A History of Western Philosophy

by Bertrand Russell

  This point of view excludes scientific observation and experiment as methods for the attainment of knowledge. The experimenter’s mind is not “gathered into itself,” and does not aim at avoiding sounds or sights. The two kinds of mental activity that can be pursued by the method that Plato recommends are mathematics and mystic insight. This explains how these two come to be so intimately combined in Plato and the Pythagoreans.

  To the empiricist, the body is what brings us into touch with the world of external reality, but to Plato it is doubly evil, as a distorting medium, causing us to see as through a glass darkly, and as a source of lusts which distract us from the pursuit of knowledge and the vision of truth. Some quotations will make this clear.

  The body is the source of endless trouble to us by reason of the mere requirement of food; and is liable also to diseases which overtake and impede us in the search after true being: it fills us full of loves, and lusts, and fears, and fancies of all kinds, and endless foolery, and in fact, as men say, takes away from us all power of thinking at all. Whence come wars, and fightings and factions? Whence but from the body and the lusts of the body? Wars are occasioned by the love of money, and money has to be acquired for the sake and in the service of the body; and by reason of all these impediments we have no time to give to philosophy; and, last and worst of all, even if we are at leisure to betake ourselves to some speculation, the body is always breaking in upon us, causing turmoil and confusion in our inquiries, and so amazing us that we are prevented from seeing the truth. It has been proved to us by experience that if we would have true knowledge of anything we must be quit of the body—the soul in herself must behold things in themselves: and then we shall attain the wisdom which we desire, and of which we say we are lovers; not while we live, but after death: for if while in company with the body the soul cannot have pure knowledge, knowledge must be attained after death, if at all.

  And thus having got rid of the foolishness of the body we shall be pure and have converse with the pure, and know of ourselves the clear light everywhere, which is no other than the light of truth. For the impure are not permitted to approach the pure…. And what is purification but the separation of the soul from the body? … And this separation and release of the soul from the body is termed death…. And the true philosophers, and they only, are ever seeking to release the soul.

  There is one true coin for which all things ought to be exchanged, and that is wisdom.

  The founders of the mysteries would appear to have had a real meaning, and were not talking nonsense when they intimated in a figure long ago that he who passes unsanctified and uninitiated into the world below will lie in a slough, but that he who arrives there after initiation and purification will dwell with the gods. For many, as they say in the mysteries, are the thyrsus-bearers, but few are the mystics, meaning, as I interpret the words, the true philosophers.

  All this language is mystical, and is derived from the mysteries. “Purity” is an Orphic conception, having primarily a ritual meaning, but for Plato it means freedom from slavery to the body and its needs. It is interesting to find him saying that wars are caused by love of money, and that money is only needed for the service of the body. The first half of this opinion is the same as that held by Marx, but the second belongs to a very different outlook. Plato thinks that a man could live on very little money if his wants were reduced to a minimum, and this no doubt is true. But he also thinks that a philosopher should be exempt from manual labour; he must therefore live on wealth created by others. In a very poor State there are likely to be no philosophers. It was the imperialism of Athens in the age of Pericles that made it possible for Athenians to study philosophy. Speaking broadly, intellectual goods are just as expensive as more material commodities, and just as little independent of economic conditions. Science requires libraries, laboratories, telescopes, microscopes, and so on, and men of science have to be supported by the labour of others. But to the mystic all this is foolishness. A holy man in India or Tibet needs no apparatus, wears only a loin cloth, eats only rice, and is supported by very meagre charity because he is thought wise. This is the logical development of Plato’s point of view.

  To return to the Phaedo: Cebes expresses doubt as to the survival of the soul after death, and urges Socrates to offer arguments. This he proceeds to do, but it must be said that the arguments are very poor.

  The first argument is that all things which have opposites are generated from their opposites—a statement which reminds us of Anaximander’s views on cosmic justice. Now life and death are opposites, and therefore each must generate the other. It follows that the souls of the dead exist somewhere, and come back to earth in due course. Saint Paul’s statement, “the seed is not quickened except it die,” seems to belong to some such theory as this.

  The second argument is that knowledge is recollection, and therefore the soul must have existed before birth. The theory that knowledge is recollection is supported chiefly by the fact that we have ideas, such as exact equality, which cannot be derived from experience. We have experience of approximate equality, but absolute equality is never found among sensible objects, and yet we know what we mean by “absolute equality.” Since we have not learnt this from experience, we must have brought the knowledge with us from a previous existence. A similar argument, he says, applies to all other ideas. Thus the existence of essences, and our capacity to apprehend them, proves the pre-existence of the soul with knowledge.

  The contention that all knowledge is reminiscence is developed at greater length in the Meno (82 ff.). Here Socrates says “there is no teaching, but only recollection.” He professes to prove his point by having Meno call in a slave-boy whom Socrates proceeds to question on geometrical problems. The boy’s answers are supposed to show that he really knows geometry, although he has hitherto been unaware of possessing this knowledge. The same conclusion is drawn in the Meno as in the Phaedo, that knowledge is brought by the soul from a previous existence.

  As to this, one may observe, in the first place, that the argument is wholly inapplicable to empirical knowledge. The slave-boy could not have been led to “remember” when the Pyramids were built, or whether the siege of Troy really occurred, unless he had happened to be present at these events. Only the sort of knowledge that is called a priori—especially logic and mathematics—can be possibly supposed to exist in every one independently of experience. In fact, this is the only sort of knowledge (apart from mystic insight) that Plato admits to be really knowledge. Let us see how the argument can be met in regard to mathematics.

  Take the concept of equality. We must admit that we have no experience, among sensible objects, of exact equality; we see only approximate equality. How, then, do we arrive at the idea of absolute equality? Or do we, perhaps, have no such idea?

  Let us take a concrete case. The metre is defined as the length of a certain rod in Paris at a certain temperature. What should we mean if we said, of some other rod, that its length was exactly one metre? I don’t think we should mean anything. We could say: The most accurate processes of measurement known to science at the present day fail to show that our rod is either longer or shorter than the standard metre in Paris. We might, if we were sufficiently rash, add a prophecy that no subsequent refinements in the technique of measurement will alter this result. But this is still an empirical statement, in the sense that empirical evidence may at any moment disprove it. I do not think we really possess the idea of absolute equality that Plato supposes us to possess.

  But even if we do, it is clear that no child possesses it until it reaches a certain age, and that the idea is elicited by experience, although not directly derived from experience. Moreover, unless our existence before birth was not one of sense-perception, it would have been as incapable of generating the idea as this life is; and if our previous existence is supposed to have been partly super-sensible, why not make the same supposition concerning our present existence? On all these grounds, the argument fails.


  The doctrine of reminiscence being considered established, Cebes says: “About half of what was required has been proven; to wit, that our souls existed before we were born:—that the soul will exist after death as well as before birth is the other half of which the proof is still wanting.” Socrates accordingly applies himself to this. He says that it follows from what was said about everything being generated from its opposite, according to which death must generate life just as much as life generates death. But he adds another argument, which had a longer history in philosophy: that only what is complex can be dissolved, and that the soul, like the ideas, is simple and not compounded of parts. What is simple, it is thought, cannot begin or end or change. Now essences are unchanging: absolute beauty, for example, is always the same, whereas beautiful things continually change. Thus things seen are temporal, but things unseen are eternal. The body is seen, but the soul is unseen; therefore the soul is to be classified in the group of things that are eternal.

  The soul, being eternal, is at home in the contemplation of eternal things, that is, essences, but is lost and confused when, as in sense-perception, it contemplates the world of changing things.

  The soul when using the body as an instrument of perception, that is to say, when using the sense of sight or hearing or some other sense (for the meaning of perceiving through the body is perceiving through the senses) … is then dragged by the body into the region of the changeable, and wanders and is confused; the world spins round her, and she is like a drunkard, when she touches change…. But when returning into herself she reflects, then she passes into the other world, the region of purity, and eternity, and immortality, and unchangeableness, which are her kindred, and with them she ever lives, when she is by herself, and is not let or hindered; then she ceases from her erring ways, and being in communion with the unchanging is unchanging. And this state of the soul is called wisdom.

  The soul of the true philosopher, which has, in life, been liberated from thraldom to the flesh, will, after death, depart to the invisible world, to live in bliss in the company of the gods. But the impure soul, which has loved the body, will become a ghost haunting the sepulchre, or will enter into the body of an animal, such as an ass or wolf or hawk, according to its character. A man who has been virtuous without being a philosopher will become a bee or wasp or ant, or some other animal of a gregarious and social sort.

  Only the true philosopher goes to heaven when he dies. “No one who has not studied philosophy and who is not entirely pure at the time of his departure is allowed to enter the company of the Gods, but the lover of knowledge only.” That is why the true votaries of philosophy abstain from fleshly lusts: not that they fear poverty or disgrace, but because they “are conscious that the soul was simply fastened or glued to the body—until philosophy received her, she could only view real existence through the bars of a prison, not in and through herself, … and by reason of lust had become the principal accomplice in her own captivity.” The philosopher will be temperate because “each pleasure and pain is a sort of nail which nails and rivets the soul to the body, until she becomes like the body, and believes that to be true which the body affirms to be true.”

  At this point, Simmias brings up the Pythagorean opinion that the soul is a harmony, and urges: if the lyre is broken, can the harmony survive? Socrates replies that the soul is not a harmony, for a harmony is complex, but the soul is simple. Moreover, he says, the view that the soul is a harmony is incompatible with its pre-existence, which was proved by the doctrine of reminiscence; for the harmony does not exist before the lyre.

  Socrates proceeds to give an account of his own philosophical development, which is very interesting, but not germane to the main argument. He goes on to expound the doctrine of ideas, leading to the conclusion “that ideas exist, and that other things participate in them and derive their names from them.” At last he describes the fate of souls after death: the good to heaven, the bad to hell, the intermediate to purgatory.

  His end, and his farewells, are described. His last words are: “Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt?” Men paid a cock to Asclepius when they recovered from an illness, and Socrates has recovered from life’s fitful fever.

  “Of all the men of his time,” Phaedo concludes, “he was the wisest and justest and best.”

  The Platonic Socrates was a pattern to subsequent philosophers for many ages. What are we to think of him ethically? (I am concerned only with the man as Plato portrays him.) His merits are obvious. He is indifferent to worldly success, so devoid of fear that he remains calm and urbane and humourous to the last moment, caring more for what he believes to be truth than for anything else whatever. He has, however, some very grave defects. He is dishonest and sophistical in argument, and in his private thinking he uses intellect to prove conclusions that are to him agreeable, rather than in a disinterested search for knowledge. There is something smug and unctuous about him, which reminds one of a bad type of cleric. His courage in the face of death would have been more remarkable if he had not believed that he was going to enjoy eternal bliss in the company of the gods. Unlike some of his predecessors, he was not scientific in his thinking, but was determined to prove the universe agreeable to his ethical standards. This is treachery to truth, and the worst of philosophic sins. As a man, we may believe him admitted to the communion of saints; but as a philosopher he needs a long residence in a scientific purgatory.

  CHAPTER XVII

  Plato’s Cosmogony

  PLATO’S cosmogony is set forth in the Timaeus, which was translated into Latin by Cicero, and was, in consequence, the only one of the dialogues that was known in the West in the Middle Ages. Both then, and earlier in Neoplatonism, it had more influence than anything else in Plato, which is curious, as it certainly contains more that is simply silly than is to be found in his other writings. As philosophy, it is unimportant, but historically it was so influential that it must be considered in some detail.

  The place occupied by Socrates in the earlier dialogues is taken, in the Timaeus, by a Pythagorean, and the doctrines of that school are in the main adopted, including the view that number is the explanation of the world. There is first a summary of the first five books of the Republic, then the myth of Atlantis, which is said to have been an island off the Pillars of Hercules, larger than Libya and Asia put together. Then Timaeus, who is a Pythagorean astronomer, preceeds to tell the history of the world down to the creation of man. What he says is, in outline, as follows.

  What is unchanging is apprehended by intelligence and reason; what is changing is apprehended by opinion. The world, being sensible, cannot be eternal, and must have been created by God. Since God is good, he made the world after the pattern of the eternal; being without jealousy, he wanted everything as like himself as possible. “God desired that all things should be good, and nothing bad, as far as possible.” “Finding the whole visible sphere not at rest, but moving in an irregular and disorderly fashion, out of disorder he brought order.” (Thus it appears that Plato’s God, unlike the Jewish and Christian God, did not create the world out of nothing, but rearranged pre-existing material.) He put intelligence in the soul, and the soul in the body. He made the world as a whole a living creature having soul and intelligence. There is only one world, not many, as various pre-Socratics had taught; there cannot be more than one, since it is a created copy designed to accord as closely as possible with the eternal original apprehended by God. The world in its entirety is one visible animal, comprehending within itself all other animals. It is a globe, because like is fairer than unlike, and only a globe is alike everywhere. It rotates, because circular motion is the most perfect; and since this is its only motion it needs no feet or hands.

  The four elements, fire, air, water, and earth, each of which apparently is represented by a number, are in continued proportion, i.e. fire is to air as air is to water and as water is to earth. God used all the elements in making the world, and therefore it is perfect
, and not liable to old age or disease. It is harmonized by proportion, which causes it to have the spirit of friendship, and therefore to be indissoluble except by God.

  God made first the soul, then the body. The soul is compounded of the indivisible-unchangeable and the divisible-changeable; it is a third and intermediate kind of essence.

  Here follows a Pythagorean account of the planets, leading to an explanation of the origin of time:

  When the father and creator saw the creature which he had made moving and living, the created image of the eternal gods, he rejoiced, and in his joy determined to make the copy still more like the original; and as this was eternal, he sought to make the universe eternal, so far as might be. Now the nature of the ideal being was everlasting, but to bestow this attribute in its fulness upon a creature was impossible. Wherefore he resolved to have a moving image of eternity, and when he set in order the heaven, he made this image eternal but moving according to number, while eternity itself rests in unity; and this image we call Time.*

  Before this, there were no days or nights. Of the eternal essence we must not say that it was or will be; only is is correct. It is implied that of the “moving image of eternity” it is correct to say that it was and will be.

  Time and the heavens came into existence at the same instant. God made the sun so that animals could learn arithmetic—without the succession of days and nights, one supposes, we should not have thought of numbers. The sight of day and night, months and years, has created knowledge of number and given us the conception of time, and hence came philosophy. This is the greatest boon we owe to sight.