Skip to content

Philosophy as a personal journey.

I HAVE SUGGESTED THAT philosophy cannot justify ultimate premises, and that the hostile criticism of rival premises has limited rational power. But it does not follow from any of this, nor do I intend it to follow, that philosophy may not be about premises. Each of us has a world-view, a fundamental orientation to reality and to our fellows. This world view is, as already remarked, formed by all sorts of influences, including philosophical influences, which have worked their way through the culture of our nation, through our families and friends, and through our own biographies. Most people do little to make their world-views explicit, and are often unconscious of their implications and starting-points. Their world-views may, as a result, have a degree of incoherence and certainly a degree of fuzziness. Lives and world-views often remain unexamined, and if we are concerned, as reflective beings, to know ourselves and our world, this must be a bad thing. The unexamined life may not be worthless, as Socrates contended, but, other things being equal, it may be worth less than an examined one.

As self-conscious and reflective persons, once we start to think about who we are and what we expect, this type of incoherence and fuzziness is bound to be unsatisfactory. The initial impulse to philosophy is not so much wonder (as Aristotle and Whitehead may have thought), though wonder may come into it, as a desire to become clear about the world and one’s place within it. This will include becoming clear about what science, history, psychology, the arts and other forms of knowledge and experience tell me about the world and myself, and about their reasons for what they tell me. But this cannot be a purely scientific or historical or sociological or psychological or artistic matter, because part of what is involved here will be what I think about the role of science, history, sociology and psychology in the world, by which I really mean their role in my world view.

In becoming clearer about my world-view, I will also inevitably affect it. In making the inarticulate articulate I will be making clear and definite what is fuzzy and inchoate. Here there will be much to be said for reading and studying what others have said about the things I am seeking clarity on, for seeking reasons, in other words, both for and against. I will begin to understand just what I am committed to, just what its implications are. I will realise things about what I think that I did not previously know, just as in reading Proust on love and jealousy or Baudelaire on ennui I will come to understand much about my own emotions which I did not previously realise. In this process of intellectual and conceptual discovery or self-discovery, I may also come to change things I originally thought or thought I thought. Some of these changes might be at a high level of argument or exposition, a level which does not really affect my fundamental commitments, as when a physicalist realises that a type-type identification of mental and brain states won’t quite work, and does not take this to impugn his commitment to physicalism, but rather to spur him on to further argumentative epicycles, or as when a theist abandons a literal interpretation of Genesis, but does not take this to undermine Scripture’s deeper truth, and begins instead to follow Augustine’s plea for more mature and spiritual understandings of Holy Writ.

Subscribe
Notify of
guest

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
0
Would love your thoughts, please comment.x
()
x