Is Philosophy Stagnant?

W. Durant
The Story of Philosophy. Pocket Books: NY, 2nd Ed., 1991

We want to know that the little things are little, and the big things big, before it is too late; we
want to see things now as they will seem forever - “in the light of eternity.” We want to learn to
laugh in the face of the inevitable, to smile even at the looming of death. We want to be whole,
to coordinate our energies by criticizing and harmonizing our desires; for coordinated energy is
the last word in ethics and politics and perhaps in logic and metaphysics too. “To be a
philosopher,” said Thoreau, “is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school,
but so to love wisdom as to live, according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence,
magnanimity, and trust.” We may be sure that if we can but find wisdom, all things else will be
added unto us. “Seek ye first the good things of the mind,” Bacon admonishes us, “and the rest
will either be supplied or its loss will not be felt.” Truth will not make us rich, but it will make us
free.
Some ungentle reader will check us here by informing us that philosophy is as useless as chess,
as obscure as ignorance, and as stagnant as content. “There is nothing so absurd,” said Cicero,
“but that it may be found in the books of the philosophers.” Doubtless some philosophers have
had all sorts of wisdom except common sense; and many a philosophic flight has been due to
the elevating power of thin air….
But is philosophy stagnant? Science seems always to advance, while philosophy seems always
to lose ground. Yet this is only because philosophy accepts the hard and hazardous task of
dealing with problems not yet open to the methods of science— problems like good and evil,
beauty and ugliness, order and freedom, life and death; so soon as a field of inquiry yields
knowledge susceptible of exact formulation it is called science. Every science begins as
philosophy and ends as art; it arises in hypothesis and flows into achievement. Philosophy is a
hypothetical interpretation of the unknown (as in metaphysics), or of the inexactly known (as in
ethics or political philosophy); it is the front trench in the siege of truth. Science is the captured
territory; and behind it are those secure regions in which knowledge and art build our imperfect
and marvelous world. Philosophy seems to stand still, perplexed; but only because she leaves
the fruits of victory to her daughters the sciences, and herself passes on, divinely discontent, to
the uncertain and unexplored.
Shall we be more technical? Science is analytical description, philosophy is synthetic
interpretation. Science wishes to resolve the whole into parts, the organism into organs, the
obscure into the known. It does not inquire into the values and ideal possibilities of things, nor
into their total and final significance; it is content to show their present actuality and operation,
it narrows its gaze resolutely to the nature and process of things as they are. The scientist is as
impartial as Nature in Turgenev’s poem: he is as interested in the leg of a flea as in the creative
throes of a genius. But the philosopher is not content to describe the fact; he wishes to
ascertain its relation to experience in general, and thereby to get as its meaning and its worth;
he combines things in interpretive synthesis; he tries to put together, better than before, that
great universe-watch which the inquisitive scientist has analytically taken apart. Science tells us
how to heal and how to kill; it reduces the death rate in retail and then kills us wholesale in
war; but only wisdom - desire coordinated in the light of all experience - can tell us when to
heal and when to kill. To observe processes and to construct means is science; to criticize and
coordinate ends is philosophy; and because in these days our means and instruments have
multiplied beyond our interpretation and syntheses of ideals and ends, our life of full of sound
and fury, signifying nothing. For a fact is nothing except in relation to desire; it is not complete
except in relation to a purpose and a whole. Science without philosophy, facts without
perspective and valuation, cannot save us from havoc and despair. Science gives us knowledge,
but only Philosophy can give us wisdom.
Specifically, philosophy means and includes five fields of study and discourse: logic, esthetics,
ethics, politics, and metaphysics. Logic is the study of ideal method in thought and research;
observation and introspection, deduction and induction, hypothesis and experiment, analysis
and synthesis - such are the forms of human activity which logic tries to understand and guide;
it is a dull study for most of us, and yet the great events in the history of thought are the
improvements men have made in their methods of thinking and research. Aesthetics is the
study of ideal form, or beauty; it is the philosophy of art. Ethics is the study of ideal conduct;
the highest knowledge, said Socrates, is the knowledge of good and evil, the knowledge of the
wisdom of life. Politics is the study of ideal social organization (it is not, as one might suppose,
the art and science of capturing and keeping office); monarchy, aristocracy, democracy,
socialism, anarchism, feminism - these are the dramatis personae of political philosophy. And
lastly, metaphysics (which gets into so much trouble because it is not, like the others forms of
philosophy, an attempt to coordinate the real in the light of the ideal) is the study of the
“ultimate reality” of all things: of the real and final nature of “matter” (ontology), of “mind”
(philosophical psychology), and of the interrelation of “mind” and “matter” in the processes of
perception and knowledge (epistemology).
…Each [philosopher] has some lesson for us, if we approach him properly. “Do you know,” asks
Emerson, “the secret of the true scholar? In every man there is something wherein I may learn
of him; and in that I man his pupil.” Well, surely we may take this attitude to the master minds
of history without hurt to our pride! And we may flatter ourselves with that other thought of
Emerson’s, that when genius speaks to us we feel a ghostly reminiscence of having ourselves, in
our distant youth, had vaguely this self-same thought which genius now speaks, but which we
had not art or courage to clothe with form and utterance. And indeed, great men speak to us
only so far as we have ears and souls to hear them; only so far as we have in us the roots, at
least, of that which flowers out in them. We too have had the experiences they had, but we did
not suck those experiences dry of their secret and subtle meanings: we were not sensitive to
the overtones of the reality that hummed about us. Genius hears the overtones, and the music
of the spheres; genius knows what Pythagoras meant when he said that philosophy is the
highest music.
So let us listen to [philosophers], ready to forgive them their passing errors, and eager to learn
the lessons which they are so eager to teach. “Do you then be reasonable,” said old Socrates to
Crito, “and do not mind whether the teachers of philosophy are good or bad, but think only of
Philosophy herself. Try to examine her well and truly; and if she be evil, seek to turn away all
men from her; but if she be what I believe she is, then follow her and serve her, and be of good
cheer.”