Plato to Kant

A ristotle begins his treatise on metaphysics with the assertion that all human beings have the desire to acquire knowledge. By this, he means that we value knowledge for its own sake, entirely apart from its utility. As evidence, Aristotle cites the delight that we take in sense perception, and in particular, in vision, the sense that discriminates the largest number of intelligible forms. His teacher, Plato, expressed the delight in vision in a still more radical way in the Symposium by attributing it to a demonic force, Eros, which raises human beings up from the world of everyday life to the domain of pure intelligible structure. In these two great founding fathers of the Western philosophical tradition, one sees a poetical and a sober or prosaic statement of the universality of philosophical love.

Implicit in both statements, but perhaps more clearly in that of Plato, is the claim that we desire not merely knowledge, in the sense of a system of true propositions about the world, but a kind of knowledge that satisfies our most fundamental desire for happiness or blessedness. In the mythical language of the doctrine of Eros, human beings strive for a completeness in the vision of the truth that is the philosophical version of the completeness of sexual love. Otherwise stated, sexual love desires the satisfaction of the body, of which the most radical form is the overcoming of personal finitude through the act of procreation, whereas the love of the soul can be satisfied only through a vision of the order of the whole of human experience.

In short, the Platonic dialogues present us with a poetical account of the philosophical nature of the human being. They also raise the following question: what kind of knowledge is characteristically philosophical? The same question lies at the heart of contemporary philosophy. In the Greek texts, the philosophical appetite seeks to replace opinions with knowledge. But some forms of knowledge are more satisfactory than others. Plato and Aristotle both place general truths higher than particular ones, and they define knowledge in the strict sense as precise and unchangeable. In the contemporary world, the precision and the reliability of mathematics and the experimental sciences seem to make these the definitive types of knowledge, even though it would be difficult to say that such knowledge is unchangeable. Are we then to assume that mathematical and scientific knowledge is philosophical knowledge par excellence, or, in other words, that philosophy is either the same as science or the analysis of scientific method?

This assumption is unsatisfactory because it leaves out all reference to human life in any sense other than that of the pursuit of scientific, that is, theoretical, truth. If the love of truth is the desire for completeness or happiness, then a purely scientific conception of philosophy is at odds with human life. For who could honestly claim that scientific knowledge alone is both the necessary and sufficient prerequisite for happiness? Furthermore, if we look a bit more closely at what is meant by scientific knowledge, we find that it cannot itself be explained purely theoretically, that is, simply by the assertion of true propositions about the state of things. The propositions in which we describe the state of things themselves depend upon a host of assumptions about scientific procedure, assumptions which cannot themselves be fully verified by that procedure.

In other words, science is saturated with philosophy in the form of theories about how to conduct the scientific enterprise, in particular about what things are, and how they become, accessible to scientific investigation. Still more fundamentally, questions arise as to the extent of the applicability of scientific methods, the use to which we should put scientific knowledge, and even how far we should push our inquiry into the secrets of nature. None of these questions entails the conclusion that science is defective. The questions rather illuminate the difference between science and philosophy, or let us say that they remind us of the many kinds of knowledge and the various senses of true.

Such a difference is already visible at the level of the arts and crafts, that is, in any activity defined generally as technical. By this, I mean a methodical procedure, whether simple or complex, that can be taught to others in a step-by-step way, and which is then practiced in accord with rules. A purely technical or objective explanation of any art or science is impossible. The choice of technical materials, their arrangement, an exposition of the purposes of the art or science, are all an expression of a more general interpretation of the activity in question. In sum, the intrinsic utility of the technique and the intentions of its practitioners are not accessible in a description based upon the methodology of science. Political, ethical, social, aesthetic, and even religious considerations enter into the picture. For that matter, there is not one universal scientific method, but a multiplicity of procedures, assumptions, hypotheses, and so on, all of them chosen on the basis of varying philosophical convictions about the nature of reality.

The similarity in the problem of explaining any human activity, whether or not it qualifies as technical, to that of explaining philosophy is itself a sign of the universality of philosophy. As soon as we go beyond a merely technical account of some procedure (assuming that merely technical accounts are possible), we are philosophizing. It is not only insufficient, but also impossible, to find out the facts without reflecting upon what counts as a fact, how to determine facts of different kinds, and why we should be concerned with them. Those who believe themselves to dislike philosophy, or to be of a purely practical nature, are therefore deluding themselves. They fail to see that practical already designates a philosophical position or doctrine. We can escape philosophy only by escaping from our very humanity.