Philosophy: Four Basic Questions

Artist's rendering of the Ancient city of Mari, Syria, ca. 2900 BCE

In my summary of Tracinski's "What Went Right" series, I mentioned that I disagreed with his view on what philosophy is. Here is Tracinski's view:

"[Ayn Rand's] philosophy is so crucially needed today. It is needed because it serves the function of philosophy: as a new abstraction that integrates, preserves, and magnifies all of the knowledge produced by the scientists, economists, novelists, businessmen who came before it. It represents the greatest such sum to date, the highest integration yet made of what humanity has learned in the five millennia of human civilization."

This is a grandiose view of philosophy and Tracinski claims it is dependent on knowledge from the specialized sciences. Ayn Rand had a different view:

“Philosophy by its nature has to be based only on that which is available to the knowledge of any man with a normal mental equipment. Philosophy is not dependent on the discoveries of science; the reverse is true.” (Ayn Rand, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, Expanded Second Edition, p. 289)

Ayn Rand gives her view of what philosophy is in Philosophy: Who Needs It:

"Most men spend their days struggling to evade three questions, the answers to which underlie man's every thought, feeling and action, whether he is consciously aware of it or not: Where am I? How do I know it? What should I do? ... [T]here is only one science that can answer [these questions]: philosophy. Philosophy studies the fundamental nature of existence, of man, and of man's relationship to existence."

The answers to these questions are the province of metaphysics, epistemology and ethics. The fourth branch of philosophy, politics, answers the question: How should I live with my fellow man? Politics studies the fundamental nature of man's relationship to man.

Tracinski believes philosophy is an ever-expanding integration and sum of knowledge acquired by humankind. I believe it is simply the answers to four basic questions about man and existence. If true, then a citizen of the Sumerian city of Mari (shown above) could have figured out a proper philosophy five thousand years ago. Let's see if this is plausible.

Where am I? What kind of a world do I live in? Let's say our Sumerian is a farmer who plants and harvests one of the fields shown. He knows that if he plants the seeds and waters them, his crop will grow. This process is consistent year after year, even though sometimes the plants are bigger and sometimes the fields flood and the crops are ruined. He has observed that the natural world has a set of rules that are constant. He may not know them all, but he has learned enough of them to know that the natural world has rules that don't change. He can also observe that no matter how much he wishes the crops to grow, his mind is powerless to affect the real world simply by thinking. He can refute subjectivity with simple experiments. He has acquired the proper metaphysics: objective reality.

How do I know things about the world? Our Sumerian farmer has learned how to plant and harvest his crops from his elders and when he follows the process, crops grow. But another man, say a witch doctor, tells him he must kill a lamb every third Sunday to ensure his crops will grow tall. He tries this and finds no correlation between killing lambs and the height of his crops. By simply testing different hypotheses in reality and observing the results, he can form the proper epistemology: reason. He doesn't need to know what concepts, abstractions or measurement-omission are to know that ideas need to prove their worth in reality to be validated.

What should I do? What choices should I make to live a healthy and happy life? Our farmer will have learned that the harder he works on his field and the more care he takes to provide enough water, the better the crop. I don't know if he owned the land himself or how he was paid, but regardless of the situation, he could observe that his effort—both physical and intellectual—was directly tied to the amount of food he produced. Even if he wasn't allowed to keep the excess, he could observe that man must make an effort to produce what he needs to live, and this process is good and right. And he will have observed that it was his individual initiative that produced the crops, because only he can generate the motivation to put forth the effort. That is the essence of a proper ethics: individualism and rational self-interest.

How should I deal with my fellow man? Mari was a trading city situated between cities on the Mediterranean Sea and others on the Persian Gulf. Thus, our farmer could observe how trading made both parties richer by taking advantage of the division of labor. He could also observe that by being more productive in his own profession—farming—he could produce excess and then trade that for things produced by others. Furthermore, as is obvious to any child, he could observe that by stealing or killing, one could take the products of others with physical force. But since our farmer knows the effort required to produce his crops, he knows that the city would starve if everyone were allowed to steal or kill. He has thereby figured out the essence of a proper politics: men should deal with each other as traders; killing and stealing are forbidden. (In the earliest known written laws, the Code of Ur-Nammu, the first two offenses listed are murder and robbery.)

Our Sumerian farmer is undoubtedly a rare individual with abilities in logic and introspection very advanced for his time, and perhaps he did not exist. But the point of the above exercise is that the Sumerian farmer had enough information available to him to figure out a philosophy for living on earth. It did not require knowledge of the ancient Greeks, the scientific discoveries of the Enlightenment, or the incredible productivity of the Industrial Revolution. Philosophy deals with fundamental questions of man and existence and can be figured out—from scratch—by any honest, rational individual.