THE VALUE OF PHILOSOPHY by : Bertrand Russell

We need to consider what is the value of philosophy and why it ought to be studied. It is the more
necessary to consider this question, in view of the fact that many people, under the influence of
science or of practical affairs, are inclined to doubt whether philosophy is anything better than
innocent but useless trifling, hairsplitting distinctions, and controversies on matters concerning
which knowledge is impossible.

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.

But further, if we are not to fail in our endeavor to determine the value of philosophy, we must first
free our minds from the prejudices of what are wrongly called “practical” people. The “practical”
person, as this word is often used, is one who recognizes only material needs, who realizes that
people must have food for the body, but is oblivious of the necessity of providing food for the
mind. If all people 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.

Philosophy, like all other studies, aims primarily at knowledge. The knowledge it aims it is the kind
of knowledge which gives unity and system to the body of the sciences, and the kind which results
from a critical examination of the grounds of our convictions, prejudices, and beliefs. But it cannot
be maintained that philosophy has had any very great measure of success in its attempts to
provide definite answers to its questions. If you ask a mathematician, a mineralogist, a historian,
or any other person of learning, what definite body of truths has been ascertained by his science,
his answer will last as long as you are willing to listen. But if you put the same question to a
philosopher, he will, if he is candid, have to confess that his study has not achieved positive results
such as have been achieved by other sciences. It is true that this is partly accounted for by the
fact that, as soon as definite knowledge concerning any subject becomes possible, this subject
ceases to be called philosophy, and becomes a separate science. The whole study of the
heavens, which now belongs to astronomy, was once included in philosophy; Newton’s great work
was called “the mathematical principles of natural philosophy.” Similarly, the study of the human
mind, which was, until very lately, a part of philosophy, has now been separated from philosophy
and has become the science of psychology. Thus, to a great extent, the uncertainty of philosophy
is more apparent than real: those questions which are already capable of definite answers are
placed in the sciences, while those only to which, at present, no definite answer can be given,
remain to form the residue which is called philosophy.
This is, however, only a part of the truth concerning the uncertainty of philosophy. There are many
questions—and among them those that are of the profoundest interest to our spiritual life—which,
so far as we can see, must remain insoluble to the human intellect unless its powers become of
quite a different order from what they are now. Has the universe any unity of plan or purpose, or
is it a fortuitous concourse of atoms? Is consciousness a permanent part of the universe, giving
hope of indefinite growth in wisdom, or is it a transitory accident on a small planet on which life
must ultimately become impossible? Are good and evil of importance to the universe or only to
humanity? Such questions are asked by philosophy, and variously answered by various
philosophers. But it would seem that, whether answers be otherwise discoverable or not, the
answers suggested by philosophy are none of them demonstrably true. Yet, however slight may
be the hope of discovering an answer, it is part of the business of philosophy to continue the
consideration of such questions, to make us aware of their importance, to examine all the
approaches to them, and to keep alive that speculative interest in the universe which is apt to be
killed by confining ourselves to definitely ascertainable knowledge…

The value of philosophy is, in fact, to be sought largely in its very uncertainty. The person 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 cooperation or consent of his deliberate reason. To such a person the
world tends to become definite, finite, obvious; common objects rouse no questions, and
unfamiliar possibilities are contemptuously rejected. As soon as we begin to philosophize, on the
contrary, we find, as we saw in our opening chapters, that even the most everyday things lead to
problems to which only very incomplete answers can be given. 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
traveled into the region of liberating doubt, and it keeps alive our sense of wonder by showing
familiar things in an unfamiliar aspect.

Apart from its utility in showing unsuspected possibilities, philosophy has a value—perhaps its
chief value—through the greatness of the objects which it contemplates, and the freedom from
narrow and personal aims resulting from this contemplation. The life of the instinctive person is
shut up within the circle of his private interests: family and friends may be included, but the outer
world is not regarded except as it may help or hinder what comes within the circle of instinctive
wishes. In such a life there is something feverish and confined, in comparison with which the
philosophic life is calm and free. The private world of instinctive interests is a small one, set in the
midst of a great and powerful world which must, sooner or later, lay our private world in
ruins. Unless we can so enlarge our interests as to include the whole outer world, we remain like
a garrison in a beleaguered fortress, knowing that the enemy prevents escape and that ultimate
surrender is inevitable. In such a life there is no peace, but a constant strife between the insistence
of desire and the powerlessness of will. In one way or another, if our life is to be great and free,
we must escape this prison and this strife.

One way of escape is by philosophic contemplation. Philosophic contemplation does not, in its
widest survey, divide the universe into two hostile camps—friends and foes, helpful and hostile,
good and bad—it views the whole impartially. Philosophic contemplation, when it is unalloyed,
does not aim at proving that the rest of the universe is akin to humanity. All acquisition of
knowledge is an enlargement of the Self, but this enlargement is best attained when it is not
directly sought. It is obtained when the desire for knowledge is alone operative, by a study which
does not wish in advance that its objects should have this or that character, but adapts the Self
to the characters which it finds in its objects. This enlargement of Self is not obtained when, taking
the Self as it is, we try to show that the world is so similar to this Self that knowledge of it is
possible without any admission of what seems alien. The desire to prove this is a form of self-
assertion, and like all self-assertion, it is an obstacle to the growth of Self which it desires, and of
which the Self knows that it is capable. Self-assertion, in philosophic speculation as elsewhere,
views the world as a means to its own ends; thus it makes the world of less account than Self,
and the Self sets bounds to the greatness of its goods. In contemplation, on the contrary, we start
from the not-Self, and through its greatness the boundaries of Self are enlarged; through the
infinity of the universe the mind which contemplates it achieves some share in infinity.

For this reason, greatness of soul is not fostered by those philosophies which assimilate the
universe to Humanity. Knowledge is a form of union of Self and not-Self; like all union, it is
impaired by dominion, and therefore by any attempt to force the universe into conformity with
what we find in ourselves. There is a widespread philosophical tendency towards the view which
tells us that humanity is the measure of all things, that truth is person-made, that space and time
and the world of universals are properties of the mind, and that, if there be anything not created
by the mind, it is unknowable and of no account for us. This view, if our previous discussions were
correct, is untrue; but in addition to being untrue, it has the effect of robbing philosophic
contemplation of all that gives it value, since it fetters contemplation to Self. What it calls
knowledge is not a union with the not-Self, but a set of prejudices, habits, and desires, making an
impenetrable veil between us and the world beyond. The person who finds pleasure in such a
theory of knowledge is like the person who never leaves the domestic circle for fear his word
might not be law.

The true philosophic contemplation, on the contrary, finds its satisfaction in every enlargement of
the not-Self, in everything that magnifies the objects contemplated, and thereby the subject
contemplating. Everything, in contemplation, that is personal or private, everything that depends
upon habit, self-interest, or desire, distorts the object, and hence impairs the union which the
intellect seeks. By thus making a barrier between subject and object, such personal and private
things become a prison to the intellect. The free intellect will see as God might see, without a here
and now, without hopes and fears, without the trammels of customary beliefs and traditional
prejudices, calmly, dispassionately, in the sole and exclusive desire of knowledge—knowledge
as impersonal, as purely contemplative, as it is possible for humanity to attain. Hence also the
free intellect will value more the abstract and universal knowledge into which the accidents of
private history do not enter, than the knowledge brought by the senses, and dependent, as such
knowledge must be, upon an exclusive and personal point of view and a body whose sense-
organs distort as much as they reveal.

The mind which has become accustomed to the freedom and impartiality of philosophic
contemplation will preserve something of the same freedom and impartiality in the world of action
and emotion. It will view its purposes and desires as parts of the whole, with the absence of
insistence that results from seeing them as infinitesimal fragments in a world of which all the rest
is unaffected by any one person’s deeds. The impartiality which, in contemplation, is
the unalloyed desire for truth, is the very same quality of mind which, in action, is justice, and in
emotion is that universal love which can be given to all, and not only to those who are judged
useful or admirable. Thus, contemplation enlarges not only the objects of our thoughts, but also
the objects of our actions and our affections: it makes us citizens of the universe, not only of one
walled city at war with all the rest. In this citizenship of the universe consists humanity’s true
freedom, and his liberation from the thralldom of narrow hopes and fears.
Thus, to sum up our discussion of the value of philosophy: Philosophy is to be studied, not for the
sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known
to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge
our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination, and diminish the dogmatic
assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the
greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and
becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.