Isaiah Berlin – my twisted mind criticizes…

In India there is a place called Gandhi Ashram. It is like a memorial to Gandhi and his life. I went to that place once with my friends. While all my friends were very impressed by the place and the displays, I found the whole setup to be rather dull and to a certain extent redundant and dead. I thought that the place stressed too much emphasis on the existence of Gandhi rather than the idea of him. In such a situation one is confronted with questions like “What do you mean by the idea of Gandhi?” “Is it even possibly to depict physically an idea, a notion which might as well differ from person to person?” These are the kind of questions that are, as Berlin [1] states, neither empirical nor formal.
The first question the skeptic asks is whether such questions are of any importance. What purpose do they serve? To what ends to they cater? How do they affect our existence our future and present?
While Berlin [1] goes to great lengths about how a certain section of inquiries cannot be placed in the hackneyed terminology of empirical and formal sciences, the paper fails to answer any of the above questions. What the paper seems to be concentrating on is to justify the existence of philosophy (maybe as a science) despite it qualifying as neither empirical nor formal. To that end the writer goes on to show how the modern branches of sciences are riddled with philosophical inquiries. The paper discusses the origins of ‘astronomy’ and how that used to be in the domain of philosophy and how with the advent of the space age it tried to unfetter itself of ‘the shackles of philosophy’ and go over to the realm of sciences, and how it still has leftover (as well as new) abstract questions which can not be solved by the scientific approach.
Then the writer uses a phrase no philosophers questions are physical, some physicists questions are still philosophical. Now while this statement is very cute, it is extremely irritating to a person of scientific disposition because it seems that philosophy and philosophers simply prey on the absence of observed and empirical data and the lack of clarity of the human mind, rather being serious and try to solve issues. Or to put it simply it seems that the purpose of philosophy is to muddle rather than elucidate.
I rather like the idea of philosophy because while we look at the same things what we see is totally different. A cliché example of this would be the half tumbler of water: one sees it as half filled and another as half empty. How do we resolve the conflict of ideas? And more importantly how do we resolve the conflict of facts? So many times trouble spews not from notions but facts. While men like Machiavelli will say the deceit and manipulation is the essence of stable and successful governance for the greater good, can science help us refute the treatise or guiltlessly embrace the same? No these shoes can only be filled by philosophy, which is like fluid and thus can mould itself according to vessel. Once poured however getting it to harden and explain the shape of the problem is not always that easy, or sometimes even feasible. However the way is not to give up on philosophy, by trying to fit the question to a science by scraping the surface and trying to fit the question to the answer instead of finding a fitting answer.
The trouble with philosophy is that by its very nature it is a gradient of grey. Its gossamer abstractions are hard to grasp. It is impossible to not be overwhelmed, sometimes to a degree of being suicidal like Umberto Eco and Nietzsche. Here I would quote an example from a Douglas Adams’ book where a supercomputer is set to the task of finding the ultimate answer. When the answer is discovered it turns out to be 42. The bamboozled reader is told that the people looking for the answer didn’t know question. Apart from being extremely droll, this situation holds a lot of truth. A lot of times in philosophical pursuits one loses sight of the question to an extent that one ends up with a bigger mess than what one began with. But this situation is not singular to philosophy. You can see it various branches of sciences. Only where philosophy is concerned it might be slightly harder to see the answers right away. The difficulty of the ordeal does not render it useless just makes it more daunting. And this is what the philosopher is left to deal with, all the while looking to justify this pursuit to the society (as in non philosophers). To that end Berlin [1] does do justice by expounding in very clear terms that philosophy is cumbersome to handle, as it does not provide with systematic or well-defined approaches to a problem. Picking on the terminology of Berlin himself, when dealing with philosophy one has to act like the fox rather than the hedgehog. This view is in slight contradiction with Science where everyone wants to do an Einstein and be a hedgehog. Picking on the writings of Kant, Berlin remarks that the difference in perception of any instance for between individuals, between cultures, between people of different religions means that one cannot have a single satisfactory universal answer, which is in contradiction to well the standard scientific notion (there are of course exception like the wave-particle duality, but then Berlin classifies that too as a philosophical question). This means that to resolve questions of liberty, justice, ethics etc. one needs to look to philosophy for answers instead of science. Thus I do agree with the writer that Philosophy is indeed important. However I do not agree with his approach of trying to justify or prove the preceding statement. I believe he glosses over a lot of questions while not even touching some of the more important ones. I believe the article is repetitive and redundant (just like this statement). But since the article is by Isaiah Berlin one wonders if one is in ones right mind to criticize it. (However the writer is supposed to have remarked that his reputation was based on the systematic overestimation of his abilities.)

References
[1] Berlin, I. (2000) “The Power of Ideas”, Princeton University Press Princeton, New Jersey.