An outline of philosophy
Source: Victorian Labor College lecture, circa 1970
First published: Labor College Review, 1990-94
Transcription, mark-up: Steve Painter
“Measles, rheumatics, whooping-cough, fevers, agers and lumbagers,” said Mr Squeers, “is all philosophy together; that’s what it is. The heavenly bodies is philosophy, and the earthly bodies is philosophy. If there’s a screw loose in a heavenly body, that’s philosophy; and if there’s a screw loose in an earthly body, that’s philosophy too; or it may be that sometimes there’s a little metaphysics in it, but that’s not often. Philosophy’s the chap for me. If a parent asks a question in the classical commercial, or mathematical line, says I, gravely, ‘Why, sir, in the first place are you a philosopher?’ ‘No, Mr Squeers,’ he says, ‘I ain’t.’ ‘Then sir,’ say I, ‘I am sorry for you, for I shan’t be able to explain it.’ Naturally the parent goes away and wishes he was a philosopher, and, equally naturally, thinks I’m one.”
So says the rascally schoolmaster in Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickelby. And although by no means to be taken as an authority on anything, Mr Squeers comes very near to the mark with his pronouncement on the subject of philosophy. For philosophy is nothing more than the attempt to understand the universe as a whole. There are no bounds to its sphere of interest. It has been termed the mother of sciences.
Philosophy investigates the origin of moral experience, the nature of moral obligation. This branch is termed ethics.
It awakens the mind to appreciation of art, as distinct from the dullness of commercial products. This branch is termed aesthetics.
It inquires into the origin of religion. Is religious experience a process whereby we project for our own comfort the whims of our imagination? Do we in religion find god; or merely create god in our own image? Thus, it is seen that philosophy inquires into a mass of data concerning morals, aesthetics, religious consciousness and scientific discoveries.
The wide bounds in which philosophy interests itself have been expressed by many philosophers, a few of which we will quote:
Prof John Laird, MA, regius professor of moral philosophy at the University of Aberdeen (1924-46) writes:
The specialist, so far as he is a mere specialist, is like the man who cannot see the wood for the trees; he loses sight of the proportion of the whole in the details of his own province. The co-ordination of the sciences, the unification of knowledge, is a task which remains to be undertaken by the philosopher.
C.E.M Joad, BBC broadcaster on philosophy and other matters, states: “Philosophy is the clearing house of sciences.”
Plato said:
The philosopher is the man who insists on seeing things together, who refuses to consider the parts out of relation to the whole whose parts they are: the inexorable foe of crude and premature generalisations from whichever department of investigation happens for the time to be most in evidence.
Karl Marx said philosophy was:
The science of the most universal laws governing the development of nature, human society and thought.
Having read so far, the student could not be blamed for thinking they had missed out on a subject of mass interest and importance and could even be startled and resentful at such ignorance.
No need to worry, however, for although everybody is influenced by philosophical views that they have not thought out by themselves, it is because philosophy has become a specialised job undertaken by trained members of various schools of philosophy. It is now a profession, so one speaks of professional philosophers. As a result, much of the discussions of these schools has become uninteresting and incomprehensible to all outside the professionals and their circle.
The aims of these professional schools of philosophy is to become more and more specialised and more and more remote from the problems likely to interest workers. They consider it a virtue and think they are painstakingly unraveling the truth. But in reality they are obscuring and distorting the truth in a maze of conundrums of their own invention.
A number of these schools of philosophy argue with one another. They elaborate ideas that amount to a more or less direct defence of things as they are. Others know that something is wrong, but advise passive acceptance of social evils by teaching that they flow from the very nature of things and from the imperfections of humankind.
Some express the demand for a change, but sidetrack this into utopian schemes. All of this is for the purpose of providing a force that will operate in the realm of thought to influence acceptance of the capitalist way of life. However remote from the man in the street these schools may be, their teachings nonetheless do not fail to influence him.
Because of this existing state of philosophy the question is often raised: what is the use of philosophy anyway? But this uncritical outlook merely means that one becomes influenced by all kinds of odds and ends of philosophical doctrines emanating from the professional schools.
For it must be remembered that everyone is influenced by philosophy, and where there is no interest, the mind becomes influenced by these secondhand scraps that come their way through the schools, the press, the church, radio and cinema. Having no use for philosophy means accepting the ideas of the dominating class, which in this period means capitalist philosophy.
To be able to solve their own problems, the working class must make use of philosophy. But it can only do this by advancing our understanding of the world, of human society and the basic discoveries of science and the study of progress through the class struggle.
For Karl Marx, philosophy meant not only to know the world but to use such knowledge to change it. Only in this way can philosophy be made to serve the interests of the workers. Against the philosophies of capitalism, Marxism defends the philosophy of socialism — the philosophy of dialectical materialism.
Marxism unlocks the door of philosophy and brings to life the heritage of the past by continuing the tradition of philosophical thought that seeks to achieve a rational comprehension of the material world and its history. It is only by the striving to change the world that we can understand it.
As this introduction shows; those who have no acquaintance with philosophy go through life imprisoned in the prejudices, the preferences and habitual beliefs of the society in which they live. None of the views they hold are based on independent thought. All are the products of the conventions and prejudices of their age. To such a one the world tends to become dull and obvious. Common objects provoke no questions, and unfamiliar possibilities are contemptuously rejected.