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This biography of a British philosopher is a stub. They have been using telescopes rather than microscopes, so they can deal with a larger subject-matter. In short, they have been philosophizing.
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It is what makes it a genuinely important occupation, in fact an occupation that matters to all of us. Philosophy is not just one speciality among others. The reason why some philosophers become well-known is not that they have discovered new facts but that they have shifted the whole standpoint of thought. Philosophers have repeatedly brought absurdities to the attention of their age by displaying current customs against a new background and pointing out the strange assumptions that are distorting them. After this, new ways of thinking become possible. Similarly, when this same Rousseau pointed out the strangely unnatural way in which babies were being reared — babies who were removed from their mothers, bandaged onto boards and handed over to carers who might well not care much about them — people started to notice anomalies in their whole idea of what nature is, and how it relates to our species.
These anomalies had never struck them before.
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More immediately, they also started for the first time to pay some serious attention to small children, as they have gone on doing ever since. It is interesting that our forefathers apparently could not see through these previous muddled ways of thinking until someone like Rousseau pointed them out. The assumptions that had produced these earlier customs simply persisted till some shock was delivered — till they were plainly stated in a form that could be grasped and made more workable.
This shows how deeply our thought depends on a mass of unstated assumptions, very much in the way that our physical life rests on the hidden shifting masses of the earth beneath us. This is why I have often suggested that philosophy is best understood as a form of plumbing. This is something both deeper and more outward-looking than just examining the structure of our current thought and language, which seems to be what Dummett was calling for.
Another useful piece of plumbing was done in the late seventeenth century, when John Locke worked out the concept of Tolerance. During most of that century people throughout Europe had assumed that they must not tolerate disagreement. The idea that different opinions could perfectly well be allowed to exist side by side was seen as a culpable weakness, leading to anarchy. Nobody ever has the whole truth, and people who grasp different bits of it can, in fact, perfectly well live peacefully together.
Indeed, that may be the best way of putting the various partial truths together in the end. It was much more like inventing a new musical instrument and working out how to play it. Locke and the people who worked with him had to learn how to tolerate what had previously seemed intolerable, and how to do business with people they had previously thought were outside the pale.
They had to learn, too, how to look at the outer borders of this toleration and decide what must still be regarded as intolerable. In fact, toleration, like all big philosophical ideas, is a very complex instrument, as hard to play as the cello or bassoon, which is why we still have so much difficulty learning how to handle it properly and why we still need to go on thinking out the ideas behind it. And the other ideals round which we try to structure our lives, ideals such as equality, freedom, compassion, fraternity or sisterhood, justice — are all as complicated as they are attractive.
Yet they all have to be thought out and used together by the whole orchestra,.
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These ideals were, of course, central to the message of the Enlightenment, a message which we now assume is the obvious framework for any decent human life. It had to be invented, devised with a great deal of hard, grinding work by philosophers like Locke and Rousseau and it has had to be thought through with increasing labour up to the present day. In every age, more work of this kind is needed because the truth about the world is endlessly complicated. Are we getting any clearer now about what is the real aim of philosophical enquiry?
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Physical sciences spiral inward and down onto particular bits of the truth, which sometimes are ready-made facts, while philosophy ranges indefinitely outward looking for new connections — new ways of thinking and living. So it is quite proper for nuclear physicists to know more and more about less and less. But philosophers are supposed to do almost the opposite — to find links that will restructure the whole scope of our experience and allow us to live differently.
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Their use is to extend our range. They can bring a landscape in sight that nobody even knew existed. Of course the contrast between these two forms of thought is not complete because as we have seen physical scientists do sometimes have to widen their views in order to shift their focus, and philosophers too must sometimes deal with detailed technical questions. But in their general balance these two approaches really are opposed — not because they are at war, but because they serve quite different needs. Nuclear physicists are normally addressing a limited audience of specialists — people who already share much of their knowledge and want to know more about a particular aspect of it.
Philosophy aims to bring together those aspects of life that have not yet been properly connected so as to make a more coherent, more workable world-picture. And that coherent world-picture is not a private luxury. World-pictures — perspectives, imaginative visions of how the whole world is — are the necessary background of all our lives. They are often much more important to us than our factual knowledge, as may be seen in the case of climate sceptics whose traditional views remain unchanged whatever new evidence appears that seems to disprove them.
We all have these background pictures and we usually get them half-consciously from the people around us. But, if we do ask, we shall probably find that they have been shaped by earlier philosophers who have influenced our tradition. It has shaped the way we think. It has deep roots in the soil of our lives and it goes on developing there in its own characteristic way until somebody comes along and rethinks it.
Thomas Baldwin (philosopher)
That is why people who refuse to think philosophically so often end up trapped in bits of earlier philosophy that they have unconsciously taken on from their predecessors. The alternative to being enslaved by past thought in this way is to attend directly to what these earlier philosophers actually said and to see how it relates to our life today. In fact, it is still throwing out shoots that can help us today. The reason why these philosophers caught the attention of their times was as I have said not just that they had solved particular problems but that they had lit up life from unexpected angles.
They suggested, not just new thoughts but new concepts, distinctive approaches, whole new ways of thinking. Of course none of these new approaches solves all problems, but each of them gives us a fresh stance, fresh tools for the endless balancing act by which we try to understand our confusing world We can see how influential these suggestions still are, not just because people today often still quote from say Marx or Nietzsche or Plato or Buddha for their illustrations, but because current thinking as a whole is still often visibly shaped by these people; coloured through in a way that the people using it now are no longer aware of.
So, how can it be plausible to think that they are out of date and we can now forget about them? How could it not be necessary for us to attend to these still influential factors in our lives? We need also to attend to these mighty trees themselves for their own sake. We need to understand them because they have shaped the whole way of life that we still live by.
They are still active features of our present life, parts of the tangled forest through which we are still travelling. On the political scene this is obvious.