Senses Working Overtime:
Bertrand Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy

Bertrand Russell

1,927 words

We do not regard any of the senses as wisdom, yet surely these give the most authoritative knowledge of particulars. — Aristotle, Metaphysics

And it’s 1-2-3-4-5
Senses working overtime.
— XTC, “Senses Working Overtime”

The philosopher has a defining trait which, although he shares it with other disciplines, was the first to show the centrality of the self in asking questions of the world. He is thus his own object of study. A mineralogist is not a rock, and, although a chemist is himself a mass of chemicals, his studies are not therefore self-referential in the way that the philosopher’s have no choice but to be. And what we are, simplistically and in traditional dualist terms, is mind plus body, rationality along with what Blake called “our senses five.” These are the media via which the philosopher approaches the world and the questions it poses.

That may seem at odds with the idea of philosophy as a disinterested study of the world, but that purist questioning of objective reality went out with the pre-Socratics and only reemerged, purged of philosophy, in the scientific revolutions of the eighteenth century in Europe. Philosophy from Plato onwards turned inwards, and even the external world came to be viewed as complicit with the internal in the production of both.

Bertrand Russell’s short 1912 book The Problems of Philosophy (PP) is both an excellent, non-classical introduction to the subject, and of interest in its own right to the philosopher. Russell himself was genuine British aristocracy, almost the last thinker of a Whiggish generation about to suffer the slings and arrows of Continental philosophy. He was politically engaged, and was notoriously arrested on a march under the banner of the CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament); he memorably stated that “Hitler is an outcome of Rousseau.”

Russell’s best-known work, which he co-authored with Alfred North Whitehead — and which Russell said ruined him mentally — was the Principia Mathematica, and Ludwig Wittgenstein was Russell’s protégé. Wittgenstein was an elusive but very influential philosopher of language, and that era of philosophy was involved in language and meaning in a rather different way from the Continental schools grouped around post-structuralism and post-modernism, although one way or another the linguistic turn was coming.

PP does not, however, become mired in linguistic concerns, but rather stays true to the original commerce between what we are accustomed to call the subjective and the objective. Far from being dismissive of metaphysics, the assumed default position for the more hard-headed British school of thinkers, Russell explains that he wishes to stress a positive rather than a negative approach to philosophy, and for this reason “theory of knowledge occupies a larger space than metaphysics” in PP:

Most of the great ambitious attempts of metaphysicians have proceeded by the attempt to prove that such and such apparent features of the actual world were self-contradictory, and therefore could not be real.

Russell’s view of philosophical problems here could fairly accurately be labelled “problematics,” and his skill is to tease out the difference between philosophical problems and the problem of philosophy, which centers on a further and vital distinction:

[O]ne of the distinctions that cause most trouble in philosophy [is] the distinction between ‘appearance’ and ‘reality’ . . .

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Philosophy has to perform a sort of epistemological double-entry bookkeeping, as there are always two explanations of the world at play. Appearance and reality, sense data and sensation, are not either/or, but rather reality is an amalgam of both. This is Kantian, of course, but Kant requires a philosophical grounding before his transcendental philosophy can be attempted, and PP is very much geared towards being Kant 101. The central object of interest in both writers is revealed to be the philosopher rather than the raw material on which he philosophizes.

For Russell, philosophy seen as a methodology for problem-solving is very much the wrong model. At best, philosophy enables problems to be stated and clarified both by teaching how to frame questions, and also how to assess a range of possible answers. These can then be evaluated individually, and the likelihood of one or another being true compared and contrasted:

Philosophy, if it cannot answer so many questions as we would wish, has at least the power of asking questions which increase the interest of the world, and show the strangeness and wonder lying just below the surface even in the commonest things of daily life.

This unpacking of experience into more or less likely answers to a range of questions allows philosophy to refine a problem rather than necessarily to answer it:

Philosophy may claim justly that it diminishes the risk of error, and that in some cases it renders the risk so small as to be practically negligible.

The spear tip of philosophy is not its ability to select an answer from a range of possibles, but to show that those possibles are there in the first place:

Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts which it raises, is able to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom.

This is philosophy as liberatory discourse. Indeed, Russell derides the “arrogant dogmatism of those who have never travelled into the region of liberating doubt.”

Like Boethius in his cell, visited by the Lady Philosophy, so, too, the discipline is still freeing prisoners today:

[W]e must escape this prison and this strife. One way of escape is by philosophic contemplation.

And the freedom philosophy grants, the prison escape she helps plan and carry out, will benefit the philosopher in more ways than simple liberty of thought, but will enrich other aspects of his life:

The mind which has become accustomed to the freedom and impartiality of philosophic contemplation will preserve something of the same freedom and impartiality in the world of action and emotion.

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Thus, philosophy augments life itself in other quarters, just as a tango dancer moves more gracefully than others even when he is not dancing.

Russell has not written a self-help book, however, and covers philosophical terrain that makes PP doubly useful to the beginner wishing to understand basic philosophical terms and traditions.

British philosopher Bishop Berkeley enables Russell to illustrate the opposition of — and alliance between — realism and idealism. Berkeley’s eighteenth-century work, Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, in Opposition to Sceptics and Atheists, features conversations between Hylas, representing materialism and what is from the Ancient Greek hylē, and Philonous, or “lover of mind.” Matter does not exist independently of mind, states the latter, and our experience is entirely mental. This famously caused Dr. Johnson to kick a rock and yell, presumably at Boswell and concerning Berkeley, “Thus I refute him!” The good doctor rather missed the point. Russell has serious doubts about Berkeley’s position, but appreciates the importance of its being taken:

Berkeley retains the merit of having shown that the existence of matter is capable of being denied without absurdity, and that if there are any things that exist independently of us they cannot be the immediate objects of our sensations.

René Descartes is also present, as one would skeptically expect where the problems of philosophy — and those it engenders — are under discussion. Russell provides as clear and concise (both adjectives valued highly by Descartes) a summation of the Cartesian cogito as I have read, and an interesting aside is worth unpacking:

By inventing the method of doubt and by showing that subjective things are the most certain, Descartes performed a great service to philosophy . . .

At first reading this looks odd. Is doubt something that had to be invented? Surely it is hard-wired into every sentient being. But Russell does not say that Descartes invented doubt, but doubt as method, as the application of a methodology which takes a natural response and channels it into philosophical enquiry.

Russell states unequivocally that philosophical answers to questions of religion are not forthcoming, which makes philosophy’s tenure as handmaiden to theology look as though philosophy may have lied on her resumé, but there is a perfectly good reason for this shortcoming built into philosophy herself:

The value of philosophy is, in fact, to be sought largely in its very uncertainty.

Uncertainty and religious faith have a long history of knocking heads. Religion, of course, does have its “cloud of unknowing” and its Kierkegaardian leap of faith when reason fails, but part of the insight of Russell’s book is that, for those setting out on a philosophical path, there can be no certainty that the path will lead anywhere either desired or worthy of the effort. That depends entirely on your attitude to the path and the journey.

The final chapter of PP serves as a standalone essay. This is Russell’s “defense of philosophy,” as it were, and introduces the evaluation with a passage worth quoting in full, as it seems to me to combine an exact rendering of the role of Western philosophy with an exhortation no less moving for its being understated:

Many men . . . are inclined to doubt whether philosophy is anything better than innocent but useless trifling, hair-splitting distinctions, and controversies on matters concerning which knowledge is impossible.

This view of philosophy appears to result, partly from a wrong conception of the ends of life, partly from a wrong conception of the kind of goods which philosophy strives to achieve.

Philosophy is not, or not only, a dry and desiccated academic discipline; it is a lived activity. All the sense data and empiricism in the world are worthless if they enrich no one. Philosophy is too often seen as an archaic pursuit, like collecting jazz records or coins, and not as a vital component for the development of personality, and the enrichment of life that brings with it:

If the study of philosophy has any value at all for others than students of philosophy, it must be only indirectly, through its effects upon the lives of those who study it.

Russell lightly scolds the “practical man,” who recognizes the need of the body for sustenance, but not the concomitant requirement of the mind. He is also dismissive of a non-worldly, hyper-rationalist approach to philosophy as “. . . rigid, exact, delightful to the mathematician, the logician, the builder of metaphysical systems, and all who love perfection more than life.”

David Hume advised philosophy, if it wished to advance, to perfect its ability to analyze the mind. Hume got his wish, but by that time it was called psychology, which Russell sees as originally a part of philosophy before going solo, as it were. Russell, in PP, is not indulging in psychology — now a very specialized subject — as such by virtue of assessing mental operations and the problems they produce, but rather patiently explaining that philosophy is not for the specialist, but for anyone who wishes to round out their existence by examining its possibilities. And it is open to all. PP gently laments the insularity and exclusivity of philosophy:

[H]ardly anyone except students of philosophy ever realizes that there are such entities as universals.

Philosophy is withering on the vine in the West. I have just finished writing a book on the subject. Traduced by the aggressive programs of the new Left, too dull and taxing for a modern generation, decolonized, defunded, riddled with new and punishable heresies, and overwhelmingly white, philosophy never stood a chance. But, as books such as Russell’s PP show, resistance is possible and it begins at a local level. There are few books I would be unhesitating in recommending to those new to philosophy, but this is surely one of them.