The Philosophy Book

by DK Publishing

  Du Bois goes on to say that the “only possible death” is to lose one’s belief in the prospects for human progress. But there are also hints of deeper philosophical roots here, going all the way back to the ancient Greek idea of eudaimonia or “human flourishing”; for the philosopher Aristotle, this involved living a life of excellence based upon virtue and reason.

  "The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line."

  William Du Bois

  Political activist

  Du Bois considers two of the major impediments to a life of excellence to be racism and social inequality. He rejects scientific racism—the idea that black people are inferior genetically to white people—that was prevalent throughout most of his life. As racial inequality has no basis in biological science, he regards it as a purely social problem, one that can be addressed only by committed political and social activism.

  Du Bois is tireless in his search for solutions to the problem of all forms of social inequality. He argues that social inequality is one of the major causes of crime, claiming that lack of education and employment are correlated with high levels of criminal activity. In his final message to the world, Du Bois reminds us that the task of bringing about a more just society is still incomplete. He states that it is up to future generations to believe in life, so that we can continue to contribute to the fulfilment of “human flourishing.”

  Martin Luther King Jr. cited Du Bois’ writings as a key influence in his decision to become actively involved in the battle to demolish racial divisions and establish social equality in the US.

  WILLIAM DU BOIS

  Du Bois showed exceptional academic promise from an early age. He won a scholarship to Fisk University, and spent two years in Germany studying in Berlin before attending Harvard, where he wrote a dissertation on the slave trade. He was the first African-American to graduate from Harvard with a doctorate.

  Alongside an active career as a university teacher and writer, Du Bois was involved in the Civil Rights movement and in radical politics. His political judgement has sometimes been called into question: he famously wrote a glowing eulogy on the death of the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. Nevertheless, Du Bois remains a key figure in the struggle for racial equality, thanks to what Martin Luther King Jr. called his “divine dissatisfaction with all forms of injustice”.

  Key works

  1903 The Souls of Black Folk

  1915 The Negro

  1924 The Gift of Black Folk

  1940 Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept

  See also: Aristotle • Charles Sanders Peirce • William James • John Dewey

  IN CONTEXT

  BRANCH

  Ethics

  APPROACH

  Analytic philosophy

  BEFORE

  1867 Karl Marx publishes the first volume of Capital.

  1905 In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, German sociologist Max Weber argues that the Protestant work ethic was partly responsible for the growth of capitalism.

  AFTER

  1990s Growth of the trend of “downshifting”, promoting fewer working hours.

  2005 Tom Hodgkinson, editor of the British magazine The Idler, publishes his leisure-praising book How To Be Idle.

  2009 British philosopher Alain de Botton explores our working lives in The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work.

  The British philosopher Bertrand Russell was no stranger to hard work. His collected writings fill countless volumes; he was responsible for some of the most important developments in 20th-century philosophy, including the founding of the school of analytic philosophy; and throughout his long life—he died aged 97—he was a tireless social activist. So why is this most active of thinkers suggesting that we should work less?

  Russell’s essay In Praise of Idleness was first published in 1932, in the middle of the Great Depression, a period of global economic crisis following the Wall Street Crash of 1929. It might seem distasteful to promote the virtues of idleness at such a time, when unemployment was rising to a third of the working population in some parts of the world. For Russell, however, the economic chaos of the time was itself the result of a set of deep-rooted and mistaken attitudes about work. Indeed, he claims that many of our ideas about work are little more than superstitions, which should be swept away by rigorous thinking.

  What is work?

  Russell begins by defining work, which he says is of two kinds. First, there is work aimed at “altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relative to other such matter.” This is the most fundamental sense of work—that of manual labor. The second kind of work is “telling other people to alter the position of matter relative to other such matter.” This second kind of work, Russell says, can be extended indefinitely—not only can you have people employed to supervise people who move matter, but others can be employed to supervise the supervisors, or give advice on how to employ other people, while still more can be employed to manage the people who give advice on how to employ people, and so on. The first kind of work, he says, tends to be unpleasant and badly paid, while the second tends to be more pleasant, and better paid. These two types of work define two types of worker—the laborer and the supervisor—and these in turn relate to two social classes—the working class and the middle class. But to these Russell adds a third class, who he claims has a lot to answer for—that of the leisured landowner who avoids all work, and who depends on the labor of others to support his or her idleness.

  According to Russell, history is littered with examples of people working hard all their lives and being allowed to keep just enough for themselves and their families to survive, while any surplus they produce is appropriated by warriors, priests, and the leisured ruling classes. And it is always these beneficiaries of the system, says Russell, who are heard extolling the virtues of “honest toil”, giving a moral gloss to a system that is manifestly unjust. And this fact alone, according to Russell, should prompt us to re-evaluate the ethics of work, for by embracing “honest toil” we comply with and even promote our own oppression.

  Russell’s account of society, with its emphasis on the struggle between classes, owes something to the thought of the 19th-century philosopher Karl Marx, although Russell was always uneasy with Marxism, and his essay is as critical of Marxist states as it is of capitalist states. His view also owes much to Max Weber’s book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, first published in 1905, particularly Weber’s examination of the moral claims that underlie our attitudes to work—claims that Russell insists should be challenged.

  For example, not only do we see work as a duty and an obligation, we also see different types of work as occupying a hierarchy of virtue. Manual work is generally considered less virtuous than more skilled or intellectual work, and we tend to reward people in accordance with this perceived virtue rather than for what they produce. And given that we consider work itself to be inherently virtuous, we tend to see the unemployed as lacking in virtue.

  The more we think about it, the more it seems that our attitudes toward work are both complex and incoherent. What, then, can be done? Russell’s suggestion is that we look at work not in terms of these curious moral ideas that are a relic of earlier times, but in terms of what makes for a full and satisfying human life. And when we do this, Russell believes, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that we should all simply work less. What, Russell asks, if the working day were only four hours long? Our present system is such that part of the population can be overworked, and so miserable, while another p
art can be totally unemployed, and so also miserable. This, it seems, does not benefit anyone.

  "Immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous."

  Bertrand Russell

  The Great Depression was the worst economic depression of the 20th century. For Russell, it highlighted the need for a critique of capitalism and a re-evaluation of the ethics of work.

  The importance of play

  Russell’s view is that reducing our working hours would free us to pursue more creative interests. “Moving matter about,” Russell writes, “is emphatically not one of the ends of human life.” If we allow work to occupy every waking hour, we are not living fully. Russell believes that leisure, previously something known only to the privileged few, is necessary for a rich and meaningful life. It might be objected that nobody would know what to do with their time if they worked only for four hours a day, but Russell regrets this. If this is true, he says, “it is a condemnation of our civilization,” suggesting that our capacity for play and light-heartedness has been eclipsed by the cult of efficiency. A society that took leisure seriously, Russell believes, would be one that took education seriously—because education is surely about more than training for the workplace. It would be one that took the arts seriously, because there would be time to produce works of quality without the struggle that artists have for economic independence. Moreover, it would be one that took the need for enjoyment seriously. Indeed, Russell believes that such a society would be one in which we would lose the taste for war because, if nothing else, war would involve “long and severe work for all.”

  "The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery."

  Bertrand Russell

  The balanced life

  Russell’s essay may appear to present something of a Utopian vision of a world in which work is reduced to a minimum. It is not entirely clear how, even if it were possible to reduce the working day to four hours, this change would lead to the social revolution that Russell claims. Nor is Russell’s faith in the idea that industrialization can ultimately free us from manual labor entirely convincing. The raw materials for industrial production still need to come from somewhere. They need to be mined and refined and exported to the place of production, all of which depends on manual labor. Despite these problems, Russell’s reminder that we need to look more closely at our attitudes to work is one that remains relevant today. We take as “natural” the length of the working week and the fact that some kinds of work are rewarded more than others. For many of us, neither our work nor our leisure are as fulfilling as we believe they could be, and at the same time we cannot help feeling that idleness is a vice. Russell’s idea reminds us that not only do we need to scrutinize our working lives, but that there is a virtue and a usefulness to lounging, loafing, and idling. As Russell says: “Hitherto we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines; in this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish forever.”

  Leisure time, for Russell, should no longer be spent merely recovering from work. On the contrary, it should constitute the largest part of our lives and be a source of play and creativity.

  BERTRAND RUSSELL

  Bertrand Russell was born in Wales in 1872 to an aristocratic family. He had an early interest in mathematics, and went on to study the subject at Cambridge. There he met the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, with whom he later collaborated on the Principia Mathematica, a book that established him as one of the leading philosophers of his era. It was also at Cambridge that he met, and deeply influenced, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

  Russell wanted philosophy to speak to ordinary people. He was a social activist, a pacifist, an educationalist, an advocate of atheism, and a campaigner against nuclear arms, as well as the author of numerous popular works of philosophy. He died of influenza in February, 1970.

  Key works

  1903 The Principles of Mathematics

  1910, 1912, and 1913 (3 vols) Principia Mathematica

  1914 Our Knowledge of the External World

  1927 The Analysis of Matter

  1956 Logic and Knowledge

  See also: Jean-Jacques Rousseau • Adam Smith • Edmund Burke • Jeremy Bentham • John Stuart Mill • Karl Marx • Henry David Thoreau • Isaiah Berlin • John Rawls

  IN CONTEXT

  BRANCH

  Ethics

  APPROACH

  Phenomenology

  BEFORE

  c.380 BCE Plato writes his Symposium, a philosophical exploration of the nature of love and knowledge.

  17th century Blaise Pascal writes of the logic of the human heart.

  Early 20th century Edmund Husserl develops his new phenomenological method for studying the experience of the human mind.

  AFTER

  1953 Polish philosopher Karol Wojtyza (later Pope John Paul II) writes his PhD thesis on Scheler, acknowledging the philosopher’s influence on Roman Catholicism.

  The German philosopher Max Scheler belongs to the philosophical movement known as phenomenology. This attempts to investigate all the phenomena of our inner experience; it is the study of our consciousness and its structures.

  Scheler says that phenomenology has tended to focus too exclusively on the intellect in examining the structures of consciousness, and has overlooked something fundamental: the experience of love, or of the human heart. He introduces the idea that love forms a bridge from poorer to richer knowledge in an essay entitled Love and Knowledge (1923).

  Scheler’s starting point, which is taken from the 17th-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal, is that there is a specific logic to the human heart. This logic is different from the logic of the intellect.

  A spiritual midwife

  It is love, Scheler believes, that makes things apparent to our experience and that makes knowledge possible. Scheler writes that love is “a kind of spiritual midwife” that is capable of drawing us toward knowledge, both knowledge of ourselves and knowledge of the world. It is the “primary determinant” of a person’s ethics, possibilities, and fate.

  At root, in Scheler’s view, to be human is not to be a “thinking thing” as the French philosopher Descartes said in the 17th century, but a being who loves.

  "Philosophy is a love-determined movement toward participation in the essential reality of all possibles."

  Max Scheler

  See also: Plato • Blaise Pascal • Edmund Husserl

  IN CONTEXT

  BRANCH

  Epistemology

  APPROACH

  Existentialism

  BEFORE

  1800s Søren Kierkegaard writes of philosophy as a matter of the individual’s struggle with truth.

  1880s Friedrich Nietzsche says that “God is dead”, there are no absolute truths, and we must rethink all our values.

  1920s Martin Heidegger claims that philosophy is a matter of our relationship with our own existence.

  AFTER

  From 1940 Hannah Arendt’s ideas of freedom are influenced by Jaspers’ philosophy.

  From 1950 Hans-Georg Gadamer explores the idea that philosophy progresses through a fusion of individual perspectives.

  For some, philosophy is a way to discover objective truths about the world. For German philosopher and psychiatrist Karl Jaspers, on the other hand, philosophy is a personal struggle. Strongly influenced by the philosophers Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, Jaspers is an existentialist who suggests that philosophy is a matter of our own attempts to realize truth. Since philosophy is an individual struggle, he writes in his 1941 book On my Philosop
hy, we can philosophize only as individuals. We cannot turn to anybody else to tell us the truth; we must discover it for ourselves, by our own efforts.

  The philosopher lives in the invisible realm of the spirit, struggling to realize truth. The thoughts of other, companion, philosophers act as signposts towards potential paths to understanding.

  A community of individuals

  Although in this sense truth is something that we realize alone, it is in communication with others that we realize the fruits of our efforts and raise our consciousness beyond its limits. Jaspers considers his own philosophy “true” only so far as it aids communication with others. And while other people cannot provide us with a form of “ready-made truth”, philosophy remains a collective endeavor. For Jaspers, each individual’s search

  for truth is carried out in community with all those “companions in thought” who have undergone the same personal struggle.

  See also: Søren Kierkegaard • Friedrich Nietzsche • Martin Heidegger • Hans-Georg Gadamer • Hannah Arendt