Russell on Why Philosophy Matters

Bertrand Russell wrote The Problems of Philosophy in 1912 as an introductory book for students. The final chapter, on the value of philosophy, is the most quoted, because it does something that defenses of philosophy rarely do: it does not claim that philosophy is useful.

Most defenses of philosophy are defensive. They argue that philosophy teaches clear thinking, that it produces lawyers and statesmen and CEOs, that it sharpens skills useful in other domains. Russell sets all of this aside. He grants that philosophy has not, in two and a half millennia, produced anything like the cumulative results that science has. Most philosophical questions either get pulled into science once they become tractable, or remain stubbornly unsolved, debated by each generation in slightly different terms. He concedes this. He then says: this is exactly the point.

The value of philosophy, for Russell, is in the size of the questions, not in their answers. Most of us spend most of our lives on a small set of practical concerns — work, family, money, status. These are real and they matter, but they are also confining. The world they describe is small, and the self that operates in that world is correspondingly small. Russell is interested in the moment when a person is briefly pulled out of this small world — when they look up at a difficult problem in mathematics, or contemplate the age of the universe, or genuinely sit with the question of whether their political opinions are well-founded — and finds themselves momentarily larger.

This enlargement is the value. Philosophy, in his account, is the practice of asking large questions in a way that allows the self to be enlarged by them. It is not that the questions get answered. It is that the self becomes capable of holding them.

There is a moral edge to this argument. Russell believed that the small self, the self preoccupied entirely with practical concerns, was the source of much human cruelty. The man who has never considered any question larger than his job and his family is the man most easily mobilized to hate his neighbors. The deeper move is contemplative. Make the self larger, by giving it larger objects of attention, and the smaller hatreds become less interesting.

This is the opposite of what most people imagine philosophy is for. They imagine it produces sharper opinions, more confident arguments, the ability to win debates. Russell believed it produced something more like the opposite: humility, a sense of how much is unknown, a corresponding patience with other people who are also working out what they think.

There is a famous closing passage in the chapter. Russell describes a man who has come to see the world without the distortions of prejudice — who has, through philosophy, learned to think of his own interests as one set of interests among many, rather than the center of the universe. Such a man, Russell writes, is freed not just from the limitations of his original opinions but from the limitations of the self that held them. Philosophy enlarges the self by enlarging what the self can contemplate. The freedom it offers is not the freedom to do anything in particular. It is the freedom to be more.

Russell is sometimes accused of being too optimistic about this. There are people who study philosophy professionally and remain petty. There are people who have never read a philosopher and possess this enlargement naturally. The discipline does not guarantee the result. But Russell would say, I think, that the practice is the only practice we have that aims directly at the enlargement. It does not always succeed. Nothing always succeeds. The question is whether it more often succeeds than its alternatives, and on that question Russell was, with the appropriate caveats, hopeful.