BUT THAT DOES NOT mean that they are incomprehensible, or that an iconoclast’s sense of ennui is much of a criterion philosophically. Maybe what Bradley was striving to articulate is complicated and difficult. and maybe Bradley himself was not as gifted a writer or arguer as Russell; but maybe a philosophical faith in science as the touchstone of reality is itself cramping and claustrophobic (as Blake intimates in ‘Newton’), inducing in its adherents a form of blindness to genuine aspects of experience.
What then is left for philosophy, if there is no absolute rationality over choice of ends and premises, if what is at issue is in part a mood, an atmosphere, a style, a basic intuition about the way things are, a sense of conviction owing as much to one’s disposition as to rational argument? Is the claim of philosophy to take us nearer the truth at a deep level not just empty, but deceptive in that these deep truths, or what we take to be deep truths, are not susceptible of rational proof or argument? I must admit that when I reached this point in my reflections as I was writing this, I began to feel rather depressed, having appeared to reach a point of convergence with Athenian sophists and contemporary post-modernists: that there is no ultimate truth in these areas (or if there is we cannot recognise that we have reached it), and that all that is left to philosophy is persuasion, philosophy being, as it was for the sophists, the art of persuasion. Of course, if we could get to ultimate truths by philosophical means, then philosophy would in another sense be the art of persuasion (as I imagine Russell believed it to be).
I want in the rest of this essay to contest the idea that philosophy aims primarily at persuasion, in either sense. It should not aim at the sophistical type of persuasion through rhetoric, because that would be manipulative of others; nor should it aim at persuading others of ultimate truths by means of rational argument, because rational argument cannot take us that far. Although I do not think that philosophy is a matter of therapy (because I do not think that it deals with philosophical illnesses), the view I am not going to sketch has more in common with the therapeutic view than with thinking of philosophy as attempting to persuade others.
Philosophy, properly conceived, has as much to do with self-discovery as with making a noise or having an influence in the world outside, taking self-discovery in a wide sense to include discovering my fundamental orientation to the world outside me. It is, in a certain sense (Descartes’s sense), meditative; it does involve a Platonic care of the individual soul.
