OU on the BBC: Journeys In Thought - Why Take Journeys In Thought?

About philosophy

Philosophy is one of the great forms of cultural activity, alongside music, poetry, drama and art. And yet it has a serious image problem. Lots of otherwise intelligent people are convinced that philosophy is obsolete – that the rise of the natural sciences has exposed it as mere verbal doodling, a sedentary and self-indulgent way of whiling away the time. So what, if anything, is the point of philosophy in an age of science?

If you asked me to define philosophy, I would say that it is a battle against the tyranny of the obvious. From the moment we are born we absorb masses of words, conventions, habits and notions from our surroundings. Before long they become second nature, the unconsidered framework of our whole approach to life and the world.

But nothing obliges us to go with the flow. We can sometimes dig in our heels, and adopt a quizzical stance towards the assumptions that have incorporated themselves into our patterns of thinking. If we are lucky, we will be able to put a distance between ourselves and the ideas we normally take for granted. We will be able to get then into proportion, and see them in perspective. What happens on those occasions is what I’d call philosophy.

Advocating philosophy

The works of the great philosophers lie heavy on the library shelves, gathering dust. But the familiar methods of trying to drum up interest in them can all too easily backfire.

A tabloid summary of the gist of a life’s philosophical work may satisfy your passing pub-quiz curiosity. (“Descartes believed that knowledge is based on reason”, for instance, or “de Beauvoir is the leading representative of feminist existentialism”, or “Hegel held that truth resides not in the part but in the whole”.) But little capsules like these are unlikely to persuade you that the great philosophers have anything really interesting to say to you: can they really be the jewels in philosophy’s crown?

Nor does it help if a few personal anecdotes and historical details are added for the sake of local colour. Philosophers, like poets and artists, tend to lead rather cranky lives. They need to concentrate on what they are working on, for hours or days or months or even years together; and as far as the rest of the world is concerned their behaviour is bound to look eccentric, obsessive, unsociable, and rather tiresome. A book of “Lives of the Great Philosophers” would be like a gallery of fusspots and freaks, maniacs and misfits. It might give pleasure to the kind of readers who enjoy smirking at the weakness, inconstancy or triviality of those they are expected to admire; but it would be no use to inquirers hoping to get some excitement, illumination and joy out of the works of the great philosophers.

About this series

In this series, I shall be travelling to various places which, for brief periods, have played important roles in the lives of some of the philosophers I most revere. Arendt, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Rousseau and Wittgenstein: all of them wrote remarkable books, and in addition – so it seems to me – they all led lives of extraordinary courage. They may not have been brave in a political, military or public sense, but they insisted on asking awkward questions about the self-serving common sense that surrounded them, and they refused to go along with the smudges and fudges that most of us resort to, most of the time, to try to cover up the gaps and inconsistencies in our everyday thinking. They may well have found it hard to make friends, and harder still to keep them; and in some cases they have indeed strayed over the line that divides careless eccentricity from helpless insanity. But like anyone else who deserves to be called a philosopher, they were capable of facing barrages of conceptual complacency and conformism without flinching. I fear and admire their example.

People tend to reveal interesting sides of themselves when they are away from home. What all these thinkers showed in their often troubled travels, was the intensity of their determination to scrutinise and anatomise some assumptions that everyone else was taking for granted. If they were inclined to withdraw from the world, it was only in order to examine it more rigorously. Their writings were never works of self-serving escapism, but despatches from the endless battle which pits intelligence against thoughtlessness and superficiality – the struggle against the tyranny of the obvious.

Journeys In Thought in more depth: