P A R T

O N E

Introduction

C H A P T E R

O N E

What Is Philosophy?
those who are eager to learn because they wonder at things are lovers of wisdom (philosophoi).
A L EX A N D ER OF AP H R O D I S I A S

LEARNING OBJECTIVES After studying this chapter students should be able to: explain as clearly as possible their understanding of what philosophy is, name and distinguish the major branches of philosophy, define foundationalism, constructivism, and state the differences, distinguish cognitive from moral relativism, distinguish ethnocentrism from ethnocentric imperialism, explain the differences between Russells and Phillipss understanding of philosophy, distinguish reading analytically from reading critically, identify Pythagoras, Sophists, Socrates, Russell, and Phillips, answer all the questions relating to the selections.

1.1 A DEFINITION OF PHILOSOPHY

Have you ever wondered about the purpose of life? Have you ever been curious about what you can reasonably believe? Have you ever marveled at the beauty of nature or been upset by suffering? Have you ever thought that life is unfair? Have you ever been puzzled about what you ought to do? Perhaps you associate these kinds of questions with philosophy. If you do, why do you? What do you think is philosophical about these questions? When you hear the word philosophy, what do you think it means? Think about it awhile and write your answer. The Greek philosopher Aristotle (384322 BCE), who asserted that philosophy begins in wonder, was impressed by the ability of human beings to think. In fact, he defined humans as rational animals. Aristotle maintained that philosophy arises from the human ability to reflect on experience, to wonder and be curious about what happens to us and to others. Of course, wonder is not the sole cause of philosophizing. Sufficient leisure must be available to engage in reflection, and hence economic and cultural factors play an important role in promoting and influencing human curiosity. However, without the 3

4 CHAPTER 1 What Is Philosophy? human capacity to wonder and be curious, it is doubtful that philosophical thinking would occur. I hope this book will stimulate your natural ability to wonder, teach you something of the art of wondering, and help you learn how to live in wonder. Cultivating the art of wondering is important, Aristotle believed, because such an art leads us along the path toward wisdom. The word philosophy comes from a combination of two Greek wordsphilos, meaning loving, and sophia, meaning wisdom. Etymologically, philosophy means the love of wisdom. To love something is to desire it. So, for many Greeks, the philosopher was the one who desired wisdom. The word philos also refers, for the Greeks, to the special kind of love found in close friendship. Hence the philosopher could also be characterized as the friend of wisdom. The historical origin of a word, however, often does not help us very much when we are searching for an adequate definition today. The meanings of words change. Also, meanings derived etymologically are sometimes unclear. If the philosopher is the lover or friend of wisdom, then what is wisdom? About that, philosopherseven Greek philosophersdisagree. Philosophy in Western culture was born in the sixth century BCE among a group of thinkers called the Pre-Socratics. According to tradition, one of these thinkers, Pythagoras (about 570 BCE), coined the word philosophy. Along with other Pre-Socratics, he was intensely interested in nature, in knowing how the universe or cosmic order developed, and in figuring out what things were made of. These thinkers disagreed about the stuff out of which things are made (some said earth, some air, others fire, still others water or some combination of these elements), but many of them did think that wisdom consisted of knowledge about nature. To love wisdom, as far as they were concerned, was to search for knowledge about the universe. A century later, another group of thinkers in Athens offered their services as teachers to those who could afford them. They claimed to teach virtue. The Greek word for virtue (aret) means excellence or power. So to possess virtue is to possess power. Wisdom, they taught, is the possession of virtue. It is to have certain powers or abilities, especially in the social and political realm, to influence people and be successful. Since these teachers claimed to possess this wisdom, they came to be called Sophists or The Wise Ones. For them, philosophy is not a search for knowledge about the universe, nor a search for wisdom. Rather, philosophy is the possession of wisdom and hence the possession of virtue or excellence, especially in the social and political dimensions of life. Socrates (470399 BCE) lived in Athens at the same time as the Sophists. He spent his days wandering around the marketplace, asking people questions about all kinds of things. He found himself perplexed by things other people claimed to know. For example, people claimed to know what knowledge, justice, virtue, and the right way to live are. The Sophists claimed to teach these things. However, under Socrates relentless critical questioning, the definitions and grand theories that people held about these sorts of things collapsed. The oracle at Delphi, a well-respected source of divine truth in the ancient world, said that Socrates was the wisest man in Athens. When word of this got to Socrates, he was greatly puzzled. How could he, who knew next to nothing and spent his days asking others, be the wisest? What about the Sophists, the teachers of wisdom? Were not they the wisest? Socrates did believe he knew what virtue is; it is knowledge.

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But what is knowledge? He had to confess he did not know, so how could he be wise? And yet, he reasoned, the oracle of Delphi could not be lying. It was, after all, the voice of the god Apollo. But the oracle was tricky. You had to figure out what it meant. Finally, Socrates understood. Wisdom, the oracle was telling him, is knowing that he did not know! Wisdom is the awareness of our ignorance, an awareness of the limitations of knowledge. Let the Sophists claim to be wise; the best Socrates could do was to claim he was a lover of wisdom. He lived his life in the pursuit of wisdom as lovers live their lives in pursuit of the beloved. For him, philosophy was a critical examination of our pretensions to knowledge and the constant search for that final truth that always seems to be just beyond our grasp. The Greeks were not the only ones to philosophize, for the pursuit of wisdom is common to all cultures. The Greeks were also not the only ones to disagree about the nature of wisdom. For example, in India some philosophers claimed that wisdom is coming to know ones true self as immortal. Yajnavalkya,1 a wise man described in early Indian literature called the Upanishads, tells his wife Maitreyi that wealth will not gain one immortality; only the true self or atman, as he called it, is immortal. However, other Indian philosophers disagreed. Wisdom, they said, did not consist in the knowledge of a true immortal self or atman. Quite the opposite is the case. Genuine wisdom consists in knowing that there is no such thing as an eternal self or atman. Clearly there are different understandings of what wisdom is and hence there are different understandings of what philosophy is about. No single definition can possibly capture all the nuances of the art of wondering in every place and time in which it appears. This does not mean, however, that we can define philosophy any way we wish, and it does not mean that some definitions are not better than others. Let me offer my definition, which, I think, states something important about philosophizing and helps us distinguish it from other types of thinking: Philosophy is the rational attempt to formulate, understand, and answer fundamental questions. Many people think that philosophy is a body of doctrines and that philosophers are people who have answers to difficult questions about the meaning of life. My definition stresses that (1) philosophy is an activity rather than a body of set teachings, and (2) philosophers are as concerned with formulating and understanding questions as they are with finding answers. Formulating questions is very important. What we ask and how we ask it determine, in large part, where we look for answers and the kinds of answers we get. Progress in many fields consists, in part, of an ever-greater refinement of our questions and more precision and sophistication in our methods of interrogation. You will not get good answers if you do not ask the right questions. For example, the title of this chapter is What Is Philosophy? and at the beginning of the chapter I asked you to think about the meaning of the word philosophy and to write your answer. Review your answer. Now think about the question, What is it to philosophize? If I had formulated the question about your understanding of philosophy as a question about what it is to philosophize and asked you to answer it, would your answer have been any different? If so, how would it have been different?
1 For a pronunciation guide for Sanskrit, Chinese, and Arabic words see Appendix II. To facilitate reading, I have left out diacritical marks that indicate sounds in other languages that are not normally part of English.

6 CHAPTER 1 What Is Philosophy? Understanding what we are after when we ask questions is as important as formulating questions. Words are often ambiguous and vague; we must be as clear as possible about what they mean. If I ask, What is the meaning of life? what do I mean? What am I looking for? Is this the best way to put it? What might count as a helpful answer? Where should I look for an answer? Am I asking about the purpose of life? Is life the sort of thing that has a purpose? Or am I interested in what makes life worthwhile? Is the purpose of life (if there is one) the same as what makes life valuable or worthwhile? The purpose of formulating and understanding questions as precisely as we can is to find answers, but often our answers lead to further questions. Why assume some answer is final? Or why assume all questions we can ask have answers? Also, what counts as an answer? How do I know when I have a good one? Consider this conversation: Yolanda: What is the meaning of life? Jos: What do you mean by that question? Yolanda: I mean, what is the purpose of life? Jos: Oh, thats easy; its purpose is survival and reproduction. Thats what my biology textbook says. Is Joss answer a good one? Is it the sort of answer Yolanda is after? Can this question be answered with factual information, or is it about values? When Yolanda asks, What is the meaning of life? is she asking, What makes life ultimately valuable? And if she is asking that, then the answer Jos gives may well miss the mark (unless, of course, Yolanda thinks survival and reproduction are more valuable than anything else). I said in my definition that philosophers are concerned with fundamental questions. The word fundamental means basic and has to do with what is primary. Fundamental questions are radical questions in the sense of pertaining to roots. They are the most basic questions we can ask. Therefore, they are often abstract questions that have to do with a wide area of human experience. However, even though the sorts of questions that concern philosophers are abstract, they are about concepts we employ every day. We are constantly making judgments about good and bad, right and wrong, true and false, reality and fiction, beautiful and ugly, just and unjust. But what is good? By what norms can we distinguish right behavior from wrong? What is truth? How can I distinguish appearance from reality? Is beauty only in the eye of the beholder? What is justice, and is it ever possible to achieve it? Some of the main branches of Western philosophy are distinguished by the kinds of fundamental questions they ask. Many philosophers have regarded What is truly real? as a fundamental question. Note the word truly. I did not ask, What is real? but What is truly real? In other words, I am assuming that not everything that appears to be real is real. Or, to put that another way, by asking, What is truly real? I am asking how we might distinguish appearance from reality. The branch of philosophy called metaphysics deals with this and related issues. One of its purposes, some philosophers have claimed, is to develop a theory of reality or a theory of what is genuinely real. It is also concerned with what might be the most fundamental question we can think of: Why is there something rather than nothing?

CHAPTER 1 What Is Philosophy?

What is knowledge and what is truth? These seem to be good candidates for fundamental questions because the concepts of knowledge and truth are basic to so much of our thinking, including all that we call science. The branch of Western philosophy known as epistemology concerns itself with the issues of knowledge and truth. Epistemologists search for a theory of what knowledge is and how it might be distinguished from opinion. They look for a definition of truth and wonder how we might correctly distinguish truth from error. Axiology, the third main branch of Western philosophy, has to do with the study of value and the distinction between value and fact. Traditionally, it is divided into two main subdivisions: aesthetics and ethics. Aesthetics deals with such questions as: Is beauty a matter of taste, or is it something objective? What standards should be used to judge artistic work? Can we define art? Ethics attempts to decide what values and principles we should use to judge human action as morally right or wrong. What is the greatest good? How should one live? Applied ethics applies these values and principles to such social concerns as human rights, racial justice, globalization, environmental ethics, and animal rights in order to determine what would be the morally right thing to do. Fundamental questions are not only basic and abstract; they are also universal questions. They are the sorts of questions any thinking person might ask anywhere and at any time. They arise out of our capacity to wonder about ourselves and the world in which we live. They arise naturally, as it were, as we search for wisdom. Although fundamental questions are universal, or nearly so, it should be noted that the way I have described the organization of the field of philosophy (metaphysics, epistemology, axiology) is decidedly Western. Different societies organize knowledge in different ways. Also, what may seem fundamental in one society may seem far less important in another. For example, some Buddhist philosophers have been suspicious of intellectual speculation about metaphysical matters, especially questions like Does God exist? This question, so important to many people, excites little interest among these Buddhist thinkers. It should also be noted that each of the three main branches of Western philosophy deals with important distinctions that all of us learn to make based on the standards our society teaches us. Hence, metaphysics is concerned with the distinction between appearance and reality, epistemology with the distinction between knowledge and opinion, and axiology with the distinction between fact and value. One important question is whether we can discover criteria that are universal and not merely relative to our own particular time in history and our own particular cultural view for making these distinctions. Fundamental and abstract questions about reality, knowledge, and valueand the distinctions these questions implymay be universal in the sense that most cultures have developed intellectual traditions concerned with these issues. However, the concrete way the questions are asked, understood, and answered varies a great deal from one tradition to another. For example, Plato (428348 BCE) made the distinction between knowledge and opinion, at least in part, by claiming that opinion has to do with beliefs about the world, which are based on our sensations, but knowledge has to do with the reality we discover through our reason. For him, logic and mathematics constituted examples of knowledge, but information about physical objects based on sensation did not. Under the influence of physical science, many people today would be inclined to say almost the opposite of what Plato said. For instance, many of my students have

8 CHAPTER 1 What Is Philosophy? maintained that knowledge is what empirical science provides, and opinion is a product of abstract speculation like philosophy. As twenty-first century students living in a highly technological and pluralistic society, we live in a very different world from the ancient Greeks or Indians. Yet we, like them, wonder about life and ask basic questions about what is real, what is true, what is good, and what is beautiful. This is not to say that there are not vast differences among philosophies and ways of doing philosophy. There are. You are about to experience something of this variety firsthand as you read different philosophers from different cultures and different eras. In sum, I think philosophy is the activity of rationally attempting to formulate, understand, and answer fundamental questions. I have discussed most of the parts of that definition except the word rational. Why must it be a rational attempt? And what is it to be rational, anyway? If we cannot agree on what rationality is, how can we know what constitutes a rational attempt to formulate and answer basic questions?

1.2 WHAT IS RATIONALITY?

This fundamental question is one of the most hotly debated issues in philosophy today. I cannot hope to settle the puzzles about rationality here, but I can give you some idea about what the issues are, describe some of the different views, and offer a few thoughts of my own. William James (18421910), an important American philosopher, said that philosophy is the unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly. Now thinking is a word with a much broader meaning than the word rational. To be rational is to think, but all thinking is not necessarily rational thinking. James does add the qualification clearly. That narrows the field somewhat. But what is clear thinking, and how do we know it when we see it? Consider this passage from a Chinese philosopher named Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu)2 who lived about 350 BCE.
Suppose you and I have had an argument. If you have beaten me instead of my beating you, then are you necessarily right and am I necessarily wrong? If I have beaten you instead of your beating me, then am I necessarily right and are you necessarily wrong? Is one of us right and the other wrong? Are both of us right or are both of us wrong? If you and I dont know the answer, then other people are bound to be even more in the dark. Whom shall we get to decide what is right? Shall we get someone who agrees with you to decide? But if he already agrees with you, how can he decide fairly? Shall we get someone who agrees with me? But if he already agrees with me, how can he decide? Shall we get someone who disagrees with both of us? But if he already disagrees with both of us, how can he decide? Shall we get someone who agrees with both of us? But if he already agrees with both of us, how shall he decide? Obviously, then, neither you nor I nor anyone else can know the answer. Shall we wait for still another person?
2 There are two methods in wide use today for romanticizing (translating into a Latin-based alphabetical system) Chinese words. One is called Wade-Giles and the other Pinyin. The rst time a word or name is introduced, I have used the Pinyin spelling and provided the Wade-Giles spelling in parentheses. See the pronunciation guide for Chinese words in Appendix II. The quotation is from Chuang Tzu: Basic Writings, translated by Burton Watson (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1996, p. 43).

CHAPTER 1 What Is Philosophy?

Zhuangzi wonders how we might decide who is right and who is wrong. You and I are not in a good position to make such a decision, at least not an objective one, because the fact that we are arguing shows that we disagree. According to Zhuangzi, to bring in a third party to settle the dispute does not help because he or she may not know what we are arguing about, may agree with both of us (which will not settle anything) or may disagree with you or with me or with both of us. What was a twoperson argument will now become a three-person argument. Zhuangzi is wondering how we might proceed to settle an argument. What procedures do we have that will eventuate in agreement? Should we appeal to authority? Perhaps some divine revelation? A long-standing tradition? Common sense? Force? Rationality? You might be tempted to say that we should settle it by applying rational standards. If we follow that course, then we can decide which argument is the most rational. Are there, however, objective and universal standards of rationality? Is rationality something entirely subjective or, at the very least, relative to particular historical periods and cultural communities? Fundamental disagreements about the nature of rationality are very difficult to settle because in initially proceeding to approach the topic we have already made assumptions about what is a rational way to proceed. Rationality has to do with the way we proceed to investigate matters, settle disputes, evaluate evidence, and assess peoples behaviors, practices, and beliefs. If we could get agreement about the standards of rationality, then the only thing left to argue about would be whether or not these standards were fairly and accurately applied. But how do we proceed if we cannot agree on the standards themselves? Imagine Zhaungzis imaginary arguers arguing about the nature of rationality. Not only would they and some third-party find an acceptable settlement of the dispute difficult to obtain, they would not even know how to go about reaching a settlement. What would count as a rational solution to their disagreement if the very nature of rationality is itself the subject of the disagreement? With Zhaungzi we might ask, with more than a mere hint of futility, Shall we wait for still another person? To avoid the futility of endless disagreements, some philosophers maintain that there must be objective and universal standards of rationality. This position on the question of rationality is called foundationalism. Generally (there are many different varieties of foundationalism), foundationalists hold that we can decide what is rational by appealing to principles that are undeniable to any rational person. For example, if I maintain that my belief about extraterrestrials visiting Peru is rational, I, according to this view, should be able to present good reasons in support of my belief. The reasons I present will be good ones insofar as they ultimately rest on a set of ideas that are selfevidently true for any person who can properly understand them. What are these foundational principles? Many philosophers have maintained that they are the basic laws of logic and the rules and procedures deducible from those laws. Aristotle, for example, claims that the law of noncontradiction (a statement cannot be both true and false) stands at the foundation of all rational reasoning. You cannot rationally assert p (where p stands for any statement) and not-p. If you claim p is true, you cannot also claim it is false and be rational. Furthermore, he argues, anyone who denies this law and who is prepared to defend that denial will be unable to advance her or his argument without relying on the very law supposedly rejected. I must confess that people who argued that the law of noncontradiction is false, and thereby meant that all statements (including their own statement about the falsity

10 CHAPTER 1 What Is Philosophy? of the law of noncontradiction) could be both true and false, I would think either perverse or irrational. You would probably agree with me. However, you might quickly point out that being logical and correctly applying the laws of logic are, at best, necessary conditions of rationality. These are not sufficient. We can imagine someone applying logical procedures and arriving at the most absurd conclusions. If I were clever enough, I could justify my belief in extraterrestrials visiting Peru without violating any logical laws, but is that enough for you to conclude that my belief is rational? So it would seem we need some fundamental principles, besides the laws of logic, in order to know both the necessary and sufficient conditions of rationality.3 And here is where the fight really breaks out among foundationalists. Some (usually called rationalists) claim that these foundational principles of rationality amount to clear and distinct ideas that are innate in the human mind or can be discovered by a careful and critical analysis of our beliefs. Others (usually called empiricists) argue that immediate sense impressions form the foundations of rational beliefs. You will encounter something of this debate between rationalists and empiricists as you read this book, so I will not belabor the point here. I only wish you to understand that much philosophical energy has been expended in a search for the foundational principles of rational belief. If we can find such principles, then we will have agreed-upon procedures for sifting through the many different answers to metaphysical questions (What is real?), epistemological questions (What is knowledge?), and axiological questions (What is value?) and settling on those that prove the most rational. I think you can see the attractiveness of the foundationalist position, especially if you have ever been in one of those arguments where someone keeps asking you, How do you know that? At first you are patient and display your reasons. But she or he persists. How do you know those are good reasons? You explain why. Again, Well, how can you be so sure? About now your blood pressure is rising because you are beginning to see an infinite, bottomless abyss opening up. This could go on forever! But have no fear. Foundationalism can ride to your rescue because foundationalism maintains that regress is not infinite, the pit is not bottomless, and there is a sure foundation of first principles that your questioner will recognize to be rational. There is a way, according to foundationalists, of settling Zhaungzis imaginary dispute. However, the foundation you reach on your descent may turn out to be a ledge that gives way under your weight. Why? Because all the philosophical energy that has been spent on the search for foundational principles has ended in disagreement. Thus, many philosophers have declared the modern search for fundamental rational principles bankrupt. Welcome to the postmodern age of anti-foundationalism. Just as there are many varieties of foundationalism, there are also many varieties of anti-foundationalism. In order to remove the negative connotations of the anti, let us call the critics of foundationalism constructivists because many of them maintain that rationality is a social construction. Some constructivists point to the failure of agreement among foundationalists as proof that the search for objective, universal, self-evident, rational principles is fruitless.
3 Something can be sufcient without being necessary and vice versa. A rock hitting a window is sufcient to break it, but not necessary because a baseball might do as well. Milk is necessary to make yogurt, but not sufcient.

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Others argue that the so-called self-evident, objective, universal, ahistorical, transcultural foundations of rationality have been shown again and again to be little more than the elevation of the prejudices of an elite class, or of males, or of white culture, or of Western civilization to the honorific title of self-evident rational principles. What is alleged to be rational turns out, after careful critical analysis, to be what AngloAmerican European white males value! Foundationalism, this line of criticism maintains, is merely a variety of ethnocentric imperialism disguised with the mask of rationality. Many constructivists argue that we are all so embedded in our cultures, our traditions, our religions, and our historical situations that we can never find some neutral point, some gods-eye view from which to pass judgment. Not one of our limited viewpoints is privileged. We are hopelessly culture-bound. There is no culturally neutral third party, as Zhaungzi pointed out so clearly centuries ago, who can settle once and for all our important disputes. There are, of course, cultural procedures for settling disputes. However, it is a grave mistake to elevate such procedures to selfevident, universal marks of rationality. Still other critics of foundationalism point out that foundationalism is fatally flawed because it is itself based on a contradiction. Foundationalism claims that a rational belief is one supported by good reasons. This means that before I accept your beliefs as rational, I should expect you to be able to display, if questioned, good reasons for such beliefs. If, after you have given me your good reasons, I persist and ask for more, sooner or later I shall have to be content with a belief whose truth is, you claim, self-evident. So it turns out that good reasons rest on principles that we are asked to accept as self-evidently true and in need of no further support. Such principles would be irrational given the criterion initially assumed to be the hallmark of a rational beliefthat is, a belief supported by good reasons. Displaying the evidence and exploring the subtleties and shifts of argument between foundationalists and constructivists would take us too far afield. However, I should mention one major issue that this debate has engendered because it is particularly relevant to what this book is about. That is the issue of cognitive and ethical relativism. The foundationalists charge the constructivists with both cognitive relativism (the denial of universal truths) and ethical relativism (the denial of universally valid moral principles). They claim that if one denies the existence of transcultural, universal, objective standards of rationality, then what one is maintaining amounts to the view that there is no such thing as rationality; all there are, are rationalities. Eventually, this will lead the constructivist to assert moral relativism as well. One will be led down a slippery slope resulting in the conclusion that any cultures values, any religious tradition, any morality, indeed any set of beliefs, is as good or as rational as anyone elses. However, such relativism is self-defeating. If your view is no better or worse than my view, then all views are of equal merit. Therefore, constructivists can have no justification to support their claim that foundationalism is wrong. Foundationalists views of rationality as universal and ahistorical are no more rational or any less rational than constructivists views of rationalities as local and historical (see Table 1.1). This is a powerful response to the constructivist critique of foundationalism. Few of us would argue with others if we thought that all views of morality or all views of truth were of equal worth. Yet we do argue. Few of us would be willing to maintain that programs of ethnic cleansing, which lamentably characterize so much of human

12 CHAPTER 1 What Is Philosophy?

TABLE 1.1 Foundationalism Claim One rationality that is universal and objective Argument Beliefs are rational if supported by good reasons. If an infinite regress of reasons is to be avoided, there must be a foundation of self-evident beliefs.* Such foundational beliefs are: the laws of logic or clear and distinct ideas or beliefs evident to the senses. Critique of Constructivism Constructivism amounts to a self-refuting relativism. Critique of Foundationalism Foundationalism cannot agree on what counts as foundational beliefs, hence they are not self-evident. Its definition of rational beliefs is contradictory, and its claims amount to ethnocentric imperialism Constructivism Claim Many rationalities that are local and based on intersubjective agreement Argument Rationality is conditioned by history and culture. Vast amounts of historical, cultural, anthropological, and linguistic evidence supports the above claim.

Only internalist versions of foundationalism hold foundational beliefs are self-evident. Externalist versions reject this view and, according to one type of externalism, appeal to notions like reliability.

political practice, are as rational or moral as programs that aim at getting human beings to live in peace with one another. We seem to be caught on the horns of a dilemma. We do not wish to opt for either ethnocentric imperialism or a kind of relativism that advocates anything goes. Is there any other choice? Is there a way out of this predicament? Much contemporary philosophy is presently concerned with finding a way out of this dilemma, a sort of middle ground that allows us to assert that some answers are better than others but stops short of imposing on others our own local views of what is rational and what is good. One way to escape the horns of a dilemma is to make careful distinctions. There is a difference between ethnocentrism and ethnocentric imperialism. Perhaps it is impossible to totally escape an ethnocentric viewpoint, but we do not have to impose our views on others by presenting them as if they are the only true views. Likewise some philosophers distinguish between different kinds of relativism. Not all relativism may be self-defeating, contrary to what some foundationalists believe. We must carefully distinguish between relativism in the strong sense (the claim there are no universally valid standards) and relativism in the weak sense (the claim that standards of rationality and morality are culturally diverse). It seems obvious that standards of rationality and morality are relative to historical and cultural conditions in the sense that they are related to such conditions (weak relativism). Standards of rationality do not float in some timeless, nonhuman space. However, to conclude from this that all standards of rationality are of equal value or are equally true (the sort of self-defeating relativism the foundationalists charge the constructivists with) requires a big leap. It does not follow from the fact that there exist different understandings of rationality and morality that all understandings are of equal value, any more than it follows from the fact that there are different understandings of science that all of them are equally good or useful.

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However, you might argue that if there are no objective standards of rationality or, at the very least, if we must admit we do not know what they might be, then all we are left with are rationalities bound to historical conditions and local cultural communities, and we have no way of determining which are better. Perhaps you are right. However, I think that we do have some options. We can remain convinced that our community has the last word on the subject and all others are wrong. Or, as we encounter other communities and other cultures, we can listen to them (and they to us) and try to discover ways of settling our disputes together. We can expand our conversations, listen to other voices, and together with them ask, What is real? What is knowledge? What is good? As we listen, as we enter into a dialogue, yes, and even as we argue, our standards of rationality will grow and, although we may still disagree in the end, at least we can say we have understood. Hans-Georg Gadamer, a contemporary German philosopher, argues that truth is an understanding that occurs when there is a fusion of horizons. Authentic conversation or dialogue occurs when we can recognize our own understanding as a horizon resulting from the perspective or bias we have acquired and when we are willing to risk our horizon in order to allow the horizon of the other to appear. This book is an attempt to expand the philosophical dialogue. A wide variety of views will be heardAfrican American, Latino, Native American, feminist, and even Anglo-American European white malesand I hope these views will turn into meaningful voices of wisdom. We will not agree with all these voices, but we can learn from each, and we may discover wider areas of agreement than we thought possible. My claim that agreement about what is rational can emerge out of dialogue and expanded cultural communication rests on the assumption that we can understand philosophical views held by people who live in times and places very different from our own and on the hope that learning about ourselves and others is a worthwhile enterprise. Some might argue that we can never understand what others who are very different from us are saying and that my hope is naive. I do not have the space to defend my assumption and my hope, but I do believe that good reasons can be given for them. In any case, we will never find out if we do not try. Recall that I characterized philosophy as a rational activity of formulating, understanding, and answering fundamental questions. This activity, I wish to stress, relies heavily on the logical skills of analyzing, criticizing, and developing arguments. It is, however, more than this. If the goal of philosophy is to formulate, understand, and answer fundamental questions on both an intellectual and practical level, then we can determine how rational this activity is only by assessing how successfully this goal is achieved by all those who participate in this sort of activity. I do not believe we can rule out any of the profound thinking about fundamental problems that the many peoples of the world have to offer by imposing some predetermined model of rationality. Hence, the very process of assessment is something we must learn as we go. The Jains of India have a teaching called syad-vada, which might be translated as the perhaps method. This teaching holds that 353 different viewpoints can be held on any question; hence, dogmatic closed-mindedness is inappropriate. To any perspective or any issue, the thoughtful will reply, Perhaps. This method is based on the assumption that no single philosophical view or system can say all there is to be said about reality. It does not mean we should remain silent, nor does it mean that everything that is said (however partial) is of equal worth.

14 CHAPTER 1 What Is Philosophy? There are times, I think, when we can be a bit more definite than perhaps, but the flexibility and openness this method recommends is a virtue we all need to practice when we have no privileged viewpoint from which we might settle a matter once and for all. Not all answers are rational. Some are better than others. However, the range of rational responses may be far broader than we realize.

1.3 DOES PHILOSOPHY BAKE BREAD?

Why should I study philosophy? That is a question I often hear my students ask. It may be a question you are asking. Today many people approach their education pragmatically. They ask, How will learning this prepare me for a job? The implication of such a question is that if it does not help me get a job, it is not worth studying. If philosophy bakes no bread, why study it? In the first two sections you have read about how we might define philosophy and about some debates over the nature of rationality. What have you learned that is of any importance? When you are interviewed for that first job upon graduation, do you think the interviewer might ask, All right then, who do you think is right, the foundationalists or the constructivists? Well, you might say, I certainly dont think that the value of a field of study is completely exhausted by whether or not it leads to gainful employment. However, isnt it the case that philosophy, unlike science, never really settles anything? Philosophers just spin their wheels in endless debate. It is true that uncertainty haunts the philosophers study. Indeed, it is uncertainty that keeps the philosophical fires burning. If science could answer all our questions, if putting bread on the table were all there is to a happy life, if religion could provide all the answers we need, then I fear the philosopher in us would soon cease to exist. However, the philosophic wonder of which Aristotle spoke keeps our minds stirring largely because there are so many things about life that are uncertain. There is an important sense, I think, in which we cannot help but philosophize. Lifes circumstances and experiences compel us to think about things beyond our daily bread. If this line of reasoning is right, if we cannot help but philosophize, then should we not learn to do it well? One way of learning how to do it is to listen carefully to others who have philosophized from many different times and places. We can learn by example even when we disagree with the views of those from whom we learn. If helping you get a job or answering with certainty the big questions is not the most important reason to study philosophy, it does not follow that philosophical study is totally without commercial value. I encourage you to visit the Web site of the American Philosophical Association (http:/ /www.apaonline.org). There you will find all kinds of valuable information about philosophy and its study. Among other things you will find illustrations of both academic and nonacademic careers pursued by philosophy majors. These careers include educator, advertising executive, computer systems analyst, publisher, librarian, commodities broker, diplomat, attorney, TV producer, editor, minister, and so forth. The skills of critical thinking and clear expression that you can learn from the study of philosophy prove to be valuable in many different pursuits that do bake bread. We continue with a Western example. Bertrand Russell (18721970) is the author of the following selection. He explicitly addressed the issue of the value of philosophy in a book called The Problems of Philosophy published in 1912. What he

BERTRAND RUSSELL On the Value of Philosophy

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has to say may surprise you. Whatever you may think about his claims, it is clear that the questions about the usefulness of philosophy are neither new nor unimportant. As you read what Russell has to say, see if you can answer the following reading questions and identify the passages that support your answers. Discuss in class the questions you had difficulty answering and the ones that stimulated your own thinking about the value of philosophy.

READING QUESTIONS
3. What does Russell mean when he asserts that the value of philosophy is to be sought in its very uncertainty? 4. According to Russell, what may be the chief value of philosophy?

1. Where, according to Russell, is the value of philosophy to be found? 2. Why does Russell maintain that the uncertainty of philosophy is more apparent than real?

On the Value of Philosophy

BERTRAND RUSSELL
Having now come to the end of our brief and very incomplete review of the problems of philosophy, it will be well to consider, in conclusion, what is the value of philosophy and why it ought to be studied. It is the more necessary to consider this question, in view of the fact that many men, under the influence of science or of practical affairs, are inclined to doubt whether philosophy is anything better than innocent but useless trifling, hairsplitting distinctions, and controversies on matters concerning which knowledge is impossible. This view of philosophy appears to result, partly from a wrong conception of the ends of life, partly from a wrong conception of the kind of goods which philosophy strives to achieve. Physical science, through the medium of inventions, is useful to innumerable people who are wholly ignorant of it; thus the study of physical science is to be recommended, not only, or primarily, because of the effect on the student, but rather because of the effect on mankind in general. Thus utility does not belong to philosophy. If the study of philosophy has any value at all for others than students of philosophy, it must be only indirectly, through its effects upon the lives of those who study it. It is in these effects, therefore, if anywhere, that the value of philosophy must be primarily sought. But further, if we are not to fail in our endeavour to determine the value of philosophy, we must first free our minds from the prejudices of what are wrongly called practical men. The practical man, as this word is often used, is one who recognizes only material needs, who realizes that men must have food for the body, but is oblivious of the necessity of providing food for the mind. If all men were well off, if poverty and disease had been reduced to their lowest possible point, there would still remain much to be done to produce a valuable society; and even in the existing world the goods of the mind are at least as important as the goods of the body. It is exclusively among the goods of the mind that the value of philosophy is to be found; and only those who are not indifferent to these goods can be persuaded that the study of philosophy is not a waste of time. Philosophy, like all other studies, aims primarily at knowledge. The knowledge it aims at is the kind of knowledge which gives unity and system to the body of the sciences, and the kind which

From Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy, London: Oxford University Press, 1912, pp. 153161.

16 CHAPTER 1 What Is Philosophy? results from a critical examination of the grounds of our convictions, prejudices, and beliefs. But it cannot be maintained that philosophy has had any very great measure of success in its attempts to provide definite answers to its questions. If you ask a mathematician, a mineralogist, a historian, or any other man of learning, what definite body of truths has been ascertained by his science, his answer will last as long as you are willing to listen. But if you put the same question to a philosopher, he will, if he is candid, have to confess that his study has not achieved positive results such as have been achieved by other sciences. It is true that this is partly accounted for by the fact that, as soon as definite knowledge concerning any subject becomes possible, this subject ceases to be called philosophy, and becomes a separate science. The whole study of the heavens, which now belongs to astronomy, was once included in philosophy; Newtons great work was called the mathematical principles of natural philosophy. Similarly, the study of the human mind, which was a part of philosophy, has now been separated from philosophy and has become the science of psychology. Thus, to a great extent, the uncertainty of philosophy is more apparent than real: those questions which are already capable of definite answers are placed in the sciences, while those only to which, at present, no definite answer can be given, remain to form the residue which is called philosophy. This is, however, only a part of the truth concerning the uncertainty of philosophy. There are many questionsand among them those that are of the profoundest interest to our spiritual life which, so far as we can see, must remain insoluble to the human intellect unless its powers become of quite a different order from what they are now. Has the universe any unity of plan or purpose, or is it a fortuitous concourse of atoms? Is consciousness a permanent part of the universe, giving hope of indefinite growth in wisdom, or is it a transitory accident on a small planet on which life must ultimately become impossible? Are good and evil of importance to the universe or only to man? Such questions are asked by philosophy, and variously answered by various philosophers. But it would seem that, whether answers be otherwise discoverable or not, the answers suggested by philosophy are none of them demonstrably true. Yet, however slight may be the hope of discovering an answer, it is part of the business of philosophy to continue the consideration of such questions, to make us aware of their importance, to examine all the approaches to them, and to keep alive that speculative interest in the universe which is apt to be killed by confining ourselves to definitely ascertainable knowledge. Many philosophers, it is true, have held that philosophy could establish the truth of certain answers to such fundamental questions. They have supposed that what is of most importance in religious beliefs could be proved by strict demonstration to be true. In order to judge of such attempts, it is necessary to take a survey of human knowledge, and to form an opinion as to its methods and its limitations. On such a subject it would be unwise to pronounce dogmatically; but if the investigations of our previous chapters have not led us astray, we shall be compelled to renounce the hope of finding philosophical proofs of religious beliefs. We cannot, therefore, include as part of the value of philosophy any definite set of answers to such questions. Hence, once more, the value of philosophy must not depend upon any supposed body of definitely ascertainable knowledge to be acquired by those who study it. The value of philosophy is, in fact, to be sought largely in its very uncertainty. The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the co-operation or consent of his deliberate reason. To such a man the world tends to become definite, finite, obvious; common objects rouse no questions, and unfamiliar possibilities are contemptuously rejected. As soon as we begin to philosophize, on the contrary, we find that even the most everyday things lead to problems to which only very incomplete answers can be given. Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts which it raises, is able to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the

BERTRAND RUSSELL On the Value of Philosophy

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tyranny of custom. Thus, while diminishing our feeling of certainty as to what things are, it greatly increases our knowledge as to what they may be; it removes the somewhat arrogant dogmatism of those who have never travelled into the region of liberating doubt, and it keeps alive our sense of wonder by showing familiar things in an unfamiliar aspect. Apart from its utility in showing unsuspected possibilities, philosophy has a valueperhaps its chief valuethrough the greatness of the objects which it contemplates, and the freedom from narrow and personal aims resulting from this contemplation. The life of the instinctive man is shut up within the circle of his private interests: family and friends may be included, but the outer world is not regarded except as it may help or hinder what comes within the circle of instinctive wishes. In such a life there is something feverish and confined, in comparison with which the philosophic life is calm and free. The private world of instinctive interests is a small one, set in the midst of a great and powerful world which must, sooner or later, lay our private world in ruins. Unless we can so enlarge our interests as to include the whole outer world, we remain like a garrison in a beleaguered fortress, knowing that the enemy prevents escape and that ultimate surrender is inevitable. In such a life there is no peace, but a constant strife between the insistence of desire and the powerlessness of will. In one way or another, if our life is to be great and free, we must escape this prison and this strife. One way of escape is by philosophic contemplation. Philosophic contemplation does not, in its widest survey, divide the universe into two hostile campsfriends and foes, helpful and hostile, good and badit views the whole impartially. Philosophic contemplation, when it is unalloyed, does not aim at proving that the rest of the universe is akin to man. All acquisition of knowledge is an enlargement of the Self, but this enlargement is best attained when it is not directly sought. It is obtained when the desire for knowledge is alone operative, by a study which does not wish in advance that its objects should have this or that character, but adapts the Self to the characters which it finds in its objects. This enlargement of

Self is not obtained when, taking the Self as it is, we try to show that the world is so similar to this Self that knowledge of it is possible without any admission of what seems alien. The desire to prove this is a form of self-assertion and, like all selfassertion, it is an obstacle to the growth of Self which it desires, and of which the Self knows that it is capable. Self-assertion, in philosophic speculation as elsewhere, views the world as a means to its own ends; thus it makes the world of less account than Self, and the Self sets bounds to the greatness of its goods. In contemplation, on the contrary, we start from the not-Self, and through its greatness the boundaries of Self are enlarged; through the infinity of the universe the mind which contemplates it achieves some share in infinity. For this reason greatness of soul is not fostered by those philosophies which assimilate the universe to Man. Knowledge is a form of union of Self and not-Self; like all union, it is impaired by dominion, and therefore by any attempt to force the universe into conformity with what we find in ourselves. There is a widespread philosophical tendency towards the view which tells us that Man is the measure of all things, that truth is man-made, that space and time and the world of universals are properties of the mind, and that, if there be anything not created by the mind, it is unknowable and of no account for us. This view, if our previous discussions were correct, is untrue; but in addition to being untrue, it has the effect of robbing philosophic contemplation of all that gives it value, since it fetters contemplation to Self. What it calls knowledge is not a union with the not-Self, but a set of prejudices, habits, and desires, making an impenetrable veil between us and the world beyond. The man who finds pleasure in such a theory of knowledge is like the man who never leaves the domestic circle for fear his word might not be law. The true philosophic contemplation, on the contrary, finds its satisfaction in every enlargement of the not-Self, in everything that magnifies the objects contemplated, and thereby the subject contemplating. Everything, in contemplation, that is personal or private, everything that depends upon habit, self-interest, or desire, distorts the object,

18 CHAPTER 1 What Is Philosophy? and hence impairs the union which the intellect seeks. By thus making a barrier between subject and object, such personal and private things become a prison to the intellect. The free intellect will see as God might see, without a here and now, without hopes and fears, without the trammels of customary beliefs and traditional prejudices, calmly, dispassionately, in the sole and exclusive desire of knowledgeknowledge as impersonal, as purely contemplative, as it is possible for man to attain. Hence also the free intellect will value more the abstract and universal knowledge into which the accidents of private history do not enter, than the knowledge brought by the senses, and dependent, as such knowledge must be, upon an exclusive and personal point of view and a body whose sense-organs distort as much as they reveal. The mind which has become accustomed to the freedom and impartiality of philosophic contemplation will preserve something of the same freedom and impartiality in the world of action and emotion. It will view its purposes and desires as parts of the whole, with the absence of insistence that results from seeing them as infinitesimal fragments in a world of which all the rest is unaffected by any one mans deeds. The impartiality which, in contemplation, is the unalloyed desire for truth, is the very same quality of mind which, in action, is justice, and in emotion is that universal love which can be given to all, and not only to those who are judged useful or admirable. Thus contemplation enlarges not only the objects of our thoughts, but also the objects of our actions and our affections: it makes us citizens of the universe, not only of one walled city at war with all the rest. In this citizenship of the universe consists mans true freedom, and his liberation from the thraldom of narrow hopes and fears. Thus, to sum up our discussion of the value of philosophy: Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.

G
1.

CRITICAL QUESTIONS
What do you think Russell means when he characterizes true philosophic contemplation as finding satisfaction in the enlargement of the not-Self? Is this clear? 2. How does Russell sum up the value of philosophical study? Do you agree with Russell? Why, or why not?

1.4 WHO ARE THE PHILOSOPHERS?

The title philosopher is often used in an honorific sense. It is bestowed on those history has deemed very wise for one reason or another. You can go to http:/ /www .wadsworth.com/philosophy_d for a timeline of Western philosophy complete with dates, names, and background information. If you want a broader look, try http:/ / www.wadsworth.com/religion_d for another timeline that includes Eastern as well as Western thinkers. Are these lists exhaustive? The title philosopher is also used for those who make philosophy their profession. They teach, study, and write philosophy in universities. They get paid for this and form a cadre of professional philosophers. Some will be added to the timeline of great thinkers in the future. Most will not make the cut. Christopher Phillips, author of the next selection, is a freelance writer, educator, and founder of the Society for Philosophical Inquiry (see www.philosopher.org).

CHRISTOPHER PHILLIPS Socrates Caf

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He believes philosophical discussion belongs in the marketplace where Socrates originally started it. His movement to promote public philosophical discussion has led to the establishment of philosophy cafes around the United States and abroad.

READING QUESTIONS
4. What is the magic of Socratizing? 5. What are the aims of the Socratic method of questioning? 6. What is the philosophic spirit?

1. What is the ethos of Socrates Caf? 2. What does Phillips mean when he says that facilitating philosophical discussion with all types of people in different settings is a calling? 3. What are the characteristics of what Phillips calls antiguru philosophy?

Socrates Caf
CHRISTOPHER PHILLIPS
Psychiatry is the rape of the muse! The outburst jolts me from my reverie. Im perched on a swivel stool in the middle of about forty-five people seated on filigreed wrought iron benches and chairs in the courtyard of an art deco caf in San Francisco. It is a Tuesday night in midsummer and were about halfway through this particular weekly gathering. Were trying to answer the question What is insanity? The dialogue started out grounded in concrete examples, which quickly begged more and more questions. Was Hitler insane? Or was society itself insane at the time and did he just tap into it with cold and calculating sanity? Was Jack London insane? What about Edgar Allan Poe? And van Gogh? Was insanity a key to their genius? Is anyone who sacrifices his health for his art insane? Or is such squandering the essence of sanity? Is it sane to risk your life for something that you believe in? Or for something you dont believe in? Is a businessman sane who works all day at a job he hates? Is a society wacky that tries to prolong perpetually the lives of the terminally ill? Is a society that does not sparingly use its natural resources off its rocker? Is it nutty to have thousands of nuclear weapons poised to be launchedan act that would obliterate the planet? How can anyone be sane in this world? Or is the universe itself insane? How is the concept of insanity related to such concepts as irrationality, eccentricity, lunacy, and craziness? Is it possible to be sane and insane at the same time? Is it impossible not to be? Is it possible to be completely sane, or completely insane? What are the criteria for determining that someone or something is insane? Is there really any such thing as insanity? Questions, questions, questions. They disturb. They provoke. They exhilarate. They intimidate. They make you feel a little bit like youve at least temporarily lost your marbles. So much so that at times Im positive that the ground is shaking and shifting under our feet. But not from an earthquake.

WELCOME TO SOCRATES CAF

Even though it is the dead of summer, it is a chilly evening. No matter. The courtyard is filled. The motley group of philosophical inquirersaging beatniks, businesspeople, students, shopworkers, professors, teachers, palm readers, bureaucrats, and homeless persons, among othersare huddled

From Christopher Phillips, Socrates Caf: A Fresh Taste of Philosophy. New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 2001, pp. 214; 112115; 151152. Copyright 2001 Christopher Phillips. Reprinted by permission.

20 CHAPTER 1 What Is Philosophy? in the middle of an ivy-laced garden. In a way, the gathering slightly resembles a church servicefor heretics. And what connects us is a love for the question, and a passion for challenging even our most cherished assumptions. All attention now is fastened on the tall, railthin man who lashed out against psychiatrists. He did so only after a psychiatrist said with an air of authority that the only antidote to insanity is psychiatric treatment. While the psychiatrist in question seems ruffled by the disparaging remark about his profession, his critic is sitting stockstill, the picture of calm. He has deep-set blue eyes that seem to be looking inward and a gaunt face that reveals the faintest hint of a smile. His bright red hair is neatly combed straight back except for one rebellious lock dangling over his forehead. At the moment, the only sound to be heard as we look his way is the trickling water in the gargoyle fountain. What do you mean? I ask the man. How is psychiatry the rape of the muse? I have an inkling that he hoped his statement would have shock value and that we would let it pass, unchallenged. Not at Socrates Caf. Here we subscribe to the ethos that it is not enough to have the courage of your convictions, but you must also have the courage to have your convictions challenged. It takes him some time to fix his gaze on me. Plato spoke of a type of divine madness which he defined as possession by the Muses, he says at last, choosing his words carefully. Plato said having this madness was indispensable to the production of the best poetry. But psychiatrists want to modify our behavior, they want us to be moderate people. They want to destroy our muse. Im a psychiatric social worker, a man quickly interjects. I expect him also to take offense at this critique of psychiatrists. But instead, with a pensive half-smile, he says, I worry a lot about the long-range effects on people of antipsychotic medications. Just as psychiatrists try to cure children with attention deficit disorder by giving them Ritalin, I think that drugs like Haldol and Zymexa and the old Thorazine are dispensed with alarming frequency to adults because of societys desire to control behavior. Moderate behavior is the god of our mental health system. To me this is chilling. Isnt it better to be insane than to let them kill the artist in you? the gaunt-faced man asks his unexpected ally. But is it a choice between moderation and sanity? I ask. Cant we be a little insane, or somewhat insane, without being completely insane? In Platos dialogue Phaedo, Socrates says that a combination of sobriety and madness impels the soul to philosophize, and Im wondering if the same is true with art. Cant we temper the insanity within in a way that enables us to be even more in touch with our muse, and so be even more creative than wed otherwise be able to be? But then I start to wonder if I know what Im talking about. I seem to be the last person to know sane from insane. For a good while, Ive been on the rather zany quest of bringing philosophy out of the universities and back to the people, wherever they happen to be. Almost always, I do it for free. Apparently what I am doing is seen as too new, too different, too outside the norm, too crazy. So, either for free or for a pittance, I facilitate philosophical discussions, which I call Socrates Caf. I go to cafs and coffeehouses and diners. I go to day care centers, nursery schools, elementary schools, junior high and high schools, schools for special-needs children. I go to senior centers, nursing homes, assisted-living residences. Ive been to a church, a hospice, a prison. I travel across the countryfrom Memphis to Manhattan, from Washington State to Washington, D.C.to engage in philosophical dialogue and help others start Socrates Cafs. I pay all expenses out of my own pocket, earning a dollar here and there by other means. I often ask myself, Am I crazy to do this? But that is beside the point. I do not want to profit from this. This is not about money. It is a calling. For one thing, I dont facilitate Socrates Caf to teach others. I facilitate Socrates Caf so others can teach me. The fact is that I always learn much more from the other participants than they could ever learn from me. Each gathering enables me to benefit from the perspectives of so many others. For another thing, you might even go so far as to say that this crazy quest of mine has saved my

CHRISTOPHER PHILLIPS Socrates Caf

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sanity. But that might be going too far. So Ill just say this: Im seeking Socrates. Eventually, more hands go up around the circle. The discussion heats up, gathers a certain momentum. Then a bald, stocky man with a fedora clinched in one hand jumps to his feet. I can speak as an expert on this subject, he says. His remarkable bright green eyes seem to dance from one person to another. Ive been committed to psychiatric institutions three times since the beginning of the year. Who are they to commit me? Who are they to classify me as insane? Im one of the sanest, smartest people I know. He remains standing. He seems surprised that his comment is not met with shock or derision. Instead, he is peppered with questions. People want to know his story. It seems clear that most are asking themselves, Who better to comment with insight on insanity than a person who has been labeled insane? I am hard pressed to think of any other setting in which a group of people, most of them total strangers, would crave hearing more from someone whos just said hes certifiably insane (even if, as he insists, hes been misdiagnosed). Then he goes on to say one of the most memorable and reasonable things Ive ever heard: Don Quixote was mad. But his madness was of a type that made him immortal. The Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno said Don Quixotes legacy was himself. And he wrote that a man, a living, eternal man, is worth all the theories and philosophies, because in a sense he remains on earth and lives among us, inspiring us with his spirit. I think that what Unamuno says of Don Quixote is even more true of Socrates. Unlike Don Quixote, Socrates apparently lived among us at one time. And he was the epitome of a rational person. He pauses for a moment, his head now bowed. Then he looks up at all of us and says, Socrates left us himself. He left us his wisdom and his virtue. And he remains among us, inspiring us with his spirit. We look at him in wonder. A statuesque woman with short purple hair who is wearing a purple Green Peace T-shirt eventually asks, Was Socrates really all that sane? What do you think? I ask her.

Well, she replies, when Socrates was tried and convicted of heresy for impiety and for corrupting the youth of Athens, his prosecutors hinted that if hed agree to keep his mouth shut they wouldnt put him to death. But Socrates said hed rather die than quit asking questions. Was it crazy of him to prefer death? I ask. Socrates said that the unexamined life isnt worth living, she says. So I guess for him it wasnt crazy. I think he was crazy, says a somewhat disheveled man in sandals, a Hawaiian shirt, and a battered bowler hat that completes a picture of sartorial strangeness. But his brand of craziness has been the guide for civilizations whenever they try to set themselves on a road of sanity. Socrates was the quintessential social being. Wherever he went and engaged in dialogue, he tried to help people be more thoughtful and tolerant and rational. He wasnt insane, because his decisions were conscious and rational choices within his control. Even his decision to end his life was such a choice. But by normal societal standards he was crazya good crazy. I end this evenings discussion on insanity by saying what I typically say at the end of every Socrates Caf: Its something to keep thinking about. And then the participants clap. Are they nuts? The discussion was intense, passionate, frustrating. Emotions were highly charged. It ended with many more questions than answers. Nothing was resolved. So why clap? I dont know, but I wind up clapping too.

SEEKING SOCRATES
Seeking Socrates? What in the world do I mean by that? Heres the short answer: For a long time, Id had a notion that the demise of a certain type of philosophy has been to the detriment of our society. It is a type of philosophy that Socrates and other philosophers practiced in Athens in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. A type that utilized a method of philosophical inquiry that everyman and everywoman could embrace and

22 CHAPTER 1 What Is Philosophy? take for his or her own, and in the process rekindle the childlikebut by no means childishsense of wonder. A type of vibrant and relevant philosophy that quite often left curious souls with more questions than theyd had at the outset of the discussion, but at times enabled them to come up with at least tentative answers. A type of anti-guru philosophy in which the person leading the discussion always learns much more from the other participants than they could ever learn from him. A type of philosophy that recognized that questions often reveal more about us and the world around us than answers. A type of philosophy in which questions often are the answers. But centuries ago something happened to this type of philosophy: It disappeared, for all intents and purposes. To be sure, in the eighteenth century, Voltaire held court in the gilded and red velvet setting of his favorite Parisian cafLe Procope, where he fine-tuned his ideas about reason and the development of a natural science about man. And two centuries later, in the wake of the Nazi occupation of France, Sartre developed his philosophy of existentialism under the cut-glass art deco lamps at the Caf de Flore. But these cafs were reserved for the intellectual elite, who often seemed to think they had a corner on the answers. It seems safe to say that, unlike this cabal of chatterers. Socrates didnt think he knew the answers, or that knowledge was the rarified domain of socalled intellectuals. The one thing Socrates knew beyond a shadow of a doubt, he was fond of saying, was that he didnt know anything beyond a shadow of a doubt. Yet Socrates, contrary to what many think, did not try to pose as the ultimate skeptic. He wasnt trying to say that all knowledge was groundless, that we were doomed to know nothing. Rather, he was emphasizing that what he had come to know, the truths he had discovered by hard-won experience, were slippery, elusive, always tentative at best, always subject to new developments, new information, new alternatives. Every last bit of knowledge, every assumption, Socrates felt, should always be questioned, analyzed, challenged. Nothing was ever resolved once and for all. It is with this ethos in mind that I launched Socrates Caf. And the one and only firm and lasting truth that has emerged from all the Socrates Caf discussions Ive taken part in is that it is not possible to examine, scrutinize, plumb, and mine a question too thoroughly and exhaustively. There is always more to discover. That is the essence, and magic, of what I have come to call Socratizing. Socrates Caf does not have to be held in a caf. It can take place anywhere a group of peopleor a group of onechooses to gather and inquire philosophically. It can take place around a dining room table, in a church or a community center, on a mountaintop, in a nursing home, a hospice, a senior center, a school, a prison. Anywhere. Anywhere and anytime you desire to do more than regurgitate ad nauseum what youve read, or think youve read, about philosophers of the past who are considered by academics to be the undisputed exclusive members of the philosophical pantheon. It can take place anywhere people want to do philosophy, to inquire philosophically, themselves, whether with a group of people or alone. To be sure, one of the most fruitful and flourishing places for Socrates Caf to be held is at a caf or coffeehouse. The gatherings typically start out small, but word spreads, and eventually more and more people come. People tell me quite frequently that theres a hunger for this type of discussion, that people are weary of the guru approach to group discussion. Im not so sure about this. It seems to me that the gurus are flourishing. In fact, at one coffeehouse where I facilitated Socrates Caf, while our discussion was taking place out back in the garden, tarot card readers were operating a brisk trade inside the caf. Some of these mystic soothsayers seem to have been none too amused by the fact that a number of their clients, who sat with us in the garden while waiting their turn at the tarot-reading table, wound up so immersed in our dialogue that they ended up passing on the opportunity to shell out money to have their future foreseen. But over the short haul at least, tarot card readers and their ilk need not fear what Im doing. For every client they lose, there are many more to take their place. There has been an upsurge of interest in the irrational the likes of

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which has not been seen since a similar fascination contributed to the demise of the short-lived golden age of reason of the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations. Millions of people still embrace such irrational phenomena as astrology. Even military commanders and politicianseven first ladies of the United Statesquite often resort to this method to predict whether a crucial battle or competition or significant event of some other sort will have a favorable outcome. Id argue that this modern-day embrace of the irrational reveals that overall our civilization is hardly more rational than in the days when Roman commanders sought to predict their immediate future by examining the intestines of chickens. In a way, it is startling to me that otherwise rational people can give in so easily to the temptation to see a connection between independent phenomena that happen to coincide in time. But then I recall that even the fourth-century Greek philosopher Aristotle, one of the greatest philosophers of all time, who lived amid a resurgence of belief in supernatural phenomena, was not surprised by the citizenrys pervasive love affair with the irrational. Based on his careful observations of human nature, Aristotle came to the conclusion that few men can sustain the life of pure reason for more than very brief periods. The classical Greek scholar E. R. Dodds noted in The Greeks and the Irrational that in the days of Aristotle, astrology and other irrational practices fell upon the Hellenistic mind as a new disease falls upon some remote island. Why? For a century or more the individual had been face to face with his own intellectual freedom. And now he turned tail and bolted from the horrid prospect better the rigid determinism of astrological Fate than that terrifying burden of daily responsibility. The fear of and flight from freedomwhich goes hand in glove with a fear of honest questioning that is taking place today does not simply parallel what happened in ancient times. Rather, it seems to be the same fear and same flight. Today were not so much experiencing a return of the irrational as we are an upsurgence of the irrational elements in ussuch as tendencies to build belief systems on foundations of quicksand, and proclivities for

destruction and self-idealizationthat are part of the human fabric. There are antidotes to the irrational. Though by no means perfect, and certainly not always skillfully handled, such antidotes can enable us to better understand ourselves, better overcome our fears, better come to grips with the irrational in us. One such antidote is the Socratic way of questioning utilized at Socrates Caf. More and more people are discovering its inherent joys. They are discovering that the Socratic method can be of immense help in putting perplexities into better focus, in envisaging new directions of self-realization and human aspiration, and in pressing home the debate with the irrational. The Socrates method of questioning aims to help people gain a better understanding of themselves and their nature and their potential for excellence. At times, it can help people make more well-informed life choices, because they now are in a better position to know themselves, to comprehend who they are and what they want. It can also enable a thoughtful person to articulate and then apply his or her unique philosophy of life. This in turn will better equip a questioning soul to engage in the endless and noble pursuit of wisdom. No matter what question we discuss at Socrates Caf, the dialogues, as Socrates says in Platos Republic, are not about any chance question, but about the way one should live. So the discussions do not just enable us to better know who we are but lead us to acquire new tactics for living and thinking so we can work toward determining, and then becoming, who we want to be. By becoming more skilled in the art of questioning, you will discover new ways to ask the questions that have vexed and perplexed you the most. In turn you will discover new and more fruitful answers. And these new answers in turn will generate a whole new host of questions. And the cycle keeps repeating itselfnot in a vicious circle, but in an ever-ascending and ever-expanding spiral that gives you a continually new and replenished outlook on life. Wherever Socrates Caf is held, those who take part form a community of philosophical inquiry. My fellow Socratics have an enduring

24 CHAPTER 1 What Is Philosophy? curiosity that cannot be quenched or satisfied by the facile responses of know-it-all gurus or of psychologists who cubbyhole their existential angst into demeaning paradigms of psychological behavior. Those who take part in Socrates Caf are more concerned with formulating fruitful and reflective questions than with formulating absolute answers. Everyone is welcome and virtually all topics are valid for debate. Together, and alone, we push our thinking in surprising directions. The possibilities are limited only by the questions your imagination and sense of wonder enable you to come up with. Contrary to popular belief, the more questions you have, the firmer the footing you are on. The more you know yourself. The more you can map out and set a meaningful path for your future. This book is about my experiences seeking Socrates with people of all ages and all walks of lifeand with myself. It is about rediscovering and tapping into my love of questions, questions, and more questions. It is about following the charge of the Delphic oracle: Know thyself. It is not a traditional self-help book, though it might prove helpful in any number of ways. I do not pretend to be a teacher, much less a guru. Or rather, if I am a teacher, then everyone else who seeks Socrates with me is a teacher too. The many dialogues interspersed throughout this book are real enough, though they are not rendered verbatim. I never brought along a tape recorder to any of the philosophical confabs in which I took part. Whats more, the dialogues included here have had ample time to age and filter through my mind before I put pen to paper. Plato must also have added the perspectives of time and imagination when he eventually set down the original Socratic dialogues for posterity. In fact, he seemed to use considerable literary and philosophic license at just about every turn, in order to present even more perspectives, to make his dialogues all the more real and timeless, and to make Socrates into a figure of, some would say, mythic proportions. As with Platos dialogues, theres no getting around the fact that the dialogues in this book are more, and less, and other, than the real live dialogues they strive to depict. Most important, the ensuing dialogues are a seamless part of one great ongoing dialogue without beginning or end.

THE PHILOSOPHERS CLUB

What is silence? It is Wednesday and our twice-weekly gang meeting begins at 2 P.M. sharp. I am with twenty-one fourth and fifth graders at Cesar Chavez Elementary School, a brightly painted school in the heart of San Franciscos vibrant but impoverished Mission District. The children and I are in the school library seated on comfortable sofas. We like meeting in the library. It has an informal, relaxed atmosphere. And its easy for me to sneak in cookies and juice. In many ways, this place is an oasis for the kids from the outside world, where drug dealers abound and young toughs who belong to gangs with names like the Reds and the Blues and the North Street Gang haunt nearby street corners. Our gang is called the Philosophers Club. When, several years ago, I first visited with these children, who live in an area with a school dropout rate that is woefully high, theyd never before heard of the word philosophy. Now they cant imagine life without it. We philosophers think up questions so we can think up answers, so we can think up more questions is how my philosopher friend Rafi, now nine, a fourth grader at Cesar Chavez, describes the philosophical pursuit. It was soft-spoken Wilson, a kid from Ecuador with penetrating almond-shaped blue eyes, who proposed early on that we call ourselves the Philosophers Club. His fellow young philosophers loved the name. It stuck. And now, at this latest club meeting, he has asked us, What is silence? His question immediately brings to mind a number of perspectives on silence. I had recently reread the Brazilian educator Paolo Freires Pedagogy of the Oppressed, in which he writes of a culture of silence composed of people who, because

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of a lifetime of deprivation and oppression, fatalistically accept that they have little or no control over their lives. I think of the parents of these children, many of whom are in such straits. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a French phenomenologist, offers a much different perspective on silence. In The Visible and the Invisible, he describes silence as the ground for all language. My silence in both speaking and listening is necessary for my role as an active participant in my dialogue with the world. But some forms of silence can indicate that one is shirking a critical opportunity to engage in dialogue. In her acclaimed The Language of Silence: West German Literature and the Holocaust, Ernestine Schlant, a professor of comparative literature, analyzes West German literaturespecifically, noted novels by non-Jewish German authorsand its attempts to come to terms with the Holocaust and its impact on postwar West German society. She comes to the disturbing conclusion that in such literature there all too often is a language of silence in which the victims and their suffering are overlooked. My silent reflections are cut off when Wilson amends his initial question by saying, Well, actually, what I really want to know is, is it possible to be silent if everyone else around you is screaming? He can see that I am slow on the uptake, so he explains, Even when I try to go to sleep at night, I hear screaming. I hear gangs outside screaming. I hear the neighbors screaming. So I cant be silent even if Im silent. He pauses. We silently wait for him to complete his thought. Then he says, So I guess what Im really wondering is, if everyone around you is screaming, can you really be silent? Because you can still hear everybody else even if you plug up your ears. Lets experiment, I say. We take turns stopping up our ears while everyone else in the Philosophers Club screams. Sure enough, the screaming foils our best attempts to create a wall of silence around us. So, we collectively conclude, it is in fact impossible to be silent, to be in a state of silence, with everyone screaming around you. But then Juan Carlos, who is from Peru and is the other unusually silent kid in our group, says,

Even if its possible for someone to block out all the noise around him, its still impossible for him to be silent. He can see by my expression that I dont quite understand what hes getting at. But like all the Philosophers Club kids, hes patient with me, because he knows adults like me sometime have trouble philosophizing with the same keenness as children. So he explains to me, You cant be silent to yourself, even if you are silent to everyone else. I may not talk out loud, but I still talk to myself. I still have conversations with myself inside my head, even if no one else can hear me. I cant turn off the voices in my head. So thats not being silent. Is it? We again experiment. We all try to be completely silent to ourselves, to turn off the voice or voices in our minds. Each of us finds it an impossible feat. We fall outwardly silent, concentrating on our voices within. What seem like minutes pass. You can be silent but not completely silent, Rafi, a special-education student from Guatemala, says finally, breaking the silence. How so? I ask. Well, weve been silent, on the outside, but not inside our heads, he says. So we have been silent. Just not completely silent. Rafis teachers aide happens to be sitting in on this particular discussion and now has a look of astonishment on his face. Just after the gathering comes to an end, the instructor takes me aside and says to me, I didnt think Rafi was capable of thinking things like that. He adds a bit sheepishly, Im not capable of thinking like that. Indeed, Rafi may have learning deficiencies, but there seem to be few limitations on his ability to transcend them. In fact, despite his learning deficiencies, Rafi and the rest of the members of the Philosophers Club are gifted learners in my estimation. Which prompts me to ask: What is gifted?

THE PHILOSOPHIC SPIRIT

In How Philosophy Uses Its Past, John Herman Randall, Jr., equates philosophizing with a

26 CHAPTER 1 What Is Philosophy? characterization and criticism of the fundamental beliefs involved in all the great enterprises of human culture, science, art, religion, the moral life, social and political activityparticularly those beliefs that conflict with inherited knowledge and wisdom. No one embraced the task of examining and critiquing the received wisdom of his time as sweepingly and exhaustively as did Plato. He wrote his dialogues in the midst of a chaotic Athenian landscape in which the polis, or city-state, recently had been defeated in the Peloponnesian War, which had lasted nearly thirty years. Before the war, Athens had experienced a period of unbridled prosperity along with a cultural renaissance, but it now seemed to doubt its own credentials. It is in this climate that Plato, around age twenty, is generally believed to have met Socrates. Plato fast became mesmerized by his newfound mentors singular moral character and passionate intellectual quest for knowledge about how to become a virtuous person, and soon after, he reputedly vowed to follow in Socrates footsteps and devote his own life to philosophy. Even though democracy had been restored in Athens after a period of oligarchy, Socrates made many enemies in high places with his unflinching questioning. His trial for heresy, and subsequent conviction and death sentence, left Plato deeply disillusioned with Athens powers that be, as his subsequent writings showed. John Herman Randall noted that Plato viewed, and made his readers view, the problems and the chief figures of the period of Athenian prosperity and uncritical selfconfidence with something of the cold and fishy eye with which, say, Englishmen have come to regard the booming times of the Age of Kipling and Empire. Moreover, Plato was so moved by Socrates death that he apparently felt it his duty to bear witness to him for posterity, making him what would become the paradigmatic figure not just of Western philosophy but also in many ways of human aspiration at its best. In Walter Kaufmanns words, Platos dialogues, in their haunting portrayals of Socrates, spurn the safety of a sluggish intellectual and moral imagination and teach us impatience with confusions and instill us with the passion to reflect. They challenge your perspective at every turn. It is impossible to emerge from reading them unscathed and unchanged.

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1. 2.

CRITICAL QUESTIONS
Do you agree, the more questions you have, the firmer the footing you are on? Why, or why not? Can anyone be a philosopher? Why, or why not? 3. How can you tell the difference between a good philosophical discussion and a good BS session?

1.5 READING PHILOSOPHY

Reading philosophy is both exciting and rewarding. Philosophy provides intellectual stimulation: the pleasure of discovering new ideas, the fascination of following the thread of a provocative argument, the challenge of rethinking inherited beliefs. For these reasons, reading philosophy can be enjoyable, but often it is not easy. Sometimes when you read philosophy, you feel like Alice in wonderland, who remarked, Somehow it fills my head with ideasonly I dont know exactly what they are. Philosophical texts come in a wide variety of types, ranging from technical essays to dramatic dialogues. They come from different cultures and different historical periods, and they are written in different languages. It is not easy to adjust to this variety. It takes practice to appreciate and understand ancient Greek dialogues, Buddhist fables, seventeenth-century French essays, and Chinese poetry. Many of us are accustomed to reading secondary sources that explain the ideas of others. Textbooks digest what others say, explain what isnt clear, underline the important points, present summaries, and define technical words. Because much of

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our education has been centered on reading textbooks, not everyone is accustomed to wrestling with primary sourcesthe original texts and wordseven in translation. If you are not used to digesting material on your own, explaining it to yourself, learning how to do your own summaries, and looking up words and references you do not understand, then at first you will find it difficult to read primary sources. Like anything else that is new, it will take some practice and some help from your instructor. Voices of Wisdom is a combination of secondary material (my introductions to each chapter and to each selection in the chapters) and primary material (selections from the writings of philosophers past and present). Reading the primary texts may, in some cases, prove a rather difficult task. You need to learn how to read analytically and critically. The purpose of analytical reading is to find out what the text says and to understand it as best you can. To do so requires analysis on your part. To analyze something is to break it into parts or smaller units. Thus you need to distinguish main ideas from supporting ideas and to determine what the author is trying to accomplish. Critical reading involves evaluation. Your evaluation may be positive, negative, or some mixture of the two. Criticism requires you to make the effort to think about the ideas, analogies, arguments, evidence, and metaphors presented in the text, as well as their implications and assumptions. Here are some suggestions that will help you understand philosophical texts and develop critical analysis skills. 1. Read the material at least twice. 2. Read actively and with a purpose. 3. Read analytically and sympathetically. Here are some analytical questions that you can ask and answer as you read. What is the thesis (the central idea or main point)? What are the major points made in developing and supporting the thesis? How are key terms defined? What are the basic assumptions made by the author? What are the important implications of the authors position?

4. Read critically. Here are some critical questions that will help you evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the selections. Is what is said clear? If not, how is it unclear? Are adequate definitions given for important concepts? Can you think of counterexamples? Are the arguments adequate to support the claims; for example, are the premises true? the assumptions dubious? Do the implications of the text lead to absurd or false consequences? Are important aspects of the issue overlooked? How well did the author accomplish her or his goal? 5. After you have finished, review what you have read. 6. It is a good idea to keep a philosophical notebook in which you record your notes on the readings.

28 CHAPTER 1 What Is Philosophy? Before each selection are reading questions that will help you to analyze the reading. After each selection are critical questions designed to help you evaluate the reading. You can keep the answers to these questions in your philosophical notebook. For more on reading philosophy, as well as thinking logically and writing philosophy, see Reading, Thinking and Writing Philosophically, 2nd edition, Wadsworth, 2001 by Gary E. Kessler. Visit the companion Web site for chapter-specific quizzes, suggestions for further reading, video ideas, and other resources to assess and expand your understanding of the chapter material. Go to http:/ /www.philosophy.wadsworth.com and select the companion Web site for Voices of Wisdom.