...2...1
It seems that a
national telecoms company has a deeper fear of modren
technology than I had anticipated. Nevertheless, with the help of
ageing rebel, Skin-the-Cat, and a consignment of Bloom’s Day
bloomers bound once again for Montserrat, I am transported back to
the 21st century, temporarily at least.
How strange everything
seems nowadays. Where, I wonder, are the rocket boots and silver-foil
clothing we were all promised as children? The future leaves a lot
to desired, I must say. Even, or especially, at the present.
Prior to that
seasonally psychic breakdown a week or so ago, we were, if you
recall, talking about the purpose and point of philosophy; the
difficulty being that it doesn’t appear to have one. With
financial pressure being applied to the throat of educational
institutions everywhere, this may well be A Bad Thing. Worse than
that, would society or civilisation survive the death of philosophy? Doesn’t it need reflective minds?
One response would be
to point out that to think morally, in whatever arena, just is to
think philosophically, perhaps even metaphysically. Consequently, it
is something to which considerable time and energy ought to be
dedicated. The serious study of moral thinking ought, in fact, to be
at the very centre of all healthy education systems. And from it,
all – or nearly all – other philosophical problems grow.
It is a very short
stretch of the intellectual legs from here to ancient Greece where,
for us in the West, the whole thing began. Plato’s famous
observation, ‘the unexamined life is not worth living,’ springs
immediately to mind; likewise the Delphic dictum, Gnothi Seauton
(the English translation of which is, of course, the title of Tom
Buford’s most recent book).
A curious thought: we
heard these sayings at the beginning of our philosophical adventures;
why, I wonder, were we so quick to forget them? Why, that is, are
philosophers in general so little concerned with this most valuable
element of our literary and intellectual heritage? Is it, perhaps, a
consequence of the ‘analytic turn’, almost the antithesis of
self-knowledge? Or is it the wider rationalist tradition, which
hardly encourages self-awareness?
As the Greeks knew
fine well, the deepest and most important questions in philosophy are
not the abstruse ruminations of obtuse ruminants; they concern the
kind of life one lives and the kind of person one becomes as a
result. Passing this through Feuerbachian hands, philosophy becomes
therapeutic; theology all the more so, especially when transformed
into what Feuerbach himself described as ‘therapeutic atheism’
and Charles Conti, ‘developmental theology’. Its purpose is,
perhaps, to illuminate the oppressive darkness of a child’s
education in faith. (It does not matter now, whether we say
‘philosophy’ or ‘theology’ since neither can be done properly
without the other.) That violent absolutism of the nursery, for
example, a ‘theism’ which the likes of Peter Byrne still confess. Worse is the solidus-self,
divided from itself and the Other by self-certainties of sin
and eternal damnation, preached in the name of the Heart of the
World. For some, so I’m told, it was a thunderous roar: hell-fire
and brimstone, clenched fists and foaming lips. For others it was a
sinuous whisper, all the more sinister because of it’s gently
threatening proximity: breathed on the back of an agonisingly grey and guilty neck.
(God is love, but
never forget He is a jealous God. This, presumably, is why
hairy-handed intimacy with someone who, as Woody
Allen famously observed, one really loves inevitably leads the
dexterous down a sinister or left-hand path to a very different “down
below”.)
The purpose, at least
one purpose, of philosophy, then, is to drive the self to emancipate
itself from the subjugation of self-certainties and aggressive
‘apriorisms’, to teach the self to accept the natural
fragmentation of a healthy psychology so make way for ‘supernatural’,
that is, providential, participation in its development.
Emancipation, not
desertion. That is, re-appropriation: the dialectical reclamation of
redemptive images; images of otherness, of reciprocity, of creative
engagement through which consciousness must pass itself if it is to
return to itself, or rather, to the Spirit from whence it came. In
returning, consciousness may reassemble the fragments of, if not
actually innocence (we should not overstretch credibility, even
here), then at least something very like Gnothi-knowledge and
Seauton-acceptance. So emancipation may become enfranchisement as consciousness learns to
have a little faith in the thirty thousand fathoms over which it
inevitably finds itself suspended.
Or, if metaphysically
inclined mysticism is not to your taste, perhaps we could try the
same thing in something like a Wittgensteinian mood. (Would that, I
wonder, be any less mystical? Probably not, if Charles Conti is to
be believed.) Wittgenstein too, we are told, talked of philosophy as
therapy. By clarifying the ways in which language constructively
works, we might do likewise with our thinking.
Thinking about what? Why, about what we are and what that means, what else? Take a simple
example (actually borrowed from the vastly more readable Friedrich
Waismann): the open-ended-ness and open-texture of our descriptions.
For
anyone unfamiliar with Waismann, his point was simply that no
description can ever be full, final, or complete. It may be so, more
or less, for whatever purpose we have in mind when employing it, but
it is always possible that a great deal more waits to be added. On
the one hand, this is due to constraints of time: sooner or later we
have to abandon our conceptual refinements and put our constructs to
work. On the other, it is because no description can be made
logically watertight; proof, that is, against the possibility
of
vagueness. Whatever purpose we have in mind for our description, it
is unlikely to be the only one. Descriptions do many jobs and so
require many further and other refinements, presently unimagined.
To
realise this is to guard against futile attempts to translate all our
statements, including those about people, into sense-datum statements
(as Waismann showed). It also avoids the temptation – to which I
once saw the late great Maggie Boden succumb – to bumptiously
assert that, one day, we shall have a complete description of the
universe in purely physical terms. Such a description would, of
course, include consciousness or personality. Or, rather, it would
rule them out altogether.
The
moral and spiritual implications of that are well-known; they are as
obvious as they are worrying. Of course, the possibility of reducing
people to things is not merely the preserve of that other
metaphysical plaything beloved by unreflective minds, scientism or
materialism. It is also a central feature of the more virulent
political ideologies. Understand the purposeful, that is, personal,
nature of all description and we might just resist the temptation to
classify, to define, one another in purely political and/or economic
terms.
The last century and a half has shown, quite amply one would
imagine, that such definitions are quite definitely A Bad Thing.
Despite the evidence, however, it is still something that many
people, not least public servants, continue to do. Student
or patient, you are mostly likely down on the books as a customer, a
consumer of goods and services, all of which, naturally, have their
price. As, just as naturally, do we. That said, I have noticed that
politicians do not yet, as a rule, refer to either their constituents
or the electorate in general as ‘customers’. Perhaps they
daren’t. What ever would they do if we demanded our money’s
worth? Or perhaps they are aware, however dimly, that in so doing
they would diminish themselves as well as us. They would, one
imagines, rather think of themselves as statesmen than as swineherds,
however fantastic and absurd the thought may be.
The point, in any
case, remains. Here, too, philosophy offers a kind emancipation,
driving us to think and talk about how we think and talk about ourselves and
one another. And, whether the ideologies are metaphysical,
scientistic or political, the yield is the same: freedom from the
child’s tendency to objectify ourselves and those others. Such
objectifications may, as Piaget suggested, be a crucial stage of
early psychological development. Sooner or later, however, the time
comes to put away childish things.
In the end, then,
perhaps the purpose of philosophy may simply be to keep us on the
road to adulthood.
Let us leave aside any
question of gender and progress along that road. Any woman who ever
knew a man knows the answer and any man who ever had a mother knows
well what she would say. Our point stands, philosophy, when done
thoughtfully and with an eye for the reality of our total situation –
in other words, when done properly
– is there to help us grow and become ourselves, who we might
be. In which case, our personalist philosophy certainly is
well suited to the task.