by
Bertrand Russell
• Science directly benefits many people who are
ignorant of scientific discoveries
• Philosophy only indirectly benefits society
• Philosophy directly benefits those who study
it.
• Practical human – aware that humans must
have food for the body but ignores the food
for the mind.
• Philosophy is valuable for the goods of the
mind.
• If poverty and disease were reduced as low as
possible would we need to do anything else to
have a valuable society?
• The sciences give definite answers.
• Philosophy asks open-ended questions:
– Is the universe the result of a divine plan or is it a
fortunate colliding of atoms?
– Is consciousness a permanent part of the universe
or is it an accidental feature?
– Are good and evil relative to humans or do they
have a universal value?
• Philosophy’s value is found in the uncertainty
that it produces.
• Philosophy suggests to us many possibilities.
• When we free our minds from certainty we
avoid dogmatism.
• The value of philosophy is found in our
thought about the big picture.
• It expands our interests and allows us to
escape our limited perspective
• Philosophy allows us to become a part of a
bigger picture.
• Philosophy is valuable for the sake of the
questions it asks.
- “The Value of Philosophy”
What is the Value of Philosophy:?
Goods of Philosophy
Questions
Uncertainty
Philosophy’s Value
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THE VALUE OF PHILOSOPHY
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, hair-splitting 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 endeavor 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
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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 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; Newton’s 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 questions, and 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
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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
4
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, as we saw in our opening
chapters, 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 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
value, perhaps its chief value, through 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.
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One way of escape is by philosophic contemplation. Philosophic
contemplation does not, in its widest survey, divide the universe into two hostile
camps, friends and foes, helpful and hostile, good and bad, it 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 self-assertion, 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
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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, 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 knowledge, knowledge 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 man’s 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
7
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 man’s 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.
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave
• To set the scene, Plato asks us to imagine people who
have spent their entire lives chained up in the back of a
cave. Behind them is a fire, and objects are being
paraded in front of that fire. The objects case shadows
on the wall, and the prisoners spend their days watching
those shadows.
• One day someone escapes the chains, ventures outside
the cave, and returns to tell the others what he found
there. Never having seen anything but shadows, the
prisoners are incredulous. The scene can be illustrated
as follows:
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave
• The prisoners have a very limited sense of
things.
• They are not completely ignorant, but neither
can they be said to have an accurate
understanding of the world or themselves.
They are somewhere between knowledge and
ignorance. Plato will describe them as having
opinion.
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave
• For all their limitations, however, the
prisoners are confident that they know the
world perfectly well.
• Furthermore, they are confident that they
are living the most satisfying of lives. (These
are the reasons that, in the end, they resist
leaving the cave.)
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave
• The prisoner who escapes manages to rise
above those limitations – he has a more
accurate sense of the world, he realizes that
much of his earlier certainty was misplaced,
and he knows that there is a better life outside
the cave.
• He returns and tries to impart these things to
his fellow prisoners by showing them the way
out of the cave.
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave
• This effort to show the way out of the cave is
Plato’s metaphor for the philosopher and the
task of philosophy.
• We all have opinions about the world and the
good life about which we are subjectively
certain, and philosophy asks us to be critical of
those assumptions (even when it makes us
uncomfortable) for the sake of moving toward
a better picture.
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave
• Traditionally, this critical inquiry has broken
down into three parts.
• Inquiry into the nature of world is called
metaphysics, inquiry into the nature of
knowledge is called epistemology, and
inquiry into the nature of the good life is
called ethics.
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave
• As mentioned previously, however, the other
prisoners resist being shown out of the cave
because they are confident and comfortable.
Eventually this resistance turns into physical
aggression.
• For Plato, this is not simply a theoretical
possibility – it is precisely what happened to
his mentor Socrates.
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave
• In a text called The Apology Plato gives an
account of the trial of Socrates brought on
by Athenians who were disturbed by his
efforts to get them to question themselves
• In our next unit we will be considering that
text.
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