Doing philosophy down in the docks

According to Alfred North Whitehead, “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”  

When I was a student, I thought this to be a harsh verdict on Aristotle and every other major philosopher who came after him, as if precedence in time implied precedence in rank.  I also found it to be an unintentional but nevertheless amusing parody of many philosophy books and papers that I read, in which the amount of space devoted to footnotes or endnotes appeared almost equal to that allocated to the main text.   Some philosophers seemed content to be the authors of series of footnotes.   Later, I came across the sentence which immediately follows that quoted above, where Whitehead continues, “I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them”.   Now the remark made more sense: it is the richness and variety of Plato’s philosophical interests which impresses, more than his proposed solutions to the many puzzles that he, through the voice of Socrates, draws our attention to.

Whitehead was himself an important mathematician and philosopher, co-author with Bertrand Russell of the three volume Principia Mathematica (1910-13) and later a founder of what is known as process philosophy.  He won a maths scholarship to Cambridge aged nineteen and was elected a Fellow of Trinity College aged twenty-three.  He taught at the University of Cambridge, University College London, Imperial College London, and Harvard University, until his retirement, aged seventy-six.  Unlike Socrates, Whitehead earned a living as a teacher and a writer.  Unlike Whitehead, Socrates was found guilty of corrupting public morals and was sentenced to death, leading him to commit suicide rather than flee and spend the remainder of his life in exile.  (Whitehead was born in Ramsgate, Kent and spent his retirement in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which seem to me an exemplary case of the benefits of exile, even if unforced in this case.)  

In The Republic, one of his most famous dialogues, Plato sets out to answer the question, What is justice?  In so doing, he provides a theory of the ideal state and a theory of the ideal human character.  The lengthy argument starts in Piraeus, in those days a port settlement around eight kilometres to the south-west of Athens, although now a suburb of the much larger, modern conurbation.  Socrates and his companion Glaucon have walked from the city to the port, to says prayers to the goddess (perhaps Pallas Athena, or possibly Bendis, a Thracian deity, whom the Athenians associated with Artemis) and to watch part of a new festival.  They are about to start the return trip, back up the hill, when they meet some friends who insist that they postpone their journey home and join them for some conversation instead.  One, Polemarchus, lives locally and so they head to his house, where Socrates talks with his father, Cephalus, who is a successful merchant from Syracuse, a Greek city on the island of Sicily.  This foundational philosophical discussion about the nature of justice takes place not in a university seminar room, nor a royal palace, nor a temple, but in the home of a foreign businessman located in the local commercial hub.  Socrates was doing philosophy down in the docks.

One way of characterising philosophy that avoids reference to footnotes, would be to say that it is thinking about thinking.  To present that idea slightly differently, we could say that philosophy is an activity in which thought is both the subject and object, both the process and the content.  While this might sound rather abstract, detached from the many practical activities that fill up most the hours of each day, for Socrates philosophy was a quotidian task.  Talking to and learning from others, about the way we think about what we do is essential if we are to do well the things that occupy our lives.  A good life is a life that is lived thoughtfully, and Socrates claimed that only such a life – what is often translated today as ‘the examined life’ – is worth living.  His conception of philosophy is both practical and urgent. 

Thinking about thinking is therefore a basic human activity, one that comes after the provision of life’s necessities – food, shelter, warmth, reproduction – but well before the distractions of luxury and idleness.  It is an activity that can be done partly in private, but it is also important for it to be done with others, with family and friends for sure, and sometimes in public too.  While we might spend some time thinking alone, philosophy is essentially conversational: the contribution of others, in helping us to make progress, is central to the goal of thinking well. 

In the Introduction to his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, which he gave in successive years in the 1820s, Hegel describes the conditions under which philosophy becomes possible.  He notes that, “Before there can be a philosophy at all, a people must have reached a certain stage of intellectual development.  The necessities of life must have been supplied, the agonies of desire must have vanished, the purely finite interests of men must have been worked off, and their minds must have advanced so far as to take an interest in universal matters”.   He then argues that once philosophy is possible it is also necessary: “… it can be regarded as a luxury because luxury is the satisfaction derived from things that are not directly necessary, and from this point of view philosophy is of course dispensable.  But all depends on what you call necessary.  From the point of view of the thinking spirit, however, philosophy must be regarded as the most necessary thing of all.”

I realise that for someone like me, whose academic training was in philosophy and who currently spends a proportion of his time each day reading books by Hegel and others famous philosophers, to claim that philosophy is the “most necessary thing of all” sounds like blatant self-pleading: ‘Look what I do, it’s really special!’   Maybe so.  My point in this text, however, is less to do with philosophy’s status than with its locus.  What interests me is where Plato chose to set his famous dialogue, in which his conception of justice was presented.  Since the subject matter was important, so too it was important that the discussion of this subject matter should took place somewhere associated with other important, daily activities.  Piraeus was both a major trading port and a naval base, and it was therefore intimately connected with the security and well-being of the Athenian city state. 

This is not to say that we should not teach philosophy at schools and universities.  For the subject to thrive and develop it is important that there are people like Alfred North Whitehead, who spend their lives teaching and publishing.  Much of what they do will be inaccessible to most of the population, but it keeps the culture and tradition of thinking about thinking sharp. The problem is not that in society today philosophy is considered a subject of scholarly study, of interest to academics and their students.  Rather, it is that today philosophy is only considered a subject of scholarly study.  We do philosophy almost exclusively in lecture halls rather than amidst market stalls.

Outside of the university setting there are doctors, lawyers, writers, architects, engineers, scientists, artists, and priests, all of whom at some stage probably studied something at college or university as part of their early training.  Once they started working, they most likely continued to think about their subject, to build on their knowledge, to develop their skills, to become competent – maybe even excellent – at their chosen profession.  By contrast, there is no professional body of philosophers outside of the universities.  Those who think about thinking either switch to other professions once they leave university – as I did when I started to work in finance – or, like Whitehead, they continue with philosophy because they never leave the university system.

It is, for sure, possible for academic philosophers to engage in public debate and to bring their skills and thinking to bear on important matters of the day, whether medical or business ethics, the meaning of justice, the nature of language and of human understanding, or issues of personal identity, meaning and fulfilment in life.  When these contributions reflect the best thinking and encourage others to harder and better thoughts about their own decisions, they contribute to the public good.  Alas, this is not always the case.  In my first year as a philosophy student, I went to some lectures on another of Plato’s dialogues, The Euthyphro, given by Professor Elizabeth Anscombe, who some years before had been arrested a couple of times for trying to block the entrance to an abortion clinic in northern England.   What I object to here is not her anti-abortion view (although I disagree with it), nor her willingness to be arrested for civil disobedience (which I respect as a principle of ethical public action), but for the cruelty of her behaviour, directly impeding women who have come to a different moral conclusion than hers, and who are now seeking the medical care to which they are legally entitled.  Anscombe’s actions in this instance seem to me to be simply thoughtless.

This incident, and others like it, sometime encourage an objection to the engagement of academic philosophers in public life, namely that since philosophers do not agree amongst themselves about the right answers to most ethical and metaphysical questions, it is impossible for them to help others to think more clearly about these matters.  Once rival scholarly voices join the fray, they increase the amount of heat but not the amount of light, to no-one’s benefit.  But this seems to me to miss the point, which is that most of us regularly make decisions which require thought, and often we do not think hard enough before we make them, at least in part because there is insufficient pressure to do so from other, carefully considered voices taking part in the discussion.  There is no professional pressure to meet an acceptable standard of operating practice in our thinking lives, unlike other areas, such as law, medicine, and finance, the practices of which are heavily regulated. 

One of the aims of this website is to provide a venue for thinking about thinking, a place where people can try to work out in practical terms what a well-though-out life might look like.  If it is to be useful, for both writers and readers, this thinking activity needs to be engaged as well as examined.  Good philosophy should be careful – that is, neither hasty, nor impetuous – and applicable – neither abstract, nor unusable – so that it can make a beneficial difference to what we do.  It should add some traction to our lives.  Just like Socrates in Piraeus, it should be something that makes its home at the heart of the busy life of the city, where lives and livelihoods are at stake.

Each year, I teach a class on a Masters Course on Social Innovation at Glasgow Caledonian University.  My lecture covers some of the tensions and conflicts between ethics and economics, which can become acute within social businesses that try to achieve the double-bottom-line of economic profit and social impact.  One of the points I make is that if you want to understand the reality of a company’s ethical stance, you should ignore the mission statement and the photos and case studies that fill up the annual report, ahead of the accounting numbers.  The clearest evidence of the ethical stance is to be found at the Board meeting at which the annual budget is approved.  That is when resources are allocated and determination is made as to how much will be spent on which items, and for what reasons.  The conduct of this meeting is the most important indication of the moral fibre of the company’s leadership.  If these decisions are made purely on financial grounds, without a framework of ethical thought, then all the other righteous rhetoric the company engages in is meaningless.

The need for good thinking to take place during boardroom budget debates is one good reason why it matters that philosophy is done, not just in the seminar room but also down at the docks.