Philosophy afresh

When I first came to know that philosophy meant “love of knowledge,” I thought that there were no limits to the endless wealth of knowledge. But, as soon as I was suggested by my benevolent super-senior to read Ethics and Limits of Philosophy by a famous British philosopher, Bernard Williams, I was puzzled to find that they were indeed some limits. When I began reading the book, it abundantly became clear that my humanistic foundations were in for tsunami. Or rather, the bedrock of my negligible philosophical knowledge was about to be reshaped.

So, here’s my reading of the first chapter: Socrates’ Question

Beginning with the fundamental Socratic question as to how one should live, Williams alludes to his emphasis on the moral philosophy that would be expounded in the coming pages. Whether philosophy is a subject in itself that can deal with a variety of questions of general concern or it must be a strictly disciplined line of inquiry taking into account the range of philosophical practices questioned. Socrates had a free mind of thinking whereas his disciple, Plato used even mathematics to study moral philosophy. By using this standard method of presenting an argument, Williams then defines what any line of inquiry must be:

What makes an inquiry a philosophical one is reflective generality and a style of argument that claims to be rationally persuasive.

Then, Williams makes a crucial point that I never thought about: our existence now is quite different from the Socrates’ condition. The crucial difference being the nature of human reflection. Whenever the Socratic lens magnified philosophy, there was one exclusively repeating feature: meticulous reflection about everything. Whereas, Williams suggests that modern life is so “pervasively reflective and self-consciousness is so basic” to modern institutions that these qualities cannot distinguish philosophy from other activities that have an aura and meaning of their own. Williams makes a good point:

Philosophy in the modern world cannot make any special claim to reflectiveness, though it maybe able to make a special use of it.

One such special use can be seen in the recent splurge of books that interfuse movies with philosophical questions. Seems to reflect what the Harvard philosopher Alfred North Whitehead defined creativity as: “transformation of disjunctive diversities into conjunctive unities.”

Blending a commercial enterprise like cinema with a philosophical enterprise like ontology is in fact a worthwhile innovative transformation. William Irwin is the editor of one such book-series and one among those books is The Matrix and Philosophy. This book analyses various philosophical questions that make a “special use” of colorful reflections over the Movie’s unintentional musings on what reality is and whether the reality is an illusion. Even Descartes is dragged into this ambit.

The real purpose of such an exercise can be debated. But, with a thick cloud of cultural studies enveloping every possible frontier of human life, it is a healthy thing to happen: so that the discipline can be fenced properly and its area of encroachment perfectly demarcated.

Back to the text now…

So, after transporting us urgently from Socratic age to modern world by spotting the difference in the use of our reflective faculty, Williams hints that the book would provide a skeptical view of morality:

What the aims of moral philosophy should be depends on its results.

Mulling over various general questions that pose everyday challenges to human conduct, Williams poses two important questions:

What must “philosophical reflection” involve in answering various general pragmatic questions and to ask what powers of the mind and what forms of knowledge might be called upon it.

Besides, what is the place of philosophy in such meticulous answer-searching sessions?

Williams suggests that at the start-line of the lifelong run of rummaging for answers stands Socrates posing his questions on good life. Bernard’s speculative analysis merits attention: The Socrates’ question is “better than” questions like “What is our duty?” or “How we may be good” because these questions “take too much for granted.” But, he says in a balanced voice, the Socrates’ question too could take something for granted.

In the Socrates’ question: how should one live, the use of word “one” seems to presume that this question is equally applicable to anyone and the humanity at large. Moreover, Williams seems to choose this question at the starting-point because it doesn’t immediately address the everyday questions of life like “What shall I do?” the question is about the “manner of life” itself. Likewise, what the question tends to ask is not that “what life morally ought to live?” but address the life as a whole.

Williams points that this mode of questioning was disliked by some philosophers because it brings in the ambiguity of moral and non-moral sense into it. Williams further adds that this is a mistake because:

The analysis of meanings does not require “moral” and “non-moral” as categories of meaning

When someone’s called a “good” man, a question immediately comes up: whether the speaker meant that he was “morally” good or that he was good to do some profession. A variety of interpretations doesn’t result in a “moral sense of good” but just complicates the matter further. Denominations like moral cannot be indiscriminately applied to every context; rather, even before using such tokens, an extensive review of the interpretations must be constantly done.

So, what are the alternatives and does Williams define or escape the “ethical” comes in the next post…

[Source: Ethics and Limits of Moral Philosophy: Fontana Masterguides {Ed. Frank Kermode}, 1985]