Western Philosophy Made Easy

A Personal Search for Meaning

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

Contents

Background

The principal reason why people begin to read books on Philosophy is that they are deeply dissatisfied with their lives. They have discovered that worldly pleasures do not bring happiness and they start to think about meaning and purpose. They may consider looking for answers in either religion or philosophy. Which they choose depends upon their upbringing and education. If parents have told them that there is a god (or gods), who 'watches over' the world and our own lives (whether or not there is any 'interference' in these), then he or she may well turn to their faith for some explanation and guidance. If not (or if any such ideas have been overturned by independent consideration) then they must have recourse to their own thought and intellect, guided by those who have gone through this process before and recorded their conclusions in books.

I had a very intensive education. For seven years, I attended a school that was a significant distance from home, so that, each day, I had a three-hour return journey, plus a couple of hours of homework, in addition to the school day itself. I did not have time (or opportunity) for any 'worldly pleasures.' University provided plenty of opportunities, of course, but I had never acquired the social skills to take advantage of them. By the time I began work, I was pretty dissatisfied with life and ripe for beginning my own 'search for meaning.'

This began in earnest when I began attending the School of Economic Science (SES) in London, in response to the 'Course of Philosophy' lectures that they advertised on the Underground. I stayed there for a couple of years until they wanted me to part with a week's salary to be initiated into Transcendental Meditation. But at that time, they were still mainly influenced by the Eastern mystic Ouspensky, and their teaching was a bit weird to say the least, scarcely representative of Western philosophy.

After a break to get married, have a child, get divorced and remarry, I returned to SES in the mid-1980s, since this was still the only source I had found which gave some slight promise of providing answers to my 'angst.' I stayed until around 1998, by which time I had been a tutor with the school for a number of years.

After rejoining SES, I made a number of attempts to discover the source of their teaching. I looked in bookstores and libraries and searched philosophy books. It was this process that provided the background knowledge presented in this book. But, despite my energetic searching, it was quite a few years before I actually discovered the main influence for the school's teaching. It was the non-dual, Hindu philosophy of Advaita Vedanta. But I am getting ahead of myself. First – the subject of this book – I want to look at the extent to which Western philosophers of the past two thousand plus years have provided guidance as to how to live, together with justification for such guidance (in the form of meaning and purpose) and some reasoned presentation of the nature of reality.

What Western Philosophers Have Said

Philosophers used not to limit their investigation to those areas that we now think of as philosophy. Aristotle for example wrote books on physics, biology, mathematics, psychology, politics and meteorology, to mention just a few. Their interests ranged across the entire spectrum of human endeavor. It should not be too surprising, then, to find that many philosophers do not seem specifically to have addressed the questions that concern those individuals trying to make sense of their lives – there were simply too many other diverting subjects to investigate. Nevertheless, since the question of what we ought to do in order to achieve fulfillment and happiness is rather more important than most, it is perhaps surprising that it seems so difficult to discover clear guidance from this intellectual elite.

What follows is a very brief overview of the subject from the early Greeks up to the modern day, in a strictly nonacademic presentation (with many of the usual anecdotal comments!). I have tried to pick out any ideas that relate in some degree to our search for meaning. Many philosophers are much better known for their work in other areas and I have said little or nothing about them. I am not philosophically educated and my knowledge of history is atrocious. If you want to learn about the history of Western philosophy, there are many, excellent, readable books available (even if few people actually read them!). The questions that interest me are those that must have existed ever since man first looked further than where his next meal was coming from. I will be concluding that the answers provided by a particular Eastern philosophy are far more pertinent and helpful but it would be presumptuous, to say the least, to suggest that the answers given by that philosophy are in some way more complete, accurate or 'true' than those provided by Western philosophers without at least being aware of the nature of what these philosophers have said.

Philosophical Counseling

Philosophical Counseling is a relatively new discipline that has sprung up to serve those who are suffering from problems that are believed to have been caused by lack of knowledge or understanding rather than because they are mentally disturbed. They need informed advice rather than medical treatment. Once, such people might have visited their priest, local vicar or village elder. Until the advent of philosophical counselors, there were few options. In the latter part of the twentieth century, it became fashionable to visit a psychotherapist, if one could afford it. At the cheaper end of the market, there were always 'agony aunts' and fortune-tellers. The most likely option, however, was simply to talk things over with one's parents or with friends down at the pub. It seems that, in the past, all of those who might have provided this sort of counseling service would have been likely to be biased in some way. Perhaps they were attached to a specific religion or to some other system of belief or simply to their own habits of thought, acquired through their particular upbringing and experience.

There are usually experts available for consultation on the more mundane aspects of life, such as how to cope with financial problems, sue or divorce someone and so on. And there are those who can help with serious illness or bereavement. But when it comes to questions about who we really are and what we ought to do with our lives, it seems we just have to sort them out for ourselves. Philosophical Counseling aims to change that by providing independent advice founded upon knowledge accumulated by the best thinkers of the past few thousand years.

One of the principal aims of Philosophy, after all, must be to discover how to live one's life optimally, whether or not it actually claims that there is a purpose as such. Trained in logic and the application of reason to problems, philosophers are ideally placed to be able to resolve personal conflicts, clarify contradicting values and generally enable one to put things into perspective and establish a course of action. In a sense, the problem could be described as a disease of the intellect, with the philosopher, skilled in this domain, able to establish the symptoms through discussion, diagnose the underlying problem of misunderstanding and provide a remedy by restating the difficulty, clarifying terms and indicating how the situation might be resolved – what the twentieth century philosopher Wittgenstein called "untying the knots in our thinking."

Everyone knows that talking over their problems with an uninvolved friend can help shed light on the issues and show possible ways forward to resolution. Friends are not usually trained in disciplines such as logic and ethics, however, so such help is somewhat haphazard. If help is not available in the early stages, worry may lead to stress or breakdown and then the only recourse is to psychiatric help. Philosophical counseling aims to provide help in the early stages, while one's mind is still actively seeking solutions rather than resorting to despair and resignation. And, if your problems relate to discovering a meaning in life, differentiating between 'pleasant' and 'good' or deciding whether your ambitions are the 'right' ones, then you definitely need a philosopher. In this sense, then, this book could be regarded as a preliminary, overview 'counseling' session.

Branches of Philosophy

There are many branches of philosophy. Epistemology is all about knowledge – types of knowledge, objects and sources of knowledge, knowledge and certainty, belief, doubt, causation and so on – a huge subject in its own right. Some philosophers restrict their studies to aspects of this, such as the Empiricists, who believe that our knowledge is derived from the senses, or the Rationalists who argue that we can reason our way to new knowledge that was not previously directly accessible. Logic is a realm in its own right, as is the philosophy of language or political philosophy. The Philosophy of mind is another area to which people devote their lives and one which has much popular appeal today.

Ethics and moral philosophy is yet another very large branch and the one that looks as though it ought to be the most relevant to our lives. A teacher will tell you that it is important for you to listen to all that she says, to read and study in order, ultimately, to pass your exams. But then this is her job and both of you are functioning within the context of a society that automatically values these things. But is education good in itself? Why should learning about a particular subject (that in all probability will be of no use to you for the rest of your life) be something on which you should expend effort? The teacher presupposes that education is a good thing; ethics allows you to question this.

Not all philosophers who have written on the subject of ethics have specifically asked the question of what we ought to do with our lives. Concentrating more on the purpose of morality itself, they have ended up considering questions such as the ideal society, how people can live together optimally and so on, leaving our personal motivations and objectives to our own individual conscience. And this is understandable to some extent. After all, why should I listen to someone else telling me how I ought to act in order to make my life feel fulfilled? The answer is that it is likely that someone who has deeply investigated such questions may just have thought of aspects that you haven't considered and may have reached conclusions that you will find helpful. If the serious consideration of such questions requires that we also look into all of these subjects, then perhaps we are perfectly justified in seeking the guidance of experts.

So, even within the limited realm of what we now call philosophy, it is clear that it would not be possible for anyone to address all of these subjects in other than a cursory manner and it is inevitable that interests will tend in a specific direction. Here, then, is a further reason why many of the major philosophers do not seem to have anything particularly helpful to say to someone looking for personal advice. (A proviso needs to be given at this point that it is quite possible that relevant things were said by them but outside of my hearing!) Conversely just because a topic does not seem directly relevant, it should not be assumed that we can ignore it. It would not be reasonable to suppose that something so fundamental as the purpose of our life could be studied in isolation. Take the question 'What should I do?', for example. We need to investigate what we mean by 'I' – who am I exactly? Until we feel that we know the answer to this, the original question is not meaningful. We need to ask about the nature of the world in which we are proposing to act. We need to be sure that we are able to choose our course of action, otherwise the original question is somewhat irrelevant, and we need to know something about what it means to act. These are all questions of Metaphysics (meaning those things that come after physics). And we do need to know a little about what it means to 'know' anything and the means by which we find things out. All of these seem to be required before we can begin to ask about subjects such as 'good' (and 'God') and about the reasons for acting in one way rather than another. So it does look as if a question about one major aspect of our life will soon draw in many of the other questions of philosophy, like it or not.

Metaphysics, as the study of the questions of 'life, the universe and everything' is known, fell out of vogue in the twentieth century, when the attitude arose that most of what had previously been thought to be intransigent problems were not really problems at all but arose through our inability to formulate the problem correctly. Once we used language properly, it was argued, the difficulties would disappear. Many recent philosophers have not even addressed the sort of fundamental questions that arise for the 'seeker of truth.' In this respect there is a similarity with science. There was a time when an enquiring mind could range over the entire domain of what is now thought of as 'science', becoming expert in many areas and making new discoveries. The amount of material that was written down and accepted as proven was minimal. Over the past few centuries, the rate of investigation and discovery has accelerated and it is now possible to conduct novel research in only a tiny area of specialization. In the 3rd century BC, Aristotle's multi-disciplined enquiries have already been noted. By the 20th century, most of the philosophy in England was devoted to analyzing the meanings of sentences!

Many philosophical ideas seem abstruse and intellectual and it is not surprising that a metaphysician has been described as "a man who goes into a dark cellar at midnight, without a light, looking for a black cat that is not there." But clearly, if you become aware of some of these ideas and believe them, then it does become necessary to modify your life accordingly, if you are not to feel that you are missing the point completely. More importantly, how can you become aware of them if you do not make the effort to find out? You owe it to yourself to make some effort to establish what has been discovered or conjectured by those who have devoted their lives to such investigations. If you fail to do this now, then how may you feel in later life when 'the end' is getting nearer and you no longer have the time to make the enquiry?

The name given to the branch of Philosophy that deals with judgments about the (nonmoral) 'values' of things is called 'Axiology.' It is usually regarded as a branch of Ethics, which itself is more generally concerned with what we ought to do or not do. Once you ask what you ought to do, you need to consider how this might affect others, whether it is moral or just, if it is actually possible to answer the question and how we could know that it was the right answer in any objective sense. Clearly, acting in such a way as to help others is not necessarily going to make our own lives easier or more pleasurable. Presuming that the main reason for acting at all is the pursuance of happiness, we are obliged to ask what that word actually means. We would tend to claim that it was not possible to be truly happy in conditions of poverty or oppression so that politics have to be taken into consideration. If we think that there might be some purpose to our existence or even an afterlife and/or a God overlooking our activities, then we will have to take into account metaphysical considerations. It all becomes very complicated!

Key Philosophers

Pre-Socratic Philosophers

There are a number of these whose names you will still encounter, some of whose ideas are able to influence philosophers two millennia later. Understandably, not much remains of their writings from five or six centuries BC. Most were interested in the more metaphysical aspects, though since this differentiation had not yet been made, they probably considered that their subject was rather 'natural science.' "What is the nature of the universe?" they asked. The answer was that they were mostly materialists – they believed that it was made of matter rather than mind or spirit. But they all believed that the most important thing that we could do with our lives was to study philosophy ... but then they would, wouldn't they?