The common features of contemporary philosophy
The basic philosophical problem “Man in his relation to the world” aimed to clear out man’s essence, place, role and significance in the world, and the influence of the world upon man acquired a new specific content. Our epoch has got a global character. The globalization is evident in four main forms that are as following:
1. Despite their great diversity philosophies of the end of the XX century seem to represent the integral whole. This integrity means that the problems researched by various philosophical schools are the same. The solution of these problems one can see in common brunches, though highly specific in their content that of philosophy of history, philosophy of ecology, philosophy of peace, philosophy of culture, philosophy of morality, philosophy of spirituality etc.
2. Global character of contemporary philosophy is manifested in the total contradictoriness of doctrines: that of the West and East, the West and Eurasia, the West and Africa, European and American mode of thinking, the West and Post-Soviet paradigm, imperial and independent tendencies.
3. Modern globalization provides legal self-approval of national specificity of any philosophical doctrine. The basic philosophical idea is that: every nation aspires for sovereignty, for being able to choose its own way of development and self-realization.
4. Globalization of the XX century philosophy has got the highest top in man’s understanding his own historical mission, his uniqueness, his role and significance in the development of history. All various doctrines meet at the point that just man is both the source and the creator of good and evil. Aiming to define the criteria of good and evil different philosophical schools go their own ways, but there is the universal criterion that is the harmony of the “Man - the World” relation, which is concretized by various philosophies in different forms: Man – Nature; Man – God; Man – Society; Man – Epistemology etc. As a result of such preferences new philosophical brunches appeared that is Phenomenology, Personalism, Epistemology, Structuralism, Hermeneutics etc.
The basic tendencies in the development of the present day’s philosophy
are as following:
1. Analyzing the world experience of the traditional society and technological civilization philosophy regards man as a particular type of activity in the world directed towards two opposite vectors: on one hand inward the self that is self-contemplation, self-realization and self-control and on the other hand outward the self that is towards ultimate altering society, nature, man himself. Philosophy contrasts existential values and man’s rationality underlining their integral unity and interaction.
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2. Interdependent influence of national cultures and philosophies upon each other, interaction of modes of thinking and philosophizing. Each philosophical system seems to realize national, regional, social problems through the attitude to both national traditions and all modern philosophy. The significance of philosophy as of the universal integrator of culture is growing.
3. The present day’s philosophy is characterized by the tendency of seeking the means to approve and strengthen national cultures and philosophies, national self-realization and sovereignty in philosophical systems.
4. The most powerful tendency is to approve philosophy as a planetary thinking. Theoretical philosophy stimulates the development of a new practical philosophy that is “Global thinking – local activity” aimed at “improving man” meaning the development of human reason. The present day’s philosophies are the best manifestations of this tendency.
From the latter part of the XVIII century to the present day, art and literature and philosophy, and even politics have been influenced, positively or negatively, by a way of feeling which was characteristic of what, in a large sense, may be called the Romantic movement.
Initially the Romantic Movement in its most essential form was a revolt against received ethical and aesthetic standards.
The romantics were not without morals; on the contrary, their moral judgments were sharp and vehement. But they were based on quite other principles than those that had seemed good to their predecessors. Prudence was regarded as the supreme virtue; intellect was valued as the most effective weapon against subversive fanatics; polished manners were praised as a barrier against barbarism. Newton’s orderly cosmos, in which the planets unchangingly revolve about the sun in law-abiding orbits, became an imaginative symbol of good movement. Restraint in the expression of passion was the chief aim of education, and the surest mark of a gentleman.
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By that time, many people had grown tired of safety, and had begun to desire excitement. XIX century revolt against the system of the Holy Alliance took two forms. On one hand, there was the revolt of industrialism, both capitalist and proletarian, against monarchy and aristocracy; this was almost untouched by romanticism, and reverted in many respects, to the XVIII century. This movement is represented by the philosophical radicals, the free-trade movement, and Marxian socialism. Quite different from this was the romantic revolt, which was in part reactionary, in part revolutionary. The romantics did not aim at peace and quite, but at vigorous and passionate individual life. They had no sympathy with industrialism, because it was ugly, because money-grubbing seemed to them unworthy of an immortal soul, and because the growth of modern economic organizations interfered with individual liberty. In the post-revolutionary period they were led into politics, gradually, through nationalism: each nation was felt to have a corporate soul, which could not be free so long as the boundaries of states were different from those of nations. In the first half of the XIX century, nationalism was the most vigorous of the revolutionary principles, and most romantics ardently favored it.
The Romantic Movement is characterized, as a whole, by the substitution of aesthetic for utilitarian standards. The morals of romantics have primarily aesthetic motives, but also of the change of taste which made their sense of beauty different from that of their predecessors.
The temper of romantics is best studied in fiction. They liked what was strange: ghosts, ancient decayed castles, the last melancholy descendants of once great families, practitioners of mesmerism and the occult sciences, falling tyrants and levantine pirates.
The Romantic Movement was at first mainly German. The German romantics admire strong passions, of no matter what kind, and whatever may be their social consequences. Romantic love, especially when unfortunate, is strong enough to win their approval, but most of the strongest passions are destructive - hate and resentment and jealousy, remorse and despair, outraged pride and the fury of the unjustly oppressed, martial ardor and contempt for slaves and cowards. Hence the type of man encouraged by romanticism, especially of the Byronic variety, is violent and anti-social, an anarchic rebel or a conquering tyrant.
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This outlook makes an appeal for which the reasons lie very deep in humane nature and humane circumstances. By self-interest man has become gregarious, but in instinct he has remained to a great extent solitary; hence the need of religion and morality to reinforce self-interest. But the habit of foregoing present satisfactions for the sake of future advantages is irksome, and when passions are roused the prudent restraints of social behavior become difficult to endure.
Revolt of solitary instincts against social bonds is the key to the philosophy, the politics, the sentiments, not only of what is commonly called the Romantic Movement, but also of its progeny down to the present day. Philosophy, under the influence of German idealism, became solipsistic, and self-development was proclaimed as the fundamental principle of ethics. As regards sentiment, there has to be a distasteful compromise between the search for isolation and the necessities of passion and economics.
The comforts of civilized life are not obtainable by a hermit, and a man who wishes to write books or produce works of art must submit to the ministrations of others if he is to survive while he does his work. Passionate love however is a more difficult matter. So long as passionate lovers are regarded as in revolt against social trammels, they are admired. But in real life the love relation itself quickly becomes a social trammel, and the partner in love comes to be hated, all the more vehemently if the love is strong enough to make the bond difficult to break. Hence love comes to be conceived as a battle, in which each is attempting to destroy the other by breaking through the protecting walls of his or her ego.
The Romantic Movement, in its essence, aimed at liberating humane personality from the fetters of social convention and social morality. In part, these fetters were a mere useless hindrance to desirable forms of activity, for every ancient community has developed rules of behavior for which there is nothing to be said except that they are traditional. But egoistic passions, when once let loose, are not easily brought into subjection to the needs of the society. Christianity had succeeded, to some extent, in taming the Ego, but economic, political, and intellectual causes stimulated revolt against the Churches, and the Romantic Movement brought the revolt into the sphere of morals. By encouraging the new lawless Ego it made social cooperation impossible, and it left its disciples faced with the alternative of anarchy or despotism. Egoism, at first, made men expect from others a parental tenderness, but when they discovered, with indignation, that others had their own Ego, the disappointed desire for tenderness turned to hatred and violence. Man is not a solitary animal, and so long as social life survives, self-realization cannot be the supreme principle of ethics.
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The romantic form is to be seen in Byron in a non-philosophical dress, but in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche it has learnt the language of philosophy. It tends to emphasize the will at the expense of the intellect, to be impatient of chains of reasoning, and to glorify violence of certain kinds. In practical politics it is important as an ally of nationalism. In tendency, if not always in fact, it is definitely hostile to what is commonly called reason, and tends to be anti-scientific.
Another type of revolt was a rationalistic one. Intellectual life of the XIX century was more complex than that of any previous age. This was due to several causes. First the area concerned was larger than ever before; America and Russia made important contributions, and Europe became more aware than formerly of Indian philosophies, both ancient and modern. Second, science, which had been chief source of novelty since the seventeenth century, made new conquests, especially in geology, biology and organic chemistry. Third, machine production profoundly altered the social structure, and gave men a new conception of their powers in relation to the physical environment. Fourth, a profound revolt, both philosophical and political, against traditional systems in thought, in politics and in economics gave rise to attacks upon many beliefs and institutions that had hitherto been regarded as unassailable.
The rationalistic revolt began with the French philosophers of the Revolution, passed on, somewhat softened, to the philosophical radicals in England, and then acquired a deeper form in Marx and Lenin.
So far, the philosophies that we have been considering have had an inspiration, which was traditional, literary, or political. But there were two other sources of philosophical opinion, namely science and machine production. The second of these began its theoretical influence with Marx, and has grown gradually more important ever since. The first has been important since the seventeenth century, but took new forms during the nineteenth century.
What Galileo and Newton were to the seventeenth century, Darwin was to the nineteenth. Darwin’s theory had two parts. On the one hand, there was the Doctrine of Evolution, which maintained that the different forms of life had developed gradually from a common ancestry. The second part of Darwin’s theory was the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest. This part of the Darwin’s theory has been much disputed, and is regarded by most biologists as subject to many important qualifications. That, however, is not what most concerns the historian of nineteenth century.
The prestige of biology caused men whose thinking was influenced by science to apply biological rather than mechanistic categories to the world. Everything was supposed to be evolving, and it was easy to imagine an immanent goal. In spite of Darwin, many men considered that evolution justified a belief in cosmic purpose. The conception of organism came to be thought the key to both scientific and philosophical explanations of natural laws, and the atomic thinking of the eighteenth century came to be regarded as out of date. This point of view has at last influenced even theoretical physics. In politics it leads naturally to emphasis upon the community as opposed to the individual. This is in harmony with the growing power of the state; also with nationalism, which can appeal to the Darwin’s doctrine of survival of the fittest applied, not to individuals, but to nations.
While biology has militated against a mechanistic view of the world, modern economic technique has had an opposite effect. Until about the end of the eighteenth century, scientific technique, as opposed to scientific doctrines, had no important effect upon opinion. It was only with the rise of industrialism that technique began to affect men’s thought. And even then, for a long time, the effect was more or less indirect. Men who produce philosophical theories are, as a rule, brought into very little contact with machinery. The romantics noticed and hated the ugliness that industrialism was producing in places hitherto beautiful, and vulgarity (as they considered it) of those who had made money in “trade”. The socialists welcomed industrialism, but wished to free industrial workers from subjection to the power of employers. They were influenced by industrialism in the problems that they considered, but not much in the ideas that they employed in the solution of their problems.
The most important effect of machine production on the imaginative picture of the world is an immense increase in the sense of human power. This is only an acceleration of a process, which began before the dawn of history, when men diminished their fear of wild animals by the invention of weapons and their fear of starvation by the invention of agriculture. But acceleration has been so great as to produce a radically new outlook in those who wield the powers that modern technique has created.
Though many still believe in human equality and theoretical democracy, the imagination of modern people is deeply affected by the pattern of social organizations suggested by the organization of industry in the nineteenth century, which is essentially undemocratic. On one hand there are captains of industry, and on the other the mass of workers. Ordinary citizens in democratic countries do not yet acknowledge this disruption of democracy from within. But it has been a preoccupation of most philosophers from Hegel onwards, and the sharp opposition, which they discovered between the interests of the many and those of the few, has found practical expression in Fascism. Of the philosophers, Nietzsche was unashamedly on the side of the few, Marx whole heartedly on the side of the many.
To formulate any satisfactory modern ethic of human relationships it will be essential to recognize the necessary limitations of men’s power over the non-human environment, and the desirable limitations of their power over each other.
The twentieth century has seen the persistence of the older religions and at the same time in the West the solidification of humanism as a worldview, very often through the efforts of philosophers such as Moore, Russell, Schick and Habermas. But undoubtedly the major force in the twentieth century has been nationalism. This managed in Nazism to combine with racial theories, and in facism, for instance in Italy, with certain “corporate motifs”. Nationalism has retained its impetus because of the late emergence of so many peoples from the colonial era. The high degree of personalism in existentialist thinking created ambiguities towards the State, and depressions, both psychological and economic, caused by World War l, halted for a while the successful progress of liberal and social democratic ideals. Perhaps because of its internal conflicts, and no doubt too because of the conservatism of higher education, which takes a long time adapting, especially in the humanities, European thought has been remarkably self-centered.
Of all that we have surveyed, it is difficult to resist the thought the nineteenth century AD have been the richest and most stimulating. But we see there too a divergence. Kant, John Stuart Mill and some other took humanity in the direction of individualism and human rights. But Hegel and Marx took us towards differing forms of collectivism.
Meanwhile in America we see the evolution of a technical philosophy, and we can perceive there rather more clearly than in Europe the shape of the struggles to adapt traditional religions to the modern world, and the presence of psychoanalysis as a vital movement too. It has been an area of great pioneering which has affected Europe and the wider world – forms of mass air transport, the universality of the automobile, supermarkets, personal computers as a norm, agribusiness: these and many other commonplaces of modern living have been developed there. All this undoubtedly influenced thinking. It was Feuerbach who pioneered non-classical philosophy of Western Europe, he who inspired the main paradigms of the XX century such as Sociocentrism, Voluntarism and Psychoanalysis.
Sociocentrism can be represented by Marxism.
Karl Marx (1818-83), born at Trier in the Rhineland and an exile for much of his life in Britain, belonged to the circle of the left Hegelians. He early took up the view expressed in the slogan “Criticism of religion is the beginning of all criticism”. He thought this had been successfully achieved by Feuerbach, save that we can see the slogan also in economic and political terms. Marx was greatly influenced, of course, by Hegel’s dialectical view of history. The new ingredient he added to Feuerbach and Hegel was economic analysis. So he evolved a dialectical view of historical processes based upon materialism interpreted through economic theory. It was a highly potent synthesis. Marx’s doctrines were often worked out in cooperation with, and through the financial support of Friedrich Engels (1820-95), who spent much time in England working in the family firm in Manchester. Their first work together was The Holy Family (1845), which was an attack on current ideals. Their most famous joint work was the Communist Manifesto (1848). Marx’s “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844” are important, and of course his most famous book is “Das Capital” (1867; the second and third volumes were brought out by Engels in 1885 and 1894). Various books were published after Marx’s death by Engels, notably his ”Dialectics of Nature” (published posthumously in1925). Mention should also be made of his “Anti-Duhring” (1878), directed against a German socialist writer.
Marx and Engels recognized that their conception of the dialectics came from Hegel. So it was not a question of their going back to some static form of materialism. For them, human beings were essentially active beings whose production changed nature and themselves. The key to understanding history was through consideration of the force of production and their changes. Other aspects of life (cultural, social and so forth) were essentially secondary, though they could have important effects on the basic economic situation. At a given point the growth of the force of production might be inhibited by aspects of the economic and social order – this would involve a contradiction which was to resolve by a revolutionary situation in which a transition would be made to a higher level of activity (for instance, contradictions in the feudal order giving rise to a new bourgeois order, in turn leading to problems resolved by a socialist revolution and the emergence of the proletariat as the leading class). As an active being the human will alienated from his product by the capitalist system: the worker adds value to matter by his labor, but that surplus value is in effect taken by the capitalist, who thus of necessity exploits his workers. This sense of alienation is reinforced by the fact that it is in the interest of the capitalist to the increase as far as possible the exploitation of his workers, leading to a revolutionary situation.
Eventually a socialist system will be established, including the dictatorship of the proletariat. In due course this will be replaced by a classless society, and the State will wither away. The struggle henceforth will be against nature. This ideal picture of the future depicts so to speak a heaven upon earth. For Marx and Engels class warfare, and eventually supreme class peace, replaces the war of the States in Hegel’s scheme. It is, that is to say, an inspiring worldview with strong practical implications.
It is worth adding a footnote onLenin(1870-1924), who somewhat altered certain emphases in the system of Marxism. He was keen to defend materialism as in his “Materialism and Empirio-Criticism” (1909) against those who tried to incorporate phenomenalistic notions from Marx. He held to copy theory of perception in which sensations mirror reality. In his work “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism” (1916) he analyzed the world situation, and foresaw the uneven development of socialism because of the difference in stages of economic development in the world. It was of course Marxism-Leninism that came to be the official doctrine in Marxist countries.
Two other responses to Hegel can be regarded of wide interest none the less. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), son of a Danzig (now Gdansk) merchant was for a time in his father’s business, but studied there after at Gottingen, publishing his doctoral dissertation: On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (1813). His biggest and most famous work was “The World as Will and Representation” (1819). He lectured briefly and unsuccessfully in Berlin, setting himself up as a rival to Hegel. In the last years of his life he became famous. Schopenhauer’s notion of representation gears in with the Kantian distinction between phenomena and noumena. Basically we perceive the world in the guise of representations. He criticized Kant for suggesting, however, that things in themselves give rise to phenomena. On his principles he should not have done so. On the other hand, Schopenhauer pointed to the fact that in a way we do have direct experience of noumena, but in an unexpected way. We are embodied beings who experience our activity from within. So by an analogical leap Schopenhauer used this notion to interpret the world. Likewise the world, which lies “behind” phenomena, or rather the screen of representations, is Will. Schopenhauer saw that primordial drive behind outside things as brute and without defined purpose.
Given his basic model, Schopenhauer has some very shrewd things to say about the effective subordination of the understanding to the will; the fact that consciousness is just the surface of our minds; his anticipation of Freud in the notion that the will stops things from coming to the surface of our minds; his distrust of mechanistic models of the mind (and even of nature); his emphasis on the non-rational aspects of decision making; and so on. He was in many ways a highly modern figure. The escape from slavery to the will was Schopenhauer aesthetic contemplation. He had a notion of patterns or forms in the world in order to make it manageable. The roots of his system are explicable through his extension of and critique of Kant. He thought of himself as Kant’s true heir, and indeed he is quite as plausible a reconstruction of Kant as any of the idealists. His solution to the problem of how to get at the noumena is of great interest and originality.
Very different was the angle from which Soren Kierkegaard (1813-55) came at the problems of philosophy. His highly personal style and his strong concern for a burning Christian faith were out of the mainstream of the philosophy of the period. He had a bitter view not only of Hegel but also of the established Lutheran Church. He did not think much of the spiritual life of an organization where pastors were civil servants. In 1838 he experienced a religious conversion, but three years later he called off his decision to enter the Church, and decided to devote himself to philosophy and spiritual writing. His writings were published under various pseudonyms as well as under his own name, a literary technique whose meaning is not altogether clear. His most important books are “Either- Or” and “Fear and Trembling” (1843), “The concept of Dread” and “Philosophical Fragments” (1844), “Concluding Unscientific Postscript”(1846) and “Sickness unto Death”(1849).
Kierkegaard had, like Hegel, his dialectics, but it was not of synthesis. There are stages on life’s way which need to be transcended. The first stage is the aesthetic stage, of sensuousness, of emotion, of poetry. But the person plunged in this life comes to realize that his self is dispersed. He lives in the cellar of a building, which has at its culmination the spiritual life. The aesthetic person is hit by despair, and then comes “either-or”. He must commit himself to rise above the aesthetic level to the next, the ethical. It involves heroism, and the ethical person thinks that he can achieve perfection, but does not reckon with sin. The consciousness of sin eventually induces a new sense of darkness, corresponding to the aesthetic person’s despair. He can overcome this only by a new act of commitment- to faith. If the tragic hero sacrifices himself for the universal (like Socrates) the religious person stands as an individual before the Absolute. Truth here is subjectivity – faith is an objective uncertainty held fast in an appropriation - process of the most passionate inwardness. This also is real “existence”. A man who sits in a cart letting the horse plod along without guidance exists, but the one who guides the horse and directs the cart really exists. It is this loaded and pregnant sense of existence that was later taken up by the so-called existentialist philosophers of the twentieth century: it was in that century that Kierkegaard saw system, and the system of Hegelianism, as the enemy. It pantheistically reduced the gulf between the individual and the Absolute. It washed away faith in a deluge of tepid reasoning. It did not make space in the world of the subjective passions of the individual.
Kierkegaard was taken up not just by existentialists but by Christian theologians in the twentieth century.
A different kind of rebel was Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) who was a Classical scholar at the universities of Bonn and Leipzig, but was appointed to the Chair of Philosophy at Basel before even finishing his doctorate. He was there close to Richard Wagner, with whom, however, he later broke. In 1879 he left his Chair and lived at Saint-Maria and elsewhere in Switzerland and Austria in search of good health. He developed madness towards the end of his life and was treated in clinics in Basel and Jena. His major works were “Human”, “All-too-human” (1878-1879), “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” (1883-1885), “Beyond Good and Evil” (1886), “On the Genealogy of Morals” (1887), “The Twilight of the Idols” and “Ecce Homo” (1888). His book “The Antichrist” (1895) was part of a larger work he planed on the will to power, which he did not finish.
To some degree Nietzsche was indebted to Schopenhauer: his “will to power” is an adaptation of Schopenhauer’s Will. But he was most eager to split between the phenomenal and the noumenal. Above all he wished to reject the idea of transcendent or the “other world”. The will to power was not therefore a dark force living on the other side of the light of this world: it was rather an interpretation of the mode in which the universe manifests itself. Moreover, he thought that the development of philosophy in the nineteenth century had begun to show a most important thing, God is dead. If God is dead then the morality of God needs to be rejected too. He perceived two forms of ethics – the ethos of elite and liberated person (whom he called the superman or superior human being) and that of the masses. There is a master-morality and the slave-morality. The latter seeks as its criterion the conduciveness of virtues and rules to the preservation of the weak. The weak express fear and resentment at the strong and through Christian morality cut them to size. Because of belief in what lies beyond, Christianity comes to disvalue this world and the body. What is needed is a transvaluation of values in which human powers are integrated together. The superior human being can go beyond good and evil without collapsing into decadence. The danger is that when God is dead, men will turn to active nihilism and precipitate wars and destruction on a hitherto unknown scale.
A subsidiary motif in Nietzsche’s thinking is the idea of the eternal return or recurrence. The universe shuffles its pack again and again so those events will replicate themselves exactly over a long enough period. In this way the cosmos is completely closed in on itself. It seemed an idea, which haunted Nietzsche and gave him yet a kind of satisfaction.
Henri Bergson (1859-1941) bridges the world of the nineteenth century to the conquest of France by the Nazis. He was raised in Paris, and became a student and then later professor, at the Ecole Normale. From 1900 to 1924 he taught at the College de France, and received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928. He was Jewish, though attracted by Catholicism. Among his books were “Time and Free Will” (1889), “Matter and Memory” (1896),”Laughter” (1900), “An Introduction to Metaphysics” (1903), “Creative Evolution” (1907), “The Two Sources of Morality and Religion” (1932) and “The Creative Mind” (1934). The last was a collection of essays.
Bergson was influenced by the need to put our understanding of ourselves and of nature in an evolutionary context. The world had had time to digest Darwin by the time he became a student. He saw consciousness as something continuous, not a series of discrete impressions in the style of British empiricism. As such, we are conscious of time as something dynamic and not as a series of discrete events. We are also aware of our own activity. So deterministic models of the human psyche are inappropriate and we are immediately and intuitively aware of our freedom in the process of coming to a decision. Bergson had interesting things to say about memory. He rejected central state materialism (identifying the brain and consciousness), and thought of it as a mechanism for simplifying consciousness and preventing all our memories from flooding back: a person who is active needs only a selection of what is available. As for evolution, he saw behind the real duration which we experience as elan vital, or living impulse, and he projected this drive upon the whole process of evolution, seeing that too as being God’s way of creating creators (he identified God with the living impulse). He appealed here to mystics whom he thought had an intuitive experience of the living force. The mystical spirit is typically hindered by the struggle of live, but its spread will be vital to the progress of the human race. He also made an interesting distinction between the closed and open societies. This had some influence later upon Popper. The closed society has dogmatic religion and a cohesive morality, the sort of thing indeed praised by the followers of Durkheim. The open society is richer, freer, more fluid and plural. It is full of freedom and spontaneity and expresses the mystical spirit. So the living impulse flowers there most manifestly.
Bergson had great influence in his time. He tried to put evolution at the center of his worldview, and had a great number of suggestive ideas related to time, memory, will, introspection and morality. But his work has since faded.
Much of Western philosophy since Descartes has started from inwardness. Here was perhaps a movement towards being realistic about introspection. Edmund Husserl (1859—1938) tried to purify introspection in order to create a phenomenological method in which the philosopher would only look at what is presented to consciousness. For instance, in examining time we suspend our judgment or, as he said, practice epoche concerning theories of time, but look at time as it presents itself to consciousness. On the whole his successors as phenomenologists did not practice epoche very thoroughly, but rather presented views of the nature of consciousness from within the framework of a philosophical theory (particularly Sartre and Heidegger, whose “phenomenology” appears within the ambit of existentialist views). But Husserl’s general point about epoche is very important in the social sciences — it is necessary for us to suspend our own values in trying to see what values and perceptions animate others, whether groups or individuals. This links up with the ideas of Wilhelm Dilthey in his advocacy of understanding as distinguishing the social from the physical sciences. But for the existentialist tradition, phenomenology involved novel analyses of the self.
Dilthey’s career was an exclusively academic one, culminating in his teaching at the University of Berlin from 1882 till 1905. Although he was an empiricist, wishing to banish both the noumenon and the Divine Being, he was one with a difference, since he was much concerned with meanings and understanding the inner life of humans. He had a keen sense of the richness and variety of life, and was interested in much more than sensations and perceptions, but with the interpretations made consciously and unconsciously of the content of our experience. He was as much concerned with religion and the genesis and function of legal systems as he was with perceptual knowledge. He became a vital theorist of the human sciences. He was especially concerned therefore with the philosophy of history, since human cultures manifest themselves at both the macro and the micro level in historical processes. Not only is history vital in this way, but it displays an epistemological characteristic of importance: in understanding an era or an individual we need to enter into their point of view - to consider what was taken to be of importance, etc. He also recognized that the historian is limited by the horizons of his own time. The meaning of the past is suspended, as it were, between its own time and the present.
The notion of entering into a point of view is the most important here. Of course, doing history employs a lot of the general techniques of the natural sciences. But in addition there is the method in which we understand some mental content. A major component of this is what may now be called empathy: to understand rage we need to have experienced it, and we bring that knowledge to bear in entering into another person’s experience (we of course learn to read the behavioral signs of rage). In addition it is vital to place a person’s experience, or the means of expression of it, into particular context. This in turn implies knowledge of the cultural systems in which actions and feelings are embedded.
Dilthey’s animadversions on method in history and therefore throughout the human sciences had a vital influence
Martin Heidegger(1889-1976). He taught chiefly with an interlude at Marburg. In 1933 he became Rector of Freiburg and expressed his adherence to Nazism, which he never expressly repudiated. He had his own sort of cultural nationalism, thinking that philosophy could only be done in German (though once it could be done in Greek). Like Wittgenstein he was something of a guru. His phenomenology of the individual is, though obscure and full of neologisms, interesting. First he saw the individual as thrown into his world — not the cosmos but the world for him, where things are “to hand”, to be used and treated. He was a maker rather than primarily a thinker. The Cartesian picture of us being inside a cabin looking out with interest is not Heidegger’s. A person is a temporal being, reaching out beyond himself, but recognizing his finitude, for we are bounded by death. Dread of death and nothingness calls us towards authentic existence: only the individual in silence can come face to face with his nothingness and create destiny for himself. While Heidegger’s analysis, especially in his “Being and Time” (1927), saw the individual ineluctably made of time, it is not very much interested in history in the wider sense, though Heidegger looked on himself as in continuity with such a philosopher of history as Dilthey.
An example of psychosocial approach in psychology is the work of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). Freud held than nothing we do is haphazard or coincidental; everything results from mental causes, most of which, we are unaware of. According to Freud the wind is not what is conscious or potentially conscious but also what is unconscious. This unconscious is a reservoir of human motivation comprised of instincts. In general most of what we think, believe and do is the result of unconscious urges, especially those, developed in the first five years of life in response to traumatic experiences.
A major psychic mechanism in Freudian theory is repression. Memories of events that were too powerful and traumatic are repressed - they are pushed down into the unconscious. This is not the same thing as forgetting - for the Freudian, we forget nothing. The memories are still there, and they are still active, but they influence our psychic state and our behaviors without our being aware of them. Thus, in later life, the events that occurred before we were five years old continue to influence us. Obviously the person who deals with other human beings as part of their life’s work, should have a great degree of insight into her own motivations, otherwise she might find herself reacting to others in ways that are inappropriate and relate more to her own childhood experiences rather than to the facts of the case as they stand now. This, according to another powerful Freudian concept, is because we project our own wishes and needs on to others - we are never able to break completely free of our own “Family Romance” and see others as they are.
The family drama has left us with a three-storey mind. The ego or the “me” rides upon the unconscious, says Freud, as a rider strives to dominate an unruly horse. The horse itself is made up of ail the unconscious and anarchic desires that the child has repressed - the “that” or the “id”. This dark beast can only be kept in check with great difficulty - and indeed, at night, when we are dreaming, it is unleashed to realize our most dangerous desires. The third part of the psyche is the “superego”: which is the fossilized moral injunctions of the parents - particularly the father - which subsist and which we often experience as our conscience. Mental illness occurs when the ego can no longer control either the id or the superego - in the one case, the mind is taken over by desire, and begins to act out its fantasies; in the other, the ego is paralyzed by the superego, and becomes incapable of seeking out the joys in life. A recent derivation of Freudian ideas, which has had a great deal of success in educational circles, is Transactional Analysis.
The Freudian vision is also suggestive in its picture of the psyche as a locus within which there is struggle, opposition, and hidden forces this is an advance on the rather bloodless model of man put forward by Enlightenment thinkers. The idea of the unconscious as a cunning and dangerous adversary is probably correct - although it is not likely that it works the way that Freud believed that it did.
The work of Nietzsche, the coming of Sigmund Freud, the expansion of socialist thinking, evolutionary theory and the rapid development of European nationalism all took the mood of thinking away from the rational ideals of the Enlightenment. But on the other hand the Victorian age saw the heyday of liberalism, which took up some parts of the earlier concerns, such as the rights of man. The explosive impact of the new discoveries of irrationality in the very fabric of the human psyche had greater effect between the two World Wars than they did before 1914. Meanwhile, though, a large change had been effected as a result of post-Enlightenment social and political changes. This was the increasing concentration of philosophy upon the universities. Increasingly philosophers were university professors, and the art became more and more professionalized. Knowledge in the nineteenth century was getting to be much more specialized. The scope for such wide-ranging thinkers as Descartes or Leibniz was lessening. The tendency was, too, for sub-branches of philosophy to get hived off - into political science, psychology, sociology, and so forth.
There were some discoveries likely to make traditional philosophers pause. Notably, there was the work of Nikolai Lobachevski (1793—1856) and Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann (1826—1866) in creating non-Euclidean geometry, which was bound to affect the whole post-Kantian tradition. There were new developments in logic.
There were other remarkable advances in logic, which assisted in the emergence of technical ways of doing philosophy, especially after World War II, and which helped along the process of professionalization in philosophy.
There were developments too in religion which are of some interest. The post-Hegelian period became a fertile one in the self-critical examination of Christianity, through the use of historical methods on the texts and through attempts to reconcile traditional religion and modern science. Evolutionary theory and psychoanalysis called in question uncritical views of the biblical message. Liberal Protestantism emerged as a viable movement; Catholicism, however, resisted modernism
Meanwhile the non-Western world, especially Asian religions and philosophies, was slowly beginning to percolate into Western consciousness. A notable Western philosopher who took this seriously was Paul Deussen (1845-1919). He was indeed the first person to incorporate Eastern philosophy into a systematic history of philosophy. He had edited Schopenhauer and in his early years was a friend of Nietzsche. He held that the Divine Being is non-personal, and synthesized the work of Kant, Christian values and Upanishadic teachings.
The period up to World War I was relatively optimistic. The huge changes in human production and the surge of inventions combined with evolutionary theory and its themes to induce a confident sense of progress. In Britain, meanwhile, there were the first signs of that revolt against idealism, which prepared the way for the dominance of a humanistic, largely science-oriented ideology.
After the eighteenth-century's critical work in the Encyclopedia the nineteenth century could make a new one which would prepare the new industrial and scientific system, prepared the way for the systematic Positivism of August Comte(1798—1 857). He studied science in Paris, and became secretary to Saint-Simon, though the two men quarreled after seven years. Comte lived somewhat marginally thereafter, tutoring and lecturing. His lectures on Positivism were published as a “Course of Positive Philosophy” (1830-42).Various other works followed, including his “Positivist Catechism” (1852). In effect he was founding his own religion of humanity, which he outlined in his “Discourse on Positivism as a Whole” (1 848).
One of his most influential ideas was his theory of three stages of human development. This he applied both to human history and to individual growth (less plausibly). The first stage is the theological - beginning with a rather vague endowment of material beings and forces with wills and feelings somewhat analogous to human ones. There are three sub-stages - animism (or fetishism), polytheism (when the gods are more personalized) and theism or monotheism. The next stage Comte described as the metaphysical, when gods and Gods are transformed into abstractions: an inclusive Nature is postulated, along with such forces as ether or gravitation. The third stage is the positive one. Henceforth people give up the search for the real, and confine themselves to phenomena and descriptive laws, enabling prediction. Comte coordinated these stages to forms of society — the first involves the imposition of order by the warrior class and issues in militaristic authoritarianism. Next we have a critique of the preceding era, and the evolution of the idea of the rule of law. Finally, in the positive period there is the growth of a scientific and industrial society, dominated by scientific elite. This period also needs the development of a new study, namely sociology. Both nature and society will be under human control. Comte divided the new science into two branches, namely social static, to do with the structure of society at a given time, and social dynamics, which deals with the evolution and progress of society. He thought that the age of science and industry would naturally tend to peace and love, since these are unifying ideas. To reinforce this he proposed a positivist religion, to worship the Great Being - now that God but Humanity itself. (This attracted fierce criticism from John Stuart Mill.)
The second wave of positivism was that of empiriocriticism of scientifically oriented German philosophersMach and Avenarius, who wished just not to find a scientific base for philosophy but to find a means of banishing metaphysics, or what they considered to be metaphysics. In comparison with the first stage they aimed to work out the theory of knowledge. In fact they came back to traditions of gnoseology of subjective idealism presented by D.Hume and Berkley.
The third step of Positivism named Logical positivism and Linguistic philosophy was attempted at the beginning of the 20 century by a groupe of philosophers round M.Schlick. It included such figures as Rudolf Carnap, Friedrich Waismann, L. Wittgenstein and B.Russell.
Their chief move was to formulate a criterion of meaning, namely the verifiability principle, often called the verification principle, which stated that the meaning of a sentence lies in its method of verification. That verification was usually thought of in terms of reports of sense-data. It follows that any statement which cannot be verified by sense-data is meaningless. The Logical Positivists thought that this would dispose of all metaphysics, including God. Some, such as Carnap, built up impressive edifices out of the bricks of sentences about sense-data.
But Positivism, so brashly anti-metaphysical, broke down. For one thing, what was the status of the verification principle itself? Merely a stipulative definition that tells us how it is best to use “meaning”? In that case, other paths can be taken. How, too, can universal claims ever be verified? You cannot count all electrons. Or should we take it in a weak form as proposed by neopositivists sense-data are relevant to the truth of meaningful utterances but need not be able to prove or establish them? But God could creep back here on the weak criterion. The again, sense-data takes us back to Hume and Berkeley. How we break out of phenomenalism, which looks suspiciously like idealism? Positivists looked as if they had walked in from the eighteenth century.
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) was a much larger and more adventurous figure. Not only did he do remarkable work in mathematics, but published on a huge range of philosophical topics, from Leibniz to pacifism, and from logic to marriage. His most important books are ”Principia Mathematica”, with A.N. Whitehead (1910-13), “The Analysis of Mind” (1910),”Our Knowledge of the External World” (1914), “An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth” (1940) and his “Collected Papers”, in 7 volumes (1983-84), edited by Kenneth Blackwell and others. He was educated at Cambridge and in Berlin, and spent most of his career teaching in Cambridge. But he was in prison for pacifism in World War I, and taught in the US during part of World War II. The latter part of his life he devoted to anti-nuclear campaigning. He shared the Nobel Prize for literature in 1950 with William Faulkner.
Various views of Russell came to have very wide influence. One was his and Whitehead’s derivation of mathematics from pure logic. Another was his theory of types, in which he tried to avoid logical paradoxes, and his theory of descriptions. The paradoxes seemed to wreck the basis of mathematics.
In metaphysics Russell, partly under the influence of Wittgenstein, adopted a form of what was called “logical atomism”. He tried to build the world and scientific knowledge out of elementary propositions describing simple sense-data. This was the reappearance of Hume in modern guise, and did not work eidier. Simple particulars were built into molecular propositions by logical connectives, such as “and” and “or”. All this connected up with another doctrine, later fashionable, those truths are either analytic (tautologies) or synthetic (contingent propositions).
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) came from a well-known Vienna family. He studied natural sciences in Linz, and engineering at Manchester. From there in 1912 he moved to Cambridge to work with Russell. He served in the Austrian army in World War I, and afterwards became a primary teacher in Austria. He taught in Cambridge from 1930, and took up hospital portering during the war. In 1939 he had succeeded to Moore’s Chair, and he resumed teaching after the war till 1947. He lived in Ireland for a time and returned to Cambridge, where he died. The only book published during his life was the “Tractatus Logico Philosphicus” (1922). “The Philosophical Investigations” (1953) is the most important of the many manuscripts published after his death. The latter work was in effect a critique of the Tractatus.
He made an attempt to create a structure of propositions on the assumption that every proposition can be analyzed into simple propositions (they are bound together by logical connectives). Every proposition, whether simple or complex, pictures reality. He considered that there must be elementary propositions which show their sense immediately. Apart from tautologies (and mathematical equations), all propositions are only contingently or accidentally true. There can then be no necessity outside of logic and mathematics.
From 1929 onwards he underwent conversion to a different point of view. His later view was that language is already all right and does not need explication in the ideal or logical way he tried in the Tractatus. The logical atomism of the latter was replaced by a more empirical ranging through forms of language. He took up a pluralist position language games. He came to a much more elaborate view than Moore’s, but one which was.
Philosophy results from diseases of language, and can be cured by going back through language to see where the mistakes giving rise unnecessarily to philosophical problems have been made. Philosophy became a kind of therapy turned in upon itself.
All this gave impetus to ordinary language philosophy.
Wittgenstein’s great influence was in part due to his guru-like effect on his circle of disciples. The mystique of his apothegms and of secret manuscripts had a curious influence upon philosophy, which at the same time was heir to Enlightenment motifs of the appeal to reason and the rejection of revealed authority. But linguistic philosophy, as it emerged out of an amalgam of commonsense philosophy, empiricism, analytic philosophy and the later Wittgenstein had some strong contributions to make in the elucidation of different areas of language and life, from ethics and religion to the philosophy of science. Its consequences became more pluralistic, moving away from the attempt to impose a strait-jacket, as in the days of the Vienna Circle.
The latest step of positivism is critical rationalism.
Karl Popper (1902-1997) has proved to be perhaps the most fertile and original of the philosophers of this ambiance. He used the notion of falsification or refutability to characterize scientific hypotheses: the best stick their necks out, challenging the evidence, so to speak, to rebut them. He did not have much use for a criterion of meaning, however, and thus for two reasons distrusted the verifiability principle. His wide range of writings had much to say about society and politics.
Critical rationalism takes science as an integrative system of knowledge which has been constantly in the process of development and can not be divided into separate statements or stages. Apart from its contribution in logic itself it is notable for certain philosophical positions. For one thing if attacked the analytic-synthetic distinction which underpinned so much in usual formulation of logical positivism. For another thing it made a revisionary view of the subject matter of philosophy in any case the sharp distinction between philosophy had become highly preoccupied with the nature of science and had often come to use logic as its key to the analysis of problems.
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1988) was born in Paris and studied there and later at Freiburg with Heidegger. He taught at high schools before World War II. After capture and release by the Germans he lived in Paris during the war and completed his major philosophical work “Being and Nothingness” (1944). He emerged as the leader of existentialism after the war, and with his novels, plays and philosophical writings became the most brilliant intellectual of his day. He tied in his existentialist ideas with Marxism, but with no great consistency.
While he accepted Heidegger’s time-bound view of the individual he added new qualities to the concept of authenticity. The human being is characterized by “being-for-itself”, while things have “being-in-itself”. So the individual is forced to think of himself as free, beyond the world of things into which he is projected, and beyond any definitions which may be imposed upon him by others (for instance, he might be thought by others to be essentially a waiter). Authenticity means not accepting these external definitions or roles, but by the same taken decisions cannot be laid out in advance by criteria of rationality. Such stark choices as we authentically make, then, are non-rational. Sartre’s existentialism is atheistic, but God’s absence is positive. We expect him to be there, but he is not. In this he takes a different path from that of Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973), who while stressing many existentialist themes, like starting from the fact that we are embodied, sees ourselves as we rather then I and God as a thou.
In surveying some of the existential and phenomenological motifs of French and German philosophy it is necessary to mention one important figure of Karl Jaspers (1883-1969). Apart from his noble way of standing up to the Nazis (he was saved from concentration camp by the arrival of American forces at the end of World War II), he is notable in his interest in world-wide worldviews.
He was critical of attempted identifications of philosophy with science, and his justification for including sages among the philosophers lay in the fact that worldviews are ways of interpreting the signs of the Transcendent in the world around us, rather than theories of a scientific nature to explain particularities.
Questions of reality have been an abiding concern of philosophers. Such questions fall in the realm of metaphysics. We discussed a number of metaphysical views, including materialism, idealism, pragmatism, phenomenology, existentialism, and linguistic analysis. We suggested that different thinkers sometimes share certain views. However, fundamental differences separate the views sketched.
Despite the diversity of metaphysical views, many metaphysicians agree on some important issues. These points of agreement suggest insights into the self.
First, some metaphysicians agree that something exists outside the individual self. Even the subjective idealism of Berkeley does not deny the physical world, only its independence from mind. Despite Sartre’s stress on self and Husserl’s emphasis on consciousness, these thinkers recognize the distinction between things that lack consciousness, such as chairs, trees, and books, and those that do not, such as humans. We should quickly add, however, that many phenomenologists deplore such a dichotomy. Nonetheless, although the self may be insular, in that it is bound by the sea of its experiences, there are other human “islands”, all joined by the similarity of their conditions and circumstances.
Second, some metaphysicians accept the senses and reason as primary sources of knowledge, as the tools by which the self comes to know things. True, some metaphysicians give reason a primacy that others do not; others emphasize the importance of experience. But these are differences of degree, not of substance. Many agree that by using both reason and senses, we are most likely to know ourselves and our world. At the same time, some pragmatists, existentialists, phenomenologists, and even analysts would not agree, arguing that senses and reason are products of particular conceptual frames, such as empiricism or rationalism.
Finally, various metaphysicians agree that there is an order or meaning in things that the senses and reason can discover. True, materialism may hold that the order is strictly mechanistic; idealism, that it is spiritual or even supernatural; existentialism and phenomenology, that it is being or the purpose that each of us imposes on experience; and analytical philosophy, that it is the symbolic form in which we express things. But some members within each school hold that there is some order. Most important, each of us is part of that order, whatever its nature. To know the self is at least partially to know that order and how we fit into it.
At the same time, there are fundamental differences among these metaphysical outlooks that reflect and reinforce different views of human nature and of self. For the materialist, we are part of the matter that composes the universe and are subject to the same laws. As a result, the self is the product of its experiences, the sum total of everything that has ever happened to it. There is little point in speaking of individual responsibility or personal will, for we cannot help doing what we do. When we speak of mind, we really mean brain; when we refer to mental states, we are really talking about brain states. The purpose of any life is to understand how the parts of the universe, including the self, fit together and work. With such knowledge we can control our environment to some degree and perhaps improve the human condition.
Many linguistic analysts would add that the individual who tries to find personal meaning in religion, art, or politics or in seeking what is morally good wastes time on basically meaningless pursuits. We are most likely to understand ourselves and the world by clarifying the linguistic symbols we use to speak about these things.
For many idealists, in contrast, the individual is part of cosmic mind, spirit, idea, or perhaps life force. In this sense, individuals are alike. But each finds a self-identity in personal understanding. Only the individual can be aware of his or her own experiences. In the last analysis, it is this personal awareness, these ideas that make each of us unique. The purpose of each life is to understand the order at work in the universe. This order is not matter but pure idea; for some it is a divine dimension, God. In understanding this cosmic order or plan, we understand our position in it and thus the self. The pragmatist views the self as neither primarily matter nor primarily idea. Since pragmatists avoid absolutes, they choose to see the self as consisting of many dimensions, including material and ideal. The self is a complex entity consisting of experiences, which include thoughts, feelings, sensations, concepts, attitudes, and goals. Although we are tremendously influenced by environment, we can and do play a formative role in determining the nature of our experiences. Using intelligence and reason, the individual can exercise control over nature. But we shall not find personal meaning and purpose in the cosmos, because it possesses none. For personal meaning we must turn to the consequences of our actions, judging them according to the results they produce.
Existentialism shares pragmatism’s skepticism of absolutistic doctrines. But more than any of the other outlooks, it stresses personal freedom. The self is essentially something in the making that is not finished until the individual dies. The self is whatever we choose to make it. We are ultimately free to think, choose, and act however we wish. Such freedom without guidelines is frightening, often leading to uncertainty, anxiety, and despair. But this, say the existentialists, is the human condition. For many phenomenologists, what we are is that we are. The fundamental self is not its characteristics, properties, or the other objective qualities, but being. The self is not our idea of what we are but the immediate concrete feeling of ourselves. We move furthest from knowledge of the self when we separate self from the rest of reality, as we do when we view it as some object to be studied, quantified, and known. We are closest to the self when we strip from consciousness the experiences that occupy it. Then we realize that the self is what precedes its experiences—that is, pure being. Buddhist thinking generally agrees.
So, although members of different metaphysical schools share some beliefs, they vary in their approach to the issue of self. This variation may leave us affirming or denying the self, and viewing it as essentially rational, divine, mechanical, existential, or nonexistent. These views have dramatically different impacts on the self and its place in the world.
LECTURE 10.
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