More than 2400 years ago, Socrates argued that what is important in the writings of philosophers is not what they explain, but what they assume. Philosophical problems appear as conflicts between competing sets of assumptions about human existence and, accordingly, philosophers embrace dialogue and disputation as the way of resolving conflicts. Philosophy is based on descriptive language and descriptions are rarely so unproblematic that they cannot be challenged, especially when people use metaphors to forsake literal for imaginative descriptions of themselves. Consequently, philosophers are like detectives searching for clues in three spheres: ontology (the study of existence); epistemology (the study of knowledge); axiology (the study of ethical and aesthetic values). The sum of these clues and arguments about their meaning yield worldviews which present a body of knowledge that evokes in readers values that are guidelines for personal conduct.
Traditionally, philosophers have attempted to make knowledge the regulator of values and a foundation for personal conduct. Those who are committed to knowledge, rather than opinion, accept truth as authority and, accordingly, their goal in life is to maximize personal power and thereby transcend personal boundaries. Insofar as individuals seek to increase personal power in harmony with or in opposition to the social power that regulates them, philosophy represents a challenging invitation. If individuals do not accept truth as their authority, arguments have no validity and disagreements are merely questions of social power: might is right. If, however, they reject this form of nihilism and embrace the idea that right is different from and more important than might, living becomes a philosophical activity.
One way to evaluate specific philosophies is to see whether they can be lived. Those brave folk who begin this quest encounter philosophers who invite them to penetrate the illusions of appearance and the delusions of common sense. Voltaire said that common sense isn’t very common and we might add that it isn’t very sensible. Philosophy is, therefore, a challenge because readers enter into dialogue with thinkers of the past who are nonetheless their contemporaries; through constant questioning they struggle to achieve wisdom. The willingness to set aside conventional thinking in order to confront new ideas is what the ancient Greeks called ‘examining one’s life’. One examines one’s life by thinking – by talking to oneself – and thinking about thinking is philosophy.
As philosophers talk to and argue with themselves a book about various philosophers talks to readers in different voices. Jean-Paul Sartre says somewhere that people who eschew philosophy are boring because they always speak with the same voice, something we cannot accuse Sartre of doing. Philosophy may have its critics but it can scarcely be said to be boring since it offers readers a bewildering variety of voices from which to choose. When ‘I’ speaks in different voices and ‘me’ listens, we do not enter a schizophrenic world but engage in an intelligent play of personal perspectives. Even the whispering voice so beloved by mad and bad people is philosophy in action.
The acceptance or rejection of philosophies is a complex matter and not well understood. Historically, philosophers assumed that the acceptance or rejection of their ideas would be based on rational criteria. More recently, under the impact of postmodernism, philosophies have been evaluated according to how people feel about them. Clearly, interests and inclinations play an important part in securing for a philosophy a popular following; philosophies are more likely to be judged by pragmatic criteria than by their logical coherence or empirical support. The popularity of philosophies, therefore, is frequently based on whether they ‘work’ for particular individuals or groups and this has the unhappy consequence that all philosophies, like all religions, are true when they work for some people. But, logically, they cannot all be true since they contradict each other. Of course, they can all be false, but how does one judge this pragmatically?
If truth is what works, it is open to us to judge true propositions by whether they feel right, true or good. Whether we call this reason for believing a proposition to be true ‘feelings’ or ‘faith’ is philosophically unimportant, although it is of considerable interest to clinical psychologists. To have faith in a philosophy is to admit that while there are neither logical nor empirical grounds for accepting its main propositions, one accepts them all the same. Such beliefs increase happiness for some people and that is considered to be sufficient justification.
There is, of course, another important reason for promoting a particular philosophy. Although lacking logical or scientific support, particular beliefs can give individuals and groups considerable power, and if Bertrand Russell is right that the fundamental concept in the social sciences is power, it is easy to understand why people embrace lunatic beliefs. Among philosophers there are those who value truth and those who value power and it is easy to understand the appeal of philosophers who offer disciples keys to the kingdom of knowledge since, as Francis Bacon says, knowledge is power. But power is not the same as knowledge and does not require the insurance policy which guarantees truth. As with so much in life, truth is valued for its ability to solve practical problems, not for its own sake. And the ability to solve problems is, in part, what we mean by personal power.
This book, then, includes those philosophers who walk in the shadows and those who walk in the light, those who value truth and those who value power. Included here are those thinkers who have taken up Socrates’ challenge and those who believe that the Western rational tradition was a misguided effort to achieve the impossible. There are philosophers in the following pages who believe that honesty is the best policy and those who think that people who tell the truth get their heads bashed in. One can be forgiven, therefore, for thinking that entering the world of philosophy is a potentially hazardous exercise, like entering the cave of Polyphemus (or a woman’s handbag) in which people are seen to enter but never leave. In the case of philosophy, the journey is out of the light of the ‘me’ and into the darkness of ‘I’. We live between these two poles, talking and listening to ourselves with a little help from our friends.
In our age of relativism where seriously frivolous people believe in everything and its opposite, many turn to philosophy for a kind of religious salvation. But they find questions and arguments rather than jejune solutions. Philosophers spend much of their time keeping their heads just above the water that threatens to submerge them in uncertainty. They invented such notions as ‘contingency’, ‘absurdity’ and ‘nihilism’ to account for the experiences which can drown those who seek religious salvation. In confronting these psychological issues, philosophers have attempted to outline ways of living with uncertainty without despair, looking without falling into the abyss, laughing in the face of absurdity, looking squarely at the brutality of human beings and still loving some of them, entertaining the idea that people are basically rational and coping with inevitable disappointments.
The cast of philosophical characters assembled here is dominated by those who offer philosophies of personal power: views about the nature of human beings and their place in the world which have shaped people’s lives. As such, they have explored the fusion of philosophy and psychology as a guide to an understanding of the good life.
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HOMERIC HEROES: Power and Tragedy
Some years ago a British sailor overturned his yacht and an Australian naval ship put to sea to rescue him. When the sailors returned to port, the newspapers hailed them as ‘Our Heroes’. There is something touching in the way heroes are applauded for their deeds even if today the deeds are not so great. If heroism entails a striving after something appallingly hard to obtain, then many of today’s heroes do not deserve the label or the exaggerated applause. This is merely to acknowledge that the meaning of the terms ‘hero’ and ‘heroism’ have changed over the centuries and since this chapter is concerned with ancient heroism, the anaemic, modern meanings have to be set aside. If, for example, we believe that we are on this earth mainly to be happy, we deny to ourselves heroic status. If we think that the world is wonderful and adopt the posture of the optimist, we are far removed from the views of ancient heroes for whom life was nasty, brutish and short. For the ancients heroism was a way of life and was not confined to occasional praiseworthy acts. If we prefer to concern ourselves with improving our ‘quality of life’ by placing pleasure at the top of our hierarchy