How to be a philosopher

Bertrand Russell on how to be a philosopher:

It is important to learn not to be angry with opinions different from your own, but to set to work understanding how they come about. If, after you have understood them, they still seem false, you can then combat them much more effectually than if you had continued to be merely horrified.

I am not suggesting that the philosopher should have no feelings; the man who has no feelings, if there be such a man, does nothing, and therefore achieves nothing. No man can hope to become a good philosopher unless he has certain feelings which are not very common.

A philosopher must have an intense desire to understand the world, as far as that is possible; and for the sake of understanding, he must be willing to overcome those narrownesses of outlook that make a correct perception impossible. He must learn to think and feel, not as a member of this or that group, but as just a human being.

If he could, he would divest himself of the limitations to which he is subject as a human being. If he could perceive the world as a Martian or an inhabitant of Sirius, if he could see it as it seems to a creature that lives for a day and also as it would seem to one that lived for a million years, he would be a better philosopher.

But this he cannot do; he is tied to a human body with human organs of perception. To what extent can this human subjectivity be overcome? Can we know anything at all about what the world is as opposed to what it seems? This is what the philosopher wishes to know, and it is to this end that he has to undergo such a long training of impartiality.

— Bertrand Russell, The Art of Philosophizing: And Other Essays (1968), “Essay I: The Art of Rational Conjecture” (1942), 25-6.

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The essays found in The Art of Philosophizing (1968) were written by Bertrand Russell during the Second World War. In those years the author was teaching philosophy at US universities, exercising a growing influence on America’s student population.

Image: Bertrand Russell in his private study at his home in Penhyndeudreath, Gwynedd, United Kingdom.