1 Doing Philosophy (In One Way or Another)
What is one doing when one is “doing philosophy”? What, indeed, have I been doing, first as student and then as teacher of philosophy, during the greater part of my life? One might think that there must be something wrong if, looking back, I now find it difficult to provide a ready and straightforward answer to such a question. Yet the question itself is not after all as straightforward as might first appear. In what follows, I try to explore some of its assorted complications in the hope that, in so doing, I may provide some sort of ostensive (and characteristically reflexive) exemplification of what “doing philosophy” may involve.
So what sort of activities may count as “doing philosophy”? And how might this question relate to the probably more familiar “What on earth is philosophy?” “Doing philosophy,” of course, is not to be understood as referring to just one specific type of activity alone. Gilbert Ryle used to distinguish between what he called simple and complex dispositional terms. To call anyone a smoker, to take one of his own characteristic examples, is to say that he is someone who, from time to time and on an indeterminate number of occasions, indulges in episodes of smoking. If someone is a grocer, on the other hand, this does not and cannot mean that he ever indulges in episodes of grocing, for there is no such specific activity. Grocers deal in such commodities as tea, sugar, butter, cheese etc., and “dealing in a commodity” in turn breaks down into such more specific activities as buying, selling, stocking and so on. This distinction is, evidently, a relative one. We should not seriously expect complex dispositional or activity terms to be eventually analysable out into sets of atomic or basic actions. And the prima facie simple act of smoking can itself, of course, be instantiated in a whole number of different ways: in smoking cigars rather than cigarettes; and, if cigarettes, in smoking one brand rather than another, in inhaling or not inhaling; and, if inhaling, in doing so more or less deeply and so on and so on. No matter. That a distinction cannot be made hard and fast on its margins does not mean that there is no worthwhile distinction to be made. And while the description “giving a philosophy lecture” may cover a wide variety of performances in a wide variety of different circumstances, it is clear that the giving of a lecture is only one way of doing philosophy – if indeed it is always to be counted as such – to be set alongside such other activities as reading books of philosophy, writing papers or books, giving or attending tutorials, taking part in meetings of philosophical societies, discussing philosophical problems with others and even, no doubt, just thinking about such problems.
It is, of course, a commonplace that in performing any one given type of action, one is ipso facto also performing an in principle indefinite number of others, of not all of which one may or even in principle could be aware. This is simply to say that anything that anyone does could quite properly be brought under an in principle indefinite number of different descriptions, including some whose conceptualisation might not be available in the language, let alone the consciousness, of the agent himself or herself. In speaking to you now about what I take to be a philosophical issue in what certainly presents itself as a philosophical context, I may – hopefully – be interesting or, on the other hand, boring you, making a fool of myself, speaking audibly or inaudibly and goodness knows what else besides – including, of course, trying to make a living in the following of a certain sort of career (or, if retired, trying perhaps a little desperately to maintain a certain professional self-image of myself). But I might also, of course, be doing any of these other things in many other contexts than that of presenting an invited paper to a philosophical society or, indeed, in one of “doing philosophy” in any of its range of recognisable instantiations. So here is one central connection between the questions “What is one doing when one is doing philosophy?” and the apparently more direct “What is philosophy?” It would seem that one needs at least some elements of an answer to this latter question if one is to be able to distinguish out that which makes of the writing of a given paper, the giving of a particular tutorial, the puzzling over a certain problem an instance of doing philosophy.
Two other points – questions – that should be noted at this stage in order to make sure that they are not lost sight of. The first is whether there is any other type of activity – any other action-description – which is closely tied to the activity of doing philosophy – so closely linked to the description “doing philosophy” – that, in doing philosophy, any properly self-aware agent should always take account of the implications in his or her given context of those other aspects of his or her combined act as, in effect, an integral part of the philosophical act itself. I think, for example, of the claim, once very widely made and by no means totally abandoned today, that all philosophical activity has ipso facto a political dimension to it, but this is not, no doubt, the only possible example. The other point would seem to be a very different one. The natural translation of the English verb to do would, in many other languages, be in terms of a verb which, when translated back into English, broadly covers both to do and to make: the French faire, the German machen, the Chinese tsuo, the Malay bikin and so on. It seems worth asking what difference, if any, it might make to our English-language understanding of our question if we asked instead “What is one making when one is making philosophy?”
In a contribution to a conference on “The Crisis in Analytic Philosophy,” I expressed my view of the nature of the overall philosophical enterprise as being “rooted in the endeavour to achieve what may be called a higher-order understanding of whatever the situation or activity in which one may be involved or engaged, both at the most general level of the human situation as such and at the unendingly varied more specific levels at which we may be engaged in one form of activity or another. This understanding”, I added, “may be achieved and communicated either through the deployment of explicitly formulated logical argument or through persuading people – who may be the philosophers concerned themselves – to see things in some appropriate new light; or through some combination of the two.”1
As general formulations of this sort go, this is one that I should be prepared to stick with – except that I should certainly have added (and do hereby so add) a reference to the importance of a philosophical (i.e. reflexive) understanding of what one may take the proper nature of understanding to be. My formulation was intended to capture the peculiarly reflexive nature of the philosophical enterprise while leaving appropriately open for debate and inevitable disagreement the crucial (and no doubt controversial) question of that in which understanding may or should be understood to consist. In one view, that of the philosophical tradition into which I was myself first inducted as a student, one achieves full understanding only when one is able to put into explicit propositional or cognitive form one’s grasp of whatever it may be that one seeks to understand. If one cannot say it to oneself in a form susceptible to justification by valid and validatable argument and to being acknowledged as recognisably true, then, according to this view, one cannot claim properly to have understood it. The language of understanding is thus to be seen as the language of explicit rational argument and exposition. What one has understood will be in principle communicable to others; one’s own understanding is then testable in the light of such arguments as others in turn may produce. In seeking understanding of what one may be doing when engaged in, say, physics or history or mathematics, one is doing philosophy of mathematics, history or philosophy, and, if one manages to do so successfully, one is “making” a contribution to a certain body of knowledge: that is to say, to philosophy. (One cannot be said to know that which one has not properly understood.) To do philosophy in accordance with this view of what understanding consists in is, then, to participate in the construction of a body of reflexive knowledge, a body of knowledge to which it is proper to give the name of philosophy. Naturally, a great deal of this activity will consist in the probing and criticism of what have been presented as possible contributions to this body by others, including, of course, such contributions as one may have proposed oneself, and so many of the conclusions put forward as the result of such work may appear to be of an essentially negative nature. To do philosophy in this way is, broadly speaking, to think and to work within the great classical tradition, of which, no doubt, analytic philosophy is one fairly directly derivative branch.
But this is not, of course, the only possible view of what it is to achieve understanding. There are at least three other main views, though I certainly would not claim this list to be in any way exhaustive. They are:
- There is a view of understanding which sees it as consisting in “seeing something aright” or “in seeing it in a way that makes perfect sense.” It is to be noted that these two metaphors of vision do not necessarily amount to the same thing. Two different people may “see” something in two quite different and even frankly incompatible lights, each of which make to them apparently perfect sense.2 A third person may see the “same” situation in a way that enables him at the same time to see how it is possible for it to represent itself in two such incompatible yet sense-making ways to different observers or participants; this third person may claim indeed that to see this, too, is itself an indispensable part of seeing the whole matter aright.3 There is also the possible (if naturally disputable) case of someone claiming somehow to “see” the limits of articulatable understanding, the limits, indeed, to any possibility of making the kind of perfect sense that can be put into clearly stateable propositional form and communicated as such.
- There is the view according to which intellectual understanding is only one part of a full or genuine understanding. This, it is claimed, can only come with an understanding both rooted and manifested in one’s whole (integrated) being – that is to say that, as well as being intellectual, it must comprise also its affective, bodily, behavioural aspects; indeed, the intellectual component might play only a comparatively minor or auxiliary role. There are those who will say that this is a more characteristically Eastern or Asian view of what understanding consists in: typical, for instance, or so I understand, of at least certain varieties of Buddhism. However, it would also seem to have certain clear affinities with the old Socratic doctrine according to which virtue is knowledge or, again, with a more practice-orientated view which takes understanding to be shown in the capacity to do things aright – a view which can be extended so as to cover, at least in appearance, the ability to do and say the right things in such matters as the exposition of theories or the running through of calculations.4
- Another view of understanding is that it is essentially a matter of being able to place that which is to be understood in a context of intelligibility. This may be thought of in terms of a general fit or gestalt, as when one appreciates how things fit together as in some complex jigsaw puzzle. More specifically, and very importantly, it may be “seen” as a matter of placing that which is to be understood within the context of an historical tradition – which, so far as the philosopher (rather than, for example, the historian) is concerned is likely to involve situating himself or herself – reflexively once again – within the tradition in question.
Clearly, each of these different views or forms of understanding may be so interpreted, their characteristic vocabularies so extended, as to appear, at least to some varying extent, to cover or to take account of the others. Indeed their various overlaps may go some way beyond mere appearance. The point of immediate interest, however, lies in the differences that they may make to our understanding of what might be the “essentially” or – to put it less provocatively, perhaps – the characteristically philosophical aspect of all the diverse other things that one might also be doing at the same time as and by virtue of “doing philosophy.”
I have already suggested that on the classical or neo-classical analytic view of the matter, to do philosophy may be seen as making oneself acquainted with, pondering over, passing on, subjecting to scrutiny some would-be contribution to a body of rationally articulated and assessable body of reflexive knowledge – or, centrally, as attempting to make one’s own contribution to such a body. Where understanding is taken to be essentially a matter of seeing things aright or of seeing things as they are, any possible transition to an idiom of “making” is likely to prove less plausible and less helpful. If, on such a view, it is going to make sense to speak of the philosopher as making anything at all, the metaphor of sight would seem to suggest that the object to be made must be some sort of picture. But just how, or in what form, might such a picture be instantiated? As something that one might actually – or, as it were, physically – see? The suggestion has only to be made for its implausibilities to become apparent. The “normal” object of philosophical production is, of course, a text of some sort or another – though it is also possible to speak of producing disciples or, in a teaching institution, pupils or students. Texts may, of course, include pictorial elements of a variety of sorts or, in certain cases, may themselves be configured in some pictorially relevant way. But – the case hardly needs to be argued – the understanding of a text is typically very unlike the understanding that one may have of what a picture may represent or perhaps signify in some other, non-representative way.
Insofar as philosophers may be engaged in trying to influence, probably in a new direction, the way in which they themselves and/or others may understand something by seeing it in an appropriate light, they are not so much trying to make anything – be it an argument or a contribution to propositionally expressible knowledge, still less a picture in any but a metaphorical sense – as trying to act on potential seers or beholders themselves. They may do this by suggesting novel analogies, by evoking unexpected comparisons or, for example, by a use of language apt to call to mind a range of associations normally belonging to some quite different context. They may also, of course, make use of argument sequences, put together not so much as contributing to the validation of some overall assertible thesis, but rather as devices designed to divert the attention from its more habitual focus, as a way of leading us by way of rational argument to a reasoned acceptance of what nevertheless cannot be stated as a fully coherent rational conclusion. So on this view, to do philosophy is, very broadly speaking, to try and get into a position from which to see the world or that part or aspect of it with which one may be more particularly concerned, in the most appropriate or illuminating way and to so work on others as to help them to see it likewise – by whatever discursive or “literary” means may be best adapted to such an end.
Wittgenstein is, I suppose, one obvious example of a philosopher generally regarded by analytic philosophers as belonging to their own tradition who, in his second phase at any rate, sought to change his readers’ or his listeners’ mindsets by the use of a whole range of different imaginative devices. But so, in a different tradition, did Heidegger.5 Derrida, too, may be taken as an example of one who seeks to exhibit – to cause us to see – the limits within which rational understanding is constrained, limits which lie within the very nature of its own procedures. Before them, Kant, of course, set out to show us how our own powers of reason lead us, by virtue of what he called the Dialectic of Reason, to construct apparently irrefutable lines of argument which nevertheless end up by running into inevitable collision with each other. What has one understood when one has understood such an apparently self-contradictory demonstration? In the special context of moral understanding, Kant summed up the situation this way in the famous penultimate sentence of his Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals:
While we do not comprehend the practical unconditional necessity of the moral imperative, we yet comprehend its incomprehensibility, which is all that can be fairly demanded of a philosophy which strives to carry its principles up to the very limit of human reason.
(Kant 1948, 131)
What of those who do philosophy in the conviction that intellectual understanding is only one part of a full or genuine understanding, something which can involve one’s whole (integrated) being, including most notably its affective, bodily and behavioural dimensions, and for whom a proper understanding of the “real” nature of the situation or activity with which one is concerned ipso facto carries with it an understanding of how to deal with or to face up to it? Such a philosopher may indeed be thought of in the ancient traditional way as a lover of or seeker after wisdom – after wisdom rather than, let us say, of knowledge thought of as consisting in the acquisition of great learning and scholarship. Indeed, a man may know a great many things and be a master of erudition while nevertheless living his life in an evidently foolish or even morally unacceptable manner. So, if to gain understanding is a matter of acquiring wisdom, the philosophical enterprise is to be thought of as a search for how one should live – as the pursuit, one might say, of moral or practical rather than of theoretical truth.
It goes without saying that this way of thinking of philosophy is far removed from the dominant contemporary and broadly speaking Anglo-Saxon version at least of the Western tradition of professional scholarship. The overwhelming majority of contemporary professional philosophers – in Western or Western-influenced contexts, at any rate – would take it to be evidently possible to be a first-rate philosophical scholar and at the same time a most unsatisfactory human being and, conversely, to be a morally excellent person and yet entirely innocent of philosophy. And yet … there remain traces, perhaps, within the thought of certain philosophers of this tradition of an older view of the connection between true knowledge and right action. I think, for example, of my old departmental head in my first post as a member of the department of moral and political philosophy at what was then still the University College of North Staffordshire (later to become the University of Keele), Professor Ernest Teale – not, it has to be said, one of the best known or most typical British philosophers of his generation, but for all that no mean scholar in his own way. Teale was convinced that once one had properly understood what was involved in a view of the world that was right or true (such, of course, as he took his own view to be), one could not but adopt it as one’s own. Failure so to adopt it must therefore be a sure sign either that one had not fully understood it after all or that one must be perverse to the point of near wickedness. Since he clearly did not take me to be either blockheaded or wicked, he was accordingly much perplexed by the fact that, while I seemed to be able to expound his views to students unable to follow his own exposition of them much more effectively than he could manage to do himself – in terms, moreover, which he readily acknowledged were wholly faithful to them – I nevertheless continued to argue my dissent from them.
A better-known example of the persistence into modern times of the ancient conviction that virtue is knowledge is to be found in the philosophy of R. M. Hare, who was in his day the philosopher more than any other responsible for restoring to moral philosophy the respectability of the logical analysis of argument structures. Here I refer, of course, to analytic moral philosophy, though, truth to tell, there was at the time – Hare’s The Language of Morals was published in 1952 – very little other. (How and why this should have been so is, of course, another story.) In that book – his first of three – Hare made ...
