T.S. Eliot gave philosophy this poetic
description in “Murder in the Cathedral”:
Delight in sense, in learning and in thought,
Music and philosophy, curiosity,
The purple
bullfinch in the lilac tree,
The tiltyard skill, the strategy of
chess,
Love in the garden, singing to the
instrument,
Were all things equally desirable.
Philosophy—the
study of truth-- is
for me an unending delight. Its value
lies, as Bertrand Russell said, “in its very uncertainty. While diminishing our feeling of certainty as
to what things are, it greatly increases our knowledge
as to what they may be.” My goal “is
the logical clarification of thoughts,” to quote Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. “Philosophy is not a theory but an
activity. The result of philosophy is
not a number of “philosophical propositions,” but to make propositions clear.”
The point of any philosophy is help us deal with the world as it is, and my
main objection to most philosophy today is that it is divorced from what we do
is suggested in this parable:
A sultan once awoke in the middle of
the night and summoned his wizard,
“Wizard,” he said. “My sleep is troubled. Tell me.
What is holding up the earth?”
“Majesty.” replied the wizard, “the earth
rests on the back of a giant elephant.”
“But what is holding up the elephant?”
The wizard said, “The elephant stands
on the back of a giant wizard. And you
can stop right there, Majesty. It’s turtles all the way down.” The great temptation for scholars is to
examine for their own intoxicating sake “turtles all the way down.” Philosophical radicals once put copulating
dogs in the midst of astonished professors at the American Philosophical Association
convention to show how far removed they are from the rhythms of life. Most philosophy today has more to do with
solving equations than working through classic questions of knowledge and
ethics, such as: What should we
value? What is true? What can be known? What exists?
How should life be lived? The
triumph of the analytical philosophers has left their field dull, desiccated,
and irrelevant to the public, leaving the most interesting speculation to
physicists, doctors, computer scientists, linguists, anthropologists,
geneticists, and thinkers at the sectarian universities.