| HISTORY OF WESTERN PHILOSOPHY |
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The philosophy of a period arises as a
response to social need, and the development of philosophy in the history of
Western civilization since the Renaissance has,
thus, reflected the process in which creative philosophers have responded to the
unique challenge of each stage in the development of Western culture itself. |
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The career of philosophy--how it views
its tasks and functions, how it defines itself, the special methods it invents
for the achievement of philosophical knowledge, the literary forms it adopts and
utilizes, its conception of the scope of its subject matter, and its changing
criteria of meaning and truth--hinges on the mode of its successive responses to
the challenges of the social structure within which it arises. Thus, Western
philosophy in the Middle Ages was primarily a Christian philosophy,
complementing the divine revelation, reflecting the feudal order in its
cosmology, devoting itself in no small measure to the institutional tasks of the
Roman Catholic Church. It was no accident that
the major philosophical achievements of the 13th and 14th centuries were the
work of churchmen who also happened to be professors of theology at the
universities of Oxford and Paris. |
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The Renaissance of the late 15th and
16th centuries presented a different set of problems and therefore suggested
different lines of philosophical endeavour. What is called the European
Renaissance followed upon the introduction of three novel mechanical inventions
from the East: gunpowder, block printing
from movable type, and the compass. The first
was used to explode the massive fortifications of the feudal order and thus
became an agent of the new spirit of nationalism that threatened the rule of
churchmen--and, indeed, the universalist emphasis of the church itself--with a
competing secular power. The second, printing, made the propagation of knowledge
widespread, secularized learning, reduced the intellectual monopoly of an
ecclesiastical elite, and restored the literary and philosophical classics of
Greece and Rome. The third, the compass, increased the safety and scope of
navigation, produced the voyages of discovery that opened up the Western
Hemisphere, and symbolized a new spirit of physical adventure and a new
scientific interest in the structure of the natural world. |
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Each of these inventions with its wider
cultural consequences presented new intellectual problems and novel
philosophical tasks within a changed political and social environment. For, as
the power of a single religious authority was slowly eroded under the influence
of the Protestant Reformation and as the prestige of the universal Latin
language gave way to vernacular tongues, philosophers became less and less
identified with their positions in the ecclesiastical hierarchy and more and
more identified with their national origins. The works of Albertus Magnus, St.
Thomas Aquinas, St. Bonaventure, and John Duns Scotus had been basically
unrelated to the countries of their birth; but the philosophy of Niccolò
Machiavelli was directly related to Italian experience, that of Sir Francis
Bacon and Thomas Hobbes was English to the core, and that of René
Descartes set the standard and tone of French intellectual life for 200 years. |
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Knowledge in the contemporary world is
conventionally divided between the natural sciences, the social sciences, and
the humanities. In the Renaissance, however, fields of learning had not yet
become so sharply departmentalized: in fact, each of these divisions arose in
the comprehensive and broadly inclusive area of Renaissance philosophy. For, as
the Renaissance mounted its revolt against the reign of religion and therefore
reacted against the church, against authority, against Scholasticism, and
against Aristotle, there was a sudden blossoming of interest in problems
centring on civil society, man, and nature. These three interests found exact
representation in the three dominant strands of Renaissance philosophy: (1)
political theory, (2) humanism, and (3) the philosophy of nature. |
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As secular authority replaced
ecclesiastical authority and as the dominant interest of the age shifted from
religion to politics, it was natural that the rivalries of the national states
and their persistent crises of internal order should raise with renewed urgency
philosophical problems, practically dormant since pre-Christian times, about the
nature and the moral status of political power. This new preoccupation with
national unity, internal security, state power, and international justice
stimulated the growth of political philosophy in
Italy, France, England, and Holland. |
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In early 16th-century Italy, Niccolò
Machiavelli, sometime state secretary of the Florentine republic,
explored in Il principe (written
1512-13; The
Prince) and in his Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio (completed by 1521;
"Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy" in Discourses) the techniques for the seizure and retention of power in
ways that seemed to exalt "reasons of state" above morality and
codified the actual practices of Renaissance diplomacy for the next 100 years.
In fact, Machiavelli was motivated by patriotic hopes for the ultimate
unification of Italy and by the conviction that the low estate of Italian
Renaissance morality needed to be elevated by restoring the ancient Roman
virtues. More than half a century later in France, Jean
Bodin, magistrate of Laon and a member of the Estates-General, insisted
that the state must possess a single, unified, and absolute power; he thus
developed in detail the doctrine of national sovereignty in all of its
administrative consequences and in its role as the source of all legal
legitimacy. (see also "Discourses
on the First Ten Books of Livy," ) |
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In the 17th century in England, Thomas
Hobbes, who was to become tutor to the future Charles II, developed the
fiction that in the "state of nature" that preceded civilization life
was "nasty, brutish, and short" with "every man's hand raised
against every other," and that a "social
contract" was thus agreed upon to convey all private rights to a
single sovereign in return for general protection and for the institution of a
reign of law. Because law is simply "the command of the sovereign,"
Hobbes at once turned justice into a by-product of power and denied any right of
rebellion except when the sovereign becomes too weak to protect the commonwealth
and hold it united. (see also law,
philosophy of, political power) |
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In Holland, a prosperous and tolerant
commercial republic in the 17th century, the issues of political philosophy took
a different form. Thus, when the Dutch East India Company commissioned a great
jurist, Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), to provide a
defense of their trade rights and of their free access to the seas, the
resulting two treatises, Mare Liberum (1609;
The Freedom of
the Seas) and De Jure Belli ac
Pacis (1625; On
the Law of War and Peace), were the first significant codifications
of international law. Their philosophical
originality lay, however, in the fact that, in defending the rights of a small,
militarily weak nation against the powerful absolutisms of England, France, and
Spain, Grotius was led to a preliminary investigation of the sources and
validity of the concept of "natural law"--the
notion that inherent in human reason and immutable even against the willfulness
of sovereign states are imperative considerations of natural justice and moral
responsibility, which must serve as a check against the arbitrary exercise of
vast political power. |
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In general, the political philosophy of
the Renaissance was dualistic: it was haunted, even confused, by the conflict
between political necessity and general moral responsibility. Machiavelli,
Bodin, and Hobbes asserted claims that justified the actions of Italian
despotism and the absolutisms of the Bourbon and Stuart dynasties. Yet
Machiavelli was obsessed with the problem of human virtue; Bodin insisted that
even the sovereign ought to obey the law of nature--that is, to govern in
accordance with the dictates of natural justice; and Hobbes himself found in
natural law the rational motivation that causes a man to seek for security and
peace. In the end, though Renaissance political necessity required that the
philosophical doctrines of Thrasymachus (who
held that right is what is in the interest of the strong) be implemented, it
could never finally escape a twinge of Socratic conscience. |
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The Renaissance was characterized by the
renewed study of mathematics, medicine, and classical
literature. The first two sparked the scientific revolution of the 16th
and 17th centuries; the last became the foundation of the philosophy of
Renaissance humanism. From its origin, humanism--suspicious of science and
generally indifferent to religion--emphasized anew the centrality of man
in the universe, his supreme value and importance. Characteristic of this
emphasis was the famous Oratio de hominis dignitate (written 1486; Oration on the Dignity of Man) of a
late 15th-century Platonist, Pico della Mirandola,
a leading member of Lorenzo de' Medici's Platonic Academy of Florence. But the
new emphasis upon man's personal responsibility and on the possibility of his
self-creation as a work of art was in no small part a consequence of the
rediscovery of a series of crucial classical texts, which served to reverse the
trends of medieval learning. Renaissance humanism was predicated upon the
victory of rhetoric over dialectic and of Plato over Aristotle, as Quintilian
and Cicero had triumphed over Abelard and as the cramped format of Scholastic
philosophical method gave way to a Platonic
discursiveness. |
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Much of this had been prepared by
Italian scholarly initiative in the early 15th century. The recently discovered
manuscript of Quintilian was used by Lorenzo Valla,
an antiauthoritarian humanist, for the creation of modern rhetoric and the
principles of textual criticism. But even more important was the rebirth of an
enthusiasm for the philosophy of Plato in Medicean Florence and at the
cultivated court of Urbino, a dukedom east of Florence. Precisely to service
this enthusiasm, Marsilio Ficino, head of the
Platonic Academy, had translated the entire Platonic corpus into Latin by the
end of the century. |
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Except for Pico and Giordano Bruno, a late 16th-century Italian philosopher, the direct
influence of Platonism upon Renaissance metaphysics is difficult to trace. The
Platonic account of the moral virtues, however, was admirably adapted to the
requirements of Renaissance education and gave new support to the Renaissance
ideal of the courtier and the gentleman. But Plato also represented the
philosophical importance of mathematics and the Pythagorean attempt to discover
the secrets of the heavens, the earth, and the world of nature in terms of
number and exact calculation; and this aspect of Platonism spilled over from
humanism into the domain of Renaissance science. The scientists Nicolaus
Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, and Galileo
owe more to the general climate of Pythagorean confidence in the explanatory
power of number than does Renaissance metaphysics. (see also science,
history of) |
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But Platonism also had the effect of
influencing the literary form in which Renaissance philosophy was written.
Although the very early medieval Platonists St. Augustine and John Scotus
Erigena occasionally had used the dialogue form, later Scholasticism had
abandoned it in favour of the formal treatise, of which the great
"Summas" of Alexander of Hales and St.
Thomas Aquinas are pristine examples. The Renaissance rediscovery of the
Platonic dialogues suggested the literary charm
of this conversational method to humanists, scientists, and political theorists
alike. The humanist philosopher Bruno put forth his central insights in a
dialogue, De la causa, principio e uno (1584;
Concerning the
Cause, Principle, and One); Galileo presented his novel mechanics in
his Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi
del mondo, tolemaico e copernicano
(1632; Dialogue
Concerning the Two Chief World Systems--Ptolemaic and Copernican);
and even the politician Machiavelli wrote Dell'arte
della guerra (1521; The Art
of War) as a genteel conversation taking place in a quiet Florentine
garden. |
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Renaissance humanism was primarily a
moral and a literary, rather than a narrowly philosophical, movement. And it
flowered in figures with broadly philosophical interests, such as Erasmus
of Rotterdam, the erudite citizen of the world; Sir
Thomas More, the learned but unfortunate chancellor of Henry VIII; and,
in the next generation, in the great French essayist and mayor of Bordeaux, Michel
de Montaigne. But the recovery of the Greek and Latin classics, which was
the work of humanism, had profound effects upon the entire field of Renaissance
philosophy and science through the ancient schools of philosophy to which it
once more directed attention. In addition to Platonism, the most notable of
these were Greek Atomistic Materialism, Greek Skepticism,
and Roman Stoicism. The discovery of the
manuscript of Lucretius (and the Atomistic
doctrines of Democritus) finally came to influence Galileo, Bruno, and, later, Pierre
Gassendi, a modern Epicurean, through the insights into nature reflected
in this work. The recovery of the manuscript of Sextus
Empiricus, with its carefully argued Skepticism presented in a printed
text in 1562, produced "a skeptical crisis" in French philosophy,
which dominated the period from Montaigne to René Descartes. And the
Stoicism of Seneca and Epictetus became almost the official ethics of the
Renaissance--to appear prominently in the Essais
(1580-88) of Montaigne, in the letters that Descartes wrote to the princess
Elizabeth of Bohemia and to Queen Christina of Sweden, and in the later sections
of the Ethics (first published 1675)
of the Rationalist Benedict de Spinoza. (see also atomism) |
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Philosophy in the modern world is a
self-conscious discipline. It has managed to define itself narrowly, so as to
differentiate itself on the one hand from religion and on the other from exact
science. But this narrowing of focus came about very late in its
history--certainly not before the 18th century. The earliest philosophers of
Greece were theorists of the physical world; Pythagoras and Plato were at once
philosophers and mathematicians; and in Aristotle no clear distinction between
philosophy and natural science can be maintained. The Renaissance continued this
breadth of conception characteristic of the Greeks. Galileo and Descartes were
mathematicians, physicists, and philosophers at once; and physics retained the
name of "natural philosophy" at least until the death of Sir Isaac
Newton in 1727. |
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Had the Renaissance been painstakingly
self-aware in the matter of definition (which it was not), it might have defined
philosophy, on the basis of its actual practice, as "the rational,
methodical, and systematic consideration of man, civil society, and the natural
world." The areas of its interests would in no case have been in doubt. But
exactly what constitutes "rational, methodical, and systematic
consideration" would have been extremely controversial. For knowledge
advances through the discovery and advocacy of new philosophical methods; and,
because the diverse methods advocated depend for their validity upon the
acceptance of different philosophical criteria of truth, meaning, and
importance, the crucial philosophical quarrels of the 16th and 17th centuries
were at bottom quarrels in the advocacy of methods. It is this issue rather than
any disagreement over subject matter or areas of attention that separated the
greatest Renaissance philosophers--such as Francis Bacon, René Descartes,
and Thomas Hobbes. |
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The great new fact that confronted the
Renaissance was the immediacy, the immensity, and the uniformity of the natural
world. But what was of primary importance was the new perspective in which this
fact was interpreted. To the Middle Ages the
universe was hierarchical, organic, and God-ordained. To the Renaissance it was
pluralistic, machinelike, and mathematically ordered. In the Middle Ages
scholars thought in terms of purposes, of ends, of divine intentions; in the
Renaissance they thought in terms of forces, mechanical agencies, and physical
causes. All of this had become clear by the end of the 15th century. Within the
early pages of the Notebooks of Leonardo
da Vinci, the great Florentine artist, scientist, humanist, and
mechanical genius, occur the following three propositions: |
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(1) Since experience has been the
mistress of whoever has written well, I take her as my mistress, and to her on
all points make my appeal. |
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(2) Instrumental or mechanical science
is the noblest and above all others the most useful, seeing that by means of it
all animated bodies which have movement perform all their actions. |
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(3) There is no certainty where one can
neither apply any of the mathematical sciences, nor any of those which are based
upon the mathematical sciences. |
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Here are enunciated respectively: (1)
the principle of Empiricism, (2) the advocacy of mechanistic
science, and (3) the faith in mathematical explanation; and it is upon these
three formulations, as upon a rock, that the science and philosophy of the
Renaissance built their foundations. From each of Leonardo's theses descended
one of the great streams of Renaissance philosophy: from the empirical principle
the work of Francis Bacon; from mechanism the work of Thomas Hobbes; and from
mathematical explanation that of René Descartes. |
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Any adequate philosophical treatment of scientific
method surely contains both an empirical principle and a faith in
mathematical explanation; and, in Leonardo's thinking, as in scientific
procedure generally, there need be no conflict between them. Yet they do
represent two poles of emphasis, each capable of excluding the other. Moreover,
the peculiar accidents of Renaissance scientific achievement did present some
evidence for their mistaken separation: for the revival of medical studies on
the one hand and the novel blooming of mathematical physics on the other
emphasized opposite virtues in scientific methodology. This polarity was
represented by the opposing figures of Vesalius and Galileo. |
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In the mid-16th century Andreas
Vesalius, a Belgian physician, was astounding all of Europe with the
unbelievable precision of his anatomical dissections and drawings. Having
invented new tools for this precise purpose, he successively laid bare the
vascular, the neural, and the musculature systems of the human body; and this
procedure seemed to demonstrate the virtues of empirical method, of
physiological experiment, and of the precision and disciplined skill in sensory
observation that made his demonstrations classics of inductive procedure. (see
also anatomy) |
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Only slightly later the Italian
physicist Galileo, following in the tradition
already established by Copernicus and Kepler, founders of modern astronomy (but
without their more mystical and metaphysical eccentricities), attempted to do
for terrestrial and sidereal movements what Vesalius had managed for the
structure of the human body--creating his experiential dynamics, however, with
the help of hypotheses supplied by the quantitative calculations of mathematics.
In Galileo's work all of the most original scientific directions of the
Renaissance came to a head: the revival of Alexandrian mathematics, the
experimental use of new instruments, like the lens and the telescope, the search
for certainty in physics based upon the undoubted applicability of mathematical
theory, and the underlying faith that the search for absolute certainty in
science was reasonable because matter in motion accorded with a model of
mathematical simplicity. Galileo's work also deals with some of the recurrent
themes of 16th- and 17th-century philosophy: an atomism that relates changes in
the relations of physical bodies to the corpuscular motion of their parts, the
reduction of all qualitative differences to quantitative reasons, and the
resultant important distinction between "primary" and
"secondary" qualities. The former--including shape, extension, and
specific gravity--were considered to be in fact a constituent part of nature and
therefore "real." The latter--such as colour, odour, taste, and
relative position--were taken to be simply the effect of bodily movements upon
perceiving minds and therefore ephemeral, "subjective," and
essentially irrelevant to the nature of physical reality. (see also primary
quality, secondary quality) |
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The scientific contrast between
Vesalius' rigorous observational techniques and Galileo's reliance upon
mathematical theory received further expression in the contrast between the
respective philosophies of Francis Bacon and René Descartes. And, indeed,
in its more abstract formulation as the contrast between Rationalism
and Empiricism, it was to dominate the
philosophical controversies of the 17th and 18th centuries and to present a
dilemma hardly to be resolved before the advent of Immanuel Kant. |
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Flourishing about the turn of the 17th
century, Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) was the
outstanding apostle of Renaissance Empiricism. Less an original metaphysician or
cosmologist than the advocate of a vast new program for the advancement of
learning and the reformation of scientific method, Bacon conceived of philosophy
as a new technique of reasoning that should reestablish natural science upon a
firm foundation. In the Advancement
of Learning (1605) he charted the map of knowledge: history, which
depends upon the human faculty of memory; poetry, upon that of imagination; and
philosophy, upon man's reason. To reason, however, Bacon assigned a completely
experiential function. Fifteen years later, in his Novum
Organum, he made this clear: because, he said, "we have as yet
no natural philosophy which is pure, . . . the true business of philosophy must
be . . . to apply the understanding . . . to a fresh examination of
particulars." A technique for "the fresh examination of
particulars" thus constituted his chief claim to philosophical distinction. |
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Bacon's hope for a new birth of science
hinged not only upon vastly more numerous and varied experiments but chiefly
upon "an entirely different method, order, and process for advancing
experience." This method consisted in the construction of what he called
"tables of discovery." He distinguished three kinds: tables of
presence, of absence, and of degree (i.e.,
in the case of any two properties, such as heat and friction, instances in
which they appeared together, instances in which one appeared without the other,
and instances in which their amounts varied proportionately); and the ultimate
purpose of these tables was to order facts in such a way that the true causes of
phenomena (the subject of physics) and the true "forms" of things (the
subject of metaphysics--the study of the nature of Being) could be inductively
established. (see also Baconian
method) |
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Bacon's was no raw Empiricism; his
profound sense of fact and his belief in the primacy of observation led him to
elicit laws and generalizations. Also, his conception of forms was quite
un-Platonic: a form for him was not an essence but a permanent geometric or
mechanical structure. His enduring place in the history of philosophy lies,
however, in his single-minded advocacy of experience as the only source of valid
knowledge and in his profound enthusiasm for the perfection of natural science.
It is in this sense that "the Baconian spirit" continued as a source
of inspiration: his elaborate classification of the sciences inspiring the
French Encyclopaedists of the 18th century and his Empiricism inspiring the
English philosophers of science of the 19th century. |
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The English political philosopher Thomas
Hobbes (1588-1679) was acquainted with both Bacon and Galileo. With the first he
shared a strong concern for philosophical method, with the second an
overwhelming interest in matter in motion. His philosophical efforts, however,
were more inclusive and more complete than those of either of these
contemporaries. He was a comprehensive thinker within the scope of an
exceedingly narrow set of presuppositions, and he produced one of the most
systematic philosophies of the early modern period--an almost completely
consistent description of nature, man, and civil society according to the tenets
of mechanistic Materialism. |
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Hobbes's account of what philosophy is
and ought to be clearly distinguished between content and method. As method,
philosophy is simply reasoning or calculating by the use of words as to the
causes of phenomena. When a man reasons forward from causes to effects, he
reasons synthetically, and, when he reasons from effects backward to causes, he
does so analytically. (His strong deductive and geometric bias favoured the
former.) Hobbes's dogmatic metaphysical presupposition was that the basic
reality is matter in motion. The real world is a corporeal universe in constant
movement, and the phenomena, the causes and effects of which it is the business
of philosophy to lay bare, are either the mutual action of bodies or the quaint
effects of bodies upon minds. From this assumption follows Hobbes's
classification of the fields that form the content of philosophy: (1) physics,
(2) moral philosophy, and (3) civil philosophy. Physics is the science of the
motions and actions of natural bodies conceived in terms of cause and effect.
Moral philosophy (or, more accurately, psychology) is the detailed study of
"the passions and perturbations of the mind"--that is, how minds are
"moved" by desire, aversion, appetite,
fear, anger, and envy. And civil philosophy concerns the concerted actions of
men in a commonwealth--how in detail the wayward wills of men are constrained by
power (force) in the prevention of civil disorder and the maintenance of peace. |
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Hobbes's philosophy was a bold
Renaissance restatement of Greek Atomistic Materialism with applications to the
realities of Renaissance politics that would have seemed strange to its ancient
originators. But there are also elements in it that make it characteristically
English. For Hobbes's conventionalist account of language led him to a nominalistic
position--that is, to a position denying the reality of universals (general or
common concepts)--in much the same fashion as did Bacon's exaggerated emphasis
on particulars. Moreover, Bacon's general emphasis upon experience also had its
analogue in Hobbes's sensationalist theory
of knowledge: the notion that all knowledge has its origin in sense
impressions and that all sensations are caused by the action of external bodies
upon the organs of sense. Empiricism has been a basic and recurrent expression
of British mentality, and its nominalistic and sensationalist roots were already
clearly evident in both Bacon and Hobbes. |
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But it was not their philosophy that was
to dominate the last half of the 17th century but rather that of René
Descartes (1596-1650), a French gentleman who signed himself "Lord
of Perron" and who lived the 20 most productive years of his life in the
tolerant and hospitable Dutch republic. Descartes, a crucial figure in the
history of philosophy, combined (however unconsciously or even unwillingly) the
influences of the past into a synthesis that was striking in its originality and
yet congenial to the scientific temper of the age. In the minds of all later
historians he counts as the progenitor of the modern spirit in philosophy. (see
also continental
Rationalism) |
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From the past there seeped into the
Cartesian synthesis doctrines about God from Anselm and Aquinas, a theory of the
will from Augustine, a deep sympathy with the Stoicism of the Romans, and a
skeptical method taken indirectly from the ancient Skeptics Pyrrho and Sextus
Empiricus. But Descartes was also a great mathematician, who invented analytic
geometry, who made many physical and anatomical experiments, who knew and
profoundly respected the work of Galileo, and who withdrew from publication his
own cosmological treatise Le Monde ("The
World") after Galileo's condemnation by the Inquisition in 1633. |
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Each of the maxims of Leonardo, which
constitute the Renaissance worldview, found its place in Descartes: the
Empiricism of his physiological researches described in his Discours
de la méthode (1637; Discourse
on Method), the mechanistic
interpretations of the physical world and human action detailed in the Principia
Philosophiae (1644; Principles
of Philosophy) and Les Passions
de l'âme (1649; The
Passions of the Soul), and the mathematical bias that dominates his
theory of method in the Regulae ad
Directionem Ingenii (published 1701; Rules
for the Direction of the Mind) and his metaphysics in the Meditationes
de Prima Philosophia (2nd ed. 1642; Meditations
on the First Philosophy). But of these three, it is the mathematical
strain that clearly predominates. |
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Bacon and Descartes, the founders of
modern Empiricism and Rationalism, respectively, shared two pervasive
Renaissance tenets: an enormous enthusiasm for physical science; and the belief
that knowledge means power--that the ultimate purpose of theoretical science is
to serve the practical needs of men. |
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In his Principia
Descartes defined philosophy as "the study of wisdom" or "the
perfect knowledge of all one can know." Its chief utility is "for the
conduct of life" (morals), "the conservation of health"
(medicine), and "the invention of all the arts" (mechanics). He
expressed the relation of philosophy as theoretical inquiry to practical
consequences in the famous metaphor of the tree of philosophy whose root is metaphysics,
whose trunk is physics, and whose branches are, respectively, morals, medicine,
and mechanics. The metaphor is revealing for it indicates that, for Descartes
(as for Bacon and Galileo), the major concern was for the trunk (physics) and
that he busied himself with the roots only in order to provide a firm foundation
for the trunk. Thus the Discours de la méthode,
which provides a synoptic view of the Cartesian philosophy, shows it to be
not (as with Aristotle or Whitehead) a metaphysics founded upon physics but
rather--that more characteristic product of the 17th century--a physics founded
upon metaphysics. |
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Descartes's mathematical bias was
expressed in his determination to ground natural science not in sensation and
probability (as did Bacon) but in a principle of absolute certainty. Thus his
metaphysics in essence consisted of three principles: |
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1. To employ the procedure of complete
and systematic doubt to eliminate every belief
that does not pass the test of indubitability (skepticism); |
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2. To accept no idea as certain that is
not clear, distinct, and free of contradiction (mathematicism);
(see also clarity
and distinctness) |
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3. To found all knowledge upon the
bedrock certainty of self-consciousness, so that "I think, therefore I
am" becomes the only innate idea unshakable by doubt (subjectivism).
(see also cogito,
ergo sum) |
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From the indubitability of the self,
Descartes deduced the existence of a perfect God; and, from the fact that a
perfect being is incapable of falsification or deception, he made the inference
that those ideas about the corporeal world that he has implanted within man must
be true. The achievement of certainty about the natural world was thus
guaranteed by the perfection of God and by the clear and distinct ideas that are
his gift. |
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The Cartesian metaphysics is the
fountainhead of Rationalism in modern philosophy, for it suggests that the
mathematical criteria of clarity, distinctness, and absence of contradiction
among ideas are the ultimate test of meaningfulness and truth. This stance is
profoundly antiempirical. Bacon, who had said that "reasoners resemble
spiders who make cobwebs out of their own substance," might well have said
so of Descartes, for the Cartesian self is just such a substance from which the
idea of God originates and with which all deductive reasoning begins. Yet for
Descartes the understanding is vastly superior to the senses, and, in the
question of what constitutes truth in science, only man's reason can ultimately
decide. |
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Cartesianism
was to dominate the intellectual life of the Continent until the end of the 17th
century. It was a fashionable philosophy, appealing alike to learned gentlemen
and highborn ladies; and it was one of the few philosophical alternatives to the
decadent Scholasticism still being taught in the universities. Precisely for
this reason it constituted a serious threat to established religious authority.
In 1663 the Roman Catholic Church placed Descartes's works on the Index of
Forbidden Books, and the University of Oxford forbade the teaching of his
doctrines. Only in the liberal Dutch universities, such as Groningen and
Utrecht, did Cartesianism make serious headway. |
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Certain features of the Cartesian
philosophy made it an important starting point for subsequent philosophical
speculation. Being the meeting ground of the medieval and the modern worldviews,
it accepted the doctrines of Renaissance science while attempting to ground them
metaphysically in the medieval notions of God and the human mind. Thus a certain
dualism between God the Creator and the mechanistic world of his creation and
between mind as a spiritual principle and matter as mere spatial extension was
inherent in the Cartesian position; and a whole generation of French Cartesians
(among them Arnold Geulincx, Nicolas
Malebranche, and Pierre Bayle) wrestled
with the resulting problems of the interaction and reconciliation between the
counterposed entities. (see also mind-body
dualism) |
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Two philosophers of genius carried on
the tradition of continental Rationalism: the Dutch Jew Benedict
de Spinoza (1632-77) and his younger contemporary Gottfried
Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), a Leipzig scholar and polymath. Bacon's
philosophy had been a search for method in science, and Descartes's basic aim
had been the achievement of scientific certainty; but Hobbes and Spinoza
provided the most comprehensively worked out speculative systems of the early
modern period. In certain respects they had much in common: a mechanistic picture of the
world, with its events guided by a strict determinism, and even a political
philosophy in each case looking for political stability based upon centralized
power. Yet Spinoza introduced a conception of philosophizing that was new to the
Renaissance: Philosophy became a personal and moral quest for the wisdom of life
and for the achievement of human perfection. |
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In conducting this search, Spinoza
borrowed much of the basic apparatus of Descartes: the aim at a rational
understanding of principles, the terminology of "substance" and of
"clear and distinct ideas," and a mathematical method that seeks to
convert philosophical knowledge into a complete deductive system using the
geometric model of Euclid's Elements. Spinoza
viewed the universe pantheistically as a single
infinite substance, which he called "God," with the dual attributes
(or aspects) of thought and extension, and which he differentiated into plural
"modes" (or particular things); and he attributed to this world as a
whole the properties of a timeless logical system--of a complex of completely
determined causes and effects. In so doing Spinoza was simply seeking for man
the series of "adequate" ideas that furnish the intellect and
constitute human freedom. For ultimately, for Spinoza, the wisdom that
philosophy seeks is achieved when one perceives the universe in its wholeness,
through the "intellectual love of God," which merges the finite
individual with the eternal unity and provides the mind with the pure joy that
is the final achievement of its search. |
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Whereas the basic elements of the
Spinozistic worldview are given in his one great work, the Ethics, Leibniz' philosophy has to
be pieced together from numerous brief expositions or fragments, which seem to
be mere intermissions, or philosophical interludes, in an otherwise busy life.
But the philosophical form is deceptive. Leibniz was a mathematician and jurist
(inventor of the infinitesimal calculus and codifier of the laws of Mainz),
diplomat, historian to royalty, and court librarian in a princely house; yet he
was also one of the most original philosophers of the early modern period. His
chief contributions were in the fields of logic, in which he was a truly
brilliant innovator, and metaphysics, in which he provided a third alternative
to the Rationalist constructions of Spinoza and Descartes. Leibniz saw logic as
a mathematical calculus. He was the first to distinguish "truths of
reason" from "truths of fact" and to contrast the
"necessary" propositions of logic and mathematics (which express
identities), which hold for all possible worlds, with the "contingent"
(or empirical) propositions of science, which hold only for certain existential
conditions; and he saw clearly that, as "the principle of
contradiction" controls the first, so "the principle of sufficient
reason" governs the second. (see also logic,
philosophy of) |
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In metaphysics Leibniz espoused pluralism
(as opposed to the dualism of Descartes's thought and extension and the monism
of Spinoza's single substance, which is God). There were for him an infinite
number of spiritual substances (which he called "monads"),
each different, each a percipient of the universe around it, and each mirroring
that universe from its own point of view. The chief significance of Leibniz,
however, lies not in his differences from Descartes and Spinoza but in the
extreme Rationalism that all three shared. In the Principes
de la nature et de la grâce fondés en raison (1714;
"Principles of Nature and of Grace Founded in Reason"), he stated the
maxim that can stand for the entire school: |
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True reasoning depends upon necessary
or eternal truths, such as those of logic, numbers, geometry, which establish an
indubitable connection of ideas and unfailing consequences. |
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The literary forms in which
philosophical exposition was couched in the early modern period ranged from the
scientific aphorisms of Bacon and the autobiographical meditations of Descartes
to the systematic prose of Hobbes and the episodic propositional format of
Leibniz. Two basic tendencies, however, can be discerned: |
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1. The early Renaissance commitment to
the dialogue form (already noted),
inspired by the rediscovery of the Platonic dialogues; |
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2. The later prevalence of the
systematically ordered treatise, undoubtedly influenced by the enormous prestige
of deductive mathematics. |
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The concept of serial order stressed by
geometry, in which the reasoner passes from more universal axioms to more
specific derivative propositions, influenced in turn the style of Hobbes,
Descartes, and Spinoza. The order of presentation in Hobbes's Leviathan
and in Descartes's Principia
Philosophiae reflects this serial concern, while Spinoza's Ethics
utilizes the Euclidean method so formalistically as almost to constitute an
impenetrable barrier to the basic lucidity of his thought. |
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Medieval philosophy with its texts,
readings, learned authorities, Disputed Questions, Quodlibetal Questions (brief
academic discussions), and its Summas was characteristically associated with the
medieval university. It is a singular fact, therefore, that from the birth of
Bacon in 1561 to the death of Hume in 1776--i.e., for 200 years--not one first-rate philosophical mind in Europe
was permanently associated with a university. |
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The fact is that, as the age of the
saint passed into that of the gentleman, philosophers too reflected this
profound change in their titles, their social status, and their economic
situation. Sir Francis Bacon was a lawyer, judge, and attendant upon the royal
court. Thomas Hobbes was the tutor and companion of young noblemen. René
Descartes, son of a noble family, traveled and studied at leisure, retiring to
Holland to live out his life on inherited income. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz,
courtier, diplomat, and scholar, became a privy councillor and baron of the Holy
Roman Empire. Thus philosophers often belonged to the lesser nobility or were
closely associated with the nobility, to whom--like poets--they dedicated their
works; and they lived not by philosophy but for it--either independently, by
pensions, gifts, inherited income, or in the households of the nobility. |
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Thus, philosophy in the 16th and 17th
centuries was clearly the preoccupation of a widely scattered elite; and this
meant that, despite the printed essay, much philosophical communication took
place within a small but at the same time loose and informal circle. Treatises
were circulated in manuscript; comments and objections were solicited; and a
vast polemical correspondence was built up. Prior to its publication, Descartes
prudently sent his Meditationes to the
theologians of the Sorbonne for comment; and, after its publication, his friend
Mersenne sent it to Hobbes, Antoine Arnauld, and Pierre Gassendi, among others,
who returned formal "objections," to which Descartes in turn replied.
In addition, the 17th century possessed a rich repository of philosophical
correspondence, such as the letters that passed between Descartes and the
scientist Christiaan Huygens, between Spinoza and Henry Oldenburg (one of the
first secretaries of the Royal Society), and between Leibniz and Arnauld. But
philosophers were also familiar with the great monarchs and administrators of
the age: Descartes gave philosophical instruction to Queen Christina of Sweden,
Leibniz was an intimate of Queen Sophia Charlotte of Prussia, and Spinoza
enjoyed the personal friendship of the Dutch politician Johan de Witt. |
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The chief fact, however, remains the
sharp separation of creative philosophers from the formal centres of learning:
Hobbes expressed extreme contempt for the decadent Aristotelianism of Oxford;
Descartes, despite his prudence, scorned the medievalists of the Sorbonne; and
Spinoza refused the offer of a professorship of philosophy at Heidelberg with
polite aversion. It was to be another 100 years before philosophy returned to
the universities. |
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Although they both lived and worked in
the late 17th century, Sir Isaac Newton and John
Locke were the true fathers of the Enlightenment. Newton was the last of
the scientific geniuses of the age, and his great Philosophiae
Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687;
Mathematical
Principles of Natural Philosophy) was the culmination of the entire
movement that had begun with Copernicus and Galileo--the first great physical
synthesis based upon the application of mathematics to nature in every detail.
The basic idea of the authority and autonomy of reason, which dominated all
philosophizing in the 18th century, was, at bottom, the consequence of Newton's
work. |
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Copernicus, Kepler, Bacon, Galileo, and
Descartes--scientists and methodologists of science--performed like men urgently
attempting to persuade nature to reveal her secrets. Newton's comprehensive
mechanistic system made it seem as if at last she had done so. It is impossible
to exaggerate the enormous enthusiasm that this assumption kindled in all of the
major thinkers of the 18th century from Locke to Kant. The new enthusiasm for
reason that they all instinctively shared was based not upon the mere advocacy
of propagandists like Descartes and Leibniz but upon the conviction that for the
intellectual conquest of the natural world reason had really worked. |
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Two major philosophical problems
remained: to account for the genetic origins of the reason that had proved so
successful and to shift its application from external nature to man. John
Locke's Essay
Concerning Human Understanding (1690) was devoted to the first; and
David Hume's Treatise
of Human Nature (1739-40), "being an attempt to apply the method
of experimental reasoning to moral subjects," was devoted to the second. |
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These two basic tasks reflect a shift
away from the direction in which philosophizing had moved in the late
Renaissance. The Renaissance preoccupation with the natural world had
represented a certain "realistic" bias. Hobbes and Spinoza had each
produced a metaphysics. They had been interested in the real constitution of the
physical world. Moreover, the Renaissance bias in favour of mathematics had
generated the profound interest in rational principles, necessary propositions,
and innate ideas that was so prevalent in the philosophies of Leibniz and
Descartes. On the other hand, the Enlightenment, in turning from the realities
of nature to account for the structure of the mind that knows it so successfully
and in attempting an experiential account of the furnishings of that mind,
settled on the sensory components of knowledge rather than on the merely
mathematical. Thus the school of so-called British Empiricism (John Locke,
George Berkeley, and David Hume) dominated the perspective of Enlightenment
philosophy until the time of Kant. And this school philosophized in terms of
ideas rather than things and of experience rather than innate necessary
principles. Whereas the philosophy of the late Renaissance had been metaphysical
and Rationalistic, that of the Enlightenment was epistemological and Empiricist. |
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Locke's Essay
Concerning Human Understanding thus marked a decisively new direction for
modern philosophizing because it proposed what amounts to a new criterion of
truth. The design of his essay was "to inquire into the origin, certainty,
and extent of human knowledge," which involved three tasks: |
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1. To discover the origin of men's
ideas; |
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2. To exhibit their certainty and
evidential value; |
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3. To examine the claims of all
knowledge that is less than certain. |
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What was crucial for Locke, however, was
that the second task is dependent upon the first. Following the general
Renaissance custom, Locke defined an "idea"
as a mental content, as "whatever is the object of the understanding when a
man thinks"; but, whereas for Descartes and the entire Rationalistic school
the certainty of ideas had been a function of their self-evidence--i.e.,
of their clarity and distinctness--for Locke their validity hinged expressly
upon the mode and manner of their origin. A genetic criterion of truth and
validity replaced an intrinsic one. |
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Locke's exhaustive survey of mental
contents is useful, if elaborate. Though he distinguished between ideas of
sensation and ideas of reflection, the whole
thrust of his efforts and those of his Empiricist followers was to reduce the
latter to the former, to minimize the originative power of the mind in favour of
its passive receptivity to the sensory impressions received from without.
Locke's classification of ideas into simple and complex was an attempt to
distinguish mental contents such as blueness or solidity, which come from a
single sense like sight or touch, and those such as figure, space, extension,
rest, and motion, which are the product of several senses combined, on the one
hand, from those complicated and compounded (complex) ideas of universals such
as triangle or gratitude, of substances, and of relations such as identity,
diversity, and cause and effect, on the other. (see also sense-datum) |
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Locke's Essay
was a dogged attempt to produce the total world of man's conceptual
experience out of a set of elementary sensory building blocks, moving always
from sensation toward thought and from the simple to the complex. The basic
outcome of his epistemology was therefore: |
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1. That the ultimate source of men's
ideas is sensation; |
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2. That all mental operations are a
combining and compounding of simple sensory materials into complex conceptual
tools. |
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It was a theory of knowledge based upon
a kind of sensory atomism, which sees the mind as an agency of discovery rather
than of creation and views its ideas as "like" the objects that are
the sources of the sensations it receives. But it sees also that an important
distinction must still be made between those "primary qualities" such
as solidity, figure, extension, motion, and rest, which are the actual
characteristics of objects themselves, and those "secondary qualities"
such as colour, taste, and smell, which are simply the internal consequences of
how the mind is affected by them. This important Lockean distinction (already
found in Galileo) was only a mirroring in the theory of knowledge of the physics
of Sir Isaac Newton, which was its contemporary. (see also primary
quality, secondary quality) |
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It was precisely this dualism
presupposed by the science of the time between primary qualities, which belong
to matter, and secondary qualities, which belong to mind, that Locke's successor
George Berkeley (1685-1753) sought to overcome.
Though Berkeley was a bishop in the Anglican Church who wanted to combat
"atheistic Materialism" and to sustain the power of God and
spirituality, his importance for the theory of knowledge lies rather in the way
in which he demonstrated that, in the end, primary qualities are reducible to
secondary qualities. His Empiricism led to a denial of abstract ideas because he
believed that general notions are simply fictions of the mind and vehemently
denied that one may validly distinguish between objects and the sensory
impressions that repose in the mind. Science, he argued, can easily dispense
with the concept of matter: nature is simply that which men perceive by their
senses, and this means that sense data can be considered as "objects for
the mind" rather than as "qualities adhering in a substance." A
thing is simply a recurrent group of sense qualities. With this important
reduction of substance to quality, Berkeley thus became the true father of the
epistemological position known as phenomenalism,
which has remained an important influence in British philosophizing to the
present day. |
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The third, and in many ways the most
famous, of the British Empiricists was the Skeptic David
Hume (1711-76). Hume's philosophical intention was to reap,
humanistically, the harvest sowed by Newtonian physics, to apply the method of
natural science to human nature, and to create a basic science of man. The
paradoxical result of this admirable purpose, however, was to create a skeptical
crisis more devastating than that of the early French Renaissance and to reduce
human certainty once more to the state that it was in before Descartes had
reached the dogmatic halting point in his procedure of methodical doubt. (see
also scientific
method, Skepticism) |
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Hume followed Locke and Berkeley in
approaching the problem of knowledge from a psychological perspective. He too
found the origin of knowledge in sense impressions. But whereas Locke had found
a certain trustworthy order in the compounding power of the mind,
and Berkeley had found mentality itself expressive of a certain spiritual power,
Hume's relentless analysis discovered as much contingency in mind as in the
external world. All uniformity in perceptual experience, he held, comes from
"an associating quality of the mind."
The "association of ideas" is a fact, but the relations of
resemblance, contiguity, and cause and effect that it produces have no intrinsic
validity because they are the product of an inexplicable "mental
habit." Thus the causal principle upon which all knowledge
rests indicates no necessary connections between things but is simply the
accident of their constant conjunction in men's minds. Moreover, the mind
itself, far from being an independent power, is simply "a bundle of
perceptions" without unity or cohesive quality. Hume's denial of a
necessary order of nature on the one hand and of a substantial or unified self
on the other precipitated a philosophical crisis from which Enlightenment
philosophy was not to be definitely rescued until the work of Kant. |
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Though the school of British Empiricism
represented the mainstream of Enlightenment philosophy until the time of Kant,
it was by no means the only type of philosophy that the 18th century produced.
The Enlightenment, which was based upon a few great fundamental ideas--such as
the dedication to reason, the belief in intellectual progress, the confidence in
nature as a source of inspiration and value, and the search for tolerance and
freedom in political and social institutions--produced many cross-currents of
intellectual and philosophical expression. |
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The profound influence of Locke spread
to France, where it not only produced the skeptical Empiricism of Voltaire
but also united with the mechanistic side of the teachings of Descartes to
create an entire school devoted to a sensationalistic Materialism. Julien
de La Mettrie in L'Homme-machine (1747;
Man a Machine),
Étienne de Condillac in his Traité
des sensations (1754; Treatise
on the Sensations), and Paul, baron d'
Holbach, in his Système de
la nature (1770; The System
of Nature) represented a limited worldview in which matter in motion
is the only reality, determining the functioning of the human brain and its
sensations according to ironclad and necessary laws. This position even found
its way into many of the articles of the great French encyclopaedia
edited by Denis Diderot and Jean
d' Alembert, which was almost a complete compendium of the scientific and
humanistic accomplishments of 18th-century intellectual life. |
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Though the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance had not referred to themselves by these names, the 18th century
called itself "the Enlightenment" with self-conscious enthusiasm and
pride. It was an age of optimism with a sense of new beginnings. Great strides
were made in chemistry and biological science. Jean-Baptiste,
chevalier de Lamarck, Georges Cuvier, and
Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, were
perfecting a system of animal classification. And, in the eight years between
1766 and 1774, Henry Cavendish discovered
hydrogen; Daniel Rutherford, nitrogen; and Joseph
Priestley, oxygen. It was the period when foundations were being laid in
psychology and the social sciences and in ethics and aesthetics. Anne-Robert-Jacques
Turgot, the marquis de Condorcet, and Montesquieu
in France, Giambattista Vico in Italy, and Adam
Smith in England marked the beginning of history, economics, sociology,
and jurisprudence as sciences. Hume, Jeremy Bentham,
and the British moral sense philosophers were turning ethics into a specialized
field of philosophical inquiry; and Anthony Ashley, 3rd
earl of Shaftesbury, Edmund Burke, Johann
Gottsched, and Alexander Baumgarten were
laying the foundations for a systematic aesthetics. (see also biology) |
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But, outside of the theory of knowledge,
the most significant contribution of the Enlightenment came in the field of
social and political philosophy, as Locke's Two
Treatises of Civil Government (1690) and Jean-Jacques
Rousseau's Du contrat social (1762;
The Social
Contract) proposed a justification of political association grounded
in the newer political requirements of the age. The Renaissance political
philosophies of Machiavelli, Bodin, and Hobbes had centred on the absolute power
of kings and rulers. But the Enlightenment theories of Locke and Rousseau turned
instead to the freedom and equality of citizens. It was a natural historical
transformation. The 16th and 17th centuries had constituted the age of absolutism;
the political problem had been largely that of internal order, and political
theory had been presented in the language of national sovereignty. But the 18th
century was the age of the democratic revolutions (including the French
Revolution); the political problem was that of freedom and the revolt against
injustice, and political theory was expressed in the idiom of natural and
inalienable rights. |
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Locke's political theory was an express
denial of the divine right of kings and the
absolute power of the sovereign as contained in the doctrines of Hobbes.
Instead, he insisted that all men have a natural right to freedom and equality.
The state of nature in which men originally live is not, as in Hobbes,
intolerable, but it has certain inconveniences. Therefore men band together to
form society, as Aristotle had taught, "not simply to live, but to live
well." Political power can never be exercised apart from its ultimate
purpose, which is the common good; for men enter the political contract in order
to preserve life, liberty, and property. |
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Locke thus stated one of the fundamental
principles of the liberal tradition: that there can be no subjection to power
without consent, although once political society has been founded, there is an
obligation to submit to the decisions of the majority. It is the legislature
that makes these decisions, although the ultimate power of choosing the
legislature rests with the people; and even the powers of the legislature are
not absolute, because the laws of nature remain as a permanent standard and as
principles of protection against any arbitrary authority. |
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Rousseau's more radical political
doctrines were built upon Lockean foundations. For him, too, the convention of
the social contract formed the basis of all legitimate authority among men,
although his conception of citizenship was much
more organic and much less individualistic than Locke's. The surrender of
natural liberty for civil liberty means that all individual rights (among them
property rights) become subordinate to the general will.
For Rousseau the state is a moral person whose
life is the union of its members, whose laws are acts of the general will, and
whose end is the liberty and equality of the citizens. It follows that, when any
government usurps the power of the people, the social compact is broken; and not
only are the citizens no longer compelled to obey but they also have an
obligation to rebel. Rousseau's defiant collectivism
was clearly a revolt against Locke's systematic individualism;
for him the fundamental category is not "natural person" but
"citizen." Nevertheless, however much they differed, in these two
social theorists of the Enlightenment is to be found the germ of all modern liberalism:
its faith in representative democracy, in civil liberties, and in the basic
dignity of man. |
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In his Éléments
de philosophie (1759; "Elements of Philosophy"), Jean d'Alembert,
an 18th-century French mathematician and Encyclopaedist, wrote: |
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Our century is the century of
philosophy par excellence. If one considers without bias the present state of
our knowledge, one cannot deny that philosophy among us has shown progress. |
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D'Alembert was calling attention to that
reflective self-examination for which the 18th century is famous, and he was
undoubtedly referring to the activities of mathematicians like himself, jurists,
economists, and amateur moralists rather than to narrow philosophical
specialists. But the 18th century was clearly the "century of philosophy
par excellence" in a more technical sense also. For it was the period in
which philosophizing first began to pass from the hands of gentlemen and
amateurs into those of true professionals. The chief sign of this shift was the
return of reputable philosophy to the universities. |
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This transformation first occurred in
Germany and is chiefly associated with the University of Halle (founded 1694).
In the time of the generation that lies between Leibniz (died 1716) and Kant
(born 1724), the philosophical climate changed profoundly. The chief
representative of this change was Christian Wolff,
who taught philosophy at Halle and was the intermediary between the ideas of
Leibniz and those of Kant and the profoundly different conceptions of
philosophizing for which they stood. (see also Halle-Wittenberg, Martin Luther
University of) |
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Kant later called Wolff "the real
originator of the spirit of thoroughness in Germany"; and Wolff was indeed
a pioneer in those techniques that transform philosophy into a professional
discipline--the self-conscious adoption of a systematic approach and the
creation of a specialized philosophical vocabulary. Wolff carefully
distinguished the various fields of philosophy; wrote textbooks in each of them,
which were used in the German universities for many years; and created many of
the specialized philosophical terms that have survived to the present day. |
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The German Enlightenment was the first
modern period to produce "specialists in philosophy." In England
philosophizing in the universities did not become serious until well after the
time of Hume, but already philosophical fields had been sufficiently
distinguished to be represented by distinct professorships. The titles professor
of mental or moral or metaphysical philosophy, as they arose at Oxford and
Cambridge, were the product of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. |
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Two additional factors of the German
Enlightenment are relevant: (1) the founding of the first professional journals
and (2) the rising concern of philosophy with its own history. The learned
journal, like the scientific society, was an innovation of the 17th century. But
what had begun as a general intellectual endeavour became in 18th-century
Germany a specifically philosophical enterprise. Journals were published in
great numbers; e.g., Acta
Philosophorum (Halle, 1715-26), Der
Philosophische Büchersaal (Leipzig, 1741-44; "The Philosophical
Book Room"), and the short-lived Neues
philosophisches Magazin (Leipzig, 1789-91), devoted exclusively to the
philosophy of Kant. (see also scholarly
journal) |
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More interesting still is the flowering
of voluminous German histories of philosophy after 1740. By the 18th century
there was already a vast accumulation of historical materials, and the
self-conscious feeling that philosophy constitutes a specific field the past of
which is worth examination and careful ordering combined with the German spirit
of thoroughness to produce a series of massive histories such as Johann
Brucker's Historia Critica Philosophiae, 6
vol. (1742-44; The History of Philosophy);
Johann Buhle's Lehrbuch der Geschichte der
Philosophie, 8 vol. (1796-1804; "Textbook on the History of
Philosophy"); Dietrich Tiedemann's Geist
der spekulativen Philosophie von Thales bis Berkeley, 6 vol. (1791-97;
"The Spirit of Speculative Philosophy from Thales to Berkeley"); and
Gottlieb Tennemann's Geschichte der
Philosophie, 11 vol. (1789-1819; excerpted in A Manual of the History of Philosophy). (see also historiography) |
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All of these developments led directly
to Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), professor at Königsberg,
the greatest philosopher of the modern period, whose works mark the true
culmination of the philosophy of the Enlightenment. Historically speaking,
Kant's great substantive contribution was to relate both the sensory and the a
priori elements in knowledge and thus to mend the breach between the extreme
Rationalism of Leibniz and the extreme Empiricism of Hume. But in addition to
the brilliant content of his philosophical doctrines, Kant was responsible for
three crucial philosophical innovations: (1) a new definition of philosophy, (2)
a new conception of philosophical method, and (3) a new structural model for the
writing of philosophy. (see also a priori knowledge, methodology) |
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Kant's definition of philosophy
culminated the Enlightenment, for it took reason
to be the very heart of the philosophical enterprise. Philosophy's sole task, in
his view, is to determine what reason can and cannot do. Philosophy, he said,
"is the science of the relation of all knowledge to the essential ends of
human reason"; and its true aim is both constructive ("to outline the
system of all knowledge arising from pure reason") and critical ("to
expose the illusions of a reason that forgets its limits"). Philosophy is
thus a calling of great dignity, for its aim is wisdom, and its practitioners
are themselves "lawgivers of reason." But in order for philosophy to
be "the science of the highest maxims of reason," the philosopher must
be able to determine the source, the extent, and the validity of human knowledge
and the ultimate limits of reason. And these tasks require a special
philosophical method. |
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Sometimes Kant called this the "transcendental
method," but more often the "critical method"; for his
purpose was to reject the dogmatic assumptions of the Rationalist school, and
his wish was to return to the semiskeptical position with which Descartes had
begun before his dogmatic pretensions to certainty took hold. Kant's method was
to conduct a critical examination of the powers of an a priori judging reason
and to inquire what reason can achieve when all experience is removed. The
method was based upon a doctrine that he himself called "a Copernican
revolution" in philosophy (by analogy with the change from geocentric to
heliocentric cosmology): the assumption not that man's knowledge must conform to
objects but that objects must conform to man's apparatus of knowing. The
question then became: What is the exact nature of that knowing apparatus? |
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Unlike Descartes, Kant could not
question that knowledge exists. Mathematics and Newtonian physics were too real
for any Enlightenment mentality to entertain this doubt. Kant's methodological
question was rather: How is mathematical and physical knowledge possible? What
must be the structure of man's knowing process to have made these sciences
secure? The attempt to answer these questions was the task of Kant's great Kritik
der reinen Vernunft (1781; Critique
of Pure Reason). |
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But Kant's great aim was to examine
reason not merely in one of its domains but in each of its employments,
according to the threefold structure of the human mind that he had taken over
from Wolff. Thus the critical examination of reason in thinking (science) is
undertaken in the Kritik der reinen
Vernunft, that of reason in willing (ethics) in the Kritik
der praktischen Vernunft (1788; Critique
of Practical Reason), and that of reason in feeling (aesthetics) in Kritik
der Urteilskraft (1790; Critique of
Judgment). |
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The literary format of Enlightenment
philosophizing was essentially simple and straightforward. Except for an
occasional reversion to the dialogue form, as in Berkeley's Three
Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous (1713) and in Hume's Dialogues
Concerning Natural Religion (1779), it consisted of inquiries, discourses,
treatises, dissertations, and essays, generally well written in clear,
relatively nontechnical prose. But Kant not only introduced a formidable
technical philosophical terminology into his works but was, in fact, the
originator of a new philosophical form--the "critique" or
"critical examination"--which had its own special architectonics. Each
of Kant's three critiques consists of the same division into three parts: (1) an
"Analytic," or analysis of reason's right functioning; (2) a
"Dialectic," or logic of error, showing the pitfalls into which a
careless reason falls; and (3) a "Methodology," which is an
arrangement of rules for practice. It is a form that was unique to Kant, but it
raised certain problems of "oppositional" thinking, to which
19th-century philosophers such as Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Kierkegaard were
subsequently to turn. |
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Kant's death in 1804 formally marked the
end of the Enlightenment. The 19th century ushered in new philosophical problems
and new conceptions of what philosophy ought to do. It was a century of great
philosophical diversity. In the Renaissance the chief intellectual fact had been
the rise of mathematics and natural science, and the tasks that this fact
imposed upon philosophy determined its direction for two centuries. In the
Enlightenment attention had turned to the character of the mind that had so
successfully mastered the natural world, and Rationalists and Empiricists had
contended for mastery until the Kantian synthesis. As for the 19th century,
however, if one single feature of its thought could be singled out for emphasis,
it might be called the discovery of the irrational. But many philosophical
schools were present, and they contended, one with another, in a series of
distinct and powerful oppositions: Pragmatism against Idealism; Positivism
against irrationalism; Marxism against
liberalism. |
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Politically the 19th century began with
the consulate of Napoleon and ended with the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria;
but it is the intellectual and social changes that fell in between that have
philosophical consequences. These changes were chiefly the Romantic
movement of the early 19th century, which was a poetic revolt against
reason in favour of feeling; the maturation of the Industrial
Revolution, which caused untold misery within society and called forth a
multitude of philosophies of social reform; the Revolution of 1848 in Paris,
Germany, and Vienna, which symbolized class
divisions and first implanted in the European consciousness the concepts of
"the bourgeoisie" and "the proletariat"; and, finally, the
great surge in biological science with Darwin and the publicizing of the idea of
biological evolution. Romanticism influenced
both German Idealism and philosophers of irrationalism. Experiences of economic
discord and social unrest produced the ameliorative social philosophy of English
Utilitarianism and the revolutionary doctrines of Karl Marx. And the
developmental ideas of Darwin provided the prerequisites for American
Pragmatism. |
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A synoptic view of philosophy in the
19th century reveals an interesting chronology. The early century was dominated
by the German school of absolute Idealism (Johann Fichte, Friedrich Schelling,
and G.W.F. Hegel). The midcentury was marked by a rebirth of interest in science
and its methods (Auguste Comte in France and John Stuart Mill in England) and by
liberal (Mill) and radical (Marx) social theory. The late century saw a second
flowering of Idealism, this time in England (T.H. Green, F.H. Bradley, and
Bernard Bosanquet) and, with Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, the rise
of American Pragmatism. The new philosophies of the irrational in the highly
individual thinkers Søren Kierkegaard, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Friedrich
Nietzsche ran through the century in its entirety. |
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The Enlightenment, inspired by the
example of natural science, had accepted certain bounds to the possibility of
knowledge; that is, it had recognized certain limits to reason's ability to
penetrate ultimate reality because that would require methods that surpass the
boundaries of scientific method. In this particular modesty, the philosophies of
Hume and Kant were much alike. But the early 19th century marked a resurgence of
the metaphysical spirit at its most ambitious and extravagant extreme. German
Idealism reinstated the speculative pretensions of Leibniz and Spinoza at their
height. This turn was partly a consequence of the Romantic influence but, more
importantly, of a new alliance of philosophy not with science but with religion.
It was not accidental that all of the great German Idealists were university
professors whose fathers were Protestant pastors or who had themselves studied
theology: Fichte at Jena and Leipzig (1780-84); Schelling
and Hegel at the Tübingen seminary
(1788-95). And it is probably this circumstance that gave to German Idealism its
intensely serious, its quasi-religious, and its dedicated character. (see also Absolute
Idealism) |
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The consequence of this religious
alignment was that philosophical interest shifted from Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (in which he had attempted to account for
natural science and denied the possibility of certainty in metaphysics) to his Critique
of Practical Reason (in which he had explored the nature of the moral
self) and his Critique
of Judgment (in which he had treated of the purposiveness of the
universe as a whole). For absolute Idealism was based upon three premises: |
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1. That the chief datum of philosophy is
the human self and its self-consciousness; |
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2. That the world as a whole is
spiritual through and through, that it is, in fact, something like a cosmic
Self; |
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3. That, in both the self and the world,
it is not primarily the intellectual element that counts but, rather, the
volitional and the moral. |
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Thus, to understand the self,
self-consciousness, and the spiritual universe became for Idealistic metaphysics
the task of philosophy. |
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From the point of view of doctrine,
Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel had much in common. Fichte (1762-1814), professor
of philosophy at the newly founded University of Berlin (1809-14) and a great
symbol of German patriotism through the Napoleonic Wars, combined in a workable
unity the subjectivism of Descartes, the cosmic monism of Spinoza, and the moral
intensity of Kant. He saw human self-consciousness as the primary metaphysical
fact through the analysis of which the philosopher finds his way to the cosmic
totality that is "the Absolute." And,
just as the moral will is the chief characteristic of the self, so also is it
the activating principle of the world. Thus Fichte provided a new definition of
philosophizing that made it central in dignity in the intellectual world. The
sole task of philosophy is "the clarification of consciousness." And
the highest degree of self-consciousness is achieved by the philosopher because
he alone recognizes "Mind," or "Spirit," as the central
principle of reality. (see also spiritualism) |
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This line of thought was carried further
by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), Fichte's successor at Berlin and
perhaps the single most comprehensive and influential thinker of the 19th
century. Kant's problem had been the critical examination of reason's role in
human experience. For Hegel, too, the function of philosophy is to discover the
place of reason in nature, in experience, and in reality; to understand the laws
according to which reason operates in the world. But whereas Kant had found
reason to be the form that mind imposes upon the world, Hegel found it to be
constitutive of the world itself--not something that mind imposes but that it
discovers. As Fichte had projected consciousness from mind into reality, so
Hegel projected reason; and the resultant Hegelian dictates--that "the
rational is the real" and that "the truth is the whole"--although
they express an organic and a totalitarian theory of truth and reality, tend to
blur the usual distinctions that previous philosophers had made between logic
and metaphysics, between subject and object, and between thought and existence.
For the basic tenet of Idealism, that reality is spiritual, generates just such
a vague inclusiveness. |
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To the Fichtean foundations, however,
Hegel added one crucial corollary: that the Absolute, or Whole, which is a
concrete universal entity, is not static but undergoes a crucial development in
time. Hegel called this evolution "the dialectical
process." By stressing it, Hegel accomplished two things: (1) he indicated
that reason itself is not eternal but "historical," and (2) he thereby
gave new meaning and relevance to the changing conditions of human society in
history--which added to the philosophical task a cultural dimension that it had
not possessed before. |
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The philosopher's vocation, in Hegel's
view, was to approach the Absolute through consciousness, to recognize it as
Spirit expressing and developing itself ("realizing itself" was his
own phrase) in all of the manifold facets of human life. For struggle is the
essence of spiritual existence, and self-enlargement is its goal. For these
reasons the various branches of intellect and culture become stages in the
unfolding of the World-Spirit: |
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1. The psychological characteristics of
man (habit, appetite, judgment) representing "Subjective Spirit"; |
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2. His laws, social arrangements, and
political institutions (the family, civil society, the state) expressing
"Objective Spirit"; |
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3. His art, religion, and philosophy
embodying "Absolute Spirit." |
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What began, therefore, in Hegel as a
metaphysics of the Absolute ended by becoming a total philosophy of human
culture. |
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The absolute Idealists wrote as if the
Renaissance methodologists of the sciences had never existed. But if in Germany
the Empirical and scientific tradition in philosophy lay dormant, in France and
in England in the middle of the 19th century it was very much alive. In France, Auguste
Comte (1798-1857) wrote his great philosophical history of science, Cours
de philosophie positive (1830-42; The
Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte [abridged]) in six volumes.
Influenced by Bacon and the entire school of British Empiricism, by the doctrine
of progress put forward by Turgot and Condorcet during the 18th century, and by
the very original social reformer Henri de Saint-Simon,
Comte called his philosophy "Positivism," by which he meant a
philosophy of science so narrow that it denied any validity whatsoever to
"knowledge" not derived
through the accepted methods of science. But the Cours
de philosophie positive made its point not by dialectic but by an appeal to
the history of thought, and here Comte presented his two basic ideas: (see also Mill,
John Stuart, Marx, Karl) |
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1. The notion that the sciences have
emerged as sciences in strict order, beginning with mathematics and astronomy,
followed by physics, chemistry, and biology in that order, and culminating in
the new science of sociology, to which Comte was the first to ascribe the name;
(see also science,
philosophy of) |
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2. The so-called "law of the three
stages," which views thought in every field as passing progressively
from superstition to science by first being (a)
religious, then (b) abstract, or metaphysical, and finally (c) positive, or scientific. Comte's permanent contribution was to
initiate an antireligious and an antimetaphysical bias in the philosophy of
science that has passed into the 20th century. |
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In mid-19th-century England the chief
representative of the Empirical tradition from Bacon to Hume was John Stuart
Mill (1806-73). Mill's theory of knowledge, best presented in his Examination
of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy (1865), was not particularly
original but rather a judicious combination of the doctrines of Berkeley and
Hume; but it symbolized his mistrust of vague metaphysics, his denial of the a
priori element in knowledge, and his determined opposition to any form of
intuitionism. It is in his enormously influential System of Logic (1843), however,
that Mill's chief theoretical ideas are to be found. |
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This work, as part of its subtitle, the
Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientific Investigation, shows,
was concerned less with formal logic than with scientific methodology. Mill made
here the fundamental distinction between deduction and induction,
defined induction as the process by which men discover and prove general
propositions, and presented his "four methods of experimental inquiry"
as the heart of the inductive method. These methods were, in fact, only an
enlarged and refined version of Francis Bacon's "tables of discovery."
But the most significant section of A
System of Logic was its conclusion: book 6, "On the Logic of the Moral
Sciences." |
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Mill had taken men's experience of the
uniformity of nature as the warrant of induction. Here he reaffirmed the belief
of Hume that it is possible to apply the principle of causation and the methods
of physical science to moral and social phenomena. These may be so complex as to
yield only "conditional predictions," but in this sense there are
"social laws." Thus Comte and Mill agreed upon the possibility of a
true social science. |
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Mill's Logic
was extremely influential, and it continued to be taught at Oxford and
Cambridge well into the 20th century; but in the end his importance lay less in
logic and theory of knowledge than in ethics and political theory. For Mill was
the great apostle of political liberalism in the 19th century, a true follower
of John Locke. And, just as Locke and Rousseau had represented the liberal and
the radical wings of social theory in the early modern period, so Mill and Karl
Marx represented the liberal and the radical approaches to social reform 100
years later. |
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Raised by social reformers (his father,
James Mill, and Jeremy Bentham) to be a social reformer himself, Mill's social
theory was an attempt, by gradual means arrived at democratically, to combat the
evils of the Industrial Revolution. His ethics, expressed in his Utilitarianism
(1861), followed the formulations of Bentham in finding the end of society
to consist in the production of the greatest quantity of happiness for its
members, but he gave to Bentham's cruder (but more consistent) doctrines a
humanistic and individualistic slant. Thus, the moral self-development of the
individual becomes the ultimate value in Mill's ethics. |
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This trend was also expressed in his
essay On Liberty
(1859) and Considerations
on Representative Government (1861). In the former he stated the case
for the freedom of the individual against "the tyranny of the
majority," presented strong arguments in favour of complete freedom of
thought and discussion, and argued that no state or society has the right to
prevent the free development of human individuality. In the latter he provided
a classic defense for the principle of representative democracy, asked for
the adequate representation of minorities, urged renewed public participation in
political action for necessary social reforms, and pointed up the dangers of
class-oriented or special-interest legislation. |
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A radical counterbalance to Mill's
liberal ideas was provided by Karl Marx (1818-83), a German philosopher, social
revolutionary, and political economist. Taking over from Hegel the idea of
estrangement (which Hegel had used in a metaphysical sense), Marx used this
notion prior to 1848 to indicate the alienation
of the worker from the enjoyment of the products of his work, the crass
treatment of human labour as a mere commodity (and man as a thing), and, in
fact, the general dehumanization of man in a selfish, profit-seeking capitalist
society. |
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In the famous Communist Manifesto (1848), Marx,
yielding to the revolutionary temper of the times, called (as Rousseau had done
before the French Revolution) for the violent overthrow of the established
order. All of history, Marx said, is the struggle between exploiting minorities
and the underlying population, that is, between bourgeois and proletarians; and
he advocated the formation of a Communist Party to stimulate proletarian class
consciousness toward the seizure of power and the institution of a just and
democratically managed Socialist society. (see
also class
struggle) |
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Marx's revolutionary fervour may have
tended to dampen his philosophical reputation in the West, and his philosophical
achievement remains a controversial point; but certain of his ideas (some
Hegelian in inspiration, some original) have endured. Among these are the ideas: |
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1. That society is a moving balance
(dialectic) of antithetical forces that produce social change; |
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2. That there is no conflict between a
rigid economic determinism and a program of revolutionary action; |
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3. That ideas (including philosophical
theories) are not purely rational and thus independent of external circumstance
but depend upon the nature of the social order in which they arise. |
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The end of the 19th century saw a
flowering of many independent philosophical movements. After Hegel was almost
forgotten in Germany, his influence migrated to England, where T.H.
Green, F.H. Bradley, and Bernard
Bosanquet initiated a new Hegelian renaissance. Bradley's Appearance
and Reality (1893) constituted the high-water mark of the rediscovery
of Hegel's dialectical method. In America a strong reaction against Idealism led
to the beginnings of the Pragmatic movement initiated by Charles
Sanders Peirce and William James. Peirce
was an exact logician who recognized that the function of all inquiry is to
eradicate doubt and that the meaning of a concept consists in the practical
consequences that the concept might be said to have. James transformed Peirce's
pragmatic theory of meaning into a pragmatic theory of truth and, in his Will to Believe (1897), asserted
that men have a right to believe even in the face of inconclusive evidence and
that, because knowledge is an instrument for the sake of life, the true test of
a belief is the practical consequences that it entails. Meanwhile, in Austria, Franz
Brentano, who taught at Vienna from 1874 to 1895, and Alexius
Meinong, who taught at Graz, were developing an empirical psychology and
a theory of objects, which were to have considerable influence upon the new
philosophy of Phenomenology. |
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It was not, however, any of these late
19th-century developments but, rather, the emphasis upon the irrational, which
started almost at the century's beginning, that gave the philosophy of the
period its peculiar flavour. Hegel, despite his commitment to systematic
metaphysics, had, nonetheless, carried on the Enlightenment tradition of faith
in human rationality. But soon his influence was challenged from two different
directions. The Danish Christian thinker Søren
Kierkegaard (1813-55) challenged the logical pretensions of the Hegelian
system; and one of his contemporaries, Arthur
Schopenhauer (1788-1860), himself a German Idealist and constructor of a
bold and imaginative system, contradicted Hegel by asserting that the irrational
is the truly real. |
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Kierkegaard's criticism of Hegel was an
appeal to the concrete as against the abstract. He satirized Hegelian
Rationalism as a perfect example of "the academic in philosophy"--of
detached, objective, abstract theorizing and system building, blind to the
realities of human existence, to its subjective, living, emotional character.
What a man requires in life, said Kierkegaard, is not infinite inquiry but the
boldness of resolute decision and commitment. Man's
essence is not contained in thinking but in the existential conditions of his
emotional life, in his anxiety and despair. The titles of three of Kierkegaard's
books--Frygt og baeven (1843; Fear
and Trembling), Begrebet angest
(1844; The
Concept of Dread), Sygdommen
til døden (1849; The Sickness unto
Death)--indicate his preoccupation with states of consciousness quite unlike
the usual philosophical concentration on cognition and the validity of
knowledge. |
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Schopenhauer, even though, for a short
time, he competed unsuccessfully with Hegel at the University of Berlin, soon
withdrew and thereafter waged a lifelong battle against academic philosophy. His
own system, though orderly and carefully worked out, was written in a vivid and
engaging style. Schopenhauer agreed with Kant that the world of appearances, of
phenomena, is governed by the conditions of space, time, and causality. But he
held that science, which investigates this world, cannot itself penetrate the
real world behind appearances, which is dominated by a strong, blind, striving,
universal cosmic Will that expresses itself in the vagaries of human instinct,
in sexual striving, and in the wild uncertainties of all animal behaviour.
Everywhere in nature one sees strife, conflict, and inarticulate impulse; and
these, rather than rational processes or intellectual clarity, are man's true
contacts with ultimate reality. |
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Schopenhauer's great work Die
Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The
World As Will and Idea) was published in 1819, and Kierkegaard's
uneven masterpieces appeared between 1843 and 1849. But Friedrich
Nietzsche (1844-1900), the third of the irrationalist triumvirate, wrote
between 1872 and 1889. A prolific but unsystematic writer, presenting his
patchwork of ideas in swift atoms of thought, Nietzsche saw the task of the
philosopher as that of a man who destroys old values, creates new ideals, and
through them a new civilization. He agreed with Schopenhauer that mind is an
instrument of instinct to be used in the service of life and power, and he held
that illusion is as necessary to man as truth. Nietzsche spent much time in the
analysis of such states as resentment, guilt, bad conscience, and self-contempt. |
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Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche
provided for the 19th century a new, nonrational conception of human nature, and
they viewed the mind not with the rational clarity of Locke and Hume but as
something dark, obscure, hidden, deep. But, above all, they initiated a new
style of philosophizing. Schopenhauer wrote like an 18th-century essayist;
Kierkegaard was a master of the methods of irony and paradox; and Nietzsche used
aphorism and epigram with conscious literary intention. For these three, the
philosopher should be less a crabbed academician than a man of letters. |
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Despite the tradition of philosophical
"professionalism" established during the Enlightenment by Wolff and
Kant, philosophy in the 19th century was still largely created by men outside of
the universities. Comte, Mill, Marx, Kierkegaard, and Schopenhauer were not
professors. Only the German Idealist school was rooted in academic life. Today,
however, most well-known philosophers are associated with universities. (George
Santayana after his early years and Jean-Paul Sartre are the notable
exceptions.) The agencies of professionalism--the philosophical congress, the
national philosophical societies, the narrowly specialized journals--have become
increasingly important. Philosophers more and more employ a technical vocabulary
and deal with specialized problems, and they write not for a broad intellectual
public but for one another. |
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Professionalism also has sharpened the
divisions between philosophical schools and made the definition of what
philosophy is and ought to be a matter of the sharpest controversy. Philosophy
has become extremely self-conscious about its own method and nature. |
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Intellectual competitiveness, moreover,
has been further sharpened by geographic and political considerations. The
tradition of clear analysis, inaugurated by Locke and Hume, still dominates the
Anglo-Saxon world; the Hegelian tradition of speculative metaphysics and the
Nietzschean tradition of bold psychological generalization still dominate the
Continent. And the special framework of thinking established by Karl Marx
dominated philosophy in the Socialist world. |
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Except, then, for philosophical Marxism
and a few individual philosophers such as Henri Bergson,
John Dewey, and A.N. Whitehead,
who evade easy classification, the main currents of contemporary philosophy are
(1) Analytic philosophy with its two chief branches, (a) Logical Positivism and (b)
Linguistic Analysis; and (2) Continental philosophy with its two branches, (a)
Existentialism and (b) Phenomenology. |
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Henri Bergson (1859-1941), John Dewey
(1859-1952), and Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) have been called the three
most important speculative philosophers of the first half of the 20th century.
The French Bergson and the American Dewey shared an instrumental theory of mind;
that is, influenced by Darwinism, they both held that mind has emerged in the
course of biological evolution as an instrument
of man's adaptation to his environment and, therefore, that man's mental
functions are chiefly utilitarian agencies of action. Bergson and the English
Whitehead were both adherents of a process philosophy; that is, each held that
actuality is, like a river, fluent, that ultimate reality is mobile and dynamic.
Yet, in fact, each of the three defined philosophy differently and saw it as
performing a uniquely different task. Bergson's vision of philosophy was
intuitional, Whitehead's was speculative, and Dewey's was pragmatic. |
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Bergson, in the Introduction à la métaphysique (1903; An Introduction to Metaphysics) and
in his masterpiece, L'Évolution créatrice
(1907; Creative
Evolution), distinguished between two profoundly different ways of
knowing: the method of analysis, which is that of science; and the method of intuition,
which is just that intellectual sympathy by which men enter into objects and
persons and identify with them. All basic metaphysical truths, Bergson held, are
grasped by philosophical intuition. This is how men know their deepest selves,
the duration, which is the essence of all living things, and the vital spirit,
which is the mysterious creative agency in the world. |
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For Whitehead, philosophy was primarily
metaphysics (or "speculative philosophy"), the effort "to frame a
coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every
element of our experience can be interpreted." Whitehead's philosophy was,
thus, an attempt to survey the world with a large generality of understanding,
an end toward which his great trilogy, Science
and the Modern World (1925), Process
and Reality (1929), and Adventures
of Ideas (1933), was directed. |
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While Bergson and Whitehead were
principally metaphysicians and philosophers of culture, Dewey was an all-around
philosopher who dominated the fields of ethics, metaphysics, and methodology in
the United States for many years and who stressed the unity, interrelationship,
and organicity of all forms of philosophical knowledge. He is chiefly notable,
however, because his notion of philosophy stressed so powerfully the conceptions
of practicality and moral purpose. One of the guiding aims of Dewey's
philosophizing was the effort to find the same warranted assertibility for
ethical and political as for scientific judgments. Philosophy, he said, should
be oriented not to professional pride but to human need. |
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The social thought of Mill and Marx
presented opposed solutions to the social problems of the 19th century; that of
Dewey and Lenin presented opposed solutions to the problems of the 20th century.
Not revolution but the continuous application of intelligence to social affairs
was Dewey's answer. He believed in social planning, in conscious intelligent
intervention to produce desirable social change; and he proposed a new "experimentalism"
in social affairs as the guide to enlightened public action to promote the aims
of a democratic community. His pragmatic social theory is the major social
philosophy that liberal democracy has produced in the modern world. |
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The framework of 19th-century Marxist
thought, augmented by the philosophical suggestions of Vladimir
Ilich Lenin, served as the starting point of all philosophizing in the
Socialist countries of eastern Europe. To Marx's conception of the dialectic
(that the social world progresses through the rise and fall of oppositions),
Lenin added a strong tinge of metaphysical Materialism
(material things and their systems of relations exist independently of mind, and
the laws of nature are objective) and a naively Realist theory of knowledge
(ideas and sensations are true copies of independently existing things). But
much of Lenin's thinking was also devoted to rather practical issues, like the
tactics of violence and the role of the Communist Party in bringing about and
consolidating the proletarian revolution. (see also Marxism) |
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Later Marxism continued this concern
with practical issues, because it represented the basic Marxist conception of
what philosophy is and ought to be. For Marxism (like Pragmatism) tried to
assimilate theoretical issues to practical needs. It asserted the basic unity of
theory and practice by finding that the function of the former was to serve the
latter. Marx and Lenin both held that theory was always in fact expressive of
class interests; consequently, they wished philosophy to be transformed into a
tool for furthering the class struggle: not abstractly to discover the truth but
concretely to forge the intellectual weapons of the proletariat was philosophy's
dominant task. Thus philosophy became inseparable from ideology. |
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Since the discovery and publication in
1927 and 1932 of some of Marx's early writings, many have sensed a breath of
fresh air in Marxist philosophizing outside Russia. The concern of the young
Marx with alienation, with a theory of the nature of man, and with moral values
has given Marxism a new humanistic dimension and has inspired some notable
revisionist thinking in Poland, Hungary, and the Balkan region. |
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Logical Positivism,
or Logical Empiricism, the earliest branch of modern Analytic philosophy, was
jointly inspired by Hume and by the new logic of Russell and Whitehead, authors
of the Principia Mathematica (3 vol.,
1910-13). The school, formally instituted at the University of Vienna in a
seminar of Moritz Schlick in 1923, continued
there as the Vienna Circle until 1938. Its great
period began in 1926 when Rudolf Carnap, who
became a leading semanticist and philosopher of science, arrived at the
University. Its manifesto of 1929, Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung: Der Wiener Kreis ("Scientific
Conception of the World: The Vienna Circle"), and its journal Erkenntnis
("Knowledge"), founded a year later, marked its self-consciousness
as a philosophical movement. |
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Logical Positivism's basic contribution
has been a profound alteration in the conception of the role that philosophy
itself must play. Philosophy, it claimed, must henceforth be scientific. It
should seek less a content than a function: it should produce not complicated
pictures of the world but clear thinking. This was best stated by Ludwig
Wittgenstein in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922),
first published as Logische-philosophische
Abhandlung (1921): |
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The object of philosophy is the logical
clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a theory but an activity. A
philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. The result of
philosophy is not a number of "philosophical propositions," but to
make propositions clear. |
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Despite this emphasis upon philosophy as
a pure activity, Logical Positivism did propound, at the same time, a series of
revolutionary theses: |
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1. All meaningful
discourse consists either of (a) the
formal sentences of logic and mathematics or (b) the factual propositions of the special sciences; |
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2. Any assertion that claims to be
factual has meaning only if it is possible to say how it might be verified; |
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3. Metaphysical assertions, coming under
neither of the two classes of (1), are meaningless; |
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4. All statements about moral,
aesthetic, or religious values are
scientifically unverifiable and meaningless. |
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Logical Positivism's radical denial of
the meaningfulness of metaphysics and of assertions of value at first produced
something of a philosophical scandal. But meanwhile Bertrand
Russell and his student Wittgenstein (who had emigrated from Austria)
were propounding similar doctrines in England; and, after the Nazis overran
Austria and Carnap, Hans Reichenbach (a Berlin
Positivist), and many others from the Vienna Circle moved to America, this
philosophy proved remarkably influential in the Anglo-American world. The
Logical Positivists were mainly interested in three basic themes: logic,
language, and perception. Whereas Russell began with logic, turned to problems
of perception, and ended with semantics, Carnap, having begun with perception in
Der logische Aufbau der Welt (1928; The
Logical Structure of the World), turned to problems of semantics in Logische
Syntax der Sprache (1934; The Logical
Syntax of Language) and ended with logic in Meaning and Necessity (1947). But of these three themes it was that
of language that proved most enduring. This emphasis Logical Positivism shared
with its successor, Linguistic Analysis. |
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Sometimes called "ordinary
language" Analysis or even "Oxford philosophy" from its
later stronghold, this movement was, in fact, largely the product of two
philosophers of the first half of the 20th century who were associated with the
University of Cambridge, G.E. Moore (1873-1958)
and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951). Moore made the examination of the
assertions of other men philosophically popular--i.e., the practice of directing the philosopher's critical energies
to the mistakes of his contemporaries. The major subjects of his interest were
ethics and the theory of knowledge; his thought was always Realistic and
commonsensical, and he introduced into philosophy an unbelievably precise and
closely applied analytical method. It was Moore's passion for clarity and his
infinite pains "to get everything exactly
right" that served as moral inspiration to a succeeding generation of
younger men who had attended his Cambridge lectures over a span of 30 years. |
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Wittgenstein had begun as a kind of
adjunct to the Vienna Circle. There was a time when his philosophical position
was much like that of Russell and Carnap; but as he later became more skeptical
of the foundations of mathematics and logic, his interest turned from logic and
artificial language systems toward a critical examination of ordinary natural
language. This change was principally registered in his Philosophical Investigations, posthumously
published in 1953, which has become the true bible of Linguistic Analysis. For
it is here that Wittgenstein showed how a man's entire world is constituted by
his linguistic experience and suggested that "all philosophy is critique of
language." Wittgenstein thought that to ask "Why do we use this
particular word or expression?" was the crucial philosophical question
since a focusing of philosophy not upon the world but upon the mechanisms of
linguistic use would solve most of the perplexities that have plagued
philosophizing. Thus Linguistic philosophy was to perform a therapeutic
function. |
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Wittgenstein's example found many
followers in the United States and, particularly, in England. There philosophers
Gilbert Ryle, J.L.
Austin, and P.F. Strawson have examined
"category mistakes," "systematically misleading
expressions," "mental-conduct concepts" (such as "other
minds"), and all of the major "perception words" such as
"looking," "seeing," "sensing,"
"feeling," and the like. The effect of this concentration not upon
things or ideas but upon words has, for members of this school, turned the
customary works on ethics, aesthetics, or the philosophy of religion into
treatises entitled "The Language of Ethics" or "The Language of
Aesthetics" or "The Language of Religion." And these efforts are
all, in Wittgenstein's terms, "a battle against the bewitchment of our
intelligence by means of language." |
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The Analytic philosophy that by the
mid-1970s had come to dominate Anglo-American philosophical thinking for almost
half a century has had comparatively little influence on the continent of
Europe. There the metaphysical and speculative traditions have remained strong;
and in the 1950s and 1960s the interest in both, but particularly in
Phenomenology, posed an increasing threat to philosophical Analysis in Britain
and the United States. Continental philosophy may be divided into Phenomenology
and Existentialism, but the division is not sharp. Thinkers such as Martin
Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty combine the two strands.
And the phenomenological method has been one of the formative forces in
Existentialism. |
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Edmund Husserl
(1859-1939), a German mathematician turned philosopher, was the true father of
Phenomenology. He was an extremely complicated and technical thinker whose views
changed considerably over the years. His chief contributions were the
phenomenological method, developed early, and the concept of the life-world,
appearing only in his later writings. Husserl proposed the phenomenological
method as a technique for conducting phenomenological analyses--that is, for
making possible "a descriptive account of the essential structures of the
directly given." The emphasis here is upon the immediacy of experience, the
attempt to isolate it and set it off from all assumptions of existence or causal
influence and to lay bare its actual intrinsic structure; for it is this
structure that constitutes its essence. Phenomenology restricts the
philosopher's attention to the pure data of consciousness uncontaminated by
metaphysical theories or scientific assumptions. Husserl's concept of the
life-world expressed this same idea of immediacy. It is the individual's
personal world as directly experienced, with the ego at the centre and with all
of its vital and emotional colourings. (see also phenomenological
reduction) |
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With the appearance of the Jahrbuch
für Philosophie und Phänomenologische Forschung (1913-30;
"Annual for Philosophical and Phenomenological Research"), under
Husserl's chief editorship, his personal philosophizing flowered into an
international movement. Its two most notable adherents were Max
Scheler, a scholar of life-philosophy, whose Formalismus
in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik ("Formalism in Ethics and the
Material Value-Ethics") was published in the Jahrbuch (1913-16), and the ontological Existentialist Martin
Heidegger (1889-1976), whose famous Sein
und Zeit (Being and Time) appeared in the Jahrbuch
in 1927. Despite the differences in their individual philosophies their work
showed clearly the influence of the phenomenological method: in Scheler's
careful explorations of the role that emotion plays in men's moral values and in
his descriptive analyses of the human attitudes of resentment, sympathy, and
love; and in Heidegger's startlingly original investigations of human existence
with its unique dimensions of being-in-the-world, dread, care, and being toward
death. In all of these painstaking and enormously detailed inquiries, however,
both Scheler and Heidegger held to the phenomenological principle that
philosophy is not empirical but is the strictly self-evident insight into the
structure of experience. Later, Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
a French student of philosophical psychology, in his Phénoménologie de la perception (1945; The Phenomenology of Perception),
took over Husserl's conception of the life-world and used the notions of the
lived body and its facticity to build up a hierarchical order of man's lived
experience. |
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Continental Existentialism, true to its
roots in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, is oriented toward two major themes: (1) the
analysis of human Being and (2) the centrality of human choice. Thus its chief
theoretical energies are devoted to ontology and decision. Existentialism as a
philosophy of human existence found its best spokesman in the German Karl
Jaspers, who came to philosophy from medicine and psychology. As a
philosophy of human decision, its spokesman was the French philosopher and
playwright Jean-Paul Sartre. These two
preoccupations of Existentialism lead to two different conceptions of
philosophy's function. |
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For Jaspers (1883-1969), as for Dewey,
the aim of philosophy is practical; for Dewey, however, it guides human doing,
whereas for Jaspers its purpose is the achievement of human Being.
Philosophizing is an inner activity by which the individual finds and becomes
himself: it is a revelation of Being. It is an attempt to answer the question of
what man is and what he can become; and this
activity, wholly unlike that of science, is one of mere thought, through the
"inwardness" of which a man becomes aware of the deepest levels of
Being. (see also science,
history of) |
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But if, for Jaspers, philosophy is
devoted to "the illumination of existence," that illumination is
achieved when a person recognizes that human existence is revealed most
profoundly in his experience of those "extreme" situations that define
the human condition--conflict, guilt, suffering, and death. It is in man's
confrontation with these extremes that he achieves his existential humanity. |
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Sartre (1905-80), too, has some concern
for man's Being and his dread before the threat of Nothingness. But Sartre finds
the essence of this Being in man's liberty--in his duty of self-determination
and his freedom of choice--and therefore spends much time in describing the
human tendency toward "bad faith"--reflected in man's perverse
attempts to deny his own responsibility and to flee from the truth of his
inescapable freedom. Sartre, like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, considered himself
less an academic philosopher than a man of letters and also wrote novels and
plays that assert the Existential dogma of human freedom and explore the
inexhaustible mechanisms of bad faith. It is not that Sartre overlooks the
legitimate series of obstacles to freedom a human being has to face in the
givens of place, past, environment, fellowmen, and death; but his Existentialist
bias demands that man surmount these limitations by acts of conscious decision.
For only in acts of freedom does human existence achieve authenticity. (see also
free will) |
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It seems clear that, in the 50 years
around the mid-20th century, philosophizing has become uncommonly concerned with
problems of language, symbolism, and communication. Renaissance philosophy was
primarily preoccupied with nature, with an external physical world and the
objects contained within it. The Enlightenment turned to the mind that knows the
world; its philosophy spoke of the genesis of ideas, the relation of concepts,
the quality of appearances. But 20th-century philosophizing largely states its
problems in terms of symbolic manipulation and the characteristics of words. |
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Nor is this merely the preoccupation of
Analytical philosophy: Dewey was interested in social communication; Whitehead
wrote a little volume on Symbolism: Its
Meaning and Effect (1927); Heidegger turned to poetry and the etymology of
words for the revelation of Being; Ernst Cassirer, a German Neo-Kantian,
produced a "philosophy of symbolic forms"; and Jaspers tried to
decipher the meanings reflected in human speech and gesture. |
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Apart from this underlying tendency
there seems little prospect for philosophical unification. The scientific and
the metaphysical tempers still pursue their opposite courses, and the
subjectivity of Existentialism and the objectivity of Logical Positivism still
express their opposition in mutual contempt. Thus, in the contemporary
philosophical universe, multiplicity and division still reign. (A.W.L.) |
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