WORK AT THIS LEVEL is important, but is on a different level from that which involves changes in fundamental commitments. At a more radical level I may find that some of my basic commitments are inconsistent at a deep level with other things I also believe, and cannot be solved in the manner of our physicalist or our Augustinian exegete. But in a case of deep inconsistency, the change will be against a background of commitment I am not altering. Or it may be because when I realise just how one of my commitments looks when spelt out and clarified, I do not like the look of it. I may come to realise that the image projected by a scientistic or Newtonian world-view is not such an attractive one after all. This seems to me to be a perfectly valid philosophical result, which may come from immersing myself in Wittgenstein as much as in Blake – but, in view of our strictures earlier, I should not expect my change of mind (or heart), or the considerations which led to it in my case to convince a Quine or a Paul Churchland. They may simply be, in William James’ terms, tough-minded, disposed to be materialistic, irreligious and sceptical, and determined to hold on to these dispositions and work out their implications, striving to bring them into harmony with all of their experience and commitments.
The picture of philosophy which I am here sketching, in which philosophy is part of a rational, but personal quest for meaning might not be recognised in many philosophy departments (or not by their students, anyway), and would be hard to discern in many of the most acclaimed philosophical writings of to-day. This is partly because of the tendency of academic study in all areas to specialisation and impersonality, specialisation because more and more people concentrate on less and less in an effort to achieve originality (and so get published), impersonality because of an attempt in philosophy to appear scientific.
Of course, some of the people who write and practice philosophy in these ways will see their tightly focused work as contributing to a larger vision, but it seems to me that the overall direction is false to the true nature of the subject. And although we can all agree that our endeavours are directed to the truth, and guided by reasons and arguments that bear on the truth of what each of us believes, we each have to face the fact that we will not achieve complete rational convergence on premisses, because it is not there to be achieved. Nor will we come to a set of truths which will be so evident that they will command the assent of all who embark on the journey and pursue it in a rational and reasonable manner, aiming as best they can to seek the truth. It is just this picture which our earlier considerations on the nature and history of philosophical disagreement seem to undermine. In the beginning and at the end, philosophy is a personal journey, crucial to the examined life Socrates thought so integral to human flourishing.
Anthony O’Hear is an editor of the Fortnightly Review, the director of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, and the author of Philosophy in the New Century
NOTES
1. A.N.Whitehead, Modes of Thought, Capricorn Books, New York, 1938, p 232.
2. Republic, Bk VII, 518b-519b.
3. Kathleen Raine, Autobiographies, Skoob Books, London, 1991, p 347.
4. (4) Graham Priest, Towards Non-Being: the Logic and Metaphysics of Intentionality, Oxford University Press, 2005, p 1.
5. Raine, op cit, pp 347-8.
6. Peter Ackroyd, Blake, Vintage, London, 1999, p 201.
7. Bas van Fraassen, ‘Empiricism in the Philosophy of Science’, in Images of Science, edited by P.M. Churchland and C.A. Hooker, University of Chicago Press, 1985, pp 245-308, at p 258.)
8. J.S. Mill, On Liberty, Ch. 2, in Utilitarianism, On Liberty, Essay on Bentham, Fontana edition, London, 1962, p 180.
9. Palgrave, 2007
