An Introduction to Philosophy

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Science is much practiced at pulling the rug out from under people’s feet. One minute people were getting on with their lives secure in their belief that God created the world in seven days, the next science caused mayhem and disturbance by insisting that religion was wrong: the Earth had, in fact, taken over 4.5 million years to form. Science further de-railed people’s beliefs with Darwin’s announcement that, no, Man was not created in God’s image but had actually descended from the apes.

(Before anyone starts wittering on about historical accuracy, about factual details, let me make it clear here: this is not about INESSENTIAL facts, not about recording every last unnecessary detail. This is not a tome. It is a short essay which offers the distilled essence of garnered knowledge and understanding.)

The list of rug pulling examples could go on and on. The image that comes to mind is that of the school pupil, the lout, intent on making trouble. The teacher has finally settled the class down, pupils are working calmly and well, and that is the lout’s cue to stir things up, to create discord and conflict, to destabilize and de-rail. The last thing the lout wants to see is a settled, stable, secure environment, the sort of environment that allows people to go about their own business undisturbed and productively. And that is not the half of it. What the lout is REALLY about is teasing and getting up people’s noses.

This lout is science. But the apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree. This lout is also its daddy, Philosophy. And Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy beautifully lays out the development of this loutish behaviour in Philosophy.

Take the religions of the Ancient Greeks. The worship of Bacchus involved physical intoxication. Then along came the Orphics who declared that mental, not physical, intoxication was the required form of worship.

As to the Greek philosophers……

…….Thales declared that everything is made of water. “Oh no it isn’t,” said Anaximander. His claim was that all things are made from a single, primal substance. Anaximenes, on the other hand, decided that both his predecessors were wrong: everything is made of air. Heraclitus? He claimed that everything is made from fire. He also claimed that the world is in a constant state of flux. No prizes, then, for guessing that the next one to come along, Parmenides, contradicted Heraclitus: he said that nothing changes.

So, one minute everything is made of water, the next it is made of air then fire. Running out of elements to choose from, Empedocles opted for a sort of synthesis of all the previous ideas: everything is made of water, air, fire and earth. He claimed that the elements were combined by Love and separated by Strife — which strikes me as a sort of synthesis of the theory that the world is in a constant state of flux with its antithesis, that nothing changes. Anaxagoras didn’t directly de-rail the 4 elements theory i.e everything is made of water, air, fire and earth. But everything is infinitely divisible, he claimed. Then came the Atomists. Forget fire, air, earth, water and all that rubbish. Everything is made of atoms. And, wouldn’t you know it, atoms are not infinitely divisible, so UP YOURS, ANAXAGORAS!!!

Do I really need to go on? I mean, how can anyone take this nonsense seriously? But just in case you still do……….

…………enter Socrates. His speciality was the Socratic Dialogue i.e. the practice of publicly humiliating people using logic and argument.

Then we come to Socrates’ pupil Plato, and specifically to Plato’s Republic and his construction of an ideal commonwealth, his Utopia.

Plato’s Utopia had 3 castes or classes of people. The superior class, the “guardians”, i.e. the rulers, of this state are……. wait for it ………. PHILOSOPHERS!!! (Now isn’t that a surprise?!!) In other words, Plato’s Utopia was just an excuse for him to lord it over everyone else and, more importantly, to really get up their noses. To put it another way, Plato was a power addict. Thus his Utopia has rigid censorship with respect to literature, music and just about everything else. In fact, this is a world in which people will have absolutely no freedom to think or speak what they want or do what they want or live the way they want. It is a state in which Plato can exercise his addiction to the drug power by micro-managing people’s lives right down to what they may or may not eat — no fish and only roasted meat — and even, if I know power addicts, right down to when they are permitted a toilet break. (Plato’s Utopia is the world of the film Shawshank Redemption. When Red (Morgan Freeman) finally gets his parole, he is set to work as a supermarket packer. Red’s new boss gets fed up being asked b y Red for toilet breaks and tells Red to take them without asking. But Red explains to the viewer that he has been in prison so long, is so used to a rigidly controlled life, that as a free man he “can’t squeeze a drop” unless someone gives him permission.)

If you can imagine a society that you would want to live in LESS than Plato’s Utopia, then I’d like to know about it, because I can’t. And that’s because that’s the way Plato wanted it. He wasn’t actually stupid enough to believe what he was saying himself. He was a lout. He wanted to get up people’s noses. And that is why he could appear to be stupid enough to design a Hell and call it a Utopia.

So Plato was nothing more than a power addict who wanted to feed his addiction by exercising complete control over other people’s lives. He was a lout who wanted to tease and get up people’s noses. And this man is taken seriously? Plato is considered a Great Man? This man’s ideas, his philosophy, is the basis of modern western society? Our society is Plato’s heir???

(If you don’t smell a whole army of rats by now then you need a check-up from the neck up!)

What Russell’s history illustrates, then, is as much the history of power addiction as philosophy. One expression of power addiction is competitiveness. Competition is not about winning. The aim of a competitive person is to DEFEAT his competitors. One way of defeating the competition is to destabilise, is to disturb, is to pull the rug out from under people’s feet. (Whereas Science de-stabilizes with ever more interpretations of ever more facts, the weapon of Philosophy is reason and logic, a tool which supplies a counter-argument for every argument and therefore solves nothing.) This is what the Greek philosophers were about. This is what drives philosophy. Philosophy is no more about seeking Truth than is its son, Science.

We leap now to the modern world. Where is philosophy now? Have the Great Problems been solved? Have the Great Questions been answered? Of course not! What did I say at the beginning? Philosophers are louts whose aim is to tease, to get up people’s noses and to disturb. If they were to give the final answers to these Great Questions, they would be going completely against their own purpose. People could heave a great sigh of relief and sit back and put their feet up and say: “Well, that’s it then. Thank the Lord it’s all been finally settled. Now we can get on with the business of living.” Well, that’s the last thing the louts want to hear, so they say now that these Great Questions cannot be answered (so no sitting down and putting your feet up); they say now that the questions are more important than the answers. Ah yes, now they can tease and torment us by questioning everything we thought had been settled and proving that the opposite is always true. The louts have made a heaven for themselves in Philosophy and a Hell for the rest of us illogical, ignorant dummies.

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So what you are saying is that despite all that these louts profess,

…It just keeps getting bigger.

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several points. First of all, History of Western Philosophy? really? You got to take that book
with a serious grain of salt. He is really wrong about several aspects, Nietzsche and Spinoza,
for example and he shortchanges aspects like pre-socratic philosophy. Russell is rather
a heavy handed writer of philosophy. Use his book along with other general books on the
history of philosophy. these other books tend to correct his mistakes. Every philosopher see
philosophy through a prism of their own beliefs and Russell is no different. He is interested
in power and sees philosophy through that prism. Many philosophers see philosophy through a
different prism and thus their philosophy looks different. The greatest philosopher of all,
Socrates, saw philosophy through a different prism and his philosophy was not about power,
but self-knowledge.

Kropotkin

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First, as to Russell’s history, I have read a few other modern histories. One of the problems that one notices is that the more modern they get, the more incomprehensible. Philosophy is a skill and so is writing its history. If modern writers sound better than their predecessors, it is because they have had time to upgrade the skill levels and to defend themselves against criticisms. But like I say, they just SOUND better, but underneath things are getting worse and worse. Our modern world is SO impressed by skill. Unfortunately skill is easy and trivial and leads to nothing worth anything, for the most part. In the case of philosophy the devotion to developing skills is at the expense of understanding. The same can be said for mathematicians, scientists, musicians, artists and indeed any other high flier of the modern world.

Let’s take mathematicians: mathematics is a language. Languages are about MEANING. Mathematicians concern themselves exclusively, to all intents and purposes, with the rules of the game. They thus turn mathematics from a language into a meaningless game. The fact is that you should start from an understanding of the MEANING of mathematical statements. One then judges the truth/value or whatever of that statement. If one can “prove” by manipulation of statements according to rules and definitions that statements are “true” or “false”, that is secondary to the determination of truth through understanding the meaning. In other words, mathematics should be treated like any other language. Mathematicians patently obviously do not do this. They patently obviously have no idea that they OUGHT to be doing this.

Essentially one must stand outside philosophy or maths or science or whatever in order to be able to assess it and to see what is going on. If you try to assess philosophy from inside, you’re on to a loser. You are in fact using bad practice. You never judge a thing by its own values and methods.

The greatest philosopher of all, Socrates was a piece of work, he was a very nasty piece of work. I would not liked to have had dealings with him. He used his superior skills to publicly humiliate other people, all the while having the nerve to pretend that it was all for the good of his victim — I’m just being helpful by ridding you of faulty thinking and faulty ideas. I won’t even go into justifying what I say. Anyone who has a scrap of humanity in them can SEE what Socrates was about. The rat!