Spencer Heath Archive

Item 439

Taping by Spencer MacCallum from conversation with Heath.

September 23, 1955

 

 

 

Philosophy and Science

     I made some remark about how I would teach philosophy if I were teaching it in a college. In so doing, I would have to conform to the custom and teach the traditions, because you couldn’t turn out a class of students in philosophy and not have them know about the philosophies of the past, the supposedly great philosophers and their great systems that they had promulgated. But I said that after I had carried them over a review of the philosophies of the past, I would then begin to teach them not the history of philosophy and not what had been said about philosophers and what they had said about one another, the vagaries of their minds and all that sort of thing, /but/ I would teach philosophy the way I would teach arithmetic. I would start by saying as though it were, twice two is four; I wouldn’t start by saying who first said it, who first discovered it, and who disagreed with it and who had another view. I would teach that twice two is four and try to demonstrate that by some visual, experimental mode in teaching arithmetic.

And so I would try to teach in philosophy that certain things operated in certain ways together, in certain uniformities, as the things in science do, then formulate some uniformities there. I would undertake to teach philosophy from scratch, as I would teach arithmetic. Or chemistry for that matter is another example. People don’t teach the history of chemistry, the disputes of chemistry, the mistakes of chemistry, and the diverging ideas that people had in the past. They teach the things that can be checked up in the laboratory.

So in teaching philosophy, I would try to teach something about experience, because life isn’t anything but a big laboratory in which there are a lot of experimenters. But all experimenting and everything that isn’t entirely routine. So between the routine work as in a laboratory and the newly conducted experiments as in the laboratory, the laboratory is really a model of what life is. So I would try to examine the nature of life, something about our own characteristics of our own conscious minds, and observe certain kinds of behavior and what consequences followed upon it.

 

 

/Why is it that we approach philosophy differently and study, really, the history of philosophy rather than philosophy itself?/

 

I think I can tell you that, because we have the power of conceiving, or imagining things apart from the actual experience. We can anticipate an experience by imagination, we can be conscious of it while it is going on, and we can still experience it imaginatively after it has passed by memory. Because we can imagine things, we can generalize, because we can take from a large number of experiences what there is in common. Or we take a series of events, all superficially different, perhaps, and find out something that is common to those events, and thereby we have a uniformity which we can formulate and depend upon later on, so that our knowledge is not restricted to the particular occasion. We have a kind of general knowledge which we can make use of on other occasions.

Now science, the various special sciences are examples of that. Those sciences have arisen from observing events in different fields. In the field of chemistry for instance, the field of astronomy, the field of mathematics and the field of geology and what not, we observe events. And formulating those uniformities that are discovered there, we have knowledge which will serve us on future occasions in that same field of events. Now this process of formulating the uniformities in different fields of events has something in itself uniform in all the fields. So philosophy consists in finding what all the sciences have in common, so that we can then extend the field of general science by applying the philosophic principles in new fields where there has not been any science before. Philosophy, then, can become a fund of knowledge, a kind of knowledge out of which sciences can be consciously and designedly built in fields where we have only had empirical knowledge before.

^/You haven’t answered my question why philosophy is taught differently than the natural sciences — why it is not taught, rather, but only the endless speculations about it./

 

 There is a branch of chemistry, we may call it the history of chemistry, which is very interesting. However, when we teach chemistry, we don’t undertake to teach the history of chemistry, how it all happened, the blunderings and mistakes and the wrong conceptions or the wrong theories.

We don’t do just that in chemistry because we have gone through that developmental period of groping empirically and established general principles just as we have in arithmetic, and we can teach those principles nakedly, without having to go back and go through all the history. But had we never discovered any general principles, if we were still groping empirically, as the ancients did in the chemical field, we would still pretend to be teaching chemistry when we wouldn’t be teaching anything but the traditions and the gropings and the diversities of opinion that people had had in that field. So the reason that we teach what we call philosophy, and really teach the history of philosophy and its gropings, is because we haven’t established any real philosophy in itself. As soon as we make conquests in that field, then we will have something to teach that is philosophy, not the gropings and blunderings and opinions that men have held, and very often very antagonistically towards one another, in the past. There is no antagonism between mathematicians; there is no antagonism between chemists as chemistry is now developed. So when philosophy develops in the same degree, there will be no antagonism among philosophers.

 

/Have you established some general principles of real philosophy in your own thinking?/

 

 In some measure, I think I have laid some of the foundations. I have found that the natural sciences are all examining events, and I have found something of the nature of an event, irrespective of what field of human experience it may be found in. And I have found that events always have three measurable aspects. I say measurable because unless we can measure something in terms of some units, and express it numerically, we can’t establish any ratio between that aspect of an event and any other aspect of it. Events do have three aspects which can be measured. And for that purpose, scientists have developed three measuring units; they measure what they call the mass element of an event, they measure what they call the motion, or velocity element of an event and they measure the time or duration through which a certain event or certain kinds of events endure. The most common units in these three fields are the gram, centimeter and the second. We find then that to understand events, we must measure them in their respective manifestations and discover what ratios subsist therein: in what relation is the mass to the motion, how many units of mass are there in this event for each unit of motion, how many units of motion are there for each unit of time evolved — what we call velocity. That way we can understand an event rationally because we can understand it in terms of the ratios existing or subsisting between the elements of which it is composed.

 

     Now having analyzed the events, we can bring events to pass, because we can put together a certain amount of mass, a certain amount of motion and a certain amount of time, or velocity, and cause events to occur that never did occur before or without our guidance would not have occurred. So that the applications of science are the creative side, the human side. It is the achieving of human aspirations, plans, or ends, by combining, recombining, the elements that constitute events under conscious direction.

 

/You seem to say that the application of philosophy is the founding of new sciences, — that it is once removed from human applications, which must then come through the newly established sciences. Would you say that philosophy consists in that one generalization, that experience is made up of events which have three measurable aspects?/

 

 This that I have been giving you was the philosophy of science, the philosophy of rational knowledge. But you will note that I did not give it to you in terms of any particular science. Everything I said was applicable to various sciences, and probably applicable to all sciences when they are developed. So that is why I call that philosophy, because it is the total generalization of the whole field of experience, whereas the particular sciences are generalizations within their particular fields.

 

/Is there any other philosophy besides the philosophy of science?/

 

 Attempts have been made to generalize human knowledge and experience without the aid of rationality. That’s why we have so much diversity in the philosophical systems of the past.

 

/You would not consider them philosophy? That is, not true philosophy but the groping toward it?/

 

 Yes — the aspiration has been there and the effort has been there, but men have not derived their method from the method which they have more or less empirically employed in order to have successful sciences. So the philosophy of the past has been an effort to generalize knowledge that was not rational, and so philosophy has lacked rationality itself. Now when we generalize the rational sciences, then we have a rational philosophy.

 

/And may we add, a true philosophy?/

 

 Well that is, it’s true to experience, because it is homologous we might say, analogous at least, it runs one to one, the knowledge runs one to one with the act, or with the experience.

 

/Could we call a ^‘philosophy’ philosophy if it were not about experience?/

 

 Yes, it has been done. I would not be inclined to do so. The whole field of epistemology, the question of whether people can understand anything or not, seems to be rather separate from the field of experience. That is, from objective experience. And I might say that the subjectivism, which has been a characteristic of nearly all the philosophies of the past, has not had to do with objective experience.

 

/Then epistemology would be classed with the proto-philosophies./

 

 That might be a very good term with which to designate philosophies of the past.