Although I have never been driven to philosophy in the way that Bryan Magee has, I found this "personal journey" to be extremely helpful in gaining an understanding of just what philosophy is all about. It also is an excellent way for the beginner to get to know the work of the major philosophers and the connections between their ideas. A jumping off point into the world of philosophy, if you will. The book helped me understand why Ayn Rand hated -- probably not too strong a word -- the work of Kant and that's something that has puzzled me for years...
Select excerpts:
It was through this gateway [books by Aristotle and Tocqueville] that I entered the incredible world of the ancient Greeks; and to this day my imagination is perplexed by how much members of so small a society achieved in so short a time, especially when so little had been done to prepare the ground for them at anything like the level on which they moved. [p.29]
One insight that everyone who has read L'Ancian Regime seems to carry away from it and retain for life is that if a revolution is going to occur it will probably come not when social conditions are at their worst but when they have started to improve after a long period of deprivation and repression -- in other words, revolutions happen when things are getting better, not when things are getting worse....It is the profusion in his work of wonderfully counter-intuitive insights such as this that makes Tocqueville the only sociologist of true genius that there has ever been, unless one counts Marx as a sociologist. [p.29]
...but the fact remains that most such philosophers have spent their professional lives buried in the small print of the subject, instead of...addressing themselves to big questions in big terms. [p.86]
The same can be said for all disciplines at the university level. While I would have been comfortable in an academic setting, I'm thankful that I avoided being "buried in the small print."
...we are all the time having to conduct our lives on the basis of important beliefs about reality, despite the fact that we can never be one hundred per cent sure that these beliefs are true. This leads Hume to advocate what he calls "mitigated scepticism." The wise course, he says, is to eschew all forms of dogmatism and be permanently prepared to revise our expectations in the light of experience, while at the same time acting as boldly and resolutely as getting the most out of life requires us to do. Inevitably there will be times when we fall flat on our faces, but when we do so the only thing to do is pick ourselves up and try again -- and try also to learn from the experience. In practice the adoption of this approach has certain very large implications. One is a massive, humane tolerance. Another is a firm rejection of even the possibility of building a unitary system of explanatory thought -- and therefore a rejection of total religions, ideologies and metaphysical systems as such -- for if there is scarcely anything at all we can be sure of it is the height of absurdity to claim to have an explanation of everything.
Where Hume's thought is at its most disconcerting is in his detailed demolitions. He brings forth arguments of great sophistication and power in an attempt to show not only that we cannot demonstrate the existence of a world external to ourselves but also that we cannot validate the existence of causal connection in any realm; that there is no such thing as inductive logic; that we cannot even be sure of our own existence as continuous selves, and certainly not the existence of God. His writing penetrates almost uncannily into the nooks and crannies of our certitudes, prising them apart....What he shows is that most of reason's claims are invalid. We know almost nothing. [p.100]
Not only each one of the natural languages but also mathematics and logic, and each one of the sciences, each one of the academic disciplines, each one of the arts, each one of the great religions, each one of the great ideologies, each one of the great mythologies, presents us with a world, a whole way of looking at things; and in each case its chief purposes are to help us to represent, understand, interpret, come to terms with, and perhaps master our experience and our environment, and to orientate ourselves wihin them, and to communicate with our fellow creatures about them. Our understanding of ourselves and our environment can be increased only by extending these systems in significant ways, or constructing new ones, or establishing new connections between them; and the way to enrich our understanding of what we already know is to reflect upon and analyse both the systems themselves and what is articulated by and within them. This is n immensely rich way of looking at our understanding of the world, and at our attempts to articulate our experience and our knowledge, so rich that the whole of linguistic philosophy fits into a corner of it. [p.110]
[F. S. C. Northrop helped the author realize] that science had an enormous amount in common with the arts -- for instance both are self-disciplined truth-seeking activities attempting to probe the nature of reality, including the reality about ourselves, and to articulate the search and its findings in publicly accessible ways; and both depend for their success on the creative originality of rare individuals, above all on courageous and inspired leaps of imagination into the unknown....
Another thing that I learnt from Northrop was how, and why, the two great revolutions is twentieth-century physics -- relativity theory and quantum theory -- impose on us the need to re-evaluate our view not just of the nature of science but of human knowledge as such; and what is more to look for answers in a Kantian direction, because so much that had always been taken for granted as lying out there in the external world independently of us was now understood to consist of explanatory structures that we ourselves bring into being, and then reify; not only explanatory models in science but the mathematics those embody, the logic of their arguments, and the categories of the natural [?] languages in which they are articulated.... [p.132]
Almost any belief we adopt in almost any field has consequences for our relationship to other belief-systems. So if we are intellectually serious we cannot avoid considering them in relation to one another. This imposes on us a positive duty to think in an interdisciplinary way; nothing else is compatible with intellectual responsibility. [p.137]
In short, Kant learnt from Hume that all of what had seemed to be the fundamentals of science -- scientific laws, causal connection, absolute space, absolute time -- were each of them unvalidatable both empirically and logically. He did not react to this astounding realization by concluding that science was invalid, though there have been others who have. That, in his opinion, would have been nonsense in view of the fact that science demonstrably gives us the most, and the most practically useful, knowledge that human beings have ever possessed. He reacted instead by sayin, in effect (these are my words, not his): "We know that we live in a world of space and time, within which events are causally interrelated and can be accurately predicted if we apply scientific laws to the facts of observation. But Hume has shown that it is impossible for us to have derived this knowledge from any combination of observation and logic. Therefore we must have used something other than there in the acquisition of it. Therefore observation and logical derivation cannot be the only bases for reliable knowledge."
What else is there? In his Introduction to the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics Kant tells us that the whole of his Critique of Pure Reason is an attempt to solve Hume's problem "in its widest implications." The attempt leads him into the most radical reconstruction of the theory of knowledge that anyone has ever carried out. At the end of it he pronounces that the whole nature of the world as we experience it is dependent on the nature of our apparatus for experiencing, with the inevitable consequence that htings as they appear to us are not the same as things as they are in themselves. [p.143]
This is one of those books that I have flagged so extensively that I will buy the book. The following are brief portions of excerpts that will help me locate the flagged passages:
If we think in terms of the metaphor of catching things in the network of experience, these...[p.144]
For as the years went by it was borne in on me with more and more strongly expressed feeling by my friends in the academic world that I was at greater liberty to pursue my intellectual interests than they were. [p.164]
To the end of his days he [Bertrand Russell] believed that the purpose of philosophy was what it had always been thought to be, namely the understanding of the true nature of reality, including ourselves. Work in widely differing intellectual fields could contribute to this understanding: The sciences, history, literature in many languages, psychology, and a great many other things. [p.172]
So Popper suggests as a general principle that a thinker should address himself not to a topic but to a problem, which he chooses for its practical importance or its intrinsic interest, and which he tries to formulate as clearly and as consequentially as he can. His task is then manifest, namely to solve this problem, or at least to contribute to its better understanding. [p.185]
For me, the problem is the Human Predicament as described in works such as Limits To Growth.
There are some unknowable things about which Popper does have negative beliefs, by which I mean that there are things he does not see any grounds for believing, and therefore does not believe. In this sense he does not believe that there is a God, and he does not believe that our selves survive our deaths. Of himself, he said that he had no wish for an existence after his bodily death; and he thought that people who yearned for one were rather pathetic egoists -- perhaps, as it were, collective egoists who failed to appreciate the near-nothingness of humanity in the cosmic scheme of things. [p.196]
As has been suggested earlier, what we now call philosophy begins at the point where dissent starts to be allowed. When people are permitted to criticize the prevailing worldview, and to put forward reasons for their criticisms, and thus inaugurate discussion and debate, the first stirrings of philosophy have occurred. [p.233]
...for well over two thousand years, no distinction was made between waht we now call philosophy and what we now call science. People were simply trying to understand the world -- and learning in the process about their process of learning. [p.234]
History is a beginningless catalogue of death-dealing conflict and struggle, and out of it cuture and civilization have emerged. They have developed not in spite of it but because ot it, via all those processes whereby the strong, the clever, the brave, the dedicated, the imaginative, the creative and so on persistently do down or eliminate the rest. It is and always has been conducive to the advance of civilization that the activities of such people should be untrammeled. Whatever opposes that is hostile to cultural development. But for something like the last two thousand years the great ungifted mass of the people have espoused value-systems that did precisely this, extolling the weak and meek (in other words, people like themselves) at the expenses of the strong and self-confident (of whom they were afraid), and demanding of the powerful and the bold that they live under law and not do what they like. The whole point of such value-systems is to put the strong in chains, to render superior types unthreatening by subjecting them to constraints, taking away their spontaneity and advantages, and bringing them down to the same level as everybody else. Nietzsche dubbed these views "slave moralities," and clained, for example, that it was among the slave population of the ancient world that Christianity had first become widespread. He often refers to Christianity as a, or the, "religion of slaves," by which he means also a religion of servility. [p.263]
His [Nietzsche} challenge to us is too re-evaluate our values...[p.265]
Where it [university life] fell short of the others [politics, business, media] was in the narrowness of its horizons. The supreme fault of academe lies not in its unreality...but in its littleness.... [p.305]
I like London clubs for the same reason, and have belonged to several, just as I have to several colleges. [research this] [p.314]
Some of these generalizations apply to Oxford with special force. Although undergraduates past and present tend to assume that the university exists in order to teach them, this is untrue historically as well as actually. The university began as a community of scholars, each doing his own work; and only as a subsequent development did students go there to be taught by them. [p.316]
It is not the case that a belief is worthy of respect, or is even interesting, merely because it is widely held, though that it is widely held may give one food for thought. Of the religions I studied, the one I found least worthy of intellectual respect was Judasim. I have no desire to offend any of my readers, but the truth is that while reading foundational Jewish texts I often found myself thinking: "How could anyone possibly believe this?" When I put that question to my Jewish friends they often said that no intelligent Jew did. To quote the precise words of one: "There's not a single intelligent Jew in the country who believes the religion." What they do believe, they tell me, is that it is desirable that traditional observances should be kept by at least some Jews because it is these observances more than anything else that give the Jewish people its identity, and therefore its cohesion; but that the doctrinal content or implications of the observances are not expected to be taken with full intellectual seriousness by intelligent people. [Why not come up with some other form of identity/association that is based on intelligence? Just wondering...]
The religion I found the most attractive was Buddhism. There are many different varieties of it, and I know too little about any of them to say much, but it did seem to me that some of them were genuinely insightful and genuinely profound. These did not assert the existence of a God, or of a soul, or of immortality, and yet they confidently dismissed the claims of commonsense realism as trivial and wrong. If I may so put it, Buddhism came across to me as an agnostic religion, one that often did justice to the difficulty and complexity of fundamental questions facing human beings (which commonsense realism hopelessly fails to do) without attempting to impose dogmatic answers. It occurs often in philosophy that there is more insigh in the formulation of a problem that in any of the proposed solutions to it; and it seemed to me that recognition of this was a distinctive characteristic of Buddhism. In this respect it is the opposite of the Christianity I have been acquainted with all my life. My most strongly rooted objection to Christianity is that its explanations fail so abysmally to take measure of the mysteries they purport to illluminate... [p.348]
His [Spinoza] analogies: "The man of talent is like the marksman who hits a mark the other cannot hit, the man of genius like the marksman who hits a mark they cannot even see." [p.354]
One may think, as I do, that it would be a simply incredible coincidence if what happens to be apprehensible by us happens also to coincide with the totality of what there is." [p.357]
Schopenhauer was firmly of the opinion that bad thinking drives out good and, because it perpetrates [sic.] harm, must not be ignored but has to be fought to the death. [p.364]
Once the livelihood and careers of people studying philosophy came to depend on their acquiring paid jobs in universities it was no longer possible for most of them to forget themselves impersonally in their work. [p.364]
It should be noted that this would not be a factor for those involved with the university that I envision.
Incidentally, it speaks volumes for the penetration of both Kant and Schopenhauer that by purely epistemological analysis they arrived at the conclusion that a material object is a space filled with force, and that all matter is reducible to energy, a hundred years befor physicists reached it on the path of scientific investigation. [p.369]
When he [Schopenhauer] then discovered that Hindu and Buddhist thinkers had reached conclusions similar to those of Kant and himself he studied their works with enormous interest... [p.376]
Schopenhauer was explicitly atheistic, the first great philosopher of the West to be so. Others, such as Hobbes and Hume, may have been atheists in fact but could not have been explicit about it in their writings without incurring the wrath of the law. [followed by Schopenhauer's views on a personal God and immortal souls.] [p.384]
This provides an excellent example of two truths that apply to the work of the great philosophers in general. One is that anything that is difficult to understand requires effort, and therefore requires us to try to understand -- but this calls for good will [not the normal definition...], without which understanding is not achieved. Therefore intelligence is not in itself enough for understanding: one must want to understand, and try, and be willing to sustain the effort. [p.399]
I re-read the Upanishads, which Schopenhauer turned to at the end of every day before going to sleep. [p.403]
Real thinking is hard -- not only laborious but more often than not unsuccessful, leaving us with a frustrating sense of our own inadequacy and our ignorance, not to mention exposing these to the raised eyebrows of others. It will always be easier to flee in the direction of what is safe, and safe because approved already. Our lack of self-confidence will always incline us to believe that if what we think is at odds with what a lof of intelligent people are saying then they are more likely to be right than we are. This ignores, of course, the fact that original thinking can only ever be individual, never social, though criticism can be social. We shall never have any insight or understanding of our own if we renounce independent thought. But we shall be safe, and feel secure, perhaps even superior. In practice it is not usually the case that the chief recommendation of abstract beliefs is their truth. [p.430]
What I want very much to see are two mass migrations, one out of the shallows of rationalistic humanism to an appreciation of the mystery of things, the other out of religious faith to a true appreciation of our ignorance. [p.441]
Well put.
