On Philosophy

Last night I was reading Edmund Husserl's "Cartesian Meditations" (in English translation). I'm very interested in Phenomenology. I like it a lot more than, for example, Logical Positivism or Linguistic Analysis. Anyway, I find certain epistemological questions fascinating. In the words of Bernard Lonergan, "What am I doing when I'm knowing? Why is doing that knowing? What do I know when I'm doing it?" I seem to remember that Kant concluded that we can only really know the "phenomena" or appearances of the world, and never the "noumena," the things in themselves or, if my memory is correct, he used the term "ding an sich."

Other philosophers before and after Kant would disagree with this conclusion. I know that common sense contradicts Kant, but once you start asking certain questions it becomes clear that things are much more complicated than they first appear. Many people I know aren't even aware of these questions, think that philosophy is a waste of time, and that anybody who studies philosophy rather than something more practical such as business or engineering will end up frying hamburgers for people who have real jobs. Some of the people I know who have studied philosophy think that if there are answers to these questions, we'll never find them, so there's no point in trying.

I disagree with that. It was the Greeks who started asking these questions (in the West), around 2,500 years ago. Now, if you look at less complicated questions, such as certain mathematical problems - which are by no means easy - some of the time it takes hundreds of years for somebody to prove just one theorem. Compared to mathematics, philosophy can be much more difficult, especially since the you have to do it in ordinary human language, rather than the much more precise language of mathematics. In my view there are very few ambiguities in mathematical symbolism compared to, say, Latin, Greek, Italian, Spanish or English. So for the difficulty of the problems, I don't think 2,500 years is a long time at all. Even if we never do answer the big philosophical questions, I think the effort is worth it.

I'll give a few examples which should illustrate why I think philosophy is important. The first is from history. Everyone knows who the Nazis were. Most people who aren't Nazis themselves think that the Nazis were simply evil and/or insane. History books point to economic, political, and historical reasons for the rise of the National Socialist German Workers' Party. What's most often overlooked is the influence of philosophy, most important among them misinterpretations of certain philosophers' ideas, e.g. Hegel among others. So, knowing at least something about philosophy can at least in principal help people to avoid making certain very dangerous errors in thinking, which will in turn help them to avoid making consequent errors in action. I'm not saying that correct thinking is an innoculation against doing evil, but it doesn't hurt.

The next example is a little more abstract while at the same time a little more personal. Most people I know have opinions about certain philosophical questions. Some of these people haven't done much thinking about these opinions. Among those who have done some thinking, few have studied the history of philosophy, and as a consequence tend to make similar mistakes to those who have gone before them. Philosophy addresses such questions, and even has some possible answers. If you have ever wondered "What is the nature of being human?" or "Why is there something rather than nothing?" or "When is it morally acceptable to kill another human being?," then you are asking philosophical questions. Certainly various religions offer answers to these questions, but religion has relied on philosophical thought for seeking out the answers to these questions.

There are many introductions to philosophy, dictionaries of philosophy, histories of philosophy, and so on. If you are interested in exploring these questions, I suggest you try one of them.

Hans Bricker