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Philosophy as a personal journey.

THIS IS A CARICATURE on both sides, I don’t doubt; and maybe it was ever thus (think of those medieval angels of legend), but the caricature contains more than a grain of truth. This is a shame, because the big questions are not to be derisively dismissed, and in the hands of the best philosophers of history, the two sides of philosophy are not so separate.

Deep questions – humanly deep questions – are to the fore. Yet they are treated with the sort of seriousness and rigour they need and deserve. We can, all of us, whether in philosophy departments or not, learn from that. But, and here is a second worry, given that, notoriously, most of the big disputes in philosophy remain unresolved – and have been unresolved since the time of the ancient Greeks who first raised them in systematic form – what can we actually learn from philosophy? This is the question which the quotation from Whitehead drew me to explore, Whitehead being a thinker whose logical rigour was matched only by his wide ranging speculative mind, and who might thus be thought to straddle the divide I am lamenting.

Note first the key concepts Whitehead is drawing on: wonder, purification of emotion, piercing the blindness of activity, transcendent functions. There are echoes here of the Platonic doctrine of philosophy as the care of the soul, therapy, the turning of the soul from fantasy to reality. Education (and not just philosophy), says Plato, is the art of orientation, the shedding of the leaden weights which progressively weigh us down as we become more and more sunk in the material world and the world of desire, eating, and similar pleasures and indulgences. All this is in the context of the Cave, and a form of vision which is to become able to bear ‘the sight of real being and reality at its most bright… which is a form of goodness’.

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