In Our Time - The Examined Life

Episode Date: May 9, 2002

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss self-examination. Socrates, the Greek philosopher of the 4th century BC, famously declared that "The unexamined life is not worth living." His drive towards rigorous self-enquiry and his uncompromising questioning of assumptions laid firm foundations for the history of Western Philosophy. But these qualities did not make him popular in ancient Athens: Socrates was deemed to be a dangerous subversive for his crime, as he described it, of "asking questions and searching into myself and other men". In 399 BC Socrates was sentenced to death on the charge of being "an evil-doer and a curious person". Two thousand years later, the novelist George Eliot was moved to reply to Socrates that "The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the life too closely examined may not be lived at all". For Eliot too much self-scrutiny could lead to paralysis rather than clarity. What did Socrates mean by his injunction? How have our preoccupations about how to live altered since the birth of ancient Greek philosophy? And where does philosophy rank in our quest for self-knowledge alongside science, the arts and religion? With Dr Anthony Grayling, Reader in Philosophy, Birkbeck, University of London; Janet Radcliffe Richards, Philosopher of Science and Reader in Bioethics, University College, London; Julian Baggini, Editor, The Philosopher’s Magazine and co-editor of New British Philosophy: The Interviews.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, Socrates, the Greek philosopher of the 4th century BC, famously declared that the unexamined life is not worth living. His drive towards rigorous self-inquiry

and his uncompromising questioning of assumptions laid firm foundations for the history of Western philosophy. But these qualities didn't make him popular in ancient Athens. Socrates was deemed to be a dangerous subversive for his crime, as he described it, of asking questions and searching into myself and other men. In 399 BC, Socrates was sentenced to death on the charge of being an evil-doer and a curious person. 2,000 years later, the novelist George Elliott was moved to reply to Socrates

that the unexamined life may not be worth living, but the life too closely examined may not be lived at all. For Elliot, too much self-scrutiny could lead to paralysis rather than clarity. So what did Socrates mean by his injunction? How about our preoccupations about how to live altered since the birth of ancient Greek philosophy? And where does philosophy itself rank in our quest for self-knowledge alongside science, the arts, religion, or lived experience? To examine and perhaps to justify their existence, I have with me three philosophers,

Dr. Anthony Grayling, reader in philosophy at Birkbeck University of London, Janet Ratcliffe Richards, a philosopher and reader in bioethics at University College London, and Julian Baggini, editor of the Philosopher's Magazine and co-editor of New British Philosophy, the interviews. Anthony Greiling, Socrates was a controversial figure. How did his philosophical concerns differ from his predecessors, Thales and Heraclitus? Well, Socrates is credited with shifting attention dramatically away from the concerns of his predecessors who are interested in the origins and nature of the physical universe. and he, when he was young, attended lectures

and listened to the discussions that went on on that subject and he was very dissatisfied with the results because he found that they were all disagreeing with one another and that they didn't seem in the end really to have got hold of knowledge and it surprised him that they were concerned about that and not about what he thought was a much more important matter which is how to live, what sort of person you should be, what it is to be a good individual and a good citizen.

And so he shifted that for, focus of attention away from inquiry into what we would now think of as science to ethics and politics and raise questions about what the good life for man is. What did that come out of? Did it come out of the blue? Was the tradition of that? Had previous Greek thinkers or pre-Greek thinkers hinted at that? What he came out of, I think, was the fact that in the classical period in 4th and 5th century Athens,

there was in any case a shift away from a general acceptance of the warrior virtues, the kind of virtues that you read about in Homer, to a sense that ideas were needed about the civic virtues, about what it is to be a member of a community, a good member of a community, because the Athens of Pericles, of Miltaiades, of the mysticles, of these great leaders and lawgivers like Solon, was really the first place that the idea of, a rule of law and of a civic community were fully worked out.

And so Socrates embodies and exemplifies this turn of attention towards thinking about what the good society is and what a good person is in such a society. What do you think he means by that great sentence? The unexamined life is not worth living. What sort of examination? Who examines? Is this only for a leisure class? Is this only for people who are already privileged? Does it apply to the slaves at the time or metaphorically the slaves now?

Can you just attack that sentence? Well, I think Socrates meant by the unexamined life is not worth living that if you don't think about your values and your aims, your goals and what sort of person to be and how to live your life, then you've yielded up the direction of your life to chance and to others and the decisions that other people make. And then you're no better ready than an animal being driven about by things that happen around you.

And you've lost autonomy. you're not the governor of yourself. This idea of being an autonomous and thoughtful individual who makes choices that you've reflected on seem to him, as it has to many moral philosophers since, to be a tremendously important value. It doesn't matter so much whether you're happy doing it or unhappy doing it.

More important than that is that you are directing your own fate. How many, Julian Baguini, how many people can do that, though? You do this, you do that, you do the other anti-denic. suspiciously like the advice given in agony columns to a certain extent there, Anthony. We're a bit near the verge there, but we come back to that. How many people can do that? You know, a person wakes up in around the globe.

I mean, half, three-quarters of people. They have to get on with what they're given, which is often nothing like what they want, and just buckle down and do it or give up. The examined life, the deciding what your ambitious and objective. Great. But where does it take you from my own? people? Well, I think one of the problems here is that this quote is wheeled out quite often to justify

philosophy. People say, why do philosophy? Well, you know, look at what Socrates said, the unexamined life is not worth living. I think the point is there are lots of ways of examining life. I mean, first of all, the phrase the examined life, I think we tend to think of it as being about self-examination and self-understanding. I don't think we should limit it in that way. Examining life is about examining all parts of life. Science is part of examining life. It's about examining the world around us. And that feeds into self-understanding, obviously, because we are parts of the natural world. But, you know, one can examine one's own life, I think, in any number of ways. If you read literature, in a sense, you are examining life. If you just sit down and talk

with friends, often you are examining life. So I think we shouldn't get the idea that the examined life has to entail, has to involve high-level philosophy. I think that it can involve many different things. But isn't he saying that the examine life is worth doing just to examine life? It doesn't have to lead to the one thing another, just the mere exam, not the mere, the examination of it in itself is sufficient. Yes, I think there's something in here. Aristotle put it in slightly differently, perhaps more explicitly,

that in his view, what made a human beings distinctive was their capacity for rational thought. And he thought that any creature functions and flourishes at its best when it does what is, distinctive to its own nature. So in that sense, if we are to be truly human, we have to use that active part of us, which is distinctively human. We have to use our rational capacities. So it's by thinking and examining that we become most fully human. I think there's something of that. In Plato, we don't find it articulated in quite that way. But I think that's part of the idea. Did the Greeks think that philosophy was the best way to examine life? And is there a sense in which that sort of philosophy arrived on the scene with the

Greeks themselves? Well, I'm not a historian, but the way I would understand it is that really the breakthrough with philosophy in the Hellenic world came through with the idea that the world was something which is essentially rationally comprehensible. And that means us and the external world. There's not a distinction at that point, I suppose. So I think, you know, what was the novelty for the Greeks was the idea that anything at all really was rationally comprehensible, that by thinking through things, by making observations as well, we could understand things better. And I think that was a genuine breakthrough,

it marked a shift away from understanding the world purely through myth, certainly in the Western world. Did they make a distinction between knowledge and self-knowledge? Well, there were those distinctions. I think those distinctions were there from the beginning. But in Greek philosophy, I think there is less of a division because they had what has been termed a kind of synoptic view of knowledge. that all the different branches of knowledge sort of formed a whole.

So you couldn't, for example, do biology as entirely separately from, say, ethics. It was taken for granted that in some way what you learned in one branch of knowledge would feed back into the others. Now we live in a world where knowledge is extremely specialized and you have people working in, say, biology, for example, and they would think they had very little to do

with people working in philosophy. You have people in philosophy departments who are working in different specialised, of philosophy who think they have little to say to each other. And I think that if you go back to the Greeks, philosophy was all rational inquiry, really, and I think there was an assumption that it all would hold together in some way. It would all feed into each other. Janet Ratcliffe Richards, you've argued, I believe, that it's anachronistic now to think about the world in terms of a natural order.

Was this an idea that was central to Greek thinking and to the idea of his idea, their idea of a man's role in the world? It certainly seems to me to come in Aristotle, because if you look at Aristotle's idea of the structure of the universe, the geocentric structure with expanding circles outside, it certainly seems that he integrates the moral order and the natural order. And this was quite conspicuously taken up into Christian ideas where hell was literally downwards and heaven was literally upwards and the soul was trying to get up and the body was trying to pull it down and so on. And I think certainly this is one of the things that has been rethought over time, but I think we're still in the process of rethinking it. I still think we have a lot of Aristotelian ideas in the back of the mind. Can we just unravel the idea of a natural order a little bit more for listeners who might not be as familiar with it as you yourself are? What was the natural order to Aristotle?

You briefly brushed through it, but can you just expand on it? Well Aristotle was the origin of what we now call the great chain of being, the idea that you had things ranging from inanimate objects at the bottom of the chain through the lower forms of life plants and the lower animals, up through human beings and eventually to God right at the top. And it was to some extent a matter of how much soul you had, a matter of what kind of rational soul you had or whether you had a lesser kind. So there was this idea of a hierarchy of worth, in a way, of kinds of things.

And you feel that that's gone now. What do you think is replaced it? If it has gone, what has replaced it? Or has anything replaced it? No, I don't think it's wrong to classify things in that way. It isn't that that's gone. I think what I would most challenge is the idea that to understand the nature of something is to understand what it should be doing.

I think this is a problem that we still have. For Aristotle, understanding the nature of human beings was to understand how a human being ought to live. Whereas I think in the light of modern science, to understand the nature of something is merely to understand the causes and effects and how various effects work on people. But it doesn't tell you what you ought to do.

It doesn't presuppose that there's a way to live which will be right. What's your take on this sentence about the unexamined life? I find it hard to imagine the unexamined life, but I suppose what I would want to say about that is that if life is just a grind and you haven't got time to think, that's an unfortunate thing. I think one of the interesting things about the Greek throne, especially Socrates through the Plato tradition, is that a lot of the kinds of techniques that Socrates,

used for examining life are exactly the kinds that a lot of us take our students through now. That is, somebody comes up with an idea and says, for instance, for justice, Plato, Socrates would say, what is justice or what is this or that? And his young followers would say it's this and think they'd given a clear explanation. And Socrates would force them to see that this led to all kinds of confusions which they hadn't anticipated, purely rationally. and then they had to start rethinking. And this is one of the things that analytic philosophy does. It takes ideas which people think they have clear

and forces them to see contradictions in it. It's not coming from outside and saying, this is the truth you must think it. It's getting people to realise the problems in their own ideas. Anthony Grelling, do you think that philosophy is the best tool by which to examine life? I think it's a very good tool. And I have a view which I say,

is a little bit controversial, and it is that all inquiry begins in philosophy and tends to end up in philosophy again too. So although there are many, many resources in the natural sciences, the social sciences, in the humanities, in literature and history especially, many, many resources for learning things about the human condition and about the world in which we find ourselves, nevertheless, applying philosophical kinds of reasoning to it, and recognizing the fact that there are always distinctively philosophical dilemmas at the end of these things is very important. And so philosophy is an immensely rich resource for handling them. And I think, you know, if we all went around knocking on doors and saying to people,

have you been thinking philosophically recently, we would be doing them a good term. Perhaps they have been, without putting it in terms which are being discussed this morning. I mean, there are different ways discussed philosophy. But can I come to your move it on a bit? Do you think that Christianity was a challenge to the sort of philosophy that you've been outlawed? line. It was a challenge to, do you think it came in and for, you clearly do? I mean, there's all sorts of nods and winks going around this time. Very rarely I want a television camera in, but I could have been there for two or three seconds. So can we translate this into

mere words, please? Well, I would put it like this and this perhaps somewhat over-dramatizes it, but Christianity is a, in essence, an oriental religion, are using oriental in the sense it used to apply to what we now call the Middle East. And its eruption into the European world, which had its roots, its footings in the classical tradition, was a pretty dramatic one. And one of the ways in which it was dramatic is that it put an end to the kind of inquiry that Socrates and others in the Greek and especially Hellenic tradition engaged in. And that is thinking about the basis, about the principles of the moral life. Because Christianity tells you what it is that you have to do.

It's no longer an inquiry into principles. It imports from a transcendental route from something outside the human world, a set of injunctions about what's right, what's wrong, how to live, what to do, how to behave, what to think, what the aims and goals of a human life are. And that's a dramatically different conception from the Greek one, which, as Janet correctly said, involved thinking it through for yourself and making choices on your own behalf. Well, people would say, wouldn't they, you say it's more than an inquiring, and then to be terribly clued about it,

it's a diverted what you believe in for about 1,500 years, we'll come back to how that. But people would say that it wasn't quite like that, that you had to examine your own moral nature, excuse me, very, very carefully indeed, that he gave people of all backgrounds, the tools and techniques, whatever, to examine their moral nature,

were they good, what did goodness mean, how could they help each other, how could they obey, yes, injunctions, but also precepts and also teachings of, Christ, as it were, the principal teacher. So I don't know whether it's completely wiped something out or some Christians would say enriched it. Others would say, diverted it but not diluted it.

What would you say to you in Virginia? Well, I would take a critical view of Christianity on this point. I think that the effect on ethics was to distort what was a perfectly good view of ethics. I mean, for the ancient Greeks, ethics was about how do we live. And you approach that question from the point of view as, you know, how does life go best for us? What must we do in order to ensure that life goes well for us? Now, when Christian ethics came in, it kind of replaced that kind of inquiring and sort of positive view of ethics with a set of injunctions, which were you no longer, first of all, you no longer we'd have to inquire as to about how to live, you follow the rules. And secondly, you follow the rules because they have been set down by God.

You have to just trust that it's good for us in the long run, it's good for us in the afterlife or whatever. but there were no reasons given as to why this is actually good for us. So I think from an ethical point... Yes there are. The reason is the world would be a much better place. This is Christian, the reason given is if you did this, the world will be a much better place. Blessed are the peacemakers. The world will be on a peaceful place.

It would be a kind of place. That's what it says. Some of the rules I think are good. In all ethical traditions, you find these same kind of rules coming up and again. It doesn't mean they're wrong. No, they're not wrong. But the point is the reason we're told to follow them. I'm not sure.

I think nowadays people would say, well, if we do this, the world will be a better place, etc. But that was not really the justification given. And in a way, a lot of religious history has been about not questioning too much a justification. You did have to accept the authority of what was given to you. But it's true, the fact that a lot of the moral precepts set down by Christianity

are perfectly good is not an argument for Christianity because those precepts are shared by all sorts of people. All of atheists would say exactly the same thing. And the important thing about religion anyway was that it had a different kind of ordered universe. I mean, the Aristotelian one was a naturally ordered universe. The Christian one is one that's been ordered by God. And you'll find that a lot of people who defend Christian principles

say we don't understand enough about it. We don't understand why you have to take... He did Aristotle think that his natural order was put in place by? He didn't think that way. Well, he had a natural order which could be compared. You compared it yourself. Around this table, you compared it. You started with it.

Aristotle had this natural order. It starts with the table, inanimate object, dum-da-dum, thinking man, goes to heaven. And then you said and goes to God. You use the word God. Oh, yes, but God in Aristotle. Yes, God in Aristotle is a different kind of God, however. God in Aristotle is a...

Well, this just goes to show the complexity of theology and why there is so much talk at cross purposes. No, God in Aristotle. was as it were, part of the natural order. God in Christianity is the foundation of the, is the one who produces the natural order, says let there be light. I know you would all like to go on the rampage against Christianity.

I'm going to move by saying, do you think, oh, sorry, do you think that this idea of self-examination was continued through Christianity, or thwarted by it? In the traditional sense, thwarted by it, because the examination became a matter of making sure that you properly understood what God had told you to do. It was the examination of conscience, the idea of confession and so on.

And it was a matter of getting yourself into line with something that was supposed to be done. I often think in this country at the moment, if you want to have a go at anything, the two things to have a go are the English and the Christians. That's a very dry, a very dry love from you, Anthony Greil. We're only right about one of them. But to say this is not yet.

To say this it's wrong. If Christianity were true, that would be the way to do it. You see, the point is both in Aristotle and in Christianity, the way you think about ethics presupposes a particular view of the nature of the world. And the same,

of course, is true. Even if you move into post-Aristatelian post-Christian views of the world as well, the way you think of the underlying structure necessarily influences the way you think of ethics. Well, Melvin does raise an interesting point about this idea of self-examination.

It's certainly true that in certain traditions of Christianity, particularly post-Reformation Protestant traditions, that the idea of a kind of self-examination is important. But Janit is absolutely right. The examination in question is aimed at seeing whether you're successfully conforming to the rescripts, as it were, of your faith. And that's a very different thing. It's quite astonishing, really, how in the 17th and 18th century,

when moral inquiry, ethical inquiry, started again after this long caesura introduced by Christianity, People began to think about matters of principle, about the basis, about what really motivates us when we act, and how we should make decisions about what's worth doing and why we should take other people's interests and needs into account when we're about to do something. All those questions were premised on a realisation that if there is a God and if God is good, then it's not because God says he's good, but because he or she or them are conformed. somehow to quite independent principles of the good. And the minute that you've recognised that, you see that goodness, that ethical value,

can't be a matter of what anybody, however, supernatural and grand, just dictates. Did Anthony's description of what was happening in, let's call it lucid enlightenment, was that prepared for by the advances in science, Galileo Newton? I'm just going to sort of try to scoop up that little bit before we go on through the Enlightenment. Julian Burgini. Well, to be honest, it's difficult to answer to question, give a question, answer to that, sorry.

Partly because of the tradition I've come out of, philosophy in Britain, at least, has been fairly ahistoric in the way it's approached things. And obviously there are ways in which science, art and culture, have influenced philosophy. But as a philosopher, you tend to go in, pick up a text by Descartes or something and just look at the arguments and see if they work. I think that's a failing of philosophy, frankly, but it's a failing which. I've partly been a victim of. But one thing I would say, let's go before the Enlightenment, again talking about the way in which things have moved on. In the Middle Ages, the effect of Christianity on philosophy

was that you had rational argument being used as apologetics. So again, you had to move away from the idea that you go to the foundations of your understanding in order to build up from it. And instead, you start with faith and you use the tools of philosophy, as developed by the Greeks, to somehow justify and explain and understand puzzles that arose. So, for example, how can there be evil in the world

when there's a loving God? So I think that there was, again, a move back from the Greeks in the Middle Ages in the way they appropriated philosophy, and it became, again, the servant of religion rather than an autonomous discipline. But one of the ways in which science developed in the Renaissance was by using the Socratic method.

I mean, Galileo had to argue his case in court in open debates all the time, I mean, it's been said, that that was one of the ways in which he had to sharpen, deal with, attack the signs that he was dealing with. And that brought it back in, is what I'm saying. He's brought the idea of Greek thought,

one of the ways that he, the tradition of the Greeks, the legacy of Greek, came back into, let's call loosely European thought. Would you agree with that, Anthony? Well, I would certainly agree that styles of reasoning were, indeed, brought back if ever they'd been absent,

and perhaps they hadn't really, But it's not so much, or not only a matter of the styles of reasoning, but the premises that underlie them and what it is your reasoning from and to. In the case of the hegemony of Christian thought in medieval times and indeed in Renaissance times, the thought was that your reasoning had to start on the assumption that the world is a God-created world and that the ends and aims of all our action should be to reunite with God or get to heaven.

And so if your assumptions are said, and the goals of your conclusions are set, all that the reasoning can do is to be a subordinate instrument to get from one to the other. And that's a very different thing from saying that reason itself is autonomous. You've got to follow where the reasoning leads, even if it leads to some very uncomfortable conclusions.

Are we, Janet Rutgers, are we still thinking that philosophy is the best tool to examine life? And is it doing so in a way in which it overcomes our inclinations to think and act emotionally, intuitively and so on and so forth. Is it serving almost a sort of social purpose there? I'd be interested to know how the other two would describe what they think philosophy is

because doing something is rather different from being able to explain what it is. But I think of philosophy as if you regard empirical science as a kind of extension of common sense observation of the world, I think of philosophy as an extension. of common sense reasoning. You get, and so therefore philosophy is characterized not by its subject matter so much as its methods. And if you think of philosophy as getting more and more sophisticated in reasoning,

then it isn't in contrast with anything else. It's a necessary part of every inquiry you do. It isn't in a sense optional. It's a question of whether you do it well or badly. And inevitably, understanding how you are, how the world is, is going to involve, both empirical work where you see, as it were, how your ideas latch onto the world, and the logical work, which is working out whether they fit together. And so I don't see how any kind of thinking about your life can go without philosophy.

Now, with the emotions, obviously there, in some sense, some of your emotions are given, they're very deep in you, but it doesn't necessarily mean that you should accept your intuition about how to achieve what you think is good. You may say, well, here's an emotion, but I have a conflicting emotion. I must recognise the conflict and I must work out which to go by.

Or you may say my intuitions in this context lead me in a completely wrong direction. So this is a context where I must abandon my intuitions. I think that's absolutely right. The point about philosophy is that it essentially involves reflection, It involves other things too, like trying to take account of all the evidence that is provided by all the other human pursuits, all the other inquiries that there are. But it essentially involves reflection. And if one dwells for a moment on that word, you know, it implies stepping aside and looking at yourself, looking at your own ideas, looking at the ideas that are current in society, looking at the assumptions, the methods, the aims that are current, and challenging them.

it's a very salutary experience to challenge your own most cherished beliefs, your own deepest commitments. What are your most cherished beliefs that you as a philosopher challenge? I mean, what I'm interesting is whether you three philosophers are leading a better life through your self-examination capabilities than the rest of us. I'm quite prepared to believe you. I you look very healthy and happy and fit and goodness knows what, talking eloquently without many ums and ars and cuts and so and so forth.

But do you give the answer for us. You say, don't they, that no man is a philosopher. in the dentist. And I suppose for some extent that's true. But at any rate, the point about it is not so much the success of the endeavour, but the fact that it's undertaken at all. And that does make a big difference. You can imagine a society or indeed just an individual, never reflecting, barging along, not learning from past mistakes, not making any kind of deliberate choice about what to do next and how to think about others. You just described the career pattern of a lot of successful businessman.

He also described a lot of religious. Yes, I'm going to say. Yes, well, that's... I'm being too frivolous. That speaks for itself. Bertrand Russell said that almost all questions of most interest as speculative minds are such as science cannot answer. And we have science coming in as a method which seems to challenge philosophy. But he, as a philosopher, at one stage, we do seem to have that. And he is saying, no, that's not.

What's your response to that, Julian? Well, I don't think her philosophy challenges science or vice versa. I think Janet said earlier on, really, that these things are linked up. We're talking about rational inquiry, and there are different forms, different kind of branches of rational inquiry. Science is based itself on the empirical. That's its kind of starting point. It's about observation.

Philosophy deals more with the conceptual questions. But there has to be sort of work between them. There is philosophy in science. I don't know if there's much science in philosophy, but there's certainly the other way around. And science throws up philosophical issues and problems as well. I think in evolutionary psychology, for example, we have people who are trying to explain scientifically

the origins of ethics, for example. But that raises philosophical questions. For example, if altruism is the product of evolutionary processes, what does that mean it's not really altruism? Does that mean it's just some kind of a non-moral process that we use simply to make ourselves more successful? So I really don't think there's any kind of major conflict here, and I resist any sort of temptation to generate one.

Yes. Can I ask you, we've been talking about rational in terms of philosophy, sort of skirting around Hegel's idea that the real is the rational. Freud comes along and says there's a great deal of irrationality there, which tells you the truth about yourself. And if you examine yourself, if you're going for self-examination on through my methods, Freud, you will find a deeper, truer self than you could, of course it can say that, then you would find by other methods.

Now, what do you make of that? which seems to attack the very core of what we've been talking about for much of the time. I think I prefer to put it by saying that Freud argued that there are non-rational, as opposed to irrational, that there are non-rational. How would you make a distinction? Well, in this sense that, you know, if you looked out of the window and you saw that the rain was pouring down and you thought to yourself, well, you know, inductive inferences are pretty insecure. Perhaps I won't get wet this time if I go out in the rain.

Well, that's an example of irrationality, because you've got the reasons. front of you and you're not guided by them. But something which is non-rational might be some rather deep emotional scar, let's say, or some trauma acquired in childhood, which is governing your behaviour, influencing the way you respond to things without your realising it. You're not conscious of it. So it's not a question of reasoning badly. It's just a question of not reasoning at all because it lies outside the compass of your conscious choices. And so I would put it by saying that Freud recognized the category of the non-rational, which is very influential in our actions.

And very like Spinoza actually, two or three centuries before, he argued that if you could bring what is non-rationally believed up into the light and you could see clearly what it was, that that somehow would liberate you from its influences

if the influences were malign in some way. So you don't see this as a central challenge at all to the progress, the triumphal progress of rationalism then? Well, for independent reasons, I am not being too friendly to Freudian theory in general. I would say that there are lots of philosophically questionable aspects of Freudian theory, not least the fact that this rather beautiful and elaborate structure

that he erected on the basis of half a dozen neurotic Viennese ladies is not very well supported by the evidence. But in itself, it doesn't really challenge philosophical ideas. It may very well be that quite a lot of the motivation is in fact philosophical. Can I say, John, do you want to say some here around just as no other question? Well, it's supporting this idea that it isn't a challenge. One of the ways in which quite a lot of psychotherapy works is by getting you to see the contradictions in your own view of yourself,

which is a purely philosophical business. And if you consider, for instance, what Julian was saying a little while ago about this saying, here is an explanation of human nature, so we're not really altruistic, it's very like what Anthony was saying about religious ideas. that you've got the ultimate explanation of goodness in God. In both of those, there's a clear case, well, we have these ideas of goodness, but are they really good?

We've got an account of their origins, but there still remains a philosophical question of whether they're really good. Does something like evolutionary psychology, which you propound, is that not a rather deterministic way of looking at life? Does that not render self-examination less relevant, less central than the place for you?

put it in the last half hour or so? Not in the least, because it doesn't tell you what's good. If it's true, and I think it's on a very important track, what it does is give you an understanding of how you work, what causes and effect you've got, what emotions you are, I think it's just several steps on from Freud, but it doesn't tell you at all what a good life is, how to make the best of life,

which the Aristotelian theory did. To understand your nature in the Aristotelian world was to understand how. how you should lead a good life. If you come into a Darwinian world and understand your nature, doesn't tell you anything at all about how to lead a good life.

But doesn't the deterministic element at the centre of it mean that the self-examination is stopped, is blocked by the fact that this has to happen because these things are determined by the evolutionary patterns we inherit? Well, what are you suggesting as the alternative to determinism?

To start with it, it's nothing about genetic determinism. If the world is a world of course, and effects, entirely causes and effects, then everything is determined. What are you saying as the alternative? If the alternative is that the world is undetermined, that is that it has uncaused events in, then it's not going to give people any opportunity to control life because if there are undetermined events, nobody has any control over them.

Neither you nor God nor anybody. Julian, we talked rather unsatisfactorily because I think I messed it up rather, about Bertrand Russell and Science Philosophy a few minutes ago. But he thought Bertrand Russell liked the philosophy had practical benefits, thus arousing the wrath of his pupil and then rival and then Wittgenstein. What's your reaction to philosophy having practical benefits, that notion? Well, I feel very ambivalent about this. On the one hand, yes, it does.

I think, you know, it does do the things people claim it does. It can help sharpen your critical thinking skills. It can help you to... We know that lots of other things can sharpen you. Exactly. I think that's the point. A lot of other things can do these as well. And I think that, I mean, some of the conversations we had earlier, I think we've got in danger of appearing in modest, at least,

by saying that we can see philosophy as the beginning at the end of inquiry and philosophy being part of all inquiry. I think that's all true. But sometimes philosophers get a bit carried away with that. And they therefore think that they have a right and the ability to talk about anything and everything, and that their kind of knowledge is always superior. I do think that we have to recognise

that a lot of the benefits of philosophy are also available through other means. And you just wanted to illustrate that a little bit. Well, can philosophy help sharpen your critical thinking skills? Yes, it can. But if you really want to learn to think better, you're probably best studying critical thinking. Now, critical thinking can be seen as a branch of philosophy,

and certainly it's highly informed by philosophy, but the most effective critical thinking programs, the kind of things that's been developed at King's College, London, Centre for Critical Thinking, are also informed by psychology, and they're going out there, they're tested in schools, and they're very productive and very effective. So if your main goal is to improve your critical thinking,

go on a critical thinking course, if you want to read philosophy, it's got to be because you are motivated by an interest in philosophical questions. Now, if you approach philosophy in that way, you will get other benefits. But I think that if your prime motivation isn't that you are interested in philosophical issues, then I think you're going to philosophy for the wrong reasons. I think, Julian, if you won't mind my sayings, is being a little too modest in a way about philosophy for the following two reasons.

Philosophy isn't actually so much about knowledge as it's about understanding. It's not a pursuit which is going to yield new knowledge. way that the natural sciences will, but its ambition at any rate is to try to put into perspective the knowledge that's acquired in those ways and to give us some kind of insight, some kind of understanding which helps us to make better sense of it. That's one thing. The other thing is that the philosophy is a tremendously consequential enterprise. If you look just at modern history from the 17th century onwards, in the 17th century, philosophy gave birth to the natural sciences. I mean, this somewhat over-dramatizes it, but just to put it simply, in the 18th century,

psychology. In the 19th century, empirical linguistics and sociology. In the 20th century, artificial intelligence and cognitive science, it's immensely consequential because the point about philosophy is trying to grapple with all those questions, problems, puzzles that seem very, very difficult to handle and to find ways of trying to answer them. Once you've found a way of trying to answer them, that bit of philosophy can break away, become independent, become an independent science or pursuit. But as I said earlier, even if you managed to get the independent daughters of philosophy do that, they nevertheless still end up with philosophical dilemmas that have to be encountered. Can in the end, can I come back to our beginnings in the end really, which is

due to the examined life? Is philosophy in your view the best way to find out, to examine life? Because a lot of people would say, look, I find out about my life by reading a novel by Jane Austen, which reads me, and I understand more about my morality or failing and so on by reading her. I understand more about the complexity of what a work is a man by reading Shakespeare and so on. People would say that about it. But let's stick to novels. Why not? That is, at least we can't play this comparative game. We can't have people winning the Premier League League on this sort of thing. But nevertheless, do you think that philosophy has an indisputable right to the league championship in this?

Well, you're looking at me, Melvin. My answer is yes. Because I think, for example, that Jane Austen is a very fine philosopher. She's a mouth. Well, that's easy. If you claim everybody's philosophy, you're going on the game, isn't it, really? But you see, if you think a bit about her novels, just take, for example, pride and prejudice. There's Elizabeth and Darcy. They make a mistake in moral epistemology.

They fail to recognize the true character of one another's natures. And it's through a process of readjusting, recalibrating their evaluation of one another, that they eventually end up going down the aisle, you see. And that in its way is a very interesting and very delicately observed aspect. It's not the only aspect. Of course, there are many other things about it which are tremendously enjoyable and informative. But that is a theme in it. And so, you know, philosophical material is to be found everywhere in Jane Lawson, in Shakespeare,

in the lessons of history, not just in literature, and in a great many resources. Julian, how would you react to that? Well, I mean, I would say... I'd take over bed from your friends. Well, I don't know. I kind of think that philosophy is one way to examine life. And I do think that it's true that it should be seen and connected to all the other branches of knowledge. And you can find philosophy and everything, it is true.

But I do think there's a danger that people can overstate their case. If we want to really understand the world around us and ourselves, we also need the resources of economics, politics, psychology, sociology. We need to draw on all of these things. And I think that what we'd really want, well I'd like to see is not so much philosophy take its place as the kind of king of all disciplines, but rather for people, for philosophy to become more part of the way in which we think about life and sort of be properly reintegrated because at the moment I think it's kept too far apart. Janet, very, very briefly, I'm sorry about this, but I did mention an introduction about George Eliot's view

that too much thinking prevents any sort of action. and this sort of Buridan's ass, a notion that this ass having to choose between two bales of hay couldn't choose, therefore died of starvation. Do you think there is, do you think there's anything in George Ellett's worry there? I think there's a serious problem that the more you understand the complexity of things, the less confident you feel about what to do about them, and that people with a simple view of life may often be much more decisive actors, but whether they're good or bad is entirely open question. I think with the novels and such like, what they do is give you intuitions and insights. And it's interesting that in pride and prejudice, it was when she saw Darcy's Great Lands that she suddenly decided that she'd made a mistake.

And this is not the whole story, but it's part of it. But novels give you conflicting insights. Somebody has one view, somebody has another. You've still got to think through the philosophical question of which is better and why. Well, thank you all very much indeed. Thank you very much. It was quite a romp, wasn't it, really? But you were very sporting about it.

So thanks very much to Julian Burgini, Janet Rutgers and Anthony Grayley. Next week we're going to talk about chaos on order. Well, there you go. Thanks for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.com.