Why Do We Study Philosophy? — Continued, Part Three

Philosophy also helps us increase the clarity with which our minds see life.

What is the difference between a ten-year-old boy and a forty-year-old man in their understanding of the world and its complexities?

Perhaps we can compare the difference to looking at two identical images at different resolutions. One can see an image at 72 dpi or at 300 dpi. The picture a ten-year-old child has of the world is low-resolution, and the years of life ordinarily increase that resolution.

Yet there are many people whose picture of life changes very little in clarity as the years pass. They reach the end of life still seeing only a vague, low-resolution outline of reality and simply imagine that they know what life is, because they have never seen an image of greater clarity.

Something else must therefore exist in life that can increase the resolution of our picture of it.

What can increase the clarity with which we see life and the world?

Is there a form of knowledge that can help us see the world more clearly and choose our path more wisely at each moment of decision, so that through what we do without knowing and without thinking—and through our low-resolution picture of life—we do not turn our world and the lives of others into hell?

The knowledge that increases the resolution of our picture of life is knowledge of life and living.

If there is a path out of the hell in which we find ourselves, it can only pass through knowing.

We can reduce philosophy to philosophical information, but such a reduction adds nothing to the precision with which we see the world.

The only thing that transforms us is “deep knowledge,” not superficial knowledge. The work of such knowledge is not to guide our mind towards paradise but to transform us into paradise.

What, in truth, might change in the world if all of us devoted our lives honestly to seeing it more clearly?

Human beings have lived among us, and still live among us, who have seen life and the world more precisely.

One reason changing the world is difficult is that we do not all see it with the same clarity.

In each generation only a few see and show. Many do not see, yet insist that their low-resolution and unexamined picture of the world is the world's reality and the most precise image possible. Our first task is to make sure that we are not among them.

Is philosophy a living form of knowledge?

There is a famous statement attributed to the contemporary physicist Stephen Hawking:
“Philosophy is dead.”

But is philosophy really dead?

Hawking's statement arises from a modern conviction that science answers every question we have ever asked or will ever ask.

But does science really answer all our questions?

During the Second World War, laboratories in Japan subjected prisoners of war to brutal and almost unimaginable experiments, including attempts to determine the precise amount of tensile force required to separate living tissues in different organs of the body. In later decades laboratories in many countries invested in the development of chemical and biological weapons.

There may be nothing scientifically incorrect in the experimental procedure itself, but does the belief that science alone answers all our questions overlook something fundamental about what is happening in our world?

Plato wrote more than two thousand years ago, in the source's rendering, that if knowledge is treated as an end rather than as virtue, it can itself become destructive. This helps explain why philosophical questions about what we translate from thought into action never become irrelevant or obsolete.

People in every age suffer from the blind prejudices, limited awareness and superstitions of their own time. Philosophy can help us free ourselves from them.

The belief that science—and science alone—can answer our questions is one of the blind prejudices of our age, a prejudice that has created a new religion of scientism.

In a 1944 letter to a young philosopher of science named Robert Thornton, Albert Einstein is presented as making this point beautifully. In the source's rendering, he writes:
“Philosophy gives us the independence through which we can free ourselves from the prejudices and mistaken beliefs of our age—precisely the condition in which most scientists of our time are trapped. Independence of thought is a product of philosophical thinking, and in my view this is what separates the specialist scientist from the pure thinker who seeks truth.”

Another assumption concealed within scientism is the belief that what has brought human beings progress is science and science alone.