A Brief History of Thought: Philosophical Starters and Non-Starters

It would be nice if higher education could redound to a greater number of intelligent persons, rather than merely revealing the existing ones. 

This led me to wondering: how many genuine philosophers can there be at any time? To be sure, every human being philosophizes and cannot help doing so. But the number of truly great philosophers is no doubt less than the number of great artists, scientists, or mathematicians.

And frankly, even many of the great ones aren't so great if you translate their ideas into plain English.

Here's the first thing that pops up when I searched "great philosophers ranked." Note that there are only 25 names on the list, but it nevertheless includes such embarrassments as Marx, Sartre, Foucault, and Derrida, and a number of others are scarcely less stupid.

At this point the phrase popped into my head: Philosophical Starters and Non-Starters. Because there can self-evidently be only one true philosophy, then the competing philosophies will have to be dismissed either as pieces of this true philosophy, or as non-starters. 

A philosophy can be a non-starter for any number of reasons, but they all end in absurdity or self-refutation, or are built on premises that cannot be justified by the system.

Then I thought of an old book I have called The Story of Thought: The Essential Guide to the History of Western Philosophy, by Bryan Magee. It's only an introduction aimed at a lay audience, but it does include all the important philosophers in chronological order, presenting their key ideas in such a way that we can easily identify the non-starters. 

Obviously there's much more to their philosophies than what is addressed in the book, but nevertheless, if there is even a small error at the foundation of your philosophy, then it scarcely matters how complex and elaborate the structure built atop the initial error.

Bob, isn't this undertaking a little arrogant on your part? Are we supposed to believe you're even qualified to judge these vastly superior minds, let alone be in possession of the One True Philosophy?

Can't know until we try, and besides, it's just for kicks & giggles. For all we know, I'll get bored with the pre-Socratics and abandon the endeavor before it gets off the ground. 

Before touching on those pre-Socratics there's a short introduction going to the nature of philosophy: "every now and again we find ourselves drawing back and wondering what it's all about." Which reminds me of how Whitehead defines the task, something to the effect that philosophy revolves around the simple question: WTF is it all about?

This involves "asking fundamental questions that normally we do not stop to ask." But not only is the unexamined life not worth living, life itself is far too interesting to merely live it.

This is a potentially important point -- that there are as many philosophies as there are human endeavors, for example, philosophy of science, or of religion, of politics, of ethics, of law, of aesthetics, of religion, of knowledge, et al. Who's to say there's a single philosophy or even a single approach that unites them all?

That would be me. Until you hear otherwise.

But seriously, after a long life of thinkin' & wonderin' WTF it's all about, it seems to me that thinking as such is guided by a telos that draws us toward higher and deeper syntheses. Nor is Bob the first to think this. He thought he was first, but then he discovered folks such as Bernard Lonergan, who said much the same thing except in a much less folksy way. 

For example, his magnum opus, Insight, argues that humans come into the world with an unrestricted desire to know, which is to say, nothing less than desire to know everything about everything that is knowable.

Speaking only for myself, I have this desire, nor can it be satisfied by anything short of a Total Explanation. Frankly, we are entitled to such an explanation (lookin' at you, God) and we are the first to know when some clever philosopher is trying to fob us off with a partial explanation. In fact, as we shall soon discover, many of the great philosophers we will be discussing attempt to do just this.

To which we say: no fobbing. 

As alluded to above, I've been at this for a long time, and I suppose I first bumped into this principle back in grad school, via the thought of W.R. Bion. I won't bore you with details, but he's the one who used the symbol O to stand for the ultimate unknowable reality or absolute truth with which we are in permanent dialectical tension. Except it's not so much unknowable as endlessly intelligible. 

Later I encountered another thinker, Errol Harris, who said much the same thing, but you get the idea. Let's get back to The Story of Thought. I think I'll just skip over the pre-Socratics and go straight to Socrates, because not only is he not a non-starter, he is in many ways the starter and ender. 

Why is that? Because he begins and ends with Questioning, and, supposing you're a philosopher, you can't do better than that:

Socrates did not think he knew the answers to these questions. But he saw that no one else knew them either. When the oracle at Delphi declared him to be the wisest of men, he thought that this could mean only that he alone knew that he did not know anything.

Well, join the club, and welcome to my world. In a way, not only did he discover irony, but he was its very incarnation. Which reminds me of something Schuon says -- that there is more Light in a good question than most of those answers with which they try to fob us off.

Well, we haven't gotten far in our project, but we've gotten far enough to know that our way will be lit by irony and by unknowing. And of course, no fobbing.