Editors' Introduction

Abstract

SPECULATION AND REFLECTION, OR: IT'S ALL DONE BY MIRRORS F. E. SPARSHOTI For every philosopher, in every age, the first question must be: just what is philosophy? It is agreed that its perennial task is to explore the limits of human thinking and the proper deployment of reason within those limits; but it follows that, if he could determine with accuracy and certainty the limitations and proper methods of his own activity, the philosopher would already have completed a major part of his task. It is therefore not surprising that this initial question is never answered to everyone's satisfaction. It seems that philosophy is in large measure its own subject. What kind of business, then, does it turn out to be? In so far as philosophy goes beyond its necessary but seemingly non-committal functions of analysing and criticizing, its procedures may without absurdity be characterized as speculation and re~ection. But reflecting is, of course, what mirrors do; so that, if we were so rash as to derive the term "speculation" from the Latin speculum, which means a mirror, we might go on to say that philosophy in its freer flights depends on the use of mirrors. What you are most likely to see if you look into a mirror is your own face. No harm in that: self-knowledge is always valuable, and people who can see their faces are able to keep them cleaner and tidier than they otherwise might. But mirrors do have other uses too. It is by using mirrors that commanders of submarines escape the ignorance that is the usual consequence of submersion; it is with mirrors, sUitably arranged , that dumpy persons at the backs of crowds are able to glimpse royalty riding by; searchlight crews use mirrors to bring their illumination into focus and make their observations more penetrating, and astronomers use them to obtain a record of the most remote and nebulous objects of their concern. So we may well ask: is philosophical thought reflexive as well as reflective? Does philosophy see in its mirror the stars, or merely its own face? There are three questions that might be put in this form, two of which I leave aside. One thing I do not want to ask is whether philosophers' Volume xxxv, Number 1, October, 1965. theories reBect the presupposItions of their own social and economic class. By a judicious selection and arrangement of explanatory gimmicks, anything any philosopher says can be shown to be characteristic of any class, whether he belongs to it or not, and it is beyond my powers to select a gimmick that will give only true answers. Nor do I want to ask whether men, in trying to think about the world, are not really thinking only about themselves-whether the human mind in its investigations discovers the nature of a reality other than itself or Simply its own constitution and the laws that govern its own workings. It matters little which way that question is answered: it comes to the same thing in the end. Parmenides long ago said "To be, and to be thought about, are one and the same." Or did he perhaps say "Only what can think can exist?" Or even "Thinking and being are the same?" A certain crankiness in his venerable syntax, perhaps even in his venerable character, prevents us from ever being sure.' But in any case, if we begin with the world, we can know it only in the aspect which it presents to our knowledge; and if we start with our knowledge, whatever we have knowledge of is properly called "the world." So instead of posing this unreal alternative between world-knowledge and man-knowledge I would rather assert that if philosophy's first problem is the nature of philosophy, its last problem is the nature of man and his world. And this turns out to be one problem, not two. On the one hand, to ask about the nature of the world is to ask about the environment in which men live, and the nature of an environment as such depends on the nature of those whose environment it is. On the other hand, what...