Martin Gough
There are three main positions as regards what is valuable about Philosophy as a practice. The first two offer contrasting criteria for judging the value. There is the Internalist position, which states roughly that Philosophy is good in its own right and that the practice carries with it its own justification, and there is not much more to say about it beyond that but just to confirm it by first-hand experience ('Play it again, Sam!'). A variant of this is that what is valuable is progress (so presumed) towards the goal of attainment of the Truth, where the Truth is defined internally, that is, according to characteristics arising from the practice of Philosophy itself. In contrast to this there is the Externalist criterion, which states in general terms that Philosophy is good in as much as it contributes to the attainment of some other goal already judged to be valuable, that is, external to the practice. So, for instance, the practice might help us to function better as human beings in our overall habits of living, it might improve our sex lives (someone tell Margi Clarke!), or it might directly boost the nation's Economy.
The third position is sceptical about any value in the practice of Philosophy. It might accuse the Internalist of simply begging the question about Philosophy's claim to justify itself. And it might demand more convincing proof from the optimistic Externalist that, for example, the publication in 1946 of Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy laid the foundations for the Boom years and accompanying 'feel-good factor' of the Swinging Sixties in the Western World.
Without wishing to dwell upon the relative merits and shortcomings of the Internalist and Externalist positions, I offer a fourth distinct position which may escape the sceptical challenge. This position shares a point of contact with the Internalist in that there is no reliance upon distinct material benefits nor upon the pursuit of other valued and well defined activities by which to gauge the value. But it also shares the form of the Externalist position in that there is reliance upon another realm of discourse. This discourse is the less well defined realm of the Aesthetic: the value of Philosophy is aesthetic value. This criterion is neither straightforwardly Internalist nor Externalist, so I claim that it is a new position altogether. I shall offer a brief account of the nature of the Aesthetic and demonstrate my thesis with three examples of written Philosophy.
Kids are born aesthetic
Doing Philosophy, whether by writing it, reading it, thinking it, or talking it, gives us pleasure, in as far as we find ourselves wanting to do it. I claim that this pleasure is aesthetic pleasure. What is the Aesthetic? There is no one straightforward answer to this question but certain characteristics are involved in it to varying degrees. There is something primitive to our experience of the world that is aesthetic. The object of our experience in any one instance would be describable in language: for example, we see a tree with five apples in it, so described. But the way in which all the myriad of the branches and leaves and the apples of the tree move about in the light wind in relation to each other with the sky as backdrop defies description except of the most general and remote kind. The movements in their particularities just have to be seen to be comprehended, to know what they are like. That comprehension is a pre-linguistic 'feel', and that feel is aesthetic in character. There is a common sentiment (which I have heard echoed by Colin Lyas in, for instance, his Open University Philosophy Summer School lectures in August 1993) that 'kids are born aesthetic'. That is, from their first year after birth onwards they find objects fascinating and worth examining perceptually in their own right, without needing the words to classify and otherwise describe those objects; and they often respond to music by engrossing themselves in it, both mentally and physically.
Although this aspect of experience is pre-linguistic and primitive to perceptual understanding it is not thereby necessarily non-conceptual. Indeed, it is positively intellectual in its own right. Aesthetic pleasure should be distinguished from the 'base' pleasures of hedonism and material pursuits, although this does not preclude that there are certain aspects of our experience of material gains which are aesthetic, exemplified by the Kama Sutra perhaps. I here draw uncritically from John Stuart Mill's higher/lower pleasures thesis, when he says that it is better to be human and unhappy at a higher intellectual level rather than an animal satisfied by mere pleasures of the appetite at a low intellectual level. (I am not here ruling out that, like cognitively undeveloped infant humans, animals may also enjoy aesthetic experiences to some degree.) Mill's thesis responds to Jeremy Bentham's assertion that pushpin (Nintendo might be a suitably more up to date example) is as good as poetry, 'a pleasure is a pleasure is a pleasure'. Bentham is wrong that all pleasures have the same (material) intrinsic character.
I claim that doing Philosophy affords us 'higher' aesthetic pleasure. My first example is from RenÚ Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy:
'But I have persuaded myself that there is nothing at all in the world: no heaven, no earth, no minds, no bodies. Is it not then true that I do not exist? But certainly I should exist, if I were to persuade myself of something. But there is a deceiver (I know not who he is) powerful and sly in the highest degree, who is always purposely deceiving me. Then there is no doubt that I exist, if he deceives me. And deceive me as he will, he can never bring it about that I am nothing so long as I think that I am something. Thus it must be granted that, after weighing everything carefully and sufficiently, one must come to the considered judgment that the statement 'I am, I exist' is necessarily true every time it is uttered by me or conceived in my mind.'(Meditation II, 25; Donald A.Cress trans., 2nd Ed., Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985, p61)
We could imagine Descartes experiencing a 'Eureka!'
type of feel on realising his inspiration. This experience is my paradigm
of an intellectual orgasm, or about the closest we can get to this. The
pleasure experienced is not material nor merely gratification of the senses
but is aesthetic in its character: it occurs for the cogitating subject
on top of the understanding of the meaning of the sentences of the thoughts
as linguistic. My second example is from Freddy Hegel's Phenomenology
of Spirit:
'That the True is actual only as system, or that Substance is essentially Subject, is expressed in the representation of the Absolute as Spirit - the most sublime Notion and the one which belongs to the modern age and its religion. The spiritual alone is the actual; it is essence, or that which has being in itself; it is that which relates itself to itself and is determinate, it is other-being and being-for-self, and in this determinateness, or in its self-externality, abides within itself; in other words, it is in and for itself.- But this being-in-and-for-itself is at first only for us, or in itself, it is spiritual Substance.'(Preface, para.25; A.V.Miller trans., Oxford University Press, 1977, p14)
Trying to look for a definite answer to a problem
in this passage is likely to leave you unsatisfied, even though scholars
might be able to offer interpretations in the form of newly constructed
propositions. That would be to miss part of the point of this sort of example,
compared to the first. The main point is the poetic form of the passage,
exemplified by the flow of the phrases employing the phoneme 'self', repeated
at regular intervals, and the breaking up and reconstituting of the rhythm
of the stanzas using the devices of hyphens, dashes and italics. My third
example is more of an illustration than the other two, the various
cases (a)-(m) or equivalence relations of Formal
Logic. [The original article illustrates this graphically
- Ed.]
Each one does, or can, make a statement in language, but it does so in the same way that visual art can, as embodied in the adage 'a picture speaks a thousand words'. The symbols are pleasing to the eye as are deft brushstrokes. Each of the thirteen can be examined on their own but it is more satisfying to stand back from the page and view the formal elements of the unitary image, such as the equivalence symbol swerving uncertainly down through the middle of the structure and the right-hand edge at line (e) thrusting out with a form of purposiveness yet without purpose beyond line (d), not unlike a ship's bow but not determinately like anything (following Kant's theory of beauty). The last, slightly enlarged, line (z) is not an equivalence but offers some sort of climax to the work, with its sheer length and complexity and the almost gratuitous bracketing off at the far right-hand end, as if to emphasize the finality of the piece as a statement about life, the universe, et cetera.
As my last two examples suggest, I am treating art forms typically as providing sources of proper objects of aesthetic experience, whether or not there is a logical connection between Art and the Aesthetic, since natural objects are aesthetic as well. The Sceptic could try a different tack and admit that there is a connection between Philosophy and Art, or the Aesthetic generally. But they might say that once you have done one bit of Philosophy you have done all that you need, to obtain the respective value therein. And so there would be no further value in continuing to practice it. In response, this is where the common ground with Art is important. Each and every work of art, such as they exist, is, or should be, unique, in the sense that you cannot substitute one for another and obtain the same aesthetic experience. What is important about Shakespeare's Hamlet is not captured by Rembrandt's self-portraits, nor vice-versa. From this it follows that in the event of a cessation of philosophising we would lose out on the range of possible aesthetic experiences which could yet be gleaned from our new encounters with it in the future. I intend that the variety of my examples shows both this and that all branches of Philosophy contribute irreducibly in their own ways to the overall value of the practise.
Address for correspondence: amg26@tutor.open.ac.uk