RE: Generally speaking, is philosophy a worthwhile subject of study?
February 24, 2022 at 8:29 pm
(This post was last modified: February 24, 2022 at 8:32 pm by Belacqua.)
Someone is making the claim that philosophy accomplishes nothing, and that only practical people bring about real change which philosophers later try to claim for themselves. In response, I can describe one well-documented case of a new philosophical concept which had widespread and lasting influence on life in Europe and America, which we continue to live with today.
TRIGGER WARNING: This post will be verbose, and name-drop several famous people. If you are a person who reacts badly to such things, best to sign off now.
In 1689, John Locke published An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Famously, this book argued that when a person is born, his or her mind is completely free of ideas — the well-known tabula rasa. Prior to this book, it was generally accepted that babies are born with lots of concepts pre-loaded into the software. For example, it was assumed that morality is imprinted into every new mind by God. Also certain talents or dispositions were thought to be determined from birth, meaning that leaders or criminals or geniuses are born, not made. After Locke, it was quickly and widely accepted that what a person becomes is determined almost entirely by education and environment.
This had huge influence in a number of important areas:
1) Democracy, meritocracy, equality.
If what Locke says is true, then the child of a king and the child of a ditch-digger have identical minds at birth. There is nothing in the mind of a new-born prince to determine that he will necessarily become a good leader. Naturally, a new-born prince’s environment and education is more likely to teach him the skills of leadership (or of tyranny) but if he were switched at birth with ditch-digger baby then the ditch-digger could equally become a prince.
Conclusion: leaders are made, not born. There is nothing intrinsically natural about hereditary rule. Individuals fortunate enough to have been raised and educated wisely, in the proper fields, will almost certainly become better and more effective rulers than whoever the king’s consort happens to give birth to.
Since Locke’s books were well known to Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, etc., it’s no exaggeration to say that Locke had a huge affect on the government of the United States (as it was supposed to work).
2) Universal education.
If the minds of poor babies and the minds of rich babies are the same at birth, educating the former group can bring every bit as good results as the latter.
The movement for universal free education at first explicitly cited Locke, and wouldn’t have happened then and there without his ideas. It took a while to persuade conservatives, as it always does, but if you went to free public elementary school in the US that’s indirectly thanks to Locke.
3) Literature
The idea that our characters are shaped entirely by our experiences, not in-born talents, had a huge affect on novels throughout Europe. The bildungsroman, for example, is based on this idea. Stories like Stendhal’s The Red and the Black trace out how a character’s earliest background forms the basis for the successes and failures of his later career.
4) Cultural education
In 1748, Montesquieu published De l'esprit des lois, an influential early Enlightenment text. One of its themes argued that the character of a people in any given nation is determined by that nation’s climate. He argued that the best visual artists come from Italy because the Italian climate enables them. (This is true to some extent — the weather conditions necessary for large fresco painting mean that wetter colder climates are unsuitable.) So Italy had Michelangelo, etc., but England, as a rainy country, could never produce a Michelangelo or a Raphael. England’s genius was limited to literature, because poets in candle-lit garretts could write well enough.
Naturally, as a Frenchman, Montesquieu concluded that the best climate of all was in France. (The word chauvinist is French, after all.)
Now we have a conflation of big names guaranteed to trigger the people who don’t like name-dropping. Please go to your safe space now.
Isaac Newton had discovered that planets and other things move according to laws which can be described by math. Things which had previously been a mystery, or attributed to the grace of God, were now considered to operate according to knowable, quantifiable, teachable laws.
Early Enlightenment thinkers in many fields were thrilled by this. If planetary motion has its laws, and we can know them, then why can’t we identify the laws that govern beauty? Instead of just relying on random geniuses inspired by God, the laws will turn out to be knowable, teachable, and learnable. Given the right education, schools can create a new class of Michelangelos every semester.
So here the inspiration of Newton’s abstract laws and Locke’s educational theory conspired. The result was that Joshua Reynolds in London and Claude leBrun in France founded the very first Academies of Art. These were dedicated to researching, identifying, teaching, and learning the immutable natural laws governing beauty. (Rameau attempted the same thing with music.)
This was the first time art was thought to be something teachable. Before that artists served apprenticeships to learn the materials and craft, and if they got to be genius expressive artists in addition that was just up to God. The Locke-inspired Academies changed this.
The founders and sponsors of the academies wrote up manifestos explicitly challenging Montesquieu’s judgment, and saying that thanks to Locke’s discoveries, once the proper training was in place, London could be every bit as artistic as Rome or Florence.
5) Travel and experience
For non-artists, Locke’s ideas, in conjunction with Montesquieu’s, suggested that anyone wanting a well-rounded education needed to travel — to get out of the classroom in Oxford and go to breathe the real air of Rome and Athens. The Renaissance or the Classical Ages can’t be fully appreciated until one has walked the streets of Florence or climbed the Acropolis.
And we can always steal the Elgin Marbles and take them back to show people not fortunate enough to make the trip. Public Art and History museums were opened for the common people with the specific Lockean aim of raising their cultural level through direct experience of great works.
Locke’s theory also gave rise to the Grand Tour which became customary among the wealthy, and later to culture-centered trips by the middle class, and study-abroad programs by ambitious college kids.
6) Architecture
If architectural beauty works according to eternal, immutable laws, as physics appears to, then where do we learn those laws? For Enlightenment-era people, the answer was obvious: in the surviving buildings of ancient Greece and Rome.
Not only are these buildings (according to the taste of the time) the ideal examples of beauty, by embodying eternal principles they are also intrinsically tied into permanence, reliability, and honesty. That’s why government buildings and banks and post offices, until recently, were built in neo-Classical style. To express (or perhaps propagandize) the fact that our government, financial system, and post office, are reliable, honest, eternal institutions on whom we can rely.
No doubt there are architectural critics who map Americans’ loss of faith in government with the waning of Neoclassicism as the required style.
Having said all that, I will back off just a little bit, because I know I’m guilty of the “Great Man Theory.” The way I’ve described it, it sounds as if Locke, single-handedly, changed the world. It’s not so simple. The ideas were “in the air,” and the ground was prepared for their reception. I’m using “Locke” as a kind of synecdoche to refer to a number of related people, movements, and results.
Even with that caveat, however, there’s no doubt that the ideas I cite here changed the world — A LOT.
TRIGGER WARNING: This post will be verbose, and name-drop several famous people. If you are a person who reacts badly to such things, best to sign off now.
In 1689, John Locke published An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Famously, this book argued that when a person is born, his or her mind is completely free of ideas — the well-known tabula rasa. Prior to this book, it was generally accepted that babies are born with lots of concepts pre-loaded into the software. For example, it was assumed that morality is imprinted into every new mind by God. Also certain talents or dispositions were thought to be determined from birth, meaning that leaders or criminals or geniuses are born, not made. After Locke, it was quickly and widely accepted that what a person becomes is determined almost entirely by education and environment.
This had huge influence in a number of important areas:
1) Democracy, meritocracy, equality.
If what Locke says is true, then the child of a king and the child of a ditch-digger have identical minds at birth. There is nothing in the mind of a new-born prince to determine that he will necessarily become a good leader. Naturally, a new-born prince’s environment and education is more likely to teach him the skills of leadership (or of tyranny) but if he were switched at birth with ditch-digger baby then the ditch-digger could equally become a prince.
Conclusion: leaders are made, not born. There is nothing intrinsically natural about hereditary rule. Individuals fortunate enough to have been raised and educated wisely, in the proper fields, will almost certainly become better and more effective rulers than whoever the king’s consort happens to give birth to.
Since Locke’s books were well known to Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, etc., it’s no exaggeration to say that Locke had a huge affect on the government of the United States (as it was supposed to work).
2) Universal education.
If the minds of poor babies and the minds of rich babies are the same at birth, educating the former group can bring every bit as good results as the latter.
The movement for universal free education at first explicitly cited Locke, and wouldn’t have happened then and there without his ideas. It took a while to persuade conservatives, as it always does, but if you went to free public elementary school in the US that’s indirectly thanks to Locke.
3) Literature
The idea that our characters are shaped entirely by our experiences, not in-born talents, had a huge affect on novels throughout Europe. The bildungsroman, for example, is based on this idea. Stories like Stendhal’s The Red and the Black trace out how a character’s earliest background forms the basis for the successes and failures of his later career.
4) Cultural education
In 1748, Montesquieu published De l'esprit des lois, an influential early Enlightenment text. One of its themes argued that the character of a people in any given nation is determined by that nation’s climate. He argued that the best visual artists come from Italy because the Italian climate enables them. (This is true to some extent — the weather conditions necessary for large fresco painting mean that wetter colder climates are unsuitable.) So Italy had Michelangelo, etc., but England, as a rainy country, could never produce a Michelangelo or a Raphael. England’s genius was limited to literature, because poets in candle-lit garretts could write well enough.
Naturally, as a Frenchman, Montesquieu concluded that the best climate of all was in France. (The word chauvinist is French, after all.)
Now we have a conflation of big names guaranteed to trigger the people who don’t like name-dropping. Please go to your safe space now.
Isaac Newton had discovered that planets and other things move according to laws which can be described by math. Things which had previously been a mystery, or attributed to the grace of God, were now considered to operate according to knowable, quantifiable, teachable laws.
Early Enlightenment thinkers in many fields were thrilled by this. If planetary motion has its laws, and we can know them, then why can’t we identify the laws that govern beauty? Instead of just relying on random geniuses inspired by God, the laws will turn out to be knowable, teachable, and learnable. Given the right education, schools can create a new class of Michelangelos every semester.
So here the inspiration of Newton’s abstract laws and Locke’s educational theory conspired. The result was that Joshua Reynolds in London and Claude leBrun in France founded the very first Academies of Art. These were dedicated to researching, identifying, teaching, and learning the immutable natural laws governing beauty. (Rameau attempted the same thing with music.)
This was the first time art was thought to be something teachable. Before that artists served apprenticeships to learn the materials and craft, and if they got to be genius expressive artists in addition that was just up to God. The Locke-inspired Academies changed this.
The founders and sponsors of the academies wrote up manifestos explicitly challenging Montesquieu’s judgment, and saying that thanks to Locke’s discoveries, once the proper training was in place, London could be every bit as artistic as Rome or Florence.
5) Travel and experience
For non-artists, Locke’s ideas, in conjunction with Montesquieu’s, suggested that anyone wanting a well-rounded education needed to travel — to get out of the classroom in Oxford and go to breathe the real air of Rome and Athens. The Renaissance or the Classical Ages can’t be fully appreciated until one has walked the streets of Florence or climbed the Acropolis.
And we can always steal the Elgin Marbles and take them back to show people not fortunate enough to make the trip. Public Art and History museums were opened for the common people with the specific Lockean aim of raising their cultural level through direct experience of great works.
Locke’s theory also gave rise to the Grand Tour which became customary among the wealthy, and later to culture-centered trips by the middle class, and study-abroad programs by ambitious college kids.
6) Architecture
If architectural beauty works according to eternal, immutable laws, as physics appears to, then where do we learn those laws? For Enlightenment-era people, the answer was obvious: in the surviving buildings of ancient Greece and Rome.
Not only are these buildings (according to the taste of the time) the ideal examples of beauty, by embodying eternal principles they are also intrinsically tied into permanence, reliability, and honesty. That’s why government buildings and banks and post offices, until recently, were built in neo-Classical style. To express (or perhaps propagandize) the fact that our government, financial system, and post office, are reliable, honest, eternal institutions on whom we can rely.
No doubt there are architectural critics who map Americans’ loss of faith in government with the waning of Neoclassicism as the required style.
Having said all that, I will back off just a little bit, because I know I’m guilty of the “Great Man Theory.” The way I’ve described it, it sounds as if Locke, single-handedly, changed the world. It’s not so simple. The ideas were “in the air,” and the ground was prepared for their reception. I’m using “Locke” as a kind of synecdoche to refer to a number of related people, movements, and results.
Even with that caveat, however, there’s no doubt that the ideas I cite here changed the world — A LOT.
