In the European tradition, philosophy begins not with an agreed object of study, but with the introduction of a distinct method of thinking. In the poems of Homer and Hesiod, the standard causal explanation for any important event involves some reference to interference in human affairs by one or other divinity. Understanding the moods and methods of the gods was central to providing an explanation of why history unfolded in the way it did, and why the natural world was arranged in the way it was. What set the earliest philosophers apart from their predecessors was their desire to explain why things had happened and how they were currently arranged without recourse to the gods. To be a philosopher was to think differently: to study history and science (and other subjects) for alternate sources of explanation to the mythological tales that were prevalent in society.
My philosophy developed by means of a recapitulation of this moment in the early history of European thought. I am not writing a history of Western philosophy, but it happens to be true that I was drawn to philosophy in consequence of my interest in history (and lack of interest in science), and that my developing interest in philosophy led me to abandon my attachment to a religious interpretation of the world. More about this later, for now suffice to say that, like the early Greek thinkers, I wanted to find a way of understanding the world and my place in it, and I became dissatisfied with accounts that relied on myth and mystery.
Aside from these autobiographical elements, it seems obvious that any serious attempt to set out a philosophy of life must say something about what the world is like, both the physical world and the cultural world, for this is the context in which we live, about which our philosophy attempts to make some sort of sense. Some basic ontology – an account of what there might be and how it might be organised – is necessary, even if only to provide a frame of reference in which questions about how we should live and how we might find meaning, can be purposefully asked. Broadly construed, science tells us about the physical world and history and the other humanist subjects tell us about the social world; together, they set some constraints on the choices we might make about how we live in the physical and social worlds.
Like the earliest philosophers, I concluded that studying science and history allowed me to dispense with religion as a source of explanation. Having made that step, questions about values – politics, ethics and aesthetics – become more interesting; questions about meaning become more personal. The received wisdom of the religious traditions remains a matter of interest and might also be a source of inspiration, but religious answers to questions about value and meaning require a further, secular source of legitimation. To put this another way, someone might propose that to love one’s neighbour as oneself is a good principle to follow, but they will need to provide a reason for that proposal; appealing to divine authority alone is no longer credible. The transition from enchanted to disenchanted forms of explanation started in Europe, as far as we can tell, with Thales, the olive-press monopolist; in my case, they occurred during my teens, in the rather dull suburban town where I grew up.
At school, history was my favourite subject. I liked the sense of a narrative thread, tying together disparate events in distant places, creating a coherent story of the past that made sense of the present. Looking back, I find my attraction to a comprehensively thematic account of the past to be misjudged: the gradual unfolding of a story of human progress – whether in the guise of Hegel’s Phenomenology or the Whig interpretation of history – seems less complete and far less convincing that it did when I sat at a desk in classroom at the Royal Grammar School in Guildford (a school that was itself nearly 500 years old when I was a pupil). What appeals to me now about history is the messiness, the accidental, the unexplained residuals that populate the narrative(s).
The history I was taught was the history of kings and battles, prime ministers and presidents, the passage of laws and the signing of treaties. Later I discovered the history of the ordinary, the quotidian lives of mostly unremembered people. The attempt to re-enact the thoughts – to use Robin Collingwood’s terms – of figures from the past makes clear the thread of continuity from past to present: the same choices, the same threats, the same joy and despair, lived over and over again in different ages and different places and different circumstances, and not always with the same outcomes. The persistent humanness of the subjects of historical study is central to its lasting attraction. To a certain extent the assumption of continuity – of shared experience and response – is a necessary precondition of the possibility of history: for the past to be intelligible to us we must assume some form of resemblance to the present. We can only make sense of the difference between life in modern society and life in the Roman Empire (or the Mogul, or the Aztec) if we presume an underlying similarity in the lived experience of all people. The many variations are supervenient upon the constancy of the ground.
As we move further away from our own experience – which might mean to the experience of those who lived further back in time, but might also mean to the experience of those who are more proximate in time but from societies that are culturally distant from our own – the translation of their lived experience into terms that we are comfortable with becomes increasingly difficult. The process of re-enactment demands greater effort and skill, and its outcome is more fragile, less certain. Nonetheless, the process offers glimmers of possibility: of shared human experiences that span many thousands of years, many degrees of longitude, many inventories of cultural semiotics. That there is nothing new under the sun, is both false and true: the world begins anew every day, it is always original; and yet we repeat, sometimes knowingly and sometimes not, again and again. History, understood less as the story of famous men and more the compendium of experience of ordinary people, is therefore the best antidote to loneliness.
School science was dull. I enjoyed meteorology and some aspects of biology, but the rest left me bored. It would be easy to blame poor teaching, and probably not altogether wrong; but I recognise that my curiosity about the natural world was undeveloped in my youth. In later life I have become more aware of the importance of scientific method, of thinking systematically about the world, seeking explanation through testing and evidential reasoning (although I remain pre-disposed to prefer cultural over scientific knowledge). I find the achievements of scientists – many of whom developed new ways to think about cause and effect, or who were willing to overturn commonly accepted assumptions about the physical world in order better to account for their observations – to be of more interest than the science itself. Why read Galileo’s treatises on astronomy when you can watch Brecht’s play about Galileo’s life?
Despite having no real scientific training or expertise, over the years I have learned two things about science. The first is that we know much more about the natural world that is close to us in location and scale, than we do about what is distant. By which I mean, when we consider the micro and the macro – the data from the large Hadron collider, underground in Switzerland, or the data from deep space captured by the Hubble space telescope, orbiting the earth – we find them much more puzzling than evidence of physical phenomenon that are observable directly by the human eye. The trajectory of a ball in flight – even the reverse swing of a cricket ball – is easier for us to understand than the location of the smallest particles or the movement of light across the galaxies. As more and more of the universe becomes measurable and familiar to us, so a new set of puzzles emerges just at the boundaries of what we think we know.
The second, which I learned when reading Darwin, is that science can be explanatory without being teleological. [I have written more about this here.] Since the time of Aristotle, there was a presumption that a full causal explanation must include not just the formal, material and efficient causes but also the final cause, by which is meant the goal to which events are leading. To explain means to supply, among other things, a framework of purposefulness. Darwin’s work suggests that we have no need to consider purposes: we can explain everything in terms of adaption to habitat. Striving for survival is a fact of nature but bears no explanatory weight: it tells us only that living things are organised to live. Wittgenstein famously thought that Darwin’s work was of no relevance to philosophy (Tractatus 4.1122) whereas John Dewey, greatly to his credit, recognised that the settled assumptions of scientific explanation for two thousand years had now been overturned. Leave aside the idea that humans are animals that have evolved from other animals, the central importance of Darwin’s work was to show that there is no telos in nature.
Despite Marx’s admiration for Darwin’s work, he seems not to have noticed that what applies to natural science also applies to history: explanations can be given without needing to provide any final cause that identifies the goal to which these events must lead. Marx might have turned Hegel on his head, by suggesting that the driving force of history was material not ideal; but Darwin’s work shows that there can be a driving force without there being any sense of direction, without any need of a destination. It was Charles, sitting in his study in Down House, not Karl sitting in the British Library, who was the real revolutionary. While goal directed action is characteristic of animals, and humans especially, the world as a whole – neither the natural nor the social world, neither the object of scientific inquiry nor the object of historical re-enactment – has no goal, no end, no purpose, no terminus ad quem.
What does this mean? Only that, however valuable history and science are for providing us with a rich description of our world – across time and space – they could never achieve more than to explain what there is, and how these various things connect with each other. Asking “why?” only invites further explanation at the same level of comprehension, an expansion of the story to include more parts, but never a meta-narrative that provides a sense of meaning to those growing number of parts. If I might illustrate by way of a joke:
Q: Which came first, the chicken or the egg? A: The fish.
It seems to me that this answer – which is essentially what both history and science provide, in their rather different ways – is both illuminating and infuriating. It answers the question truthfully, but only by ignoring the point of the question. It tells us that we can always know more, but that we can never know better.
At which point it might seem that the ambition of the early philosophers – to explain what happens in the world, without recourse to the gods – was always doomed to failure. Explaining how things happened – how the Trojan war was won by the Greeks, for example, or, how variations in temperature and rainfall might impact the size of the olive harvest – is possible, without needing to refer to the Olympian deities, but explaining why something happened turns out to be much more difficult. Why did the Trojans take the wooden horse to be a gift? Why is it warmer this year than last? Just because.
During my teens I was religious. In many ways this was quite conventional – I joined a church that taught and practised traditional Protestant Christianity, somewhat closer to the non-conformists than to the Catholics – but in other ways not. Conventional because it was the traditional religious choice for people of my background who lived in Northern Europe at that time, but unconventional because most people of my age at that time would not have chosen to practice any form of religion. Looking back, I think my religious commitment was an act of rebellion, a way of distancing myself from the comfortable, self-satisfied, suburban consumerism that characterised the town where I grew up. The appeal of the spiritual was, simply, that it was more than – and different to – the material; and the material seemed insufficient to satisfy both my intellectual curiosity and my desire to find meaning in the world. My faith supplied me with the very thing that I later came to believe could not be supplied by history or science: telos.
In the Protestant tradition, people talk about conversion experiences, moments when religious truth suddenly becomes clear and compelling. I did not have a revelatory experience of this kind, although for several years I was sincere in my beliefs. However, at the end of my teens I experienced a succession of de-conversion experiences – moments of illumination, for sure – when I realised that the faith I once had was now gone. One of these was purely metaphysical, the day when I recognised that I found the idea that God existed impossible to believe anymore; another was sociological, the day when I decided that it was easier to account for the religious beliefs of my fellow church members in terms of their psychological assurance rather than their historical truth; a third was more existential, when I decided that going to church with people I no longer respected, to affirm my commitment to a faith I no longer shared, was a waste of my time, which could be better spend on other activities. My days of religion were finished; I have no expectation that they will ever return.
What I would say now about the end of my religious experience is that I came to understand that religion can no more help us to answer the question “why?” than science or history. Religion, or myth, or any other form of enchanted understanding of the universe, only pushes back the search for meaning by one step. To say that something happens because it is god’s will – whether Zeus or Jehovah – does not provide a reason for what has happened; it merely stipulates an end to the demand for a reason. To say that the meaning of our life will become clear to us after death, when we experience another form of life, does not supply us with a meaning but stipulates that there is no meaning that makes sense in this life. The claim that there is some purpose, some telos in the universe, but that it is beyond our understanding, is simply to say that there is no purpose for us. Religion does not provide answers, rather it demands an end to the questions.
Q: Why did the chicken cross the road? A: First learn to walk, then you can take swimming lessons.
I have, therefore, concluded that the early philosophers were right in one respect, namely that the pursuit of knowledge through a study of the natural and social worlds could replace the form of explanation that mythology had previously supplied. The new answers are just as good – actually, better – than the old answers. There is no longer the need for religion or myth as a source of knowledge. (I leave to one side for now the question whether there is need for religion or myth as a source of comfort.) However, the new answers, just like the old answers, only explain the how and not the why. Today we know so much more than Thales about the structure of the universe and about the character of human society, but we also know just as little as he did about what it all means.
Over time I have come to appreciate the pleasure of knowledge for its own sake. I read widely because I want to know as much as I can about the world I inhabit. I do not consider that my time in history is more important than any other time, nor that my location in the universe is more significant than any other place. I am interested in other times and other places to the extent that they can teach me something about my time and place. I am attracted to what can be known, but not because I think that any quantity of information will translate into a new quality of knowledge. There is no end to the study of history and science, but equally no prospect that what we discover will provide direct answers to our questions about value and meaning.