COMMENSAL ISSUE 105

Long ago young Ugg left his flint knife on the ledge at the cave entrance for his father to sharpen, whilst little Ugget ran crying to her mother to have the tip of a thorn removed from her finger. Fathers and mothers were knowledgeable in such matters and dealt with them. The older children inquisitive for knowledge looked on with interest. And from time to time there came a child who .....

The term philosopher comes from the Greek for lover of wisdom; meaning one who desires to know what to do with knowledge. Notice it is at the end of a sequence; to know, to desire to know, to know what to do with what one knows, to desire to know what to do with what one knows. Loose though it is one might mortalise these with technician, scientist, practitioner and philosopher, or, perhaps even more so, with the surprisingly similar tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, with their trade tools of the hammer, measure, weapon and element. It is hardly fair to criticise sailors of the world before the Greeks because they did not have the name inclusive of wisdom.

Unfortunately the Greek philosophers were not all that wise. Rather than, like with Jesus, wander amongst the crowds advising on this and that, leading to a grass roots philosopher in every village teaching young and all a basic set of rules for life that just about everyone could understand, they did not promulgate general education as wisdom would have, but instead, they tended to shut themselves away with a few students in specialised schools, so that pursuit of wisdom became a subject most people have regarded as very much the academic interest of a secluded intellectual elite. And, to compound that, instead of tackling what is the actual typical problem in life, of how to determine what to do when half the salient facts are veiled shades of grey but the matter must be resolved within the hour, they, particularly Socrates and Aristotle, went very much for dwelling at length upon simple teaching examples with ideal yes-no or right-wrong answers. All of which, through few in Rome being well tutored in the broad mass of subtleties and complexities, directly led to the standard mediaeval university syllabus of theology and ethics with built in assumptions that anything not pure and perfect can not be set upon an alter and is trash. Which passed to us the notion that only the few can understand matters in depth and that any inadequacy in this or that means complete failure, ideas which remain as a ball and chain. Giving the ironical developments from ancient philosophy that the relatively recent introduction of general education of the young was done not from and for the growth of wisdom but only to produce a factually competent work-force to serve the desires of some, and with that work-force, from labourer to scientist, taught to parrot that the application of what it did was for some other to decide. So that just about all the young now consider education merely the non-lottery means towards obtaining material wealth. And the elders in society now actually expect advisement of what is newly important via media almost entirely fuelled by those from the arts, in other words by those from a field where the first principle is that whilst what is presented should appear complete and sound it need not actually be so and need not stem from any rule nor derive from any fact. Such is what ancient lovers of wisdom left us. Their record should be read with a critical eye ignoring their pinnacle status, looking for what they said and did, and even more so for what they did not say or do.

Returning to the Middle Ages to pick up another thread. Dominance of theology in that period, under the hands of such as Abelard and Aquinas, with the central question of how can it be sure there is a god, eventually led to Descartes, a Roman Catholic, asking how may one know anything, from which he arrived at the much valued quoted "I think, therefore I am". Unfortunately, in promulgating that proposition he also satisfied many that the "I" was a non-mortal point discontinuous from a mind that was not a material thing, which, by seriously distorting the foundations of the psychiatric branch of medicine for several hundred years, certainly brought about the mistreatment of tens of thousands of mentally ill people across Europe. And, even today, though it is of utterly trivial importance relative to the forgoing, Descartes still causes the unwary to claim nothing can be certain to exist, despite the fact that, as Shakespear pointed out, there was never yet philosopher that could endure the tooth-ache patiently. A statement wherein is to be found "I suffer, therefore suffer is"; a reality that brought even Jesus to protest upon the cross. The failure of Descartes was that whilst his slogan established the human, it pointed at no need to improve the human condition. Not so in "Parent, forsake me not!", the more urgent cry of the existing infant abandoned in the empty cave.

Spinoza, though believing there had been a creator of the universe and all in it, rejected the concepts of a personal god and of immortality of a human soul. And Leibniz held that the universe consisted of an infinite set of independent substances in each of which a life force was present, substances the wishes of which god took account of so as to enable the best of all possible mortal worlds. But, their rationalism not reinforcing traditional preferences, their work was largely ignored. Curiously, though, whilst one may say that their views were as much based upon their upon their faith in them as the traditional opinions of the day rested likewise upon faith, and pretty firmly indicate they believed in a divine power and a material universe left to itself, their beliefs would at least partly harmonise with the more everyday world based thinking of such English philosophers of around 1700 as Locke who, no doubt aware the king's head had recently been cut off without supernatural retribution, dismissed the divine right to rule concept and favoured liberal democratic government, and Berkeley who argued the material world is to the inner human whatever the mind makes of it, and Hume who claimed humans find impressions of more weight than ideas. Which last, if said as preferences have more force than propositions, perhaps explains why the thoughts of Spinoza and Leibniz pretty much failed to be taken up as explanations of why no god appears to intervene in chaos and no angel seems to bring an infant soul to any conception. However, in measuring these philosophers, in judging how well they knew what to do with what they knew, it is perhaps of more practical importance to note that none of them managed to limit the unnecessary death, sickness, poverty and disturbance of the rural masses of western Europe that occurred in their period.

Meanwhile, in Germany, the man who it is said was the most significant thinker of the 18th century, Kant, explored the limitations of reason by which mankind interprets experience, which might, if they became aware of it in their wanderings through the Germany states, have become an interesting debating topic amongst Napoleon's troops as they froze to death during their retreat from Moscow. Kant also maintained that there was an absolute moral law and, absolutes breeding as they do, in course managed to over-stimulate German idealism through Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea (1818), Hegel, The Philosophy of Right (1821), and Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra (1892), wherein is praised the man who is free, titanic, and powerful. Who can say what Kant and his followers might have done had they witnessed the crimes that came from their work. Interestingly, Plato, student of Socrates (who is said to have killed himself for ethical reasons but more probably did so through undiagnosed depression), was of the opinion that at times some thoughts should be suppressed in the public interest. Socrates did not entirely agree. Peculiarly, many authorities seem to consider Socrates the true professional and Plato little more than a fanciful dabbler.

And, in the last century or so. Philosophy has become a set, with many philosophies of many topics, and a core, that as a subject, practically, is now but the study of the basics of existence, knowing and judging: How do we know it is there, how do we know what it is, how do we know if it is any good. Fundamental questions. One could even address them to the love of wisdom itself. If one does one may notice contemporary philosophers must also be treated with great caution if they do not attempt the sequence's fourth question: Good or bad, how do I know what to do with it?

Many central European philosophers of the 1900s produced numerous strange ideas, but then, given events in that part of the world in that time they often had little to be cheerful about; the dictatorial empires they were born into collapsing into garbage all around them. Their contribution is perhaps best summed up in the title of one book, Sartre, Being and Nothingness (1943). Elswhere, in a place where the world was not entirely fallen down, Russell focused on the role of language itself, as a sort of mathematics with which to know the universe. To justify having squandered his energies away on that, Russell came accidentally to what is probably the most important conclusion intelligent life will ever come to; that time one enjoys wasting is not wasted.

The greater vision of Russell contrasts with the fearful views of the Vienna Circle, who, in the 1920s, insisted that philosophy should be scientific, that any assertion claiming to be factual has meaning only if it can be verified, and that propositions relating to metaphysics, art, and religion cannot be verified, and are therefore meaningless. That assertion is not confident wisdom, it is the cry of a group entirely lied to and mislead throughout WWI by an empire it had believed in, of the nightmare frightened child calling for its mother, a scream for there to be no space under the bed in which imagined crocodiles may hide. And, in any case, it is a requirement that betrays itself: Fatally, in making their claim the Vienna Circle had to rest it on what it in itself denies to be meaningful, an assumption; that it is verified there is no reality in metaphysics, art, religion, nor in the mind or in the I.

In Russell's conclusion there is better philosophy, true wisdom. It accommodates discontent and content, implies to address the former and savour the later, and it is happy for fact and fiction to have equal standing.

Albert Dean