Why Philosophy?

Once, a long long time ago, philosophy was not just considered a science, it was the science — genesis of all research and knowledge. Since then however, quite some millennia passed, meanings changed, hierarchies crumbled and new opinions were formed. It is undeniably true that the modern sciences, heavily equipped with empiricism and the principle of falsifiability, gave us a vast range of knowledge and inventions which are fundamental for our everyday life; while philosophy got stuck in the mud of metaphysics, asking questions with apparently no answers whatsoever. »Philosophy is dead« proclaimed physicist Stephen Hawking at the very beginning of his 2010 book The Grand Design^[1], so why invest in it?

A common answer that is intuitively given in defense of philosophy is the argument that philosophy itself defined modern science. The scientific revolution, the ideas of empiricism and Realism, all of these were once considered by people who were commonly identified as philosophers. Thus, modern science would not live without the work of philosophy. It is shaky reasoning, however. It does give credit where credit is due, but it is more a defense of the past than of the present. Natural sciences and engineering practices clearly emancipated from the protectorate of philosophy and claim to stand firmly on their own.

What, then, can philosophy still do for us? A fruitful line of thought stems from Bertrand Russell – himself a well-known mathematician and logician. Indeed, we find the same comparison in the final chapter of his 1912 book The Problems of Philosophy, where he seeks the very value of the subject in question by inquiring into the particular reasoning behind the evident differences between physics and philosophy.^[2]

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. Physical science, through the medium of inventions, is useful to innumerable people who are wholly ignorant of it; thus the study of physical science is to be recommended, not only, or primarily, because of the effect on the student, but rather because of the effect on mankind in general. This utility does not belong to philosophy. 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. It is in these effects, therefore, if anywhere, that the value of philosophy must be primarily sought.

The battle between practical knowledge and philosophical thought appears to be fought on uneven ground. If we compare the value of competing entities by a single standard, where said standard is given by one of those entities, we will surely struggle to build a useful comparison. The language wars in computer science could have ended a long time ago by measuring programming languages by how »pythonesque« they are, then declaring python the undisputed winner. It is of course understandable that material needs are considered of uttermost importance and any argument in favor of philosophy shall not be an argument against practical needs. But any view too narrow will ultimately make us blind to paths that lead to different locations, which is why Russell pleads for us to open our minds.

But further, if we are not to fail in our endeavour to determine the value of philosophy, we must first free our minds from the prejudices of what are wrongly called ‘practical’ men. The ‘practical’ man, as this word is often used, is one who recognizes only material needs, who realizes that men must have food for the body, but is oblivious of the necessity of providing food for the mind. If all men were well off, if poverty and disease had been reduced to their lowest possible point, there would still remain much to be done to produce a valuable society; and even in the existing world the goods of the mind are at least as important as the goods of the body. It is exclusively among the goods of the mind that the value of philosophy is to be found; and only those who are not indifferent to these goods can be persuaded that the study of philosophy is not a waste of time.

Hence, Russell seeks an answer to our question, Why Philosophy, in the needs beyond those areas that are already satisfied by our practical knowledge. What kind of world would we build if we imagined the credo of materialistic usefulness taken to its extreme? Even the beloved goods themselves are not devoid of philosophy: If you were ever truly enchanted by a book, a movie or a video game whose story preoccupied your mind even after consumption, chances are that philosophy and other non-physical disciplines did contribute to it.

But! – I hear you protest – even such tasks are about to be solved by the ingenuity of engineering! Story writing, world-building, linguistic engagement, as well as painting and other arts; we are in the midst of outsourcing such work to the LLM! — A naive sentiment, I must reply, which can only come from the »practical man«, as the term is used by Russell’s definition.

In a popular speech given in 2024 about the video game industry, Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Swen Vincke explained how to succeed against the giants of the market.^[3] The »stupidly simple formula«, he proclaimed, was »no spreadsheets«, »no KPIs«, »no sales targets«, but to make a game that they themselves would like to play. It is astonishing how this approach seems to run diametrically opposed to the established method of shoveling more numbers into the number-machine – yet people believe that an even bigger machine could be artistic. There is, however, an inherent flaw in the idea of automatizing thought, as such an endeavour must lead to a rigidity that Russell hoped to escape by practicing philosophy.

The value of philosophy is, in fact, to be sought largely in its very uncertainty. The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the co-operation or consent of his deliberate reason. To such a man the world tends to become definite, finite, obvious; common objects rouse no questions, and unfamiliar possibilities are contemptuously rejected. […] 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. Thus, while diminishing our feeling of certainty as to what things are, it greatly increases our knowledge as to what they may be; it removes the somewhat arrogant dogmatism of those who have never travelled into the region of liberating doubt, and it keeps alive our sense of wonder by showing familiar things in an unfamiliar aspect.

Russell leads us thus to another possible line of reasoning in favor of philosophy. While philosophical questions might not always lead to an answer, the fallacy is that only answers are valuable products of thought. Again we do know, of course, where this assumption is coming from, for many do not truly benefit from the process of engineering but only from the final result. And as our line of reasoning that works so very well for the material needs slowly spills over into every other problem area, we again come to believe that something must be wrong with philosophy. Only by understanding philosophy as something else, for example, a practice, can we start to dive into Russell’s logic. The sheer act of contemplating possibilities is a practice from which we can only gain, even when it comes to intellectual skills like creativity and problem-solving. Philosophy isn’t about facts – it is about the framework in which facts are contextualized.

Philosophy as a practice therefore has to be distinguished from the production of knowledge. Its value does not necessarily lie in arriving somewhere, but in the process of getting there. To contemplate a possibility, to follow an argument beyond the point where it appears immediately useful, or to question an assumption that otherwise would have remained unnoticed does not necessarily produce a new fact. It nevertheless changes the person doing it. In this sense, philosophical thought is less like constructing an object and more like training a capacity: the capacity to see things differently, to entertain possibilities, and to recognize the limits of one’s own assumptions.

In a way, philosophy is quite a difficult subject, as it does not guide us to definite answers. There is no validation of correctness, no apparent feedback, no spreadsheets which give us a sense of security by double-checking those numbers. These limitations may lead us to dismiss philosophical subjects as futile. The contrary is true: Precisely because its way of thinking diverges so much from our usual working patterns that are so heavily supported by our technical tools, it guides us off the beaten path, allowing us to gain invaluable new experiences and foster a deeper confidence in our own problem-solving abilities. An engineer may be judged by what has been built when the work is finished; the value of philosophical practice cannot be located so easily in its final product.

One might be surprised by how spiritual the final paragraphs in Russell’s text sound, considering that these were written by the author of the Principia Mathematica. “The true philosophic contemplation” he concludes his essay, “finds its satisfaction in every enlargement of the not-Self, in everything that magnifies the objects contemplated, and thereby the subject contemplating.” It is understandable if this comes across somewhat theoretical. It should only be noted, however, that to someone everything seems theoretical as long as it is not associated with personal experience.

It is certainly quite ambitious to argue against someone like Stephen Hawking, for I will never understand much of his work. Nevertheless, it is astonishing to me how such a brilliantly systematic thinker could have stepped into such incomplete argumentative structure. He answers questions that are answerable by physics and deduces that questions which philosophy does not tackle in the same way are senseless. It is true, of course: Physics does explain to us how black holes work while philosophy does not. By implicitly defining the goalposts, it becomes trivial to dismiss philosophy as dead. Russell, himself not short of scientific achievements, clearly had a much deeper understanding in this regard, even a hundred years earlier.