The Problems of Philosophy

“Philosophy, if it cannot answer so many questions as we could wish, has at least the power of asking questions which increase the interest of the world, and show the strangeness and wonder lying just below the surface even in the commonest things of daily life.”

Russell considers how a philosopher views the world compared to the average person. He suggests that most people do not concern themselves with philosophical questions, such as the nature of reality or the meaning of existence, which occupy the thoughts and time of philosophers. For many, these concerns are trivial and rarely impact everyday life. However, he asserts that The Value of Philosophy is not found in its utility. Instead, it has worth because it reveals the complexity of everyday life and seeks knowledge. Russell proposes that this pursuit is the greatest good.

“Thus it is our particular thoughts and feelings that have primitive certainty.”

Russell explains that since human experience is subjective, philosophers cannot truly answer questions about the nature of reality. Instead, they can explore how the mind forms knowledge and feels certain in that knowledge. By pursuing The Relationship Between Perception and Reality, philosophers uncover how subjective experience and thought shape how humans view the external world.

“All knowledge, we find, must be built up upon our instinctive beliefs, and if these are rejected, nothing is left.”

Although Russell is a logician and employs logical analysis to all his arguments, he also defends the role of intuition in human understanding. He asserts that without intuition, humans would not be able to form knowledge.

“We can know nothing of what it is like in itself, but we can know the sort of arrangement of physical objects which result from their spatial relations.”

This passage offers one of many examples of The Nature and Limits of Human Knowledge. Russell repeats the phrase “we can know” to emphasize that knowledge has limits but also possibilities.

“Acquaintance with objects essentially consists in a relation between the mind and something other than the mind; it is this that constitutes the mind’s power of knowing things.”

Russell blends rationalism and empiricism in his approach to understanding how humans create knowledge. By interacting with objects, humans employ both priori and posteriori knowledge. This forms the process through which humans experience The Relationship Between Perception and Reality.

“All our knowledge, both knowledge of things and knowledge of truths, rests upon acquaintance as its foundation.”

Although Russell breaks down many different types of knowledge, including knowledge by description and knowledge of truth, he argues that all types of knowledge find their roots in acquaintance. Knowledge by acquaintance is direct and immediate. His simple phrases using “knowledge of” and “knowledge by” are examples of his accessible tone.

“But if we are able to draw inferences from these data—if we are to know of the existence of matter, of other people, of the past before our individual memory begins, or of the future, we must know general principles of some kind by means of which such inferences can be drawn.”

Knowledge by acquaintance is the foundation of all knowledge because it creates a bank through which people can develop certain principles of knowing. Russell breaks down human knowledge into four fundamental examples in this passage: matter, other people, the past, and the future. This conveys to the reader the high stakes of his philosophy.

“The general principles of science, such as the belief in the reign of law, and the belief that every event must have a cause, are as completely dependent upon the inductive principle as are the beliefs of daily life.”

Throughout the work, Russell draws many correlations between science and philosophy. Here, he critiques science for its adherence to beliefs rather than maintaining an attitude of falsifiability. Russell proposes that philosophy has a responsibility to maintain an attitude of skepticism and that philosophy fills in the gap of criticism that is left behind by science.

“We judge, for example, that happiness is more desirable than misery, knowledge than ignorance, goodwill than hatred, and so on. Such judgements must, in part at least, be immediate and a priori.”

Russell explains that these types of judgments are forms of priori knowledge that contribute to The Nature and Limits of Human Knowledge. He argues that logic that leads to an understanding such as “kindness is greater than cruelty” is innate to how the human mind functions.

“Our nature is as much a fact of the existing world as anything, and there can be no certainty that it will remain constant.”

This passage exemplifies Russell’s technique of shattering the foundations of knowledge with a matter-of-fact tone. This reinforces both his logical persona in the text and his arguments that people should not take knowledge for granted.

“Not being particular, it cannot itself exist in the world of sense. Moreover it is not fleeting or changeable like the things of sense: it is eternally itself, immutable and indestructible.”

In this passage, Russell speaks about universals, using justice as an example. Unlike human knowledge, which exists only in the mind of the individual and can only be privately self-evident, universals transcend across minds. He uses the word “immutable” here to juxtapose it with the precarious forms of knowledge discussed throughout the text.

“All truths involve universals, and all knowledge of truths involves acquaintance with universals.”

Russell argues that because universals are the closest humans can get to moving outside the limitations of individual knowledge, they have an intrinsic relationship with the truth. Universals pervade all aspects of human thought and interaction. Therefore, truths cannot exist without them. Knowledge of truths cannot be achieved without accessing these universals and the connections that form them.

“The world of being is unchangeable, rigid, exact, delight to the mathematician, the logician, the builder of metaphysical systems, and all who love perfection more than life.”

This is one of the more poetic, descriptive passages in an often-sober philosophical text. Russell piles adjectives together in a sentence with multiple clauses to convey a sense of excitement, and he compares three kinds of figures to make his argument appear more vivid and applicable to life.

“The world of existence is fleeting, vague, without sharp boundaries, without any clear plan or arrangement, but it contains all thoughts and feelings, all the data of sense, and all physical objects, everything that can do either good or harm, everything that makes any difference to the value of life and the world.”

Here, Russell describes reality, a space that cannot be accessed or understood fully due to the subjective nature of perception. However, this does not mean that the pursuit of understanding reality is pointless. Russell argues that The Value of Philosophy lies in seeking unanswerable questions. This unknowable realm is where the important questions reside, and Russell believes that meaning and goodness are found in the relentless chase of inaccessible knowledge.

“All a priori knowledge deals exclusively with the relations of universals.”

Universals rely on a specific type of logic that draws connections across examples. A person’s understanding of kindness, for example, comes from multiple experiences in which kindness was shown. Through these experiences, the person develops a knowledge of kindness defined by specific actions and attitudes. This defined commonality forms a universal. Russell argues that priori knowledge is the practice of logic that is innate to human thought.

“Some of our beliefs turn out to be erroneous, and therefore it becomes necessary to consider how, if at all, we can distinguish knowledge from error.”

Russell asserts that The Nature and Limits of Human Knowledge mean that humans can never know something for certain. He establishes truths as self-evident, but even truths are susceptible to doubt. This is because humans perceive the world through the restricted workings of their own mind. They are unable to view reality outside of their own lens. For this reason, knowledge must be rigorously and continuously tested and challenged.

“There is a common impression that everything we believe ought to be capable of proof, or at least of being shown to be highly probable.”

Although Russell applies logical methodology to his argument, he also suggests that intuition plays an important role in navigating the external world. Many philosophers want to provide proof for theories to establish them as true, but Russell suggests that The Relationship Between Perception and Reality is marked by an invisible and uncrossable boundary of subjective experience. For this reason, most truths are merely probable opinions.

“Self-evidence has degrees: it is not a quality which is simply present or absent, but a quality which may be more or less present, in gradations ranging from absolute certainty down to an almost imperceptible faintness.”

This quotation refers to self-evidence, which describes the degree of closeness of a concept to its nature. This passage is more ambiguous and esoteric than many of the simpler passages in the text; the phrase “may be more or less,” for example, contains qualifying terms that do not settle. This tone change reflects the “degrees” about which Russell speaks since it is not as definite a concept as others in the text, being neither “present [n]or absent.”

“Whatever we are acquainted with must be something; we may draw wrong inferences from our acquaintance, but the acquaintance itself cannot be deceptive.”

Russell outlines The Relationship Between Perception and Reality by challenging idealism and establishing physical objects as maintaining their own existence. Humans can be acquainted with physical objects, but their perceptions of those objects are subject to error.

“It will be seen that minds do not create truth or falsehood. They create beliefs.”

Russell defines truth as self-evident, arguing that most concepts are merely probable. Humans often want to take their own thoughts as the truth, mistaking truth with belief. Russell proposes that many philosophers make this same error, developing theories about concepts about the nature of reality, something that Russell argues is innately unknowable to the human mind. This is because humans can only view the world through the lens of their own experiences, relating to the theme of The Nature and Limits of Human Knowledge.

“In spite of the truth of their belief, they cannot be said to have knowledge.”

Even if a belief is true, the human mind cannot be certain of that truth. Therefore, belief is not knowledge. Russell sorts several types of thought into three clear terms—truth, belief, and knowledge—to argue his case and separate what the layman may lump together as the same thing.

“All mental facts, and all facts concerning sense-data, have this same privacy: there is only one person to whom they can be self-evident.”

Self-evidence, like knowledge and experience, is subjective. Humans can have varying sense data of the same object. Russell uses a table to illustrate this idea. Different people standing at different points in a room have different views of a table, causing it to appear differently to each person. One person may look at the table and declare that it is rectangular, while a person standing in another area of the room may think it looks round because the individual’s view is obscured by their position in the physical space.

“A man’s nature, for example, is constituted by his memories and the rest of his knowledge, by his loves and hatreds, and so on; thus, but for the objects which he knows or loves or hates, he could not be what he is.”

This passage describes the subjective nature of individualized experience. A person is comprised of many personalized memories and sense impressions. Each contributes to how that person thinks about and experiences the world around them. For this reason, their theories and beliefs are rarely concretely true. The Nature and Limits of Human Knowledge are defined by knowledge’s subjectivity, and this impacts how humans perceive reality.