Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction

other (but don’t stand in to any of yours). Think of a lot of shreds of paper which form one group by virtue of all being pinned to the same pincushion (the model of the central self)—and a collection of iron filings which form one bunch because they are all magnetized and therefore cling together (the model of the bundle).
You will have noticed the affinity between these thoughts (adapted from Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, book 1, part 4, section 6 (1738)) and those of the Buddhist author from our Chapter 4. But there are also differences, one of the most significant being the status they give to the body. The Buddhist didn’t hesitate to include the body (‘material form’) as one of the five aggregates that compose the person, whereas the eighteenth-century version doesn’t even bother to exclude it, but just ignores it completely. Hume writes first ‘self’, then ‘self or person’, then ‘mind’, as if these were obviously the same, so that ‘What is the self (or person)?’ and ‘What is the mind?’ are for him just two ways of asking one question. Such was the change of climate brought about by centuries of religious thought deeply influenced by Plato and Neoplatonism, with their emphasis on the soul and the spiritual and their denigration of the bodily.
There is also another, huge, difference. When presented with a philosophical doctrine it is always a good idea to ask what happens next—that is to say, what its proponents want to do with it. The Buddhists, we saw, had an ethical purpose in mind. The ‘no-self’ theory would help us to live better, keep clear of ‘defilements’, avoid suffering more successfully. Hume’s next move was utterly different, having nothing at all to do with ethics but quite a lot to do with what we now call cognitive science. If we do not perceive the enduring self, why then do we believe that we are the same person from day to day? And he proposed a psychological theory to account for it. (It was by today’s standards a pretty naive one, but that is only to be expected.)
We are not so much comparing two individuals as two epochs. Nagasena’s was the age of survival, Hume’s the age of science. Where there is such a difference in the plot, no wonder if a similar thought turns up playing a very different role. Which leads straight into our next topic.Philosophy and historical context
Could Plato and Hobbes, two thousand years apart, with their different backgrounds and circumstances, really have been discussing the same thing? Could a philosopher nowadays be asking the same questions about the self as Hume did, let alone the early Buddhists? Doesn’t the idea that we can talk about philosophical themes without reference to whose and when make them sound like timeless objects that thinkers of any epoch can plug into? That view would be quite the opposite of popular nowadays. All thought, we repeatedly hear, is ‘situated’—tied to the particular historical, social, and cultural circumstances in which thinkers find themselves.
I certainly don’t wish to recommend the belief that there are eternal questions just hanging around waiting to be asked. But the view that no question or answer has any existence beyond the specific circumstances of whoever poses it is possibly even worse, and certainly no better. Part of the attraction of such extremes is that they are very simple, somewhat in the pantomime style of ‘Oh yes it is—Oh no it isn’t.’ As so often, the truth lies in between, and is much more complicated. One can approach this topic in many ways, but I’ll choose this way: is it legitimate to treat the thought of someone long since dead as a contribution to a present debate, as if it were being put to us, here and now? I think it is, and that there are even reasons why we should. But it needs to be done with care and—most importantly—with an eye to what we may be missing.
There is nothing to stop us lifting a sentence from an old text and seeing what it can do for us now. If we want to lift the thought, not just the sentence, we may have to put some work into deciding what the sentence meant. If we aren’t prepared to do that we shouldn’t expect too much of it, and we certainly shouldn’t disparage its author if we don’t get too much from it. But given that precaution we will often find it relevant to our concerns, because much philosophy arises from facts about human beings and human life which are pretty stable—at any rate they haven’t changed much over the last three thousand years.
Finding something relevant is one thing, finding it convincing is another. Suppose we dismiss Plato’s and Hobbes’s arguments as insufficient to establish the extent of the authority they ascribe to the State. There is something right about this: no doubt their arguments are insufficient. But if we then turn away, taking our business with them to be finished, we risk making a number of mistakes.
One is that though we may have understood what they have written we have not understood them—their concerns about what political thought needed, the circumstances that gave rise to these concerns and so made their conclusions attractive to them. So we may be missing the humanity behind the text, and with it an important aspect of what philosophy is for. Furthermore, whenever there is any uncertainty about what they meant, understanding why they were saying it is often a valuable means of resolving the ambiguity. In showing no interest in their motivation we take a risk with our understanding of their words.
A second point is that our appreciation of a philosopher’s achievement will be seriously blunted if we do not see the intellectual and emotional circumstances out of which their work grew. I proposed earlier that we think of philosophy as bewildered mankind’s attempt to think our way back straight. That is not a