NOTES

These are selected quotes from

Preface

This book is a survey of the main ideas in philosophy as they have crystallized in our time (xiii).

I have tried, therefore, to present philosophy as an integral part of human culture, intimately interwoven with every other form of thought and expression (xiii).

If any single claim has dominated my thinking, so far as I am aware, it is to reinstate the claims of reason in what I feel to be an age of madness, the claims of intelligence in an era of unthinking violence, the claims of moral decency in this time of base and contemptible self-seeking among the nations (xiv).

1. Love of Wisdom

It is because of it practical bearing as well as its theoretical interest that philosophic reflection has commanded so much attention, even in periods when philosophy was attacked as “purely academic” or “scholastic.” “The philosophers,” Marx declared in his Theses on Feuerbach “have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” To which Dewey replies that the point of interpretations is precisely to give impulse and direction to change. Form a properly pragmatic point of view, theory is only the form that practice takes when action encounters blocks or conflicts which prevent its consummation. We think because we must; I am, but might not be - therefore I think.

On this score American pragmatism is at one with European currents of thought-Marxism itself, which contains a strong element of pragmatism ,… existentialism, especially in the form which Friedrich Nietzsche gave it, and the evolutionism of Henri Bergson. After Darwin, how else are we to explain the growth of mental capacity in humans if not by reference to the serviceability of thought in the struggle for survival? Why animals sleep is something of a mystery; some time ago, it was suggested that the more fruitful question is, why do they ever wake up? The answer is that our troubles do not let us sleep; we must waken or die. Magic or religion, science or art, or philosophy as well, are the cries of wakefulness (4).

2. Puzzles and Problems

There is a reality within as without, and thinking so does not make it so for the facts of the inner life any more than for the facts of the outer life (4).

Those troubles that can be ended merely by straightening out our thinking I call puzzles, as contrasted with quandaries, which have an objective locus. Confronted by a puzzle, we find ourselves in a quandary, but one which on solving the puzzle we see to have been unreal (4).

So-called “philosophical” questions are often only puzzles (4).

Puzzles have philosophic import only if the uncertainty they express has its locus, not in facts, but in meanings, especially when one meaning gets in the way of another. Gilbert Ryle calls such puzzles “dilemmas” (in a book with that title) (5).

The dilemma is solved when each line of thought or manner of speaking is put back into its proper place; the conflict is in the tangle, and not in the lines themselves” Many puzzles-for instance, the puzzle concerning the relations between "the mind" and "the body" – have been dealt with in this way (6).

Puzzles are of our own making, but it is life that puts us into quandaries…We do not philosophize primarily because we have misused language or been misguided in our thinking, but because we find ourselves in real quandaries (6).

Most quandaries are what I call problems: it is possible, at least in principle, to extricate oneself from them. Problems have solutions, though not in the way puzzles do. When we have solved a puzzle we are done with it; the solution of a problem usually confronts us with new problems (6).

A quandary might more accurately be described as a problematic situation, rather than a problem…The history of science provides many examples of problems which, because of improper formulation, appeared to be insoluble (6).

Sometimes it can be demonstrated that what was thought to be a problem is in fact insoluble, and therefore only a “pseudoproblem” (6).

… Rudolf Carnap has spoken of pseudoproblems in philosophy-for instance, those arising when problems about kinds of words and sentences are mistakenly formulated as though they concerned objects and facts (7).

3. Quandaries: Predicaments.

There remain other quandaries which I call predicaments, with which philosophy is distinctly concerned. These are quandaries which do not allow for solutions, not because of any deficiencies in either knowledge or power, but simply because of the nature of things. We can only learn to live with them, cope, manage somehow (7).

Problems are contigent, dependent upon the circumstances obtaining in particular cases; not so predicaments, which are universal (8).

Typical of our predicaments is the very nature of objectivity – that facts are facts whether we like them or not (8).

One of the most influential twentieth-century philosophers, Ludwig Wittgenstein, puts it: “The world is independent of my will. Even if everything we wished for were to happen, this would only be, so to speak, a favor of fate, for there is no logical connection between will and the world which would guarantee this…” (8).

The outcome of the logical analysis coincides with the findings of psychoanalysis at about the same period (8).

There is, in reality, a world of causal determination which is not to be wheedled or cajoled. The predicament of maturity is that the world, as Freud has remarked, is not a nursery (8).

To fulfill our wishes it is not enough to make them known; one must act on the world. Our actions must be based on the recognition that materials are recalcitrant, that they have a will of their own. An object,

Dewey says somewhere, is that which objects. Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed, as Francis Bacon admonishes. But Nature signs no contracts; our obedience carries no guarantee that we shall command in turn. It is from this perspective that Arthur Schopenhauer, in his Studies in Pessimism, speaks of the long battle which forms the history of life, where every effort is checked by difficulties and stopped until they are overcome (8).

The optimism of the age of science which Bacon heralded is expressed in another aphorism of his, that knowledge is power. The predicament is that we so seldom know enough to deal with our problems, or, having the knowledge, so seldom also have the power to put the knowledge into practice. To see knowledge as power is to mistake potentiality for its own actualization (9).

Action is often enmeshed in another predicament: not merely that knowledge is limited, but that what we do know is not to the point, while what is relevant lies outside our knowledge. In particular, we cannot foretell the future (9).

Expectations are continually thwarted because human affairs are govererned by chance (9).

Our ignorance of the future is a special form of a more general predicament- that we are creatures bound by time…Among twentieth century philosophers, Bergson especially has emphasized the significance for human experience of the difference in this respect between space and time: that we can move freely in space in any direction, and not at all in time (9).

Above all, man’s subjection to time is manifested in his mortality (10).

Time says Schopenhauer, is that agent by which at every moment all things in our hands become as nothing, and lose any real value they possess (11).

What makes injustice a predicament rather than a problem – which, though frequent and widespread, would still allow for redress- is that the very institutions for which such redress are themselves implicated in the injustice, or even responsible for it… One of the greatest cartoons of our time stems from the Nazi period, though each age no doubt can draw its own version: A thug in uniform is beating a helpless little man; the caption reads: “Ya want da police? I’m da police!” (12).

There is a predicament, too, in the nature of law, and of all the institutions embodying the norms of society. As circumstances change, norms must also change if they are to serve the needs and interests of he members of the society (12).

It is true that conservatives face extinction- deservedly so, for they are looking only to the past. But radicals face a fate worse than death: their future is to become the Old Guard (13).

Whatever the nature of society, it confronts its members with another predicament: they are members of a society, but they also have their own lives to lead. Man is a social animal, but he is also an individual. Though there is enormous variation in how individuality is conceived, no matter how others are related to, they remain other (13).

More closely bound up with the individual psyche is the predicament in which we are placed by the circumstance that desire is limitless; aas Freud would say, the id knows no restraint (13).

Even the attainment of the heart’s desire is often unfulfilling…Thus Oscar Wilde, in Lady Windermere’s fan: "In this world there are two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. The last is much the worse" (13).

There is a certain futility in action. This does not entail the conclusion that life is therefore without meaning but only that such meaning cannot be found in action itself (13).

4. Religion, Science, and Philosophy.

Cultures differ in what they perceive as significant predicaments and opportunities: all agree that wisdom is making the most of whatever life affords (15).

No one person has found wisdom. “Beware lest you say, ‘We have found wisdom’” (Job) (15).

Philosophy might be described as the secular alternative to, or component of, divine wisdom” (15).

In many cultures, including our own, there is a widespread view that the task exceeds merely human powers. Wisdom comes from God, and is to be found in sacred writings which record the word of God (15).

Whatever else wisdom may be, it is in some sense an understanding of life. It is not a purely cerebral attainment; wisdom is as much a matter of what we do and feel as it is of how we think. But thought is central to it or, at any rate, to that species of wisdom which philosophy pursues (16).

Wisdom is a matter of seeing things-but as they are, not subjectively.

One of the tasks of philosophy (some say the only task) is to clarify our ideas. In this connection, philosophy addresses itself to the puzzles which stand in the way of our coming to grips with problems (16).

Locke demonstrated, for instance, that “essences” belong to the words we apply to things rather than to things themselves, and so brought definition to the forefront of scientific attention. A few decades later, another British empiricist, Bishop Berkeley, showed the crucial dependence on observation of our idea of “matter.” His younger contemporary, David Hume, made clear that in the notion of “cause” what is central is regularity of concurrence, rather than a mysterious impulsion, and so paved the way for later application of statistical methods to problems of causal connection. This British empirical tradition of clarifying our thinking was continued by such influential philosophers as John Stuart Mill in the nineteenth century and Bertrand Russell in the twentieth (17).

“Clarification is often inseparable from criticism.” “Socrates for instance, devoted himself to the analysis of familiar ideas like “justice” and “virtue” with the aim of disclosing what we know about these matters without realizing it…Those who freqent my company at first appear, some of them, quite unintelligent, but as we go further with our discussions, all who are favored by heaven make progress at a rate that seems surprising...The many admirable truths they bring to birth have been discovered from within" (17).

Discusses analysis:

The father of analysis is Hume wrote

If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask. Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion (20).

The repudiation of any philosophical function but analysis stemmed, I think, from a perspective in which the only quandaries (or, as we shall see in a moment, the only quandaries to speak of) are puzzles and problems; since problems belong to science, what is left for philosophy are only the puzzles, and the analysis of science itself. In Ludwig Wittgenstein’s epoch-making Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (published 1922), the thesis is put forward that a question can exist only where there is an answer. “We feel that if even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. Of course there is then no question left, and just this is the answer.” Thus logic and theology suddenly meet: to the problems of life there are no answers in the back of the book, Soren Kierkegaard once observed. What positivist and existentialist are agreeing to is that the deepest human quandaries are predicaments, not problems in the present narrow sense...

All this is only to affirm that predicaments are quite different from problems, but merely to recognize the difference is not necessarily all that is involved in dealing with them. Even if there is nothing to ask, there may yet be something to be said. Wittgenstein's conclusion, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" - a conclusion shared by mystics in many cultures- begs just the sort of question whose existence is being denied (20).

In addition to analysis…Philosophy has a synoptic role, summing up and systematizing the whole corpus of knowledge.

Philosophy is not science; neither is it politics, religion, or art. It owes much to all of them and resembles each in one respect or another.

5 The Philosophic Function

The Pursuit of Wisdom Abraham Kaplan

Philosophy deals both with the practical import of our theories and the theoretical presuppositions of our practice. Its function is to mediate between the life of the mind and the world of affairs which gives to mind its place and purpose. The task of philosophy is now what it seems to me always to have been-to bring the mind to bear on the great issues and concerns of its time: the pressing problems of the day and the perennial predicaments (22).

What is significant in our lives has become remote, technical, elusive, and unintelligible. But however multifarious our world, man needs to be at one with himself. More than ever we desperately need principles of integration by which we can achieve a consonance of our beliefs with one another, of what we think with how we feel, and of both thought and feeling with action (22).

For some centuries, philosophy turned on the conflict between science and religion; more recently, it is the relation between science and politics (both taken in the broadest sense) which shapes philosophy (23).

Ours is…a time in which establishing the rights of man is a central concern: the rights of races to equality, the rights of nations to identity and autonomy, the rights of all men to a life of peace. A philosophy which ignored these concerns might still have intrinsic worth, satisfying intellectual curiosity; but it would surely be, as Kant put it, comparatively useless (23).

Philosophy is no less subject to such deadening professionalism than other enterprises and may be even more vulnerable to it than most. “The shades nowhere speak without blood,” it was once said (by the philosopher F.H.Bradley, in a book of aphorisms written around the turn of the century), “and the ghosts of Metaphysics accept no substitute. They reveal themselves only to that victim whose life they have drained, and to converse with shadows, he himself must become a shade.” It is not philosophy itself which is dehumanizing, however, but the folly of pursuing wisdom with one’s back turned to one’s own humanity (26).

Those who perform the philosophic function as their own lived philosophy are men for whom philosophy is a calling, a vocation, and not merely an occupation. They are driven, as Socrates by his daemon, to face the problems of men and confront even our predicaments. There may be a kind of pathology here. Although we cannot deal with our quandaries simply by turning away from them-the defense mechanism of denial-we gain nothing by dwelling on them in morbid despair (29).

The search for the meaning of life may only hide the impulse to escape from life. (30)

Philosophy is like religion and art, not only in the previously noted aspiration to universality of content but also in the aspiration to being universally understood, accepted, appreciated, lived (30).

6. Folly of Wisdom

Yet surely it is not elitist, reactionary, nor hopelessly old-fashioned to continue to espouse the worth of calm reflection, to nurture the slow growth of ideas, to cultivate habits of deliberation, and to renounce the scholasticism, however entrenched, which substitutes technical forms for substantive content (31).

The philosophical orthodoxy of our time is a special instance of a more general monistic perspective in the lived philosophy of our culture. There is a widespread though implicit acceptance of what I might call the axiom of linearity: that all differences can be ordered on a linear scale of value, that is, arranged in order of worth. If two things differ-habits, beliefs, styles, goals, or whatever- one must be better, according to this axiom, and the other worse. No allowance is made for the possibility that the two might just not be comparable, that each might just not be comparable, that each might be wholly worthy in its own way, each as acceptable as the other if taken on its own terms (31).

Monism need not have the form of an enforced orthodoxy, however; it may also be embodied in the gentler pattern of evangelism, relying on persuasion rather than compulsion to fulfill its mission which, in both cases, is to promulgate and defend the true faith. Even in the absence of evangelism the axiom of linearity may be operative. The policy of coexistence takes for granted that the Other (social system, nation, or whatever) is wrong, but recognizes that efforts to right the wrong might well be mutually destructive, or at least not worthwhile for the present (31).

The ideal of toleration, while in no way moderating the insistence that “we” are right and “they” are wrong, emphasizes that we can afford to let them be wrong…as admissible margin of error. Thereby toleration betrays either indifference to the other or a reaffirmation of implied superiority. What is worse, in toleration there is always the danger that the error of their ways…might become intolerable; in which case we can no longer let them be wrong, or even let them be (31).

Here, for example, is Thomas Carlyle on tolerance (in his Heroes and Hero Worship): “At bottom, after all the talk there is and has been said about it, what is tolerance? Tolerance has to tolerate the unessential; and to see well what it is. Tolerance has to be noble, measured, just in its very wrath, when it can tolerate no longer. But, on the whole, we are not altogether here to tolerate! We are here to resist, to control and vanquish withal. We do not ‘tolerate’ falsehoods, thieveries, iniquities, when they fasten on us; we say to them, Thou art false, thou art not tolerable! We are here to extinguish the falsehoods and put an end to them, in some wise way!”

But surely a wise way presupposes the recognition that no man or group of men can be the sole and absolute judges of falsehood, thievery, and iniquity. The virtue in tolerating falsehoods is that occasionally some of them turn out to be true (32).

Perhaps the most humane form of monism is catholicism in the strict sense of an all-embracing stance. The Other is not denied its right; what is denied is simply that there is any other… The argument…suggests that freedom from discrimination must be paid for by abandoning whatever it is that makes one man (or woman!) different from another…Because of a very natural egocentrism, catholicism is the form quite often taken by a monism which supposes itself to be open and accepting (32).

In ecumenism there is a genuine openness, an invitation to an exchange of viewpoints conveyed in the call for “dialogue.” In practice there may be little more than reciprocal evangelism. What stands in the way of our truly transcending monism is the almost universal confusion between accepting a different viewpoint and agreeing with it. I accept your viewpoint when I recognize and understand it, acknowledge that it is in fact yours and that you are entitled to it. I agree with your viewpoint only if it is in fact my own as well.

As long as agreement and acceptance are confused, my autonomy and integrity will prevent my accepting you, or else my openness to you will demand that I abandon everything that is distinctly my own. I may become an eclectic, taking something from all around me but having nothing of my own to give; a syncretist, who supposes that bits and pieces are unified merely by being put together-the social myth of the mosaic; or I may look for some grand synthesis (for instrance, between the philosophies of “the East” and “the West”), in accord with the older myth of he melting pot (33).

There is a certain openness which derives from intellectual humility, the fallibilism which is ever aware that when my views differ from another’s I just might be wrong (33).

A forthright pluralism holds, with Nietzche’s Zarathrustra, “This is now my way, what is yours? As for the way, it does not exist.” Differences among persons, groups, cultures are real and significant; no one can live by a professed philosophy which does not reflect these differences (33).

In short. philosophical orthodoxy is as much a contradiction in terms as is philosophical specialization (33).

…philosophy stands between science and art-lesss impersonal and disinterested than the one, more logically controlled than the other. “Far be it from me to deride the imagination,” Santayana once said, “but after all it is a great advantage for a system of philosophy to be substantially true” (34).

Is not the pursuit of wisdom a striving after wind?

In our day the attack on philosophy is part of a more general anti-intellectualism.

Wisdom seems paradoxically lacking in sophistication; there is something homespun about it; it smells of the cracker barrel and the whittled stick.

Where there are no gods, we worship idols of our own making and, ultimately, make a god of man himself-the dictator, the self-proclaimed prophet, and his church or party (37).

…to understand is to transcend. In such transcendence there is indeed an element of acceptance; not quiescence in evil, but a reaffirmation of meaning and worth in thee struggle against evil even though the evil be relentless (37).

Chapter Two Semantics 7. Symbol Magic

Man is the animal that talks. To understand what it is to be human is to give centrality to our capacity for speech…much of what we say is only chatter. If to talk we add the written and graphic symbol, the volume is overwhelming…(38).

We suffer from a deep-seated, largely unconscious, and recurrent belief in the magic of symbols; the notion that symbols can affect the realities they signify…The magic lies in the “Open, Sesame!” which itself opens the door, without any human mediation. The magical belief is that the word reaches into things, that what lies at the core of things is a stuff embodied in the word, that each word partakes of the Word in which all things have their beginning and their end…the belief in the magic of words: every utterance is an invocation (40).

Belief in the magic of symbols may be rooted in the circumstances that when the infant is learning to talk, the distinctions between self and other, people and things, fantasies and veridical perceptions are blurred. His word is experienced as directly effective, working on things without the mediation of human agency.

There is the idea of "ordinary" language and at the other end "the philosopher's ideal" language (49) and in the middle is "the language of science.

Kaplan is not underestimating ordinary language. Properly understood, cultivated, "that language is adequate as well for our most profound reflections."

The language of science refers to mathematics (Russell) but is more inclusive. In an ideal language, one word means one thing and this language is something that ordinary language was considered to be an obstacle to.

Medieval kabbalists as well as more earthy Renaissance thinkers looked to a special symbolism to facilitate, illuminate, and even replace thought." There was even four centuries ago an anticipation (Raymond Lully) of "thinking machines" which are like computers, only we know computers do not think. Also: We also have today the "transmutations of elements" - it is successful but is far less "wish fullfilling than the fantasies of alchemy.