A Journey Through Modern Philosophy

2008-07-05T17:26:00.009+06:00

By M. Awais Aftab

"If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties," says Francis Bacon and thus begins Modern Philosophy...

PREFACE:

Here, you will find a short, convenient and friendly summary of the major and influential ideas of the modern philosophers. This, I admit, extends over a rather long stretch of time, from Machiavelli in the 15th century to the recent thinkers like Karl Popper... [read more]

“What once was thought can never be undone.”
Friedrich Durrenmatt, The Physicists

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

* Preface

1. Introduction
… an art of suspended judgment…

2. Early Modern Philosophers… a state of war with everyone against everyone…

3. Descartes
… I think, therefore I am…

4. Spinoza
… from the perspective of eternity…

5. Leibniz… the best of all possible worlds…

6. Locke… a tabula rasa, an empty slate…

7. Berkeley
… to be is to be perceived…

8. Hume
… nothing but sophistry and illusion…

9. French Enlightenment
… man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains…

10. Kant
… the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me…

11. Hegel
… history is the story of the world spirit…

12. Schopenhauer
… a blind, unreasoning impulse of self-preservation…

13. Nietzsche
… I teach you the Superman…

14. Positivism and Utilitarianism
… greatest happiness of the greatest number…

15. Marx
… the history of class struggles…

16. Pragmatism and James
… looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts…

17. Bergson
… life’s impulse to new creation, the élan vital…

18. Logical Analysis and Russell
… restating a philosophical problem in precise logical terminology …

19. Wittgenstein
… whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent …

20. Logical Positivism
… philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity…

21. Existentialism and Sartre
… man is condemned to be free…

22. Camus and Absurdism
… does the absurd dictate death?...

23. Popper
… a game of conjectures and refutations …

24. Postmodernism
… incredulity towards Grand Narratives…

25. Appendix

* The Existentialist Couple

* Suggestions for further study

Updates: This page keeps track of the changes that i make in the text as a result of my interaction with the readers.

Citations: For citation purposes, readers can use the following pattern. For instance, if you are quoting from the chapter on Descartes, you would make a complete citation as:

M. Awais Aftab, "René Descartes," A Journey Through Modern Philosophy. <http://historyofmodernphilosophy.blogspot.com/2008/07/ren-descartes.html> Accessed 20 February 2009

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Dedications

This book is dedicated to

‘The Riwazian Blues’:
Ardis, Dauphin and Hasnain
&
Saad Javed
&
Guinevere

Preface

2008-07-05T16:56:00.004+06:00

Here, you will find a short, convenient and friendly summary of the major and influential ideas of the modern philosophers. This, I admit, extends over a rather long stretch of time, from Machiavelli in the 15th century to the recent thinkers like Karl Popper, and any attempt to successfully cover such a lengthy period of history in a small volume, such as this, is bound to have certain weaknesses. For this I beg forgiveness, but I feel that choosing a more specific area [say, only the nineteenth and twentieth century philosophy] would not have given a complete picture of the philosophical thought required for a beginner. Furthermore, if I would recommend this book to you, it would not be because of the depth of its contents, but rather because of its simplicity. This book will provide you with a basic skeleton of comprehension of modern philosophy, and then you can study the areas which interest you in greater detail from professional resources like Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

This book in your hands is a result of a desire to share my understanding of the great philosophers of western tradition of the modern era with other people, especially of my own age group i.e. the college students. The reader is supposed to be a layman of reasonable intelligence, who has little or no previous knowledge of philosophy. Keeping in view the above mentioned audience, the book has been kept brief, simple and to the point. It is the not like the other weighty books of history of philosophy which so frighten the people by their very size and obscurity. I think that this brevity of approach will be of benefit to the people, especially those who do not have enough time to go through books like Russell’s History of Western Philosophy or sources like Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on internet. While this little book can never claim to be a substitute to the original works of the philosophers, or to the histories written by the professional philosophers, I hope that it will be helpful in bridging the gap between the young, curious minds and the great treasures of modern philosophy, by providing an entertaining and stimulating summary of the philosophical ideas of the leading philosophers of the world.

However, this book is not one of the ‘Philosophy for Dummies’ sort of book. At many points I have deliberately refrained from excessive elaboration, because I would like the reader to think on his own as he reads. The best way to learn any game is to play it again and again. The best way to learn philosophy is to think over the philosophical issues again and again. It would be useless if a person has learnt the history of philosophy but has failed to develop the philosophical spirit in his thought. It is the philosophical attitude that is most important, and if this book helps even a single person in developing that philosophical attitude, it would have achieved its purpose.

When i started working on this book, it was meant more as a collection of personal philosophy notes for my own use, hence i was not as meticulous with keeping a record of my references as i should have been. The deficiency is particularly pronounced in the first half of the book. However, since the book is not meant to be an academic endeavour or a university assignment but rather a book meant to share my understanding with others, the lack of exhaustive references would not be a problem for most readers.

I am greatly indebted to the Vice Chancellor of Government College University, Dr. Khalid Aftab, for his kind encouragement. I am also grateful to the Chief Librarian of GCU Library Mr. Abdul Waheed, for allowing me to use the valuable resources of their library. A word of thanks to Prof. Athar Baig and Prof. Azam Khan of GCU Philosophy Department for their encouraging comments.

My strong feelings of gratitude for Dr. Ahmad Arsalan, who has guided and encouraged me like an elder brother, ever ready to share his wisdom and knowledge. Thanks to Umair Khan for his moral support and for lending me precious books of philosophy.

And my biggest thanks goes to my parents, especially my father, without whose constant support and encouragement, this book would not have been possible.

In the end, I can only say like Carl Sagan that when one is in love, one wants to shout out and tell the world about. This book is my attempt to reflect my love for philosophy and to passionately tell the world about it.

Any comments or suggestions are most welcome. And I earnestly hope that you enjoy this book!

M. Awais Aftab

The author is currently a student of MBBS in King Edward Medical University, Lahore.

Email: awaisaftab@gmail.com
Blog: http://awaisaftab.blogspot.com/

Introduction

2008-07-04T01:05:00.002+06:00

Philosophy literally means ‘love of wisdom’ but it may well be defined as love of paradoxes, because most philosophers at most times have been engaged in different logical puzzles. A precise definition is difficult to achieve due to the diversity and variety of its topics, and also because what is viewed as ‘philosophy’ has been different through the course of history. The issue of definition and role of philosophy has gained importance in the 20th century, when the emergence of science as a successful institution has called into question the validity of philosophy. But here we might remember that all we consider as science was hitherto a part of philosophy. Science deals with all definite knowledge; it contains hypothesis, theories and laws, which can be tested, verified or falsified by experiments. But there are many theoretical issues and questions to which science cannot provide answers: What is the ultimate reality? Is there a being that may be called God? What is matter and what is mind and what is their relationship? Is there a purpose and meaning in our lives? Is there such a thing as free will or is it just an illusion? Is the universe moving towards a destiny or is it being governed by blind forces, in which we humans fantasize the existence of laws due to our love for order? Is there any way of life that we may call ‘good’ and another that may be called ‘evil’? Do we survive death in any sense? What is beauty? What is truth? No definite answers can be found to such questions and it is these very questions which philosophy attempts to study. Whenever a definite way is discovered to study a particular issue, that issue becomes a part of science and ceases to belong to philosophy. For example, the issue of mind and matter, and the question of free will is now being studied by cognitive science, using scientific methods of psychology, neurophysiology and artificial intelligence, yet these issues are traditionally a part of philosophy. In this sense, philosophy is the mother of science. There is a bit of truth in the satirical remark that science is what we know, and philosophy is what we do not know. Yet science is not independent of philosophy, because the validity of scientific method itself is based on the philosophy of science. Any change in the philosophy of science, such as brought by Popper and Kuhn, brings a change in the way science is viewed.

Theology, it is true, deals with many of these philosophical questions but unlike philosophy, it claims to provide certain answers to them on the basis of any authority such as that of holy scriptures; answers so certain that their very certainty makes them incredulous; philosophy accepts no such authority. As Allama Iqbal observes, “The spirit of philosophy is one of free inquiry. It suspects all authority. Its function is to trace the uncritical assumptions of human thought to their hiding places, and in this pursuit it may finally end in denial or a frank admission of the incapacity of pure reason to reach the Ultimate Reality. The essence of religion, on the other hand, is faith.”[1] Faith has no rational validity; faith is irrational. It is not my purpose to pronounce a judgment on the role of religion, but I believe Russell is making a very valid point when he writes, “[Theology] induces a dogmatic belief that we have knowledge where in fact we have ignorance, and by doing so generates a kind of impertinent insolence towards the universe.”[2] This is liable to give rise to fanaticism and fundamentalism, the evils from which the world is suffering terribly at the moment. It is the task of philosophy to dissipate such spirit of dogmatic fanaticism by showing that there is no sufficient reason to accept these dogmas. Even when a philosopher is religious, there is a lack of dogmatism which differentiates him from an average religious believer. The natural religion of Enlightenment or the aesthetic view of religion ('ultimate religion') presented by Santayana are distinctly lacking in fanaticism.

A student of philosophy learns neither to forget the philosophical issues nor to believe that he has found certain knowledge about them. He may form opinions on these issues, but they have the tentativeness of a scientific hypothesis. The greatest benefit of philosophy is that it teaches us how to live with uncertainty; it is an art of suspended judgment. “The first startling thing about philosophy, it might be discovered, is that there are usually no final answers.”[3]

Philosophy is often divided into four main branches: metaphysics inquires about the nature of ultimate reality; epistemology is the study of the origin and extent of our knowledge; ethics or moral philosophy is the study of ‘good’ and ‘evil’, and how we ought to lead our lives; aesthetics is the philosophy of art and attempts to know the nature of beauty. There are many other branches like logic, which deals with principles of valid reasoning; philosophy of religion, which analyses the fundamental axioms of religions; philosophy of history, which attempts to discover laws and patterns in history; political philosophy, which deals with the justification and mode of government of the state and philosophy of science which attempts to know what is science and what is the proper scientific method.

History of Western philosophy is divided into three major eras: Greek philosophy, Medieval philosophy and Modern philosophy. Modern philosophy is characterized by an emphasis on reason and experience, as opposed to scholastic philosophy[4], in which philosophy was a handmaiden of theology and its only use was to somehow prove the fundamental doctrines of religion. In this book, we shall attempt to understand different features of the modern philosophical thought.

The history of philosophy is of special importance for a philosopher, much more than says a history of science would be for a scientist. Unlike scientists, who share certain common experiments and phenomena which they can discuss with other scientists, philosophers share no such experimental data. What they do share is a history of common conceptual ancestory, the views and ideas of the great philosophers of the past. It provides a medium of philosophical inquiry. As Jay F. Rosenberg writes, “[History of philosophy] provides philosophers with a common expository idiom, a shared vocabulary of concepts and a set of paradigms of philosophical reasoning, which can serve as starting points for contemporary re-explorations of central philosophical concerns.”[5]

In response to the question of use of philosophy, I think it better to quote the philosopher Deleuze, than say anything myself:
“When someone asks 'what's the use of philosophy?' the reply must be aggressive, since the question tries to be ironic and caustic. Philosophy does not serve the State or the Church, who have other concerns. It serves no established power. The use of philosophy is to sadden. A philosophy which saddens no one, that annoys no one, is not a philosophy. It is useful for harming stupidity, for turning stupidity into something shameful. Its only use is the exposure of all forms of baseness of thought. . . . Philosophy is at its most positive as a critique, as an enterprise of demystification.”[6] [My italics]

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Footnotes:

[1] Allama Muhammad Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, Institute of Islamic Culture, page 1
[2] Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, Routledge, London, page 14
[3] Religious Education: Philosophical Perspectives by John Sealey, page 2
[4] Scholasticism was the Christian theological and philosophical school of the Middle Ages.
[5] The Practice of Philosophy: A Handbook for beginners by Jay F. Rosenberg, page 10-11
[6] Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (1983: Althone Press, London)

Early Modern Philosophers

2008-07-03T01:18:00.001+06:00

Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527)

“Whoever desires to found a state and give it laws, must start with assuming that all men are bad and ever ready to display their vicious nature, whenever they may find occasion for it,”[1] states Machiavelli, the Italian historian, statesman and political philosopher, whose highly influential political ideas have converted his name into a synonym of cunning and deceit. Machiavelli was born in 1469 in Florence. He served as an administrator and a diplomat in the Florentine Republic, and knew many political leaders, including the great Cesare Borgia, thought to be the model for The Prince. Machiavelli’s political career ended after fifteen years when the Medici returned to power. After his dismissal, he retired to his farm in the country, and wrote The Prince and Discourse upon the First Ten Books of Livy in peace.

The Prince is Machiavelli’s most important work and is often described as a ‘handbook for dictators’. It outlines the methods by which a prince can obtain and sustain political power. The only end to be achieved is the success in political actions and all ethical and moral rules are meaningless in the procurement of this end. Hence, Machiavelli’s prince is bare of all moral principles, though he may appear to be a virtuous man in the public. “A prince never lacks legitimate reasons to break his promise.” Machiavelli maintained that public success and private morality are entirely separate; the issue is not what makes a good human being, but what makes a good prince. “Politics has no relation to morals,” is Machiavelli’s most precious axiom. However, it is to be noted that Machiavelli is not advocating immorality. He is just declaring politics independent from it. There is ample evidence to believe that Machiavelli himself was a moral man in his day to day life.

In public life only the praise and blame of fellow human beings really matters to the prince. Thus, Machiavelli supposed, the ruler needs to acquire a good reputation while actually doing whatever wrong seems necessary in the circumstances. The prince must be aware of how to increase and maintain his fame among the people. For this, he should be as hypociritcal as necessary. Gaining the support of the populace is an important objective for the prince. For this reason, if he has to commit any cruelties, they should be committed all at once, while benefits should granted little by little, so that they may be remembered for a longer time.

Machiavelli devotes great attention to the careful use of military forces, and greatly stresses the importance of state being armed. “Before all else, be armed,” Machiavelli emphatically exhorts. “Hence it comes about that all armed Prophets have been victorious, and all unarmed Prophets have been destroyed.”[2] Although it is desirable to be both loved and feared by one’s subjects, it is far safer to be feared. Since a state is much too complex to be handled by a single man, the prince would inevitably need advisers to assist in governance. For such matters, competent and honest men should be selected, who would carry out orders regardless of their own interest. Their loyalty should be strengthened by due rewards and honors. The prince should avoid flatterers; a prince who is surrounded by such flatterers is an inefficient prince.

Mahiavelli is prominent among political philosophers in the sense that he doesn’t give an account of how state of affairs ‘ought’ to be. ‘Ought’ is an ethical consideration and success in politics is independent of ethics. In other words, the political imperative is independent of the ethical imperative. Using his own experience, Machiavelli considers how people really ‘do’ behave, and how can they be effectively governed. By doing so, he has only portrayed the real nature of the human politics, immoral though it may be. Even though The Prince was written five centuries ago, its philosphy is still important and influential because the issues it deals with are an eternal part of politics. Perhaps, Machiavelli was right when he wrote, “Of mankind we may say in general they are fickle, hypocritical, and greedy of gain.”

There would be no doubt about Machiavelli’s status as shrewd political thinker, but his status as a philosopher is a different matter, because Machiavelli makes little attempt to consider and answer the fundamental questions of political philosophy such as what should be the best form of government? Why is a state or a prince required in the first place? Can’t humans live in the state of anarchy[3]? As Daniel Donno writes, “It is important to remember that Machiavelli was not a systematic thinker. He was not concerned with the problem of rationalizing a complete and coherent political theory… he didn’t even pause to define the nature of the state[4] or to develop what its relation to the society living under its laws should be.”[5] Machiavelli himself writes in the The Prince, “I deem it best to stick to the practical truth of things rather than to fancies. Many men have imagined republics and principalities that never really existed at all. Yet the way men live is so far removed from the way they ought to live that anyone who abandons what is for what should be pursues his downfall rather than his preservation.”[6]

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Footnotes:

[1] Discourse upon the First Ten Books of Livy
[2] The Prince
[3] Anarchy: Absence of any political authority
[4] It is a misconception to believe that Machiavelli advocated monarchy. Even though The Prince is about monarchy, his Discourses reveal that he preferred a Republic over Monarchy.
[5] Daniel Donno’s Introduction to The Prince, Bantam Books, page 7-8
[6] Machiavelli, The Prince, translated by Daniel Donno, Bantam Books, page 56

Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

Sir Francis Bacon was an English lawyer, statesman, essayist, historian, intellectual reformer, philosopher, and champion of modern science. Indeed, such broad is his area of interest that he claimed “all knowledge as his province”. Francis Bacon is in many ways the first great spokesman of the modern philosophy. He didn’t create any philosophical system of his own, but he proposed a method of developing philosophy. He is credited with contributing a technique of inductive reasoning in logic known as ampliative inference. In his works, Bacon is secular in approach, empirical in attitude and rational in thought. He was the herald of a new age of science and attempted to systematize the whole scientific procedure. He was among the first to realize the importance of science in human lives; the prevalence of scientific outlook owes a great deal to him. In this respect, he is a very influential person. Bacon’s approach can be classified as belonging to empirical philosophy.

He is important in philosophy owing to his great emphasis on Induction in logical reasoning. His explains this in his book Novum Organum (The New Instrument). Induction is the process of deriving general principles from particular facts or instances. [For example, you observe that bacteria, fungi, plants and animals reproduce; and bacteria, fungi, plants and animals are all living organisms, so you induce the conclusion ‘All living organisms reproduce.’] Bacon’s own method of induction involved collection and observation of data, and utilization of these to form general laws, initially of lowest degree. From these laws, laws of second degree of generality were to be arrived at, and so on. Each axiom – each step up “the ladder of intellect” – is thoroughly tested by observation and experimentation before the next step is taken. This method itself is not very satisfactory since it leads to over-emphasis on collection and tabulation of data, and does not specify at which particular point the induction is to be made: after a dozen observations? A hundred? A thousand? So, although this method has not been used by scientists, but the spirit of scientific reasoning has been employed by scientists ever since. It is a weak point of Bacon’s philosophy that he did not try to find any philosophical basis to show the validity of induction, which, as we shall see in the chapter on Hume, is a difficult problem. Bacon also greatly underestimates the role of creative imagination in the formation of hypothesis. Hypothesis cannot, in most cases, be formed by the mere collection of data. In fact, the amount of data is sometimes so huge that a scientist has to have a hypothesis in mind to collect the relevant information; otherwise little could be inferred apart from the chaotic mass of collected data. And the value of Induction will be further dealt with in the chapter on Popper, where we shall see that according to Popper science in reality uses very little of the Inductive method.

Bacon’s book The New Atlantis is a work standing in the great tradition of the utopian-philosophic novels that stretches from Plato (Republic) and More (Utopia) to Huxley (Brave New World). It describes a fictional island, and the community living there is leading a prosperous and flourishing life, using the Baconian methods of scientific research.

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)

Thomas Hobbes was an English political philosopher, and one of the firsts to explain a state in purely secular terms. Leviathan is the most important of his works. Hobbes advocated a strictly materialistic point of view; he thought of humans as nothing more than sophisticated machines, whose functions and activities could be explained in mechanistic terms. In fact, Hobbes is such a full-fledged materialist that he defines Ethics as dealing with movements within the nervous system and Politics as dealing with the effects of one nervous system on another or group of nervous systems! Life is for him nothing but a motion of limbs. He believed that the succession of our thoughts is not arbitrary and random, but determined by laws: All humans act in such a way as to relieve their discomfort and to maintain and enhance their own well-being and welfare. Hence, good is nothing but an object of appetite (desire), while bad is just an object of aversion. This point of view was an important early influence on the ethical philosophy of utilitarianism[1].

In Hobbes’s view, man is inclined to live independently, acting on the sole motive of self-interest without any regard for others. This naturally leads to a state of war with everyone against everyone or "war of all against all" (bellum omnium contra omnes). Life in such a state is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". But man wishes to end this state of war; the only solution is to enter into a social contract — a mutually beneficial agreement to surrender the individual interests by choosing a sovereign, or a sovereign body, which will exercise authority over them and put an end to the state of universal conflict. This social contract is not to be viewed as a definite historical event but as an ‘explanatory myth’, justifying the formation of a state. The state is seen as a new, artificial person (Leviathan), who is responsible for social order and public welfare.

The sovereign has unlimited power in Hobbes’s philosophy. It is realised that the sovereign may be tyrannical but Hobbes believes that the worst despotism is a better alternative than anarchy. The only right which Hobbes gives to the individual is the right of self-preservation, since it was for this very motive the social contract was made. Hence, State is not allowed to harm the preservation of the individual.
Hobbes defines liberty very precisely; it is the absence of any external hindrance or obstruction to motion. This represents the mechanistic philosophy of Hobbes. Water, when its motion is not blocked, moves from higher height to lower height, and in this sense, it is ‘free’. When a man has freedom to do what he wills, he is free, although he has as much choice as water has of moving downhill.

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Footnotes:

[1] The doctrine that what is useful is good

René Descartes

2008-07-03T01:15:00.002+06:00

(1596-1650)

“If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties,” says Francis Bacon and thus begins Modern Philosophy. Given the background of centuries of dogmatic scholastic philosophy of saints, it is not surprising that the philosophers decided to take a fresh start and use the shovel of doubt to clear off the debris from the building site. Descartes[1] was among the first to build a new philosophical system from scratch and is rightly known as the father of modern philosophy. Although he has not managed to completely emancipate himself from the scholastic philosophy, he shows a new freshness and innovativeness in his thought, which was carried on by his successors.

Descartes was a French philosopher, scientist and mathematician. He was deeply impressed by mathematics, and is well known for his systematization of analytic geometry. The fact that mathematical method of reasoning gives absolute certainty influenced him greatly, and he sought to give philosophy the same certainty as mathematics. He argued that we should turn to mathematical reasoning as a model for progress in human knowledge. Descartes and his followers believed in deduction, the principle which presupposes some self-evident premises and then draws conclusions from them.

Descartes begins with the principle that only the indubitable is to be accepted and whatever is doubtful must be rejected. He mistrusts everything that he knows—literally, everything. Not only the information given by the senses, his age-old beliefs, his moral values but also things like logic and mathematics. But what is the basis for this doubt? Consider perceptual illusion; a traveller in desert sees a mirage and thinks it is water. Madmen have hallucinations and imagine things that do not exist. Is it not possible that what we perceive is also an illusion? But perceptual illusion can’t be extended to all the empirical knowledge we have. Descartes then examines the dream problem: While we dream, we feel as if we are in the real world. Perhaps, I am in a dream at this very moment. What if this whole of external world is nothing but my dream? Hence, we can doubt the existence of the whole of external reality. What about mathematics and logic? Surely they give us the absolute certainty we need. Descartes goes to the extreme of mistrust and asks his readers to imagine an omnipotent, evil god, who tempers with their minds and causes them to believe in irrational arguments, making them appear rational. [e.g. suppose that 2+2 is not equal to 4, but the deceiving god forces my reason to believe so.] Therefore, even the validity of mathematics cannot survive this dissolvant skepticism. Such a method of doubt is known as ‘Cartesian doubt’ (or Hyperbolic doubt).

This is where we are at the moment: we distrust what our senses tell us, we consider the world to be a mere dream and we suppose a malevolent god who deviates our reason from arriving at true conclusions. Since everything can be doubted, does it mean that we can be certain of nothing?

No, it doesn’t. There is still one thing which survives this extreme mistrust: my very existence. For if I doubt, then I must think, and if I think I must exist. Even a deceiving god can’t deceive me if I didn’t exist. Even if I am deceived, at least I exist. This Descartes expressed as cogitio ergo sum [I think, therefore I am[2].] No matter what I doubt, I can’t doubt the indubitable fact that I exist. The ancient Greek engineer Archimedes said, 'Give me a fulcrum and a firm point, and I alone can move the earth.' In the same manner, Descartes was searching for one indubitable fact to build his philosophical edifice, and this ‘firm point’ is the cogito.

[This argument by Descartes is not very original. In fact, it appears before in the philosophy of St. Augustine. Augustine writes, 'On none of these points do I fear the arguments of the skeptics of the Academy who say: what if you are deceived? For if I am deceived, I am. For he who does not exist cannot be deceived. And if I am deceived, by this same token I am' (City of God, 11:26). However, this was a very small and unimportant part of the Saint’s philosophy.]

Here we must understand that by ‘I think, therefore I am’ Descartes is not making a miniature deduction[3], which goes from ‘I think’ to ‘I exist’ [although it appears to be so due to the word therefore]. Descartes himself helps clarify this that the cogito is not deduced, but is recognized by a simple and immediate act of mental intuition. For Descartes, the very act of thought implies the existence of the ‘I’ that thinks. It is the intuitive realization of one’s own existence, and an expression of the self-conscious awareness.

The ‘cogito ergo sum’ has been criticized by many later philosophers. In ‘I think, therefore I am’, the word ‘I’ is logically illegitimate. The ultimate premise of Descartes should have been ‘There are thoughts’. When Descartes states, ‘I am a thing that thinks’, he is making an unproved assumption of I existing as a thing. However, cogito is acceptable in the grammatical sense.[4] The use of ‘I’ may be justified for the sake of grammatical convenience, but not in the sense of ‘I’ being a thing.

Cogito is the most impressive part of Descartes’s philosophy and it is surprising to see that from this point onwards Descartes fails to apply the skepticism to his own philosophy which he had applied earlier to the knowledge of the world. Descartes says that when he contemplates the certainty of his existence, he finds this truth clear and distinct. He proposes a general rule: everything he perceives clearly and distinctly is true.

Can anything about the external world also be proven beyond doubt? Descartes says yes, but he needs to prove the existence of God to do so. He puts forward a number of arguments, all of which have been derived from scholastic philosophy. Of these arguments, we shall consider here only one, which is known as the Ontological argument. The argument goes like this:

I have, in my mind, an idea of a supremely perfect being. This being is perfect in all respects. Existence is a perfection, hence this supremely perfect being exist. We can understand it with a help of an analogy. We have an idea of a triangle. This triangle has a necessary characteristic that the sum of its three angles is equal to 180°. We can’t form an idea of a triangle, which doesn’t have this characteristic, just as we can’t have an idea of a circle, which has no circumference. Existence is a characteristic of a supremely perfect being, because if it doesn’t exist, it would be imperfect. Hence, the arguments states, the supremely perfect being must exist if we are to have an idea of it. Because we have an idea of God, therefore, God exists.

This argument has had a very mixed reception by philosophers. An average person considers it as out rightly absurd. However, most philosophers have treated this argument with respect. A logical refutation was given by Bertrand Russell in his theory of descriptions[5]. He says that although ‘exists’ is grammatically a predicate[6], logically it performs a different function. “Horses exist” mean that “There are x’s such that ‘x is a horse’ is true.” In the same way, “Mermaids do not exist” is equal to saying “There are no x’s such that ‘x is a mermaid’ is true.” By saying that horses exist, we do not mean, “Horses have a quality that they exist”. Instead we simply imply that there are objects in this world to which we can apply the summarized description in the word ‘horse’. Seeing ‘existence’ is this manner, the Ontological argument fails.

However, let us continue with Descartes’s philosophy. He says that since God is perfect, and deception is a product of imperfection, it means that God does not deceive us. In fact, Descartes is now confident that God being good and non-deceiving has bestowed on him the intellectual abilities necessary for the apprehension of truth.

Descartes continues that as sense perception is a passive ability [i.e. we do not will ourselves to perceive the external world] and I am naturally designed to believe that the ideas of physical objects produced in me are caused by some external source outside my control, it must mean that these external objects truly exist because God has given us this natural belief, and God doesn’t deceive us. Hence, Descartes has shown that he exists, God exists and the external reality exists.

Descartes proceeds to explain this world. He says that there are two substances [a ‘substance’ is a basic and eternal reality] apart from God, namely matter and mind. Matter is characterized by extension and mind has the attribute of thought. Descartes believes that mind is present only in human being, and all other animals are mere biological machines. The question arises, if a human has both mind and matter, then how do these interact? My mind decides to lift the arm, and the arm lifts; how does this interaction take places? Owing to the sharp distinction and wide gulf between mind and matter, Descartes is a called a dualist and this part of his philosophy is known as dualism. Descartes separated the two so much that it became a problem to explain this mutual influence. He himself was not able to solve it, and gave a tentative explanation of ‘Pineal gland’ as the site where this interaction took place, but this was immediately rejected by his successors.

The philosophers succeeding Descartes were primarily concerned with this problem of mind-matter dualism. These philosophers are known as Cartesians and their philosophy is collectively known as Cartesianism.

One of the most important philosophers of Cartesian tradition was Geulincx (1624-1669), who gave the idea known as theory of ‘two clocks’. Assume that we have two clocks which both keep perfect time: whenever one points to hour, the other will strike. And if we could see only the first one and hear only the second one, it would seem as if the first had caused the second to strike. This is precisely the case with mind and matter. Each is ‘divinely synchronized’ and the actions of mind and matter are merely parallel i.e. they do not affect each but only seem to do so. Our mind thinks to lift the arm, and this mental event is precisely synchronized with the bodily event of lifting of arm, and has not caused it. Since physical laws strictly govern all matter, and there is no freedom, and mind is synchronized with matter, it means that mental series of events is also strictly following these laws and has no free will. Hence, Cartesianism leads to pure determinism[7].

Another important Cartesian philosopher was Malebranche (1638-1715). He believed that mind and matter are causally independent and can’t influence each other. When a change takes place in matter, God produces a parallel effect in mind. Hence, in sense perception, we "see all things in god." And similarly, our wills have no causal influence on the material world, but God provides for the coordination of our volitions with the movement of bodies.

Descartes had considerable influence on subsequent philosophy. In the next chapter we shall deal with Spinoza and see how he handles the Cartesian notion of ‘substance’ and develops a highly interesting and influential philosophy.

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Footnotes:

[1] pronounced ‘Day-cart’
[2] This is known as Descartes’s cogito.
[3] Deduction always contains two premises and a conclusion. For example,
Socrates is a man
All men are mortal
Therefore, Socrates is mortal.
‘I think therefore I am’ contains only one premise, ‘I think’. Hence it is not a deduction.
[4] Later philosophers have claimed that there is no unified thinking being classified as ‘I’ but rather it is a series of individual mental events. In ‘I think’ “I seems to be only a string of events… and [think] really covers complicated relations between events. … It is the particular events which are certain, not the ‘I think’ which Descartes made the basis of his philosophy.” [Outline of Philosophy, by Bertrand Russell. Page 192-193]
[5] See the chapter on Logical Analysis and Russell for details
[6] Predicate is that part of a proposition that is affirmed or denied about the subject. For example, in the proposition: We are mortal, mortal is the predicate. [Excerpted from The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition Copyright © 1992 by Houghton Mifflin Company.]
[7] That is, our every act is the inevitable effect of a cause, and there is no free will.

Benedict De Spinoza

2008-07-03T01:10:00.002+06:00

(1632 – 1677)

“He alone is free who lives with free consent under the entire guidance of reason,” proclaimed the Dutch philosopher Benedict Spinoza[1], and then proceeded to earn his own freedom. Spinoza is one of the greatest of the modern philosophers, and is remembered not only for his philosophy but also for the nobility of his character. Regarded as “the most impious atheist that ever lived upon the face of the earth”[2] in his own time, a modern student can’t help feeling love, admiration and sympathy for this great intellectual. Russell calls him “the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers”[3]. Most modern philosophers have similarly expressed a positive opinion of Spinoza’s character.

Spinoza belonged to the Jews that had fled to Amsterdam from Portugal to escape the Inquisition. He was educated in Jewish learning and was an excellent student. Soon, however, he began to have doubts regarding different problems of theology, which led him to increasing deviation from the traditional Jewish doctrines. He studied philosophy and was greatly influenced by Descartes. His heretical ideas began to spread and he was excommunicated from the Jewish community in 1656. Attempts were also later made in his life to assassinate him. Spinoza found himself in bitter and terrible isolation and spent the rest of his life quietly, devoted to the development of his philosophy. Only a few books were published in his own lifetime, and his greatest work Ethics Geometrically Demonstrated was published after his death.

In Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (The Treatise on Religion and State), Spinoza anticipates a great deal of later work on Biblical criticism or ‘higher criticism’. Spinoza maintains that the language of Bible is deliberately and intentionally metaphorical and that the prophets used to express their ideas and thoughts allegorically to make them influential and understandable for the uneducated masses. Their objective was not to give a logical and reasonable account of religious ideas but to present them in a style, which would attract and affect the people. This is the reason for the abundant accounts of miracles and supernatural events; people tend to believe that God is at work only when nature is abrogated. They conceive of God and nature as two separate entities but who in reality are not separate. Interpreted in this metaphorical manner, Spinoza maintains, Bible contains nothing contrary to reason, and reveals the profound and deep insight of the great religious leaders.

Ethics is unique and important because it presents philosophy in a very different manner—geometrically. Descartes had put forward the principle that philosophy should look up to mathematics as an ideal but he himself didn’t act upon it devotedly. This was done by Spinoza, who expressed his thought in the style of Euclid with definitions, axioms, and theorems. This makes him difficult to read and understand. He begins with a small number of axioms and definitions, and deduces his whole philosophy from them. His attempt is splendid and the reader of Ethics is bound to admire it. But it nevertheless reveals the hold of rationalism on Spinoza; he believed that one can understand the whole universe and the human life only by the logical analysis and extrapolation by deduction of self-evident axioms. Descartes believed the same, and so did Leibniz. This is the hallmark of the rationalistic tradition of philosophy. Rationalism has gone out of practice with the advent of scientific outlook, according to which facts about the world and universe have to be discovered by observation and experiments. They cannot be discovered by merely theoretical means or reason alone.

Ethics can be seen as consisting of three parts. The first putting forward Spinoza’s metaphysics, the second giving a theory of emotions and the third explains a theory of ethics, which is perhaps the most original part of Spinoza.

Spinoza is a proponent of Pantheism[4] and monism. Descartes believed in dualism; he had considered the world to be made up of two distinct substances which he called mind and matter. Although Descartes did believe in God as a separate substance which was superior to both mind and matter, but the world nevertheless existed separately from God. Spinoza believes in only one substance, which he calls God. The world as a whole is a single substance, whose parts are not capable of existing alone. There is only one underlying reality of the world, and all individual or particular things are its expressions in different forms. Spinoza calls them modes, a temporary expression of the substance. You, your house, all the different animals and plants, this planet itself are all modes. There is another distinction between ‘temporal order’ and ‘eternal order’. The former is the world of individual things and particular events, while the latter is the world of laws governing these things and events. Spinoza sees nature under a double aspect: natura naturata (nature begotten, or God’s creation or passive nature), which consists of the particular things and contents of nature, and natura naturans (nature begetting or God creating or active nature) the active, vital and creative aspect of nature, which gives rise to the contents of the passive nature[5]. All these different distinctions are more or less the same for Spinoza: Substance and modes, eternal order and temporal order, active nature and passive nature, God and the world. These dichotomies are synonymous and explain the same thing.

Hence, Spinoza is led to deny an anthropomorphic concept of God. Most people, even though they may not admit this fact, have an idea of God in their mind that resembles that of a man in power, such as a king. It is foolish of humans to think of God as an aristocrat of a male sex seated in the stars; if triangles had religion, their God would have been three sided! Spinoza believes that God is the underlying design and laws of the universe. All that is, is in God.

Spinoza does not think of God as separate from nature. He doesn’t believe in a God that reveals his presence by the abrogation of a set of ‘natural’ laws. Instead, Spinoza envisions a God that is revealed in the order and harmony of nature. For Spinoza, the will of God and the laws of the nature are one and the same thing.

In the universe presented by Spinoza, determinism prevails over everything and nothing can escape from the laws. Consequently, there is no free will [Not, at least, in the common sense view of ‘free will’] and no element of chance in the events of the world. We are as much bound by these laws as the objects are by laws of physics. A result of this determinism is that it is logically impossible that the events could have happened place in any other way than they have in this world.

There is no such thing as good or evil in the universe. These are terms relative to human existence; God is independent of all such classifications. “I would warn you that I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused.” But then what of the evil that we see in this world? Was the mass killing of Jews by Hitler not an evil thing? Is the persecution being faced by Palestinians not evidence that the world is being plagued by evil? Spinoza answers that this evil exists only from the view of us finite creatures. There is no evil in the world when things and events are seen in relation to the whole, and not as individual, finite happenings. Therefore, all evil is illusory.

Spinoza denies the dualism between mind and matter. He considers them as two attributes of God, who has infinite attributes but we are only aware of two of them. There is only one underlying reality, seen inwardly as mind and thought, and seen outwardly as matter and motion. Since there are not two different substances, Spinoza doesn’t face the problem of interaction between mind and matter, which so haunted the Cartesians. Will (the series of ideas) and intellect (the series of actions or volitions) are also, for Spinoza, the same things and the difference is only a matter of degree. Volition is just an idea which has remained long enough in the consciousness to become an action.

All free will is an illusion. Man considers himself free because he is aware of his actions but not of their causes. We are bound by the same cosmic law that binds everything else. Spinoza gives the example of a stone projected in space thinking that it determines its own trajectory and target; same is with humans, like the thrown-stone we are bound to move in the trajectory defined by nature’s laws, but being conscious only of our desires, we fabricate the false idea of free will.

Spinoza believes self-preservation to be the fundamental motive of passion; everything attempts to preserve its own being. However, this desire of self-preservation will change its shape when one becomes aware of the reality of the world and God. He would realize that real self-preservation is not in maintaining the appearance of separateness but rather in unification with the whole. Spinoza believes that wrong actions are due to ignorance and that if a man is really aware of the reality of things, he would never do something wrong.

Time is meaningless for Spinoza; whatever happens is a part of an eternal timeless universe. All events that happen are of temporary nature and the wise man attempts to see them as God sees them, sub specie aeternitatis, from the perspective of eternity. Therefore, all emotions that are related with time, such as fear, hope or expectation, are disapproved by Spinoza. Since time is illusory, there is no difference between the past and the future, and to think so is contrary to reason. Only due to ignorance do we believe that we can change or prevent the future events; they are as much as determined as the past and nothing that we do will ever change them.

There is, of course, no survival after death in the religious sense. Personal survival is certainly not possible, but there is nevertheless an impersonal sort of survival which arises by our union with the whole.

Spinoza interprets freedom as self-knowledge; when I understand the causes underlying my actions and volitions, when I see myself as a part of an undivided whole, when I become aware of what I do and why I do, then I am free. We cannot change what is going on, because whatever happens happens due to the eternal law of God. As far as man is an unwilling part of the whole, he is in bondage, but when he understands the reality and sees things from the perspective of eternity, he is free. It may be difficult to lead such a life, “But all excellent things are as difficult as they are rare.”[6]

There is, however, a contradiction in Spinoza’s philosophy which Spinoza didn’t seem to realize. If everything in nature is determined, then it means that the attitude of a person is also determined; one would be powerless to change it. Yet, Spinoza speaks of changing one’s attitude to see things from perspective of eternity and hence achieving a peace of mind. But if everything in the nature, including my attitude, is determined then it is not in my power whether to see things from the perspective of eternity or finitude of human life. As Avrum Stroll writes, “But if all events in nature are determined, then one is essentially powerless to alter his attitudes. Either he will be determined to have the sort of attitude Spinoza suggests or he will be determined not to have it. But if the latter, there is nothing he can do about acquiring it.”[7]

Although Spinoza’s metaphysics and ethics are strongly interrelated in the original philosophy and former is the basis of the latter, Russell believes that it is possible to view Spinoza’s ethics separately from his metaphysics. Seen in isolation, Spinoza’s ethics is concerned about human conduct in the full realization of the narrow limits of human power. Man becomes a victim of several misfortunes throughout his life, and it is in this case that Spinoza’s idea of the meaninglessness of time is effective. Death should not be feared. Of course, it should be avoided in all cases, if possible but it should be not be accompanied by a horror or dread of death. We should see our personal troubles in the view of the infinite stretch of time, and we will realize that they are only misfortunes to us and not to the universe. The importance of this ethical point of view is best expressed by Russell: “There are even times when it is comforting to reflect that human life, with all that it contains of evil and suffering, is an infinitesimal part of the life of the universe. Such reflections may not suffice to constitute a religion, but in a painful world they are a help towards sanity and an antidote to the paralysis of utter despair.”[8]

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Footnotes:

[1] His original name was Baruch Spinoza, which he later changed to Benedict Spinoza.
[2] Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Pocket Books , page 158
[3] Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, Routledge, London, page 552
[4] The doctrine that equates God with the universe and its phenomenon
[5] Compare this with Bergson’s élan vital.
[6] Ending sentence of Spinoza’s Ethics
[7] Philosophy Made Simple, Richard H. Popkin and Avrum Stroll , Doubleday & Company, Inc. USA, page 36
[8] Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, Routledge, London, page 562

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

2008-07-03T01:08:00.001+06:00

(1646-1716)

The German philosopher Leibniz (also spelled as Leibnitz) was one of the greatest minds of all time. He is also known as the ‘Aristotle of the Seventeenth Century’ because he touched nearly every subject under the sun. His works cover a broad range of topics such as mathematics, philosophy, theology, law, diplomacy, politics, history, philology, and physics. He invented calculus independently of Newton, and is considered the forefather of modern mathematical logic.

There are, however, two philosophical systems associated with Leibniz; one, which he proclaimed and publicized, the other that he kept to himself and was discovered from his manuscripts very later after his death. The former is shallow, and doesn’t reveal the real intellect of Leibniz. The latter philosophy is profound, consistent and logical.

Let us begin with Leibniz’s philosophy of substance. As we know, Descartes believed in two substances matter and mind, apart from God; Spinoza believed in only one substance, namely God, and considered extension and thought as two attributes of God. Leibniz, however, disagreed with both. He believed in an infinite number of substances, which he called ‘monads’. He didn’t consider extension to be an attribute of a substance, because extension involves plurality and could develop only as a result of aggregation of substances. Leibniz maintained that extension was divisible, but substance was not, therefore extension could not be ascribed to a substance. Each monad is unextended, and possesses only thought as its attribute. Hence, each monad is a soul. Each monad is an entelechy, and has in it a certain perfection and self-sufficiency.

Humans are composed wholly of monads, each of which is an immortal soul, but there is one dominant monad, which is the soul. Each monad is different from any other monad, and is continuously changing. These changes have an internal cause because nothing external can influence them. Leibniz retained the Cartesian notion that two substances cannot interact. This he expressed in his words that monads are ‘windowless’. So, all the apparent causal interactions between monads are deceptive and unreal. They only seem to affect each other because there is a ‘pre-established harmony’ between changes in one monad and another, which gives rise to the apparent interaction. As the reader will remember, this is an extension of the philosophy of ‘two clocks’ of Geulincx. Since it is odd that these infinite monads should be so precisely synchronized, Leibniz used it as a proof of the existence of God; there must have been a single outside cause, which regulated all the monads.

Leibniz doesn’t give only the pre-established harmony of monads as a proof of God’s existence. Having a sharper mind, he refined many of the old arguments of the existence of God. For example, he added to the Ontological argument the definition of perfection. He defined perfection as a ‘simple quality which is positive and absolute, and expresses without any limits whatever it does express.’ Using this definition, it was possible to show that no two perfections can be logically incompatible. However, even after the addition, the argument is still refutable by the fact that existence is not a predicate.

Another argument was the Cosmological argument. Leibniz proclaimed a belief in the law of sufficient reason [only in his popular philosophy; this law in his unpublished philosophy has a different statement], which states that there is no fact or truth that lacks a sufficient reason, why it should be so. Leibniz says that everything in the world is contingent i.e. it was logically possible for it not to exist, and therefore it doesn’t contain within itself any reason for its existence. Since, the whole of universe is contingent, there must be a sufficient reason outside the universe, which is the necessary being called God.

Kant maintained that this argument was based on the Ontological argument. If a necessary being exists, it must be a being whose essence involves existence, and this is how the Ontological argument defines God. It would be meaningless to call God the sufficient reason for the existence of the universe unless it is assumed that God is a being whose essence involves existence. Therefore, this argument, like the Ontological argument, is also not valid. Another common objection raised against this argument is that only propositions can be called logically necessary, and that it is a misuse of language to speak of a logically necessary being. Another powerful criticism is that the cosmological argument presents two possibilities: either there is a necessary being or the world is ultimately unintelligible[1]. The arguments proves the existence of God only if the second possibility has been ruled out, which it is not logically possible to rule out.

Leibniz denies the space as it appears to the senses, or the space assumed by Newtonian physics (i.e. absolute space). Location of an object is not a property of an independent space, but a property of the located object itself - and also of every other object relative to it. Consider Leibniz’s own example of leaves; there are two leaves which are absolutely identical. But if the two leaves are identical in all respects, there is no sufficient reason why one leaf is in one place, while the other leaf is in another place and not the other way. Leibniz points out that the location is a property of a monad, and since they are at two different positions, they are not the same leaves. Space (and time) are internal features of the complete concepts of things, and not extrinsic. Space and time are just ways of perceiving certain virtual relations between substances.

An important feature of Leibniz’s popular philosophy is the idea of ‘the best of all possible worlds’. A world is ‘possible’ if it doesn’t contradict the laws of logic. God thought about all these worlds before creating this actual world. Since God is good, He wished to create the best world, but the best world is not a world in which there is no evil, but in which there is the greatest excess of good over evil. There could have been a world in which there was no evil, but that would also not have contained much good, because many goods are associated with certain evils. So, although this world contains evil, it has the greatest excess of good over evil than any other possible world. Therefore, this is ‘the best of all possible worlds’[2]. This also explains the connection of sin and free will. Free will is good, but it is logically impossible that free will exists, and sin doesn’t.

This philosophy of best possible world was extremely ridiculed by Voltaire, who wrote the short novel Candide as a satire. Leibniz was caricaturized as Doctor Pangloss:

'Pangloss was professor of metaphysicotheologicocosmonigology …. “It is demonstrable,” said he, “that all is necessarily for the best end. Observe that the nose has been formed to bear spectacles…legs were visibly designed for stockings…stones were designed to construct castles…pigs were made so that we might have pork all the year round. Consequently…all is for the best.'[3]

This doctrine of best of all possible worlds, although logically possible, is not necessary. A person can create a parallel argument claiming that this was the worst of all possible worlds, and good is present because certain evils are bound up with good. Good men exist so that the wicked can punish them, and this sin of punishing would not have existed had good men not existed. This idea, although highly incredible, is also logically possible! Leibniz realizes that this world contains both good and evil, but his assumption that the good preponderates evil has no justification, and is open to debate.

Let us now see certain elements of Leibniz’s unpublished philosophy. It gives a perfect example of the importance of logic in philosophy, and Leibniz uses logic as a basis of his metaphysics. An ‘analytic’ proposition is one in which the predicate is a part of the subject e.g. ‘All mortal men are men.’ Leibniz uses two logical principles. The first is the law of contradiction, which states that all analytic propositions are true. The second is the law of sufficient reason according to which all true propositions are analytic. But consider the proposition ‘John went to London in 1981’. Does the subject contain the predicate in itself? Apparently no, but Leibniz says yes. All the sentences, which have ‘John’ as the subject, would have predicates describing whatever happens to John. The sum of all these predicates makes up the notion of ‘John’. Hence, John’s going to London in 1981 is a part of his notion, and therefore a part of the subject ‘John’. (John’s notion will include all the facts such as that John had an accident last year, that John is now working at his job, and that he will go to France next year.) Seen in this manner, the proposition ‘John went to London in 1981’ is analytic. Since all that happens to one in past, present or future is already contained in the subject, it means that all things have already been decided, and whatever is going to happen is eternally determined. Hence, there is no free will. As this idea was contrary to the Christian doctrine of sin, Leibniz carefully abstained from making it public to avoid unpopularity.

Leibniz’s esoteric philosophy also gives a different account of the creation of the world. His popular philosophy of the best of all possible worlds maintained that only that thing can exist which is compatible with the absolute goodness of the Creator, but here he takes a different position, without involving the concept of God. Leibniz states that two or more things can exist only in so far as they are “compossible” i.e. their existing together is not logically contradictory. Therefore, this world contains the largest group of compossible things. [Suppose that A is compossible with C, D and E; and B is compossible with F and G; and A and B are not compossible, then A will exist because it is compatible with larger number of objects.]

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Footnotes:

[1] Or, in other words, the world is ‘absurd’, as the Existentialists would later call it.
[2] English philosopher F.H. Bradley (1846–1924) sarcastically wrote: ‘The world is the best of all possible worlds, and everything in it is a necessary evil.’ [Appearance and Reality, Preface]
[3] Voltaire, Candide

John Locke

2008-07-03T01:06:00.002+06:00

(1632-1704)

One of the common things among Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz is that they are all rationalists. Rationalism is the system of thought, which believes in reason as a primary source of knowledge. A rationalist may also believe that man has certain innate ideas, which exist in his mind a priori, i.e. not derived from experience. Descartes was French, Spinoza was Dutch and Leibniz was German, so we often refer to this movement as Continental Rationalism.

As opposed to rationalism, another system of thought appeared in the later half of seventeenth century, which declared experience as the primary source of all human knowledge. Only the information we receive through our senses is what we can know about the world. This system of philosophy is known as Empiricism and John Locke was its founder. It was extended by Berkeley and Hume. Locke was English, Berkeley was Irish, and Hume was Scottish. Hence, we refer to their philosophy as British Empiricism. As the rationalists admired the abstract mathematical reasoning, the empiricists were inspired by the development of science and its stress on observation and experiment. Their philosophy was also crucial to the development of psychology.

John Locke was one of the most influential men of all times. His contributions have a very wide range; he was one of the initiators of the eighteenth century liberalism. He advocated democracy, religious toleration, economic freedom, and educational progress. Despite his remarkable additions to human thought and development, we shall mostly restrict ourselves to Locke as the founder of empiricism.

Locke’s most important work is An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. He begins with ideas. An idea is a broad concept and includes all the objects of understanding and contents of knowledge (sensory images, thoughts and memories, hopes and desires, and political and moral views etc, are all included in the term ‘idea’.) Locke inquires about the source of these ideas: from where do we derive them?

A prevalent answer was that many ideas are innate. Locke utilizes a great part of his book in refuting innate ideas. There are no innate ideas present in the human mind. He maintains that neither logic and metaphysics nor principles of morality are stamped on our mind from birth. The wide diversity of human views on these matters itself is a strong argument against this concept, but even if an idea is universal and present among all persons, it doesn’t mean that the idea is innate. In fact, the generality of such ideas can be better explained in terms of self-evidence and shared experience. Locke’s main argument is that since mind is defined as consciousness, there can be nothing in the mind of which it is not aware. If innate ideas like God and causality are present from birth, then even infants, savages and untutored men must be aware of them, but we find even the most learned philosophers differing on these problems. Hence, there are no such innate ideas.[1] It must be understood that Locke is denying innate ideas, not innate faculties. The mind has no innate ideas, but it has innate faculties: it perceives, remembers, and combines the ideas that come to it from without; it also desires, deliberates, and wills; and these mental activities are themselves the source of a new class of ideas, as we shall see.

After a detailed refutation, Locke gives the answer that he considers to be correct: all ideas are derived from experience through senses. He calls the mind at birth a tabula rasa, an empty slate. It is bare of all knowledge; it is an unfurnished room. This vacant room is furnished with ideas by two means: sensation and reflection. Sensation depends wholly upon senses, and is the perception of the external objects, e.g. ‘soft’, ‘green’, ‘sour’, ‘hot’ are all ideas of sensation. Reflection is concerned with the internal operations of our mind, it is an ‘internal sense’ by which we think about what we perceive and feel. When we form ideas by thinking, reasoning, believing or doubting, we are using reflection.

Locke says that what we can perceive directly are only simple ideas. For example, when I am eating an apple, I do not perceive the ‘apple’ as a unit idea. I receive a whole series of simple sensations: there is something green and round, and tastes juicy and sharp. It is only when these simple ideas are experienced a large number of times that an idea of ‘apple’ is formed. Hence, ‘apple’ is a complex idea. Since all knowledge comes through simple ideas, all knowledge must be reducible to simple ideas. An immediate objection is raised that if all our knowledge comes from experience, then how can we have an idea of non-existent things like unicorns, mermaids, and vampires. The answer is that our mind classifies and organizes things, and often does a ‘cut and paste job’. That is, it takes different simple ideas and joins them together to form complex ideas, which do not exist in reality. We can think of a ‘mermaid’ only because we have an idea of a woman and a fish. We can conceive a ‘unicorn’ because we already have ideas of a horn and a horse. [And, as a psychologist might add, we can think of God as a kind father because we have ideas of kindness and father.]

Locke also classifies between primary qualities and secondary qualities. Primary qualities are the intrinsic feature of an object, such as its mass, figure, motion, volume, number etc Secondary qualities are not present in the thing itself, but produce in us the ideas of color, sound, smell, taste etc. An apple is intrinsically round but it is not intrinsically red; it is one’s own subjective experience. You may see the apple as green but a colorblind person will see a different color. But you would both agree that its mass is 5 grams. You may perceive a lemon as sweet or sour, but either it is round or it is not. Therefore, secondary qualities vary from person to person but primary qualities do not. This classification was very useful in Physics and dominated the scientific thought for a long time, although it was rejected by philosophers succeeding Locke. This classification was also meant to clarify the problem of perceptual illusion. Locke maintained that this illusion is restricted to secondary qualities and hence, is purely subjective.

Locke initiated empiricism as a system of philosophy but he himself didn’t properly apply its principles. Berkeley developed empiricism after Locke and in Hume it reached its climax.
In his political philosophy, Locke, like Hobbes, also discusses the origin of a State. Locke imagines a primitive condition in which individuals exist without any mutual authority, and rely upon their own abilities. However, this state is not the state of Hobbes’s war with all against all, because everyone uses the faculty of reason, and is bound by the ‘self-evident laws of nature’. They emerge from this primitive state by a social contract, and gather under the authority of the government. But unlike Hobbes’s social contract, the government is a party of the contract, and the contract is revocable, if the government doesn’t fulfill its terms and conditions.

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Footnotes:

[1] Psychology, however, maintains that there can be contents in the mind of which we are not consciousness i.e. the unconscious part of mind. However, it was not until the time of Sigmund Freud that the idea of an unconscious mind began to be accepted. Before Freud, Nietzsche had also hinted about the idea of unconscious motives and desires in his writings.

George Berkeley

2008-07-03T01:04:00.001+06:00

(1685-1753)

“All the choir of heaven and furniture of earth - in a word, all those bodies which compose the frame of the world - have not any subsistence without a mind,” was the view of George Berkeley, an Irish bishop and philosopher. He was an empiricist and is among the most prominent proponents of Empirical Idealism. Idealism is the view that physical objects are mind dependent and have no existence outside the mind that contemplates them. That is, physical things exist only in the sense that they are perceived. In very simple words: matter doesn’t exist![1] Berkeley was greatly troubled by the rise of skepticism and atheism. He viewed materialism as the principal cause of this trend and made it is his target to disprove materialism and to prove the existence of God.

Berkeley strongly criticizes the idea of abstract ideas. [For example, I have only seen particular triangles, but supporters of abstract ideas maintain that I have in my mind an abstract idea of a ‘triangle’, which is independent of these particular triangles I have seen.] Berkeley believes that the human mind possesses no such abstract idea. Taking the example of a horse, Berkeley says that if we examine our minds we will find an idea of this or that particular horse, but never an idea of ‘horsiness’ or an abstract horse.

Berkeley, in his Idealism, makes use of a confusion created by Locke. Locke had used the word idea as encompassing two meanings: 1) idea as a content of knowledge and 2) idea as whatsoever the mind perceives. Although he intended to keep the two usages separate, it resulted in the confusion between the objects of awareness with state of being aware. Berkeley retained this confused usage.

Berkeley accepted the principle lay down by Locke that all knowledge we obtain comes from senses and experience. However, he criticized Locke for the improper application of this concept. He agreed with Locke on the subjectivity of secondary qualities i.e. the qualities like taste, color, sound and smell are not present in the object itself, but are produced by us. But Locke had also said that primary qualities are present intrinsically in the object. Berkeley disagreed with this. The primary qualities are as subjective as secondary qualities. He pointed out that his perception of shape and size depend upon the position of his eyes, his experience of solidity depends upon his sense of touch, and his idea of motion is always relative to his own position. A straight stick appears bent when placed in water; a bacterium appears larger when seen through a microscope. The distinction between primary and secondary qualities is, therefore, not valid.

Berkeley maintained that the only things which exist are what we perceive, and, he said, we have never experienced or perceived “matter”. If the reader is inclined to a skeptical smile, it is not surprising. Obviously, a common man would say, we have perceived matter. Whenever the hammer strikes our thumb, what else do we perceive, if not matter? Indeed, Dr. Johnson[2] responded to this by kicking a stone and proving, as he thought, that the stone exists.

But did that really prove that the stone exists? Did Dr. Johnson actually ‘experience’ the stone? When he kicked it, he must have felt something hard and solid. He had the sensation of hardness, but he never felt the actual matter of the stone. He might have kicked a stone in dream and experienced the same pain, but there is no stone present in this case. Berkeley insisted that all sensible objects are nothing more than collections of sensible qualities, so they are merely complex ideas in the minds of those who perceive them. Therefore, there are no material objects. It must be understood that Berkeley is not denying the existence of sensible things i.e. of what is perceived directly by the senses. But he says that these ‘things’ are not material objects, but ‘ideas’ present in the mind.

Berkeley believes that ‘To be is to be perceived’ and ‘To be is to perceive’. He says that no such thing can exist which neither perceives nor is being perceived. He asks his readers to think of a sensible object existing independently of any perceiver. It may appear to be an easy task, but it is not so. Suppose you conceive of something very far away — suppose, a house in an isolated jungle — that no one perceives. But if I am thinking about it, it is present in my mind; and since it is present in my mind, the supposed house is nevertheless mental.

This raises a little problem: the existence of what I see depends on my seeing it. So, does a thing ‘disappear’ whenever I close my eyes? Does it mean that whenever I blink, the thing pops out of existence and is again created? As the reader will feel, it is a very absurd notion, although, strictly speaking, it practically makes no difference.

Nonetheless, Berkeley has a way out of it. He says that the existence of what I perceive does not depend only on my perceiving it; it will exist as long as anyone perceives it. When I close my eyes, the object infront of me will continue to exist if someone is perceving it. And this ‘someone’ happens to be God. Even when none of us perceives any object, God does. All things are permanently present in the mind of God, and they exist independently of our perception. So, Berkeley claimed that the existence of God is far more clearly perceived than the existence of man himself. Hence, Berkeley thought, materialism was defeated and belief in God was restored.

However, Berkeley has his critics. His arguments are not without flaws and can be refuted to a certain extent. Bertrand Russell writes: “He [Berkeley] thinks he is proving that all reality is mental; what he is proving is that we perceive qualities, not things, and that qualities are relative to the percipient.”[3]

Referring to the challenge to conceive an object [say, a house] which no one perceives, Russell answers: “‘I do not mean that I have in mind the image of a house; when I say that I can conceive a house which no one perceives, what I really mean is that I can understand the proposition “there is a house which no one perceives”, or, better still, “there is a house which no one either perceives or conceives.”.’ This proposition is composed entirely of intelligible words … I am sure that it cannot be shown to be self-contradictory.”[4]

It is possible for things to exist, which have never been conceived or perceived before, for example: the series of integers goes on to infinity; it means that there would be many integers, which none has ever thought of, and yet, they exist. However, Berkeley can respond to this by saying that the integer only comes into existence when one thinks of it, or perhaps that God has thought of all the integers up to infinity.

Berkeley was, in fact, only a partial empiricist and had failed to develop the empirical principles to their logical conclusions. This was pointed out by Hume, who shall be under our consideration in the next chapter.

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Footnotes:

[1] Idealism may also mean, such as when applied to Kant, that an objective external reality exists, but a substantial part of the objects is determined by our perception and understanding. [See Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy, page 273]
[2] Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
[3] Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, Routledge, London, page 624
[4] Ibid, page 627.

David Hume

2008-07-02T13:23:00.001+06:00

(1711-1776)

The Scottish philosopher David Hume is one of the most brilliant and skeptical of philosophers. Our ideas of epistemology would have been very different had Hume not been born. He developed empiricist philosophy to its logical zenith and challenged traditional philosophical beliefs in such drastic a manner that the world was shocked. And his sharpness remains supreme because his arguments have still not been countered effectively. Indeed, such is the nature of Hume’s philosophy that Russell is led to state: “There are only two attitudes towards Hume’s arguments: to accept them, or to ignore them.” So, let us see what this skeptic has to say.

Hume presented his views in his chief philosophical work Treatise of Human Nature, which, against Hume’s expectations, was completely ignored by the philosophers. (In Hume’s own words: it fell dead-born from the press.) Later, Hume shortened and diluted the Treatise into Inquiry into Human Understanding, and it was through this book that he was known. It was after reading the Inquiry that Kant began the journey of his own philosophical thinking.

Hume begins with a distinction between our mental contents: impressions and ideas. Impressions are the direct, clear and forceful result of immediate experience; ideas are the faint and faded copies of these impressions. For example, the words you are reading right now on this page are impressions, but the words of your last assignment present in your memory are ideas. Hume says that every simple idea has a simple impression, and every simple impression has a corresponding idea. This is clearly a restatement of Locke’s principle that all ideas must enter through experience. Therefore, if no impression is associated with a term, it means that the term is altogether insignificant. And Hume uses this technique to analyze many of the terms we use, such as ‘causality’, ‘matter’ and ‘mind’.

Our mind links ideas in many different ways such as resemblance [Adam looks like James], contiguity [you are sitting on the chair] and cause-and-effect [a moving marble striking a stationary marble causes the latter to move].

Hume distinguishes between two sorts of beliefs: Relations of Ideas and Matters of Fact. The former deals with only association of ideas within the mind and includes logic and mathematics. The latter concerns the nature of existing things, and it is these sorts of beliefs that Hume wishes to analyze and determine their origin.

First of all Hume analyses the principle of causation i.e. the view that an effect is produced by a cause. For example, consider the example of two striking marbles. The moving marble strikes the stationary marble, and the stationary marble starts moving. What have we experienced? We have perceived two events: 1) The moving marble strikes the stationary marble 2) The stationary marble starts moving. And we perceive the following relations between these two events:

1. Contiguity: The two events are contiguous.
2. Priority: The first event occurs before the second one.
3. Constant Conjunction: The two events occur together as many times as we observe them.

Hume says that we have experienced only these three relations in the above example, and we have never experienced the moving marble causing the stationary marble to move. We have the impressions of two events but we do not have impression of the causation itself; hence, there is no logical basis to believe in cause and effect.

Here the principle of Induction also involves itself. A person may object saying that since in all observations made the two events occur together, we are justified to believe that they will always occur together. But Hume explains that induction is also not based on reason. Consider the example of a stone falling down. Every common man believes a stone dropped will always fall towards the earth, but Hume says that this belief is not rational. Let us inquire: why do we believe that a stone will always fall towards the earth? The answer is that because we have seen this happen millions of times. Hume agrees that we have experienced a stone falling to the ground many times but we have never experienced the stone falling to the ground always. [We have seen it falling to the ground always in the past but we haven’t yet experienced it falling every time in the future.] Similarly, Hume questions why do we believe that the sun will rise tomorrow? It is because we have seen it happen always in the past. But just because an event has always taken place in the past doesn’t mean that it will certainly happen in the future.

The doctrine presented here can be stated in two parts 1) There is no such thing as causality, and 2) The principle of Induction is not a valid principle. For example, if B follows A in all our observations, then 1) A doesn’t cause B and 2) it is not necessary that B will always follow A. We can only say that it is probable that B will follow A, but this probability is not a certainty, and it is always in the danger of being refuted by fact.

Then, Hume comes to the external world. He says that we have never really ‘experienced’ the external world. We perceive only impressions, which we causally assume to be caused by an external object, but we have no direct experience of the presumed cause. And Hume has just shown that causality is an irrational belief. As we perceive objects only by means of ideas, we cannot use them to establish a causal connection between the things and the objects they are supposed to represent. Hence, our knowledge of external world is not based on reason and logic, and there is no reason to believe that the external world exists.

Hume now attacks an age old belief, namely, the belief in the Self. Descartes based his whole philosophy on I think and ‘I’ had an importance in his system. Berkeley too gave a lot of emphasis on mind in his philosophy. But, Hume questions, have we ever perceived our self, or our mind? He answers in negative and says that we have no impression of the self. No matter how closely we analyse our thoughts and mental operations, we never actually experience ‘I’. What we do perceive is a rapid succession of individual and separate ideas, and there is no logical evidence of any sort of their coherence and integrity. Thus, the “Self” cannot enter into our knowledge except as a ‘bundle’ of perceptions! The self is nothing “but a bundle or collection of different perceptions which succeed one another with inconceivable rapidity and are in a perpetual flux or movement.” [This was an inevitable conclusion of empiricism, but Berkeley didn’t proceed to it.]

“If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, "Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number?" No. "Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence?" No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion,” Hume states somberly.

These conclusions are certainly disastrous. They logically reduce Hume’s position to that no knowledge is possible by reason. Does this mean that reason can tell us nothing? Is there nothing to be learnt from experience and observation? If not logic, what then are the origins of the ideas of causality, matter and self? Habit, Hume answers. All our reasoning concerning cause and effect is derived from custom. We have been so used to these ‘succession of events’ that they have become a habit. “Custom, then, is the great guide of human life”[1] says Hume. His skepticism has shown that pure empiricism does not give a sufficient basis for science, for the whole of science rests on the idea of cause and effect. The question raised by Hume is not whether the sun will rise tomorrow or not, but why do we believe so? For Hume, we believe in causality because of our feelings, and not because of reason. But feelings are subjective, and this inevitably leads to the conclusion that there is no distinction between right or wrong in these cases.

Is there really no rational basis for the principle of Induction? This principle, when applied to causation, says that if A has accompanied or is followed by B, and no exception to it has been observed, then it is probable that on the next observation A will be accompanied by or followed by B. This principle gives only a probability, and not certainty. Consider, for example, another crude example of induction: we have observed crows many times, and in all these observation the crows are black. From this, we cannot derive the conclusion that ‘All crows are black’, because we have never seen all the crows. We can only say that it is probable that the next crow we encounter will be black, but it is certainly possible that a white crow may exist which we have not yet observed. The only alternative is to accept the principle of Induction as a separate and independent logical principle, not derived from deduction, but this acceptance itself is not logically necessary. Most philosophers are convinced that induction is valid in some degree but the problem of showing how or why it can be valid remains unsolved. We shall deal more with the problem of induction in the chapter on Karl Popper, who is of the view that science is not based on the principle of induction, and hence, is safe from the problem of induction.

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Footnotes:

[1] Hume, Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding

French Enlightenment

2008-07-02T13:20:00.002+06:00

In the 18th century there were marked changes in the thought and philosophy of European people. The Enlightenment writers believed that they were casting off the age-old shackles of ignorance and authority, and were entering an epoch enlightened by science, reason and humanism. In many respects, France was the center of this intellectual movement. It was carried on by writers and philosophers like Montesquieu, Diderot, Rousseau and Voltaire, who were known as philosophes. A number of general trends can be seen in the Enlightenment; for example, there was a radical opposition to authority. England was at that time more liberal and the political ideas of free thinkers like Locke influenced these thinkers greatly. These ideas led to a mass reaction against the government and ultimately resulted in the French Revolution.

François Marie Arouet, more known by his pen name Voltaire, (1694-1778) was the leading voice of the Enlightenment. So much was his influence in the movement that Will Durant praises him by saying, “Italy had a Renaissance, and Germany had a Reformation, but France had Voltaire.”[1] Voltaire was a great proponent of the freedom of speech and press. “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,” is a remark often attributed to him. Although he never said these exact words, they certainly reflect his idea of freedom.

Voltaire is one of the first few thinkers who attempted to apply philosophy to history, and his work laid the basis for future historians like Gibbon. “History should be written as philosophy,”[2] he maintains. His history does not deal with kings, wars and revolutions; his history is an account of human culture and civilization. He is concerned with social and economic conditions in different eras and the development of arts and the progress of human mind. His rejection of kings from history was characteristic of the humanistic spirit of his age. Another feature of his history is that it considers Europe as a part of the world in which there are many other cultures and civilizations. Voltaire produces an unprejudiced and impartial account of the cultural history of the rest of the world.

In the 1760s there were a number of appalling occurrences of persecution of Protestants in France. Voltaire was infuriated and enraged, and devoted himself to an intellectual battle with the Catholic Church in particular, and religious fanaticism in general. He used his philosophy as a lethal weapon and Church found itself in a losing fight with one man, who once and forever broke the power of priesthood in France with his famous motto ‘Écrasez l'infâme!’ [Crush the infamy!] . But Voltaire was not an atheist. He was a believer in God, and advocated a simple Deism[3], while rejecting the complex and intricate doctrines of Christianity. His line “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him” has become more of a proverb. He makes the distinction between Religion and Superstition and includes all organized religions in the latter category. “Religion, you say, has produced countless misfortunes; say rather the superstition which reigns on our unhappy globe.”[4]

Voltaire himself did not believe in democracy. He preferred a strong and enlightened monarch, advised by philosophers like him. However, his views on political freedom contributed a great deal to the development of democracy.

The second most important philosopher of the Enlightenment was the Swiss philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-78). He had an intense dislike for authority and social institutions of all kinds. He rose to fame in 1750, when he won the first prize on an essay competition by the Academy of Dijon on the topic: “Has the Progress of the Sciences and the Arts Contributed to Corrupt, or to Purify, Morals.” Rousseau gave the answer in negative and concluded in his essay that science and arts are the worst enemies of humans. Progress in these fields has created more wants and has made man more of a slave to them. They have made governments more powerful and crushed individual liberty. They promote idleness and result in political inequality. He maintained that the natural state is morally superior to the civilized state. Although, he admits, there exists a natural inequality among individuals, yet he believes that most of the inequality is artificially created by political institutions and society. Savage humans, like animals, are naturally well-adapted to their surroundings and relying on pity and love for each other, have no need for this man-made morality and consequently, they live a far better life. Rousseau believes that the basis of the civil society can be found in private property. He proposes that the only way to undo this evil is to abandon civilization because man is by nature good, and is corrupted only by exposure to society. Rousseau abhors all things connected to reason and praises natural emotions as the guide in life. “I venture to declare that a state of reflection is contrary to nature; and that a thinking man is a depraved animal.”

Philosophers before Rousseau had believed in God on the basis of different logical arguments, but reason was against religion in Rousseau’s time. Hence, Rousseau despised reason as a basis of belief in God, and declared like Pascal[5] that reason was too limited to comprehend the existence of God. Rousseau maintained that the feelings of awe and fascination produced by observing nature were sufficient for him to believe in the existence of God. However, Rousseau dismisses all organized religions and complicated theology. He believes in natural religion, which has no need of revelation. This natural religion claims to find its principles written deep inside the heart by nature, and we need only to follow our natural feelings to be virtuous. “Nature never deceives us; it is we who deceive ourselves.”

Rousseau’s political ideas have been elaborated in The Social Contract. It is different from other books of Rousseau, because here he is not advocating a reversion to primitivism. It begins with an impressive piece of rhetoric: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. One man thinks himself the master of others, but remains more of a slave than they are.” Although the ideas presented appear to be in favor of democracy, when extended and analyzed, they tend to lead to a totalitarian[6] state. By democracy, Rousseau means direct participation of every citizen. Representative democracy is nothing but elective aristocracy for him. “The English think they are free. They are free only during the election of members of parliament.” He prefers City States because it is where his democracy is workable. Democracy is best in small states, aristocracy in middle ones, and monarchy in larger ones. Rousseau is in favor of the small states, as they existed in ancient Greece.

Rousseau begins with an emphasis on freedom as a birth right of man, and declares that no man has any natural right over any other person. Hence, slavery in all forms is unjustified. In Rousseau’s hypothetical account, men, in the state of nature, must have reached a point when individual abilities were not enough to maintain their state in opposition to different obstacles. The problem was to find a kind of association which will protect the interests of each citizen and yet, each member will freely obey himself alone. The solution is the Social Contract. Rousseau’s idea of Social Contract resembles that of Hobbes. In this contract, each citizen transfers all his rights to the community, and because the same conditions apply to everyone in the community, no one has any interest in making the terms and conditions very harsh. The people are the members of and the collective owners of the Sovereign power. Sovereign is more or less a metaphysical entity and represents the legislative capacity of the community. According to Rousseau, the alienation of one’s rights to the community must secure the unity of all in a desire for what will most benefit the whole, expressed through ‘general will’. The idea of general will is of importance in Rousseau’s political philosophy. It is the collective interests of all citizens of the community. Each individual has his own individual interests regardless of the community. We can imagine that after the social contract these ‘individual wills’ of citizens cancel out, and what remains are the interests common to all members; this sum of differences is the general will. [As an analogy, we can use the idea of the resultant force, the force remaining after the cancellation of all the different forces acting on the body.] The state is directed by the general will only, and is always right and in public advantage. For the proper expression of the general will there should be no political factions within the state, so that each citizen should think only his own thoughts.

Rousseau was one of the first few modern writers to attack the idea of the private property. The state is the master of all the the goods, and, hence, these goods are possessed by the whole community. Rousseau is therefore considered an early advocate of socialism and communism.

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Footnotes:

[1] Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Pocket Books, page201
[2] Voltaire, Letters, 31 Oct. 1738
[3] Belief in God as the creator of universe and that He is manifesting only through natural laws
[4] Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, God
[5] Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), “The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing” [Pensées]
Pascal is also famous for presenting ‘Pascal’s Wager’, which is supposed to be reason to believe in God. The wager says that if you believe in God, and God doesn’t exist, then you lose nothing, but if you don’t believe in God, and God does exist, then you risk going to hell. Hence, the wager says, if you want to stay on the safe side, you should believe in God. The wager has been subject to much criticism. First, it assumes that God would prefer this selfishness over intellectual honesty. If God is omniscient, he would see through this deception of the believer. Secondly, this argument presupposes a distinct Christian God. What if there is a God, but this God values intellectual honesty over beliefs. Such a God would reward an atheist for being intellectually honest and would punish a believer who believed in God just because he wanted to save his skin from hell.
[6] State in which no parties or groups in opposition to the government are allowed

Immanuel Kant

2008-07-02T13:15:00.001+06:00

(1724-1804)

“Two things fill my mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the reflection dwells on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me,” is the statement carved on the gravestone of Kant in Königsberg. Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher and is one of the most important and influential figures in Western philosophy. His system presents a landmark in the history of philosophical thought. Kant’s most important books are his three Critiques, Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason and Critique of Judgment. Kant compared himself to Copernicus and claimed his work to have brought about a Copernican revolution in Philosophy. It might be considered an exaggeration, but there is no doubt about the significant influence of Kant on subsequent philosophers. He attempted to reconcile the two opposing philosophies of rationalism and empiricism. Rationalism, by its stress on reason, had guaranteed certainty of knowledge but raised doubts about its practical contents. Empiricism, by making experience the source of knowledge, had secured the practical contents, but at the sacrifice of certainty.

Kant was a university professor, and in his early period had studied the philosophy of Leibniz. Then he read Hume’s Inquiry into Human Understanding and his skepticism greatly troubled him. Encounter with Hume’s philosophy, as Kant describes himself, awakened him from his “dogmatic slumbers”[1]. But Hume was, for Kant, a rival philosopher to be refuted. Rousseau had a more deep and positive influence, whose insistence that religion does not need reason as its foundation had a profound effect on Kant’s moral philosophy. The questions with which Kant’s philosophy are related are best summarized by Kant himself, “All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?”[2]

Kant believes knowledge to be indisputable. It would be self-contradictory to deny knowledge, because the denial is itself based on knowledge and is knowledge itself. So, Kant does not accept the position that no knowledge is possible. We do possess judgments, this is unquestionable. So, we must begin with the analysis of these judgments.

Judgments can be classified in various ways. One distinction is between a priori and a posteriori propositions, according to their origins. An a priori proposition is known independently of experience, in fact, even before any experience. An a posteriori proposition (or an ‘empirical’ proposition) is derived from our experience and sense perception. For example:
‘2 + 2 = 4’ is an a priori proposition; ‘America was discovered by Columbus’ is an a posteriori proposition and can only be known through experience.

Kant made another distinction, which was undistinguished in Leibniz’s philosophy. There are ‘analytic’ and ‘synthetic’ propositions. An analytic proposition is one in which the predicate is part of the subject. For example, ‘All old men are men’. All analytic propositions are true because it would be self-contradictory to deny them [‘All old men are not men’]. A synthetic proposition is one, which is not analytic i.e. the concepts of its subject and predicate are independent. For example, ‘All old men love to play with their children’ is a synthetic proposition.

[This distinction is generally held to be the same as between ‘necessary’ and ‘contingent’ truths. A necessary truth is a proposition which it would be self-contradictory to deny, and hence is always true. A contingent proposition may or may not be true. For example:
‘A hexagon has six sides’ is necessary because it would self-contradictory to say ‘A hexagon does not have six sides.’ ‘Pan cakes are round’ is a contingent statement because it may or may not be true.]

Earlier philosophers had held the a priori / a posteriori distinction to be synonymous with analytic/synthetic distinction, but Kant did not agree with it. He maintained that the two distinctions were not completely coincident and one could consider four possible logical combinations.

1) Analytic a posteriori judgements do not arise because we don’t need to learn from experience what is necessarily true.
2) Synthetic a posteriori judgements we derive from our experience.
3) Analytic a priori judgments are necessarily true and include logical truths.
4) Synthetic a priori judgments are the judgements which cannot be shown to be true by mere analysis of their subject-predicate relationship and use of contradiction, but are nevertheless true and independent of experience.

Previous philosophers, Kant maintained, had been led into trouble because they had not considered synthetic a priori judgements. Hume had believed mathematics to be analytic a priori and hence had considered them safe from his skepticism, but Kant states that mathematical truths are synthetic a priori. Hume had shown that the law of causality is not analytic, and therefore, we could not be certain of its truth. Kant replied that although it is not analytic but it is still a priori. So, now Kant is faced with his central issue:

How are synthetic a priori judgements possible? The Critique of Pure Reason is an answer to this question.

Before Kant, philosophers had concerned themselves with the nature of the object from which we receive different sensations, but Kant sought to study ‘knowing’ instead of ‘being’, i.e. how do we know? He believes that synthetic a priori judgements have a basis in the inherent structure of our mind, the natural manner in which our thinking operates. Kant calls this philosophy transcendental because it transcends the sense-experience. Transcendental philosophy, as Kant defines it, is a systematic exposition of all that is a priori in human knowledge, or ‘the principles of pure reason’. There are two stages in which the raw sensations are converted into finished product of thought. The first stage is the coordination of sensations by the application of forms of perception—space and time. The second stage is the coordination of perceptions into conceptions. Kant calls the study of first as Transcendental Aesthetic and the second as Transcendental Logic.

Empiricists had regarded mind as a tabula rasa, as a passive wax, which was blown into shape by the application of sensations. They failed to realize that the mind is not just a passive organ, merely receiving sensations, but it is an active selective, coordinative and directive organ, which transforms sensations into ideas. They failed to see that the mind receives sensations but perceives objects.

Sensation is an awareness of a stimulus, and each sense independently receives a different sensation. Tastes on the tongue, noise in the ear, and flash of light in the eyes are all sensations. These are not yet knowledge. The mind actively groups these sensations about a ‘thing’ in space and time, and then we are aware of an ‘object’—this is Perception. It is the coordination of sensations into knowledge.

Space and time are present inside in our mind, and have no existence outside it. In perception, the part, which is caused by the object, is sensation, but the part due to our subjective apparatus is called forms of perception. Since it is not a part of the sensation, it is not a part of the objective world. Space and time are essential a priori ideas and are necessary condition of all perceptions. They are “pure forms of sensible intuition” under which we perceive everything as being located in space and time. If a person wears red glasses, he will perceive everything as coloured red. Similarly, we can say that our mind wears the spatio-temporal glasses, and everything we perceive must be in space and time.

Leibniz had maintained that space is produced by our minds; Newton held that space was absolute. Kant said that space is objective when applied to objects, as they appear to us, but it is subjective when the objects are considered as things-in-themselves, independent of our perceptions.

Space and time are a priori as all perception involves and pre-supposes them. We can’t think of something which is neither in space, nor in time, because we can’t take off the ‘glasses of space and time’ from our perceptions. Thus laws of mathematics are also a priori because they are the laws of space and time.

Kant believes in things-in-themselves to be the cause of sensations but maintains that they are unknowable; they are are not in space and time, because space and time are our forms of perception. This means that mathematics can be applied to everything we perceive but can’t be applied to the external world, when considered independently of our perception.

The next step is the Transcendental Logic, the transformation of perceptions into conceptions, of experience into science. By Transcendental Aesthetic, an object is received by us; by Transcendental Logic, it is thought of in the mind. The former uses intuition, the latter uses concepts. Transcendental Logic is the science of rules of understanding.

The a priori concepts used in the understanding are classified by Kant into twelve ‘categories’:

1) Of Quantity: Unity, Plurality, Totality
2) Of Quality: Reality, Limitation, Negation
3) Of Relation: Substance and Accident, Cause and Effect, Action and Reaction
4) Of Modality: Possibility, Existence, Necessity

These are also subjective like space and time, and are applicable to the phenomenon we observe. These categories form the essence and character of mind. Note that Cause-and-Effect is one of these categories, and hence, Kant claims that the idea of causality is a priori as well as being synthetic. Hence, it is a part of our inherent understanding to think of phenomenon in terms of cause and effect, and the concept of cause is present prior to all experience, but it is applicable only to our thinking, and not to the thing-in-itself.

Kant makes a strict distinction between Phenomena and Noumena. The object as it appears to us is the phenomena. The original objects, which constitute the reality, the thing-in-itself (Ding an sich), are the noumena. Kant maintains that the noumena are unknowable, and we can never know their reality; we remain utterly ignorant of it. All our synthetic a priori judgments can apply only to the realm of phenomena. We can know nothing certain about the thing-in-itself, apart from its existence.

A large number of false metaphysical beliefs arise from the applications of intuitions and concepts to the thing-in-itself. When science tries to explain the thing-in-itself, it finds itself confronting ‘antinomies’ and when theology attempts to do so, it is lost in ‘paralogisms’. Kant mentions four such antinomies in his Critique, which are insoluble problems. For example, consider the idea that the world had a beginning in time, but what was there before time? We can’t imagine the condition of no time. Now, consider the opposite idea that the world had existed since eternity. We can’t think of eternity as well. Similar is the question whether space is limited or infinite. If space is limited, then what is present beyond space? And the idea of infinite space is equally unsatisfying. We can’t answer these questions because we are trying to apply our reason to things, to which it can’t be applied. Space and time are modes of perception and do not belong to the external reality.

Now, Kant proceeds to refute all the ‘rational’ proofs of the existence of God in an attempt to show that reason cannot be used to prove God’s existence. We have seen the Ontological Argument and the Cosmological Argument before. Another argument is the Physico-theological proof. It is the popular argument from design, stating that the nature reveals a harmony and order that can only be explained by the existence of divine designer. Kant treats this argument with respect but maintains that at its best it only proves an architect and not a creator. This argument also does not prove the attributes which are associated with the concept of God and which the other logical arguments claimed to prove as well. For example, it doesn’t prove the unity of God; it doesn’t prove that the attributes of God are of infinite magnitude; it doesn’t prove that God is benevolent, or that God is omnipotent or omniscient, etc and can’t be used as an adequate conception of God[3]. Hence, Kant showed that religion couldn’t be proved by pure reason.

Let us now turn to Kant’s ethical theory, which has been developed in The Critique of Practical Reason and Metaphysics of Morals. Kant maintains that a ‘good will’ is something that is intrinsically good. It can be thought of being good without any qualifications—all persons know what a good will is. It is also independent of the consequences of the action, which is being intended. Kant’s ethical theory is therefore deontological i.e. actions are morally right because of the intentions, which must be derived from a sense of duty. Moral worth exists only when an action is done from a sense of duty, and not out of inclination or any other reason. According to this theory, a shopkeeper who is honest because of the fear of police is not virtuous, but a shopkeeper who is honest because he feels it his duty, is. Kant believes that morality must be based on a moral law, which is universal and is capable of being applied to any person at any place.

Kant brings out his idea of law. All things in nature act according to law, but man has the freedom to obey the moral law. Apart from being aware of the moral law, he also has some personal desires and self interests, and the interaction of the two results in the feeling of obligation, or an imperative, a command to act in a particular way.

There are two types of imperative. A hypothetical imperative states, ‘You must do A if you wish to achieve B’ i.e. it commands an action due to an end in purpose. The categorical imperative simply states ‘You must do A’ regardless of its consequences. Kant believes in the categorical imperative and maintains that it is a priori as well as being synthetic.

Using the idea that the moral law should be universal, Kant states the categorical imperative as: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law” i.e. you should act in such a way that you can wish that all the other people in the world also do the same. For example, you can lie to achieve some benefit, but you can’t wish that everyone in the world should lie, because then there would be no promises at all. A thief may steal but he can’t wish that everyone in the world should start stealing. An action is wrong when you do it yourself but wish that it should not be done to you; the thief would not wish his possessions to be stolen.

Kant also expressed a different version of the moral law to treat men as end: “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of another, always at the same time as an end and never simply as a means.” This leads to the same actions as prescribed by the categorical imperative. For example, when a thief robs a person, he is treating him as a means to get money, and not as an end-in-itself.

Kant maintains that since humans can feel these moral obligations, it means that we are free. How could we ever conceive of the idea of duty if we did not feel ourselves to be free? Hence, the freedom, which could not be proved by theoretical reason, can be proved by the moral sense.

But although we feel a moral obligation to act, the act is not always awarded in this world. Often, those using immoral means achieve greater benefits than a virtuous man. And yet, knowing that we may not be justly rewarded in this world, we still feel that command to do the right thing. This could be possible only if at the bottom of hearts we knew that this life is not the end, and that there is a life to come after it in which we shall be justly rewarded. So, Kant claims that our moral sense proves the existence of a world hereafter.

Finally, Kant maintains, that the presence of the innate moral sense requires us to believe in a lawgiver i.e. in the existence of God. Our moral sense commands us to believe in such a being. Hence, all the religious elements that Kant had demolished by pure reason were restored by the application of practical reason.

Kant’s philosophy is far from being safe from criticism, and has been severely criticized by a number of subsequent philosophers. His arguments for the subjectivity of space and time have been shown to be flawed. For example, Kant maintained that space is an intuition because geometry is known a priori and is synthetic, and geometry utilizes the idea of space. And, similarly, arithmetic utilizes time and arithmetic is synthetic a priori. But the fact is that geometry is a term covering two different studies: Euclidean geometry, which is pure geometry and the Non-Euclidean geometry used in certain branches of physics such as theory of general relativity. The former is a priori but not synthetic, while the latter is synthetic but not a priori[4]. Mathematicians have also proved that arithmetic is not synthetic, as Kant had thought. If we adopt the point of view used in Physics, qualities in percepts are different from their unperceived causes but there is a certain correlation between the two. For example, there is a correlation between the colors and the wavelengths. On similar basis, we can say that there are two spaces. One subjective and one objective, and there is a similar correlation between the two as between colors and wavelengths. But the case with time must be different; the subjective time must be equal to objective time. Supposes that you are speaking to A, you hear him, you give a reply, and he hears you and replies back. For you, A’s speaking and his hearing of your reply is in the unperceived world. If the conversation is to be successful, the temporal order of events must be the same in both subjective and objective sense.

Then there is the Kantian view of thing-in-itself, which Kant supposed to be the cause of our sensations. But as Kant himself maintains, the idea of cause-and-effect is one of the categories of concepts and is a part of our subjective apparatus. Hence, there was no valid reason for Kant to assume that our sensations had a cause. The idea of thing-in-itself was abandoned by his immediate successors—Fichte, Schelling and Hegel—who developed an idealist philosophy out of Kant. It should also be noted that Kant set out to combat the skepticism of Hume, but his own philosophy represents an extreme skeptical position: we can know nothing, nothing at all, about the thing-in-itself. We can never know that the truth about reality. What more skepticism can there be! It is not surprising that Kant’s philosophy, when extended by the idealists, resulted in something not very different from Solipsism, the belief that the self is the only thing that exists, or that can be known and verified.

Kant’s moral philosophy is also a weak point, in which Kant had attempted to reconstruct what he had demolished of religion. The second Critique is also sometimes sarcastically called ‘Transcendental Anesthetic’! Kant’s belief in an innate, a priori moral sense created by God in us was shown wrong in the light of theory of evolution. The moral sense is not God-gifted but a product of evolution of man. It is the mode of conduct developed by attempts at group survival in the continual strife of life. Also, Kantian ethics gives no credit to a benevolent impulse. A person who is kind to his brother because he loves him is not virtuous according to Kant because he is not acting out of a sense of duty. This principle is also limited because it makes no account of the consequence of an action.

----------------------------
Footnotes:

[1] Russell, however, adds that he soon invented a soporific and went to sleep again!
[2] Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
[3] The argument from design has been severely weakened by the theory of evolution by means of natural selection by Charles Darwin. Natural Selection provides a scientific mechanism by which organisms evolve with increasing complexity as if they have been ‘designed’ by some supernatural force. It is not the purpose of this book to discuss the arguments for God’s existence in detail. For those interested, I’ll strongly recommend The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, and Philosophy of Religion by John Hick.
[4] See Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, Routledge, London, page 688

G.W.F. Hegel

2008-07-02T13:13:00.003+06:00

(1770-1831)

[The author has been made aware of certain errors in this entry on Hegel's philosophy. The text will soon be updated to make the corrections.]

“Only one man ever understood me, and he didn't understand me,” said the German philosopher Hegel, and the statement might certainly be true because Hegel is one of the most difficult and obscure philosophers of the West. He was virtually the dictator of the German philosophy and ruled the thought of the nineteenth century. This influence is amazing, given the puzzling and cryptic nature of his ideas. He is, perhaps, the hardest of all the great philosophers to understand[1]. It is not in my ability to explain Hegel in detail, so I will only present a general and simple overview of his philosophy.

Before studying Hegel, it would not do harm to say a word or two about his idealistic predecessors. Fichte (1762-1814) was an important philosopher of the idealist school. Fichte distinguishes between the Self, the ego, and the rest of the world, the non-ego. He maintained that the ground of all experience was the pure, spontaneous activity of the ego. Consciousness is the encounter between the ego and the non-ego, in which both are defined and realized. Schelling (1775-1854) was another idealist philosopher. He developed a philosophy, which was essentially pantheistic in nature, holding that the God was the same as the laws and the nature of the universe. He held that there was a perfect parallel between the world of nature and our awareness of it i.e. ‘Nature reflects Consciousness.’ Since using an individual ego is this case leads to invalid results, Schelling overcame this difficulty by using the idea of Absolute consciousness, which is the sum of the thought of every individual ego.

Hegel aimed to create such a comprehensive system of philosophy, which would encompass the works of his predecessors, and in which past and future could be philosophically understood. Hegel was initially interested in mysticism and from there he took the belief in the unity of the reality, believing all separateness to be unreal. Hegel calls the whole, or the total developmental process of everything, in all its complexity the Absolute or Absolute Spirit. Hegel believed that the task of philosophy is to chart the development of the Absolute Spirit. Unlike Spinoza, who considered both thought and extension to be attributes of the whole, Hegel considers the Absolute as pure Thought, or Spirit, or Mind, in the process of self-development.

A distinguishing feature of Hegel’s philosophy is the triadic movement called Dialectic. The Dialectic begins with a simple idea called Thesis, which owing to its imperfection (only the Absolute is perfect) gives rises to its opposite, contrasting idea, called Antithesis. Thesis and Antithesis merge to form a Synthesis. This synthesis becomes another Thesis and the process continues until the truth arrives; the final conclusion is known as the Absolute Idea.

For example, consider the assumption ‘The Absolute is Pure Being’. But a pure being devoid of any relations is nothing. (Every idea is a group of relations; an idea without relations is simply empty.) Hence, from this thesis, we are led to its antithesis ‘The Absolute is Nothing’ These two merge to form the synthesis ‘The Absolute is Becoming.’

The idea of the Absolute Spirit itself is a product of the dialectic: All thought is comprised by the thesis Idea. Its antithesis is Nature and the grand synthesis of the two is Spirit, the self-knowing, self-actualizing totality — the Absolute itself.

For Hegel, therefore, reality is understood as the Absolute unfolding dialectically in a process of self-development. This development manifests itself both in nature and in human history. Nature is the Absolute Spirit objectifying itself in material form. Human minds and human history are the process of the Absolute manifesting itself in spirit or consciousness. In fact, the Absolute comes to know itself through the human understanding of the reality. History is the story of the world spirit (Weltgeist) gradually coming to consciousness of itself. The highest kind of the knowledge can be the Absolute itself, because as the Absolute is the whole, there is nothing outside itself for it to know.

Since history follows the pattern of logical necessity through the dialectical movement from thesis to antithesis to synthesis, the present age represents the higher stage of development as compared to the previous ages. Seen in this context, there are no ‘eternal truths’ apart from the Absolute Idea. No particular thought is correct for eternity, but it can be correct for the particular age in which one lives. (For example, in ancient Greece slavery was ‘correct’ but it is ‘wrong’ in our age.) Hegel is an ardent believer of the view that “what is rational is real and what is real is rational.” This leads to the natural conclusion that whatever survives is right, or that which is right survives. “World history is a court of judgment.”[2]

Hegel studied the human progression in understanding the Absolute in three levels: art, religion, and philosophy. Art grasps the Absolute in material forms, interpreting the rational through the sensible forms of beauty. Religion understands the Absolute through images and symbols. Philosophy is the highest level as it grasps the Absolute rationally. Though philosophy, the Absolute has arrived at full self-consciousness, and the grand cosmic drama arrives at its logical conclusion. Only at this point does Hegel identify the Absolute with God.

Hegel has a different conception of freedom. Since there can be no concept of freedom without the concept of law, Hegel derives the odd conclusion that wherever there is law, there is freedom. Hence, ‘freedom’ in his political philosophy means little more than the right to obey the law. Duty can truly exist only in a social context. Individual’s highest duty is the duty to the state, as the state is manifestation of the general will[3], which is the self-conscioius ethical will of the people.

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Footnotes:

[1] With the exception of our postmodern philosophers, who have surpassed all others before them in obscurity.
[2] Hegel, The Philosophy of Right
[3] Hegel praised Rousseau for the distinction between general will and the will of all.

Arthur Schopenhauer

2008-07-02T13:11:00.001+06:00

(1788-1860)

“If we see light at the end of the tunnel, It’s the light of the oncoming train,” said the poet Robert Lowell[1], and whenever Schopenhauer saw happiness in the tunnel of life, he saw it as the oncoming train of pain. Schopenhauer, the German philosopher, is well known for his philosophy of pessimism, and in this respect, he is rather peculiar because nearly all other great philosophers are more or less optimistic. He was anti-Hegel, and did his best to stem the tide of Hegel’s popularity. When he was invited to deliver lectures in Berlin, he deliberately scheduled them at the same hours as Hegel was programmed to teach. However, he failed to lure the students and found himself lecturing to empty seats! He was greatly inspired by the mysticism of the Buddhist and Hindu philosophies, and he openly admired the Upanishads in his works. He was always hostile to idealism and Hegelianism, and called himself the true successor of Kant. His philosophical masterpiece is The World as Will and Idea (also translated as The World as Will and Representation), in which his philosophy has been outlined.

Schopenhauer begins from Kant’s division of the reality into phenomenon and noumenon. Kant had restricted himself to experience and maintained that the thing-in-itself was unknowable, but Schopenhauer believed that it was possible to transcend experience and know the thing-in-itself. He claimed that the noumenon was same as what we call Will. Will is our reality; what appears in perception to us, as our body is really our will. He sees the world in double-aspect, as Will and Idea. The world as an object in relation to a subject, as perception of a perceiver is Idea. Schopenhauer does not believe that will causes the idea. For him will and idea are one and same reality, seen from different perspectives. Their relationship is like two sides of coin, not that of cause and effect. Schopenhauer writes, “The act of will and the action of the body are not two different states objectively known, connected by a bond of causality; they do not stand in relation of cause and effect, but are one and the same thing… The action of the will is nothing but the act of will objectified i.e. translated into perception.”[2]

But the will, which is thing-in-itself, cannot consist of a number of wills. Schopenhauer, like Kant, believes space and time to be only modes of perception and not applicable to the noumena. So, the will is neither in space, nor in time. Space is the cause of plurality, without space there is only unity. The will is, therefore, one and timeless. This belief in a single cosmic will reveals the influence of mysticism on Schopenhauer. There is no separate individual will; it is just an illusion. In reality, there is just one will.

Schopenhauer, being pessimistic, believes the will to be a mindless, aimless and non-rational urge. It is utterly devoid of all rationality. The will is wicked and evil, the cause of endless suffering. It is a blind, unreasoning impulse of self-preservation. It is a will to live. It is an endless striving and blind impulse, with no purpose or aim. It has no knowledge, is bound by no laws, and is absolutely free and self-determining. There is no meaning, no reason, no God; it is an eternal, frustrated will; a purposeless incessant impulse. Here, Schopenhauer stands in contrast to Hegel who believed in an Absolute of reason.

The will appears in nature in the form of mechanical forces, in plants as vegetative life and in animals as instinct. And finally in man, it acquires consciousness. And with consciousness comes suffering. The will indicates want, an unfulfilled desire. Desire is infinite; fulfillment is not, and hence, is it is never satisfied and always remains hungry. There is no such thing as happiness. An unfulfilled desire causes pain, and if fulfilled causes satisfaction. It is satisfaction what others call happiness, which is basically negative, since it represents nothing but a cessation of pain. A desire fulfilled leads to ennui and annoyance, resulting in many more desires; it is an endless process. Life is evil, and there is nothing but a continuous strife and war. The pain increases as the organisms go higher and higher in evolution. Knowledge affords no solution, as it makes one more conscious of the evil will and the pain of life. The genius suffers most of all. Life is nothing but a painful misery.

The will is hungry, yet strives to live. It finds thousands of pretexts to continue this state of endless misery. Love, too, is such a pretext. It leads men to procreation, which brings new life, and hence a new victim of suffering and death. Suicide is useless because although the individual will perish, the will continues in the species. It is vain and foolish because the thing-in-itself remains unaffected by it.

The reality is blind, irrational and evil. Love, progress and history are nothing but deceits and illusions because the will is never satisfied of suffering and life. The only way to reduce this misery is to suppress the will. The less we exercise the will, the less we will suffer. The lesser we desire, the lesser will be our misery. The root of all evils is the will to live. To repress and quench it is our only means of escape. The only way to reduce the suffering and unavoidable frustration is to minimize our desires. The only solution is a denial of the will to live. Here, Schopenhauer shows his agreement with the ascetic mysticism of the oriental religions.

Schopenhauer gives a great importance to art and aesthetics. When a person contemplates over and appreciates a work of art, he is free of any desire and evil. A man absorbed in the meditation of beauty is a no longer a slave of the will. In the will-less contemplation of truth, a man forgets his individual self and material interests. Schopenhauer especially praises music by declaring that unlike other arts, which merely copy ideas, music copies the will itself, and this is why it is more effective and powerful.

Schopenhauer makes no attempt to hide his contempt for women. Women are suitable for being teachers and nurses of children because they themselves are childish, silly and foolish. They are ‘big children’, and represent an intermediate stage between child and man. Nature gives a woman superabundant beauty and charm for a few years so that she might capture the heart of man and use him as a means of survival for the rest of life. Just as the female ant loses its wings after mating, a woman loses her beauty after childbirth. They have the weapons of cunning and subtlety, and they are unfaithful, liars and ungrateful. Then Schopenhauer denies their very beauty and states, “Only a male intellect clouded by the sexual drive could call the stunted, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped and short-legged sex the fair sex.”[3] They are the unaesthetic sex because they are incapable of taking a purely objective interest in anything. Women lack genius and have been unable to produce a single magnum opus in science or art. They are the inferior second sex in every respect. Of course, the feminists of today wouldn’t be pleased at these outrageous comments by Schopenhauer.

The whole philosophy of Schopenhauer culminates in such a horrible picture of life because he is bent upon seeing only the evil and misery in the world. He fails to notice the good things which life has to offer, and that happiness is quite possible in this life. We have seen the unjustified optimism of Leibniz, and here we view the gloomy pessimism of Schopenhauer. The fact is that the world is neither for nor against us; it doesn’t care for our pleasure or misery; it is indifferent. From a philosophical point of view, both optimism and pessimism are groundless and unjustified.

------------------------------
Footnotes:

[1] Since 1939
[2] Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans E. F. J. Payne, Dover Publications, New York, 1966, Vol 1, page 100
[3] Parerga and Paralipomena

Friedrich Nietzsche

2008-07-02T13:00:00.004+06:00

(1844-1900)

“I know my fate. One day there will be associated with my name the recollection of something frightful -- of a crisis like no other before on earth, of the profoundest collision of conscience, of a decision evoked against everything that until then had been believed in, demanded, sanctified. I am not a man I am dynamite.”[1] Passing through this history of philosophers, we have arrived at the enigma of modern philosophy, Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the most controversial and misunderstood philosophers of all time. For almost fifty years after his death, Nietzsche’s writings were seen as ramblings of a madman in the British and American philosophical circles. And the greater misfortune is that Nietzsche’s name was unjustly associated with the movement of Nazism, owing to the political abuse of Nietzsche’s writings by his sister Elizabeth. Nietzsche belongs to no formal school of philosophy; his writings are not systematic; his style is powerful and aphoristic. In fact, in his own times, and many years after his death, he wasn’t even accepted as a philosopher, but gradually as the awareness about his works has increased, Nietzsche has emerged as one of the most influential philosophers of modern philosophy. His name has variously been associated with Existentialism, Nihilism, Nazism, Postmodernism, but I think that one would be justified in saying that in many ways Nietzsche is a separate and independent school of philosophy.

In order to fully appreciate Nietzsche’s philosophy, one has to see it in the context of his life because the two are strongly linked. And the paradox is that Nietzsche represents as an ideal in his philosophy all that he was not in his own life; Nietzsche was weak and suffered from ill health his entire life and due to this reason couldn’t serve in the army, but he idolizes strength and military training in his philosophy. Nietzsche’s writings are clearly anti-feministic but in his social life he treated women with great respect and courtesy, much more then the educated men of his own times would have done. Diane Collinson says, “The popular image of him is of someone who advocated a ruthless and passionate pursuit of power, yet in his private life he was gentle, courteous and considerate.”[2]

Nietzsche was born in Germany in 1844 in a Christian family. His father was clergy man and it was assumed that Nietzsche would become a minister himself when he grew up. Fate, however, had the very opposite in store for Nietzsche, whose intelligence had begun to show its signs even in his student life. By the age of 18, Nietzsche had lost his faith in Christianity. In 1865, he happened to read Schopenhauer's World as Will and Idea which had a marked influence on him. Nietzsche records “It seemed as if Schopenhauer were addressing me personally.” Nietzsche applied for military, but during training he was injured and was released from service. At the age of 25, Nietzsche was appointed as the professor of classical philology at the University of Basle. Around this time he became a very close friend of the famous musician Richard Wagner. Their relationship however came to an end when Wagner, particularly in Parsifal, seemed to have compromised with Christianity and the bourgeoisie. Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy, which was an analysis of the Greek drama, was published in 1872, but it was met with controversy and found little admirers in the academic circles. Nietzsche soon got more interested in developing his own philosophical ideas, and wrote a series of books. Thus Spoke Zarathustra is considered as his greatest masterpiece. It has a style which imitates that of the New Testament and the dialogues of Plato, and is abundant with literary, poetic expressions and metaphors. Nietzsche uses the character of Zarathustra as a spokesman of his philosophy. The book, however, was a failure. Later Nietzsche wrote Beyond Good and Evil, another of his important works, but which Nietzsche considered as a companion to Thus Spoke Zarathustra. After a few years Nietzsche wrote The Anti-Christ which is a bitter and powerful tirade against Christianity, considering it a menace and curse upon humanity.

After a life of illness and weakness, Nietzsche finally suffered a mental breakdown and became insane in 1889. He admitted to an asylum but his mother took him to her home. She loved him and took care of him till her death in 1897, after which his sister looked after him. Nietzsche had previously left his sister because she had married an anti-Semite, something which Nietzsche couldn’t tolerate. Elisabeth took up the job of publishing Nietzsche’s unpublished books and of promoting them. Elisabeth arranged and published Nietzsche’s notes as The Will to Power, but it is now well-known that she modified the original writings to impart her own ideology in them. And the association of Nietzsche with Nazism lies greatly to her credit. Nietzsche died in insanity in 1900. “Seldom has a man paid so great a price for genius,”[3] says Will Durant.

In his early work The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche had challenged the way Greek drama had been seen by the scholars. Nietzsche said that two conflicting strains can be discovered in the writings of Greek dramatists. These two distinct tendencies are the Apollonian and Dionysian. Apollonian tendency is marked by order, balance, beauty and refinement. The Dionysian strain is wild, tragic and orgiastic, manifest as intoxication and irrationality. Nietzsche believed that Dionysian impulse is the truly creative strain, because tragedy can only emerge from pain and conflict. Nietzsche maintained that since the time of Socrates Western thought had been dominated by the Apollonian impulse, and that the German Romanticism and the music of Richard Wagner seek to reintroduce the Dionysian drive in the Western culture.

Unlike Schopenhauer, Nietzsche doesn’t believe in a cosmic will, but rather in individual will. He violently opposes all theories, which advocate a calm acceptance of the inevitable. Nietzsche vehemently rejects the whole traditional morality, and says that we need a “transvaluation of values”, a complete overhaul of conventional ideas. He maintains that the old morality derived from philosophy and religion is wrong and harmful for human life; these morals enslave and retard our abilities and potentialities for progress and development.

Nietzsche is a atheist and proclaims the death of God; “God is dead: but considering the state the species Man is in, there will perhaps be caves, for ages yet, in which his shadow will be shown.”[4] This phrase ‘God is dead’, which occurs repeatedly in Nietzsche’s writings, is meant to show the fact that the Christian ideology has ceased to play a role in the lives of the people, and that the idea of God has become useless. With this death of God, Europe is being haunted by Nihilism, a lack of any meaning, value or truth. It is generally believed that Nietzsche was an advocate of nihilism, but we must understand that this is not so. Nietzsche is not satisfied by nihilism; he sees it as a crisis being faced by the intellectual world. He considers it destructive to human culture, and leading to apathy towards life. For Nietzsche, nihilism is something to be overcome, to be transcended. He describes nihilism as "the will to nothingness", and believes that this gap of nothingness is to filled up with a value of willful affirmation of life, with “the Will to Power”

Nietzsche will have none of the altruism and self-sacrifice of Christianity; this is all “slave morality” for him. He believes in “hero worship”, and is an admirer of aristocratic morality. He has a great disgust and repulsion for the general masses, which he calls ‘bungled and botched’. Geniuses, not masses, are the goal of evolution. It is the survival of the fittest. Good is that which wins, which survives; bad is that which loses and is eliminated. Life doesn’t need this old slavish virtue to progress, it needs strength and power; humility is to be scorned and pride is to be admired; we do not need altruism but exceptional intellect and genius; there is no equality among the people as some of them are far superior to others; justice is meaningless, it is power that matters. The only task of humanity is to bring men of genius into the world.

We do not need saints or masses; we need Übermensch (‘Superman’ or ‘Overman’). “I teach you the Superman. Man is something that shall be surpassed.”[5] Mankind’s existence is to be justified by the existence of the Superman. The sufferings and pains of the people are meaningless if they are necessary for the production of the great men. It is in time of distress and war that the human potentialities and abilities come to surface and are revealed. Hence, war and conflict is to be encouraged.

Nietzsche is in favor of strict discipline and training. The Superman should be tough, strong and powerful. He should even be cruel, if need arises. Evil is not to be despised. The Superman should have the ability and strength to endure pain, he wishes there to be more evil and more suffering. He is not soft and womanish. Power is the ultimate goal; “What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man. What is bad? All that comes from weakness.”[6] The Superman lives in constant danger and excitement. “For believe me!—the secret of realizing the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is: to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships out into uncharted seas! Live in conflict with your equals and with yourselves! Be robbers and ravagers as long as you cannot be rulers and owners, you men of knowledge! The time will soon be past when you could be content to live concealed in the woods like timid deer!”[7]

Nietzsche objects to the submission of men to the will of God in Christianity. Christianity attempts to tame the heart of man, and make him saintly, but Nietzsche is an admirer of wild, beastly and animal instincts. He values pride, war, anger and revenge, none of which Christianity approves. Nietzsche believes that Christianity is a life-denying force that seeks to suppress and destroy all those characteristics which Nietzsche considers to be a part of a healthy life. “The concept of sin makes us ashamed of our instincts and our sexuality, the concept of faith discourages our curiosity and natural skepticism, and the concept of pity encourages us to value and cherish weakness.”[8] Nietzsche makes the distinction between Christianity as an organized religion and Jesus as a person. “The word "Christianity" is already a misunderstanding -- in reality there has been only one Christian, and he died on the Cross.”[9] He claims that St. Paul had deliberately mutated Christianity into a subversive religion, as a “psychological warfare weapon” against the Romans to avenge the destruction of Jerusalem.

One of the ideas developed by Nietzsche is that of Perspectivism, according to which how we see the truth depends on our perspective. “In so far as the word “knowledge” has any meaning, the world is knowable; but it is interpretable otherwise, it has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings.—‘Perspectivism.’ It is our needs that interpret the world; our drives and their For and Against. Every drive is a kind of lust to rule; each one has its perspective that it would like to compel all the other drives to accept as a norm.”[10] Some commentators say that Nietzsche does believe in something called a ‘truth’ but that there is no one correct perspective of truth. While some others argue that Nietzsche considers the very notion of truth to be false, and that truth is just the point of view of those people who have the power to enforce their views.

Eternal Recurrence is one of the most famous ideas of Nietzsche, according to which there would be an endless, identical repetition of everything in the universe for an infinite number of times. It is doubtful whether Nietzsche believed this idea of Eternal Recurrence to be a cosmological truth, but in the works he published he treats it as a means of life-affirmation. “In other words, we should aim to live conscious of the fact that each moment will be repeated infinitely, and we should feel only supreme joy at the prospect.”[11] Wikipedia says: “According to Nietzsche, it would require a sincere Amor Fati (Love of Fate), not simply to endure, but to wish for the eternal recurrence of all events exactly as they occurred — all of the pain and joy, the embarrassment and glory. Nietzsche calls the idea "horrifying and paralyzing", and also characterizes the burden of this idea as the "heaviest weight" imaginable (das schwerste Gewicht). The wish for the eternal return of all events would mark the ultimate affirmation of life.”[12]

Nietzsche’s views on women are a subject of great controversy. Taken literally, they represent a severe anti-feminist strain: Women, as he conceives, lack in wisdom, genius, and are ‘creatures who have only dancing and nonsense and finery in their minds!’ They should be property of men; they are like delicate, beautiful birds that must be caged to prevent them from flying away. As would be obvious, Nietzsche is against the emancipation of woman, and regards it as retrogress of women. The men should keep them in control and under fear. If women are given freedom, they abuse it and become intolerable. Nietzsche believes that a real woman, a clever woman would be herself ashamed at these attempts for financial and legal independence. Some recent commentators like Derrida believe that Nietzsche’s statements on women are meant to be a word-game designed to challenge the reader and force him to inspect his own views on the issue.

It would be no exaggeration to say Nietzsche is one of the most widely read philosophers at the moment. No doubt, his superb literary style is one of the chief factors in this regard. I personally am a great admirer of his aphorisms. However, it would be a mistake to believe that the sole quality which Nietzsche possesses is that of style. Diane Collinson writes, “The arresting style and intensity of his writings have made his ideas attractive in a popular and sometimes superficial way so that the intellectual quality of his thought has sometimes been over-looked.”[13] And again, “Nietzsche’s brilliant and powerful style is perhaps his chief claim to fame. His short sentences have a poetic intensity that forces one to dwell on them and a vitality that is almost a physical presence on the page. He has been called the philosopher’s philosopher and also the non-philosopher’s philosopher.”[14]

Walter Kaufmann comments in this regard:

“It is evident at once that Nietzsche is far superior to Kant and Hegel as a stylist; but it also seems that as a philosopher he represents a sharp decline—and men have not been lacking who have not considered him a philosopher at all—because he had no “system.” Yet this argument is hardly cogent. Schelling and Hegel, Spinoza and Aquinas had their systems; in Kant's and Plato's case the word is far less applicable; and of the many important philosophers who very definitely did not have systems one need only mention Socrates and many of the pre-Socratics. Not only can one defend Nietzsche on this score—how many philosophers today have systems?—but one must add that he had strong philosophic reasons for not having a system.”[15]

In any case, the influence Nietzsche has exerted, particularly on continental philosophy, is remarkable. He is regarded as one of the founders of existentialism, and postmodernists claim him to be one of the early postmodern thinkers. Nietzsche was indeed right when he wrote in the preface of The Anti-Christ, “Only the day after tomorrow belongs to me. Some are born posthumously.”

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Footnotes:

[1] Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, "Why I Am a Destiny"
[2] Diane Collinson, Fifty Major Philosophers, (Routledge, London, 1998), page 119
[3] Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Pocket Books, page 447
[4] Nietzsche, The Gay Science
[5] Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
[6] Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ
[7] Nietzsche, The Gay Science
[8] Spark Notes, Nietzsche: Themes, Arguments, and Ideas,
http://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/nietzsche/themes.html
[9] Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, aph. 39
[10] Nietzsche, The Will to Power
[11] Spark Notes, Nietzsche: Themes, Arguments, and Ideas
[12] Wikipedia, Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_Friedrich_Nietzsche
[13] Diane Collinson, Fifty Major Philosophers, (Routledge, London, 1998), page 119
[14] Ibid, page 122
[15] Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, p. 79

Positivism and Utilitarianism

2008-07-02T12:59:00.001+06:00

“Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck,” said Kant, and the Positivists decided to do away with this dark ocean, which had swallowed up the philosophers of the past and their philosophies. Positivism began as a reaction to metaphysics. It is a philosophy based on the experience and empirical knowledge of natural phenomena. It restricts philosophical inquiry to the scientific problems, and treating philosophy as not something very different from science. Positivists believe that the aim of philosophy is the coordination and synthesis of the results of all the different fields of science. Like Bacon, they profess all scientific knowledge as their province. They simply attempt to describe the phenomena observed without going into the epistemological inquiry of whether they exist or not.

The founder of Positivism was a French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798-1857), who is also the founder of sociology. Comte’s major work is the Course of Positive Philosophy. He classified sciences according to decreasing simplicity and generality: mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology and sociology. He maintained that human thought in all subjects of knowledge followed the Law of Three Stages. At first, there is the theological stage, in which every phenomenon is explained in terms of will of one or more deities, which are mythological supernatural beings. Next comes the metaphysical stage in which metaphysics replaces religion and the phenomena are explained in abstract philosophical concepts. But this too is an inadequate and imperfect stage of knowledge. Last of all comes the positive stage, in which science gains superiority over metaphysical philosophy and all phenomena are explained in terms of cause and effect. All sciences pass through these stages. Mathematics was the first to arrive at positive stage, while sociology is the last to reach it. It is now the task of philosophy to establish sociology as a science.

Positivism moved from France to England, where John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) and Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) contributed to its development. Spencer’s most important work is A System of Synthetic Philosophy, which is spread over ten volumes, and can be treated as an encyclopedia of Positivism. Spencer systematized the positivist philosophy around the central concept of evolution. It was Spencer, and not Darwin, who coined the term ‘survival of the fittest’. Spencer defines evolution as “a change from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity, accompanying the dissipation of motion and integration of matter.” The formation of planets from the primal nebula, the evolution of multicellular plants and animals from unicellular life, the creation of society from individuals, this is the ‘integration of matter’, and as it becomes more and more integrated, the individual parts show less and less motion. The nebula was incoherent and homogeneous, but from it evolved human beings whose individual tissues and organs show a magnificent coherence and heterogeneity. Spencer discusses the evolution of life, of mind and last of all, the evolution of human society.

“The great end of all human industry is the attainment of happiness. For this were arts invented, sciences cultivated, laws ordained, and societies modelled, by the most profound wisdom of patriots and legislators,”[1] announced David Hume as an early proponent of Utilitarianism. The end of 18th century and the outset of 19th century saw the rise of the ethical theory of Utilitarianism, which is perhaps one of the most popular ethical theories. Utilitarianism attempts to define the ethical worth of an action on the basis of its utility value or its usefulness. Most followers of utilitarianism described happiness as the ultimate goal of an action. Hedonistic utilitarians like Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and John Stuart Mill analyzed happiness as a pleasure over pain. However, in 20th century, the famous British philosopher G.E. Moore (1873-1958) believed in ideal utilitarianism that apart from pleasure many kinds of consciousness such as love, knowledge, and the experience of beauty are to be included in the utility value of an action.

Bentham believed that an action is not intrinsically good or bad, but that it is to be determined by its consequences i.e. how much pleasure it produces. Bentham believed that a hedonistic calculus was theoretically possible by which hedonistic value of any human action can be calculated by taking into account factors like intensity and duration of the pleasure produced. But Bentham believes in the happiness of the whole community, not just an individual, and hence the goal of an action is the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people. Bentham maintained that the justification of the criminal law in a community was to coincide the interests of an individual and the interests of the community. For example, stealing is in the interest of the individual but not in the interest of community. By setting up a punishment for theft, stealing is no longer of benefit to the thief, and hence both the interests of the individual and community lie in the same direction.

The utilitarianism based on greatest happiness of greatest number works something like this: To determine the ethical worth of an action, analyze how much happiness it leads to in every person, and add this happiness. The act that leads to the maximum total happiness is the one that we ought to do.

A number of assumptions can be found beneath this doctrine, such as: actions are not intrinsically good or bad, that all people are equal and their happiness is to be judged on equal level, and that it is possible to measure happiness on some sort of a linear scale, and then it is possible to ‘add up’ the happiness of different people into a total happiness. These assumptions are themselves not beyond dispute and are open to debate. For example, if you, just for the fun of it, tell lies about an acquaintance to a friend, and you both have a good laugh, and forget it. This action has no other consequence apart from the pleasure you derive from it. Does it mean that there is no harm in doing so? Don’t we feel as if there is something intrinsically bad about lying? Then consider the question of equality; is the happiness of a rapist to be judged equal and desirable to the happiness of a noble doctor? And can happiness really be measured and compared? How can we ever compare the joy derived from love, the pleasure of aesthetic contemplation, the satisfaction of having a bank account filled with money, a monarch’s pleasure in having power over subjects, a mathematician’s joy of solving a difficult problem, a father’s happiness at the achievement of his son? Is there any linear scale by which we can judge and compare this diversity of modes of pleasure? As is apparent, these assumptions are not as obvious as they might appear at first glance.

Consider a hypothetical situation in which you can subject your neighbor to extreme brutal torture and by doing so you will relieve a billion people from a minute’s toothache. To judge whether this action is desirable or not, a utilitarian will just ‘add up’ the satisfaction of billion people from cessation of toothache, and compare it with the pain of your neighbor, and if the pleasure is in excess, it means that the action is justified. Is this result morally acceptable?

As is the case with all ethical theories, no basic axiom of any ethical theory can be rationally proved. Ethics basically has an appeal to our emotions and feelings, and there are no objective moral facts, or if there are, reason can’t reach them. The preferment of an ethical theory is based on one’s temperament, not pure reason. What reason can judge about any ethical theory is whether it is logically self-consistent or not. An ethical opinion can only be justified on the basis of an ethical axiom, but if that axiom is not accepted, there is no means of arriving at a rational conclusion.

----------------------------
Footnotes:

[1] Essays Moral, Political, and Literary

Karl Marx

2008-07-02T12:57:00.001+06:00

(1818-1883)

“The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it,” says Karl Marx, but he was himself such a writer whose ideas have swayed the course of history. Karl Marx was a German philosopher, economist and a revolutionary communist, and one of the most influential men in history. He is best remembered as a co-founder of scientific socialism (modern communism) along with Friedrich Engels (1820-1895), who was his lifelong friend. Marx lived a very radical life in conditions of extreme poverty, surviving only be the continuous financial support of his loyal friend Engels. Their joint work The Communist Manifesto revealed their views in a systematic and logical manner, and urged all workers to unite for a revolution. Later, Marx wrote Das Kapital (Capital), which was unfinished at the time of his death and was completed by Engels from Marx’s notes.

There are three aspects of the Marx’s philosophy. First is the metaphysics, which is the philosophy of dialectic essentially derived from Hegel, and a belief that history is being governed by dialectical forces. The second is an economic theory, which advocates a communistic economy over a capitalistic one. And the third is the ethical aspect, which shows how the capitalistic society has affected the relationships of men. All three elements are strongly interrelated in Marx’s philosophy and the division between the three is somewhat arbitrary.

Marx was a materialist, but he differed from other materialists in certain respects. We call him a dialectical materialist or a historical materialist. He does not consider man as a passive receiver of the stimulus of an active object. Sensation, is for him, an interaction between the subject and object, in which both were affected. Man does not just gain knowledge about the world around but also changes it to suit his needs. It is a continual process of mutual adaptation, not a process of one-sided activity. “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”[1] Marx calls the process as ‘dialectical’ because it goes on indefinitely and never arrives at an ultimate end.

Marx is also a successor of Hegel. He agrees with Hegel that the world history moves forward in a dialectical fashion, but for Hegel the driving force was ‘Spirit’. Marx is a materialist, and therefore considers matter as the driving force, or more specifically, man’s interaction with matter. Marx distinguishes between the basis and superstructure of a community. Basis defines the material, social and economic aspects of a society, while superstructure refers to the art, religion, politics and philosophy of that society. He believes that the superstructure of any community is an outcome of its basis i.e. how or what people think is based on what and how they eat. Marx says, “The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness.”[2]

Basis can further be classified into three levels: conditions of production refer to the natural resources available, means of production are the different methods, tools or processes used to obtain the raw materials, and distribution of production or ‘production elements’ describe the division of labor, i.e. how work and ownership is distributed between different groups. In these, the means of production hold the principal importance and production elements have a secondary importance. This ‘materialist conception of history’ reduces all history to a history of class struggles, a fight to own the means of production. “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,”[3] states Marx. Where Hegel had seen history as a dialectical conflict between nations, Marx saw it as a dialectical conflict between classes. A class is a particular socio-economic group. According to this view of history, first there existed the king-states, which broke down into elements of rulers and the slaves. From this thesis and anti-thesis emerged a synthesis… a feudalistic society emerged. But soon the feudalistic society also broke up into lords and serfs. The conflict between the two resulted in the formation of modern capitalistic society. Now, Marx says that the capitalistic society has also divided into the thesis and antithesis. The most significant classes of the capitalism are the bourgeoisie, the class that owns the means of production, and the proletariat, the class that works for the bourgeoisie for wages. And there is a fundamental inconsistency between these two classes, which is giving rise to a state of conflict. This conflict between the thesis and antithesis will ultimately lead to a new synthesis—a socialistic society. Each stage in this dialectic is ethically superior to its previous stage.

Here, it will be of benefit to consider Marx’s idea of alienation. As written before, the interaction between man and the nature is a mutual process in which both are affected. When a man alters nature, he himself is altered; when man transforms the matter around him, he himself is transformed. In this sense, work is a very important and vital element in a man’s life; his work gives him his identity. It is a positive thing which gives the worker his essence. But in capitalism, the worker works for someone else to earn the wages. His work is external to him, it doesn’t belong to him; the man becomes alien to his work, and thus becomes alien to himself. He has lost his own essence, his own reality. The alienation accompanies fetishism, which is the worship of the products of labour. The things which the labourer produces are given a greater value than the person who creates them. In these ways, capitalism depersonalizes the relationships between men, cutting off and isolating them from each other; making men more like machines and machines more like men. This is, obviously, extremely harmful to the human society. What we need is a morality that is based on human values, not a morality that sacrifices these human values for machines. In capitalism humanity is replaced by an inhuman drive for profits; socialism seeks to create a society in which human values will again get the top priority.

The capitalist gains more and more profit as work continues and he goes on expanding the methods of production, thus the value of the labor of the worker goes on decreasing, and the laborer faces a constantly increasing alienation. He is being exploited to the benefit of the bourgeoisie. “Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.”[4] This creates more and more resentment in the proletariat, as they become aware that they are being exploited. In other words, they become “class conscious”. And soon, Marx predicts, they will unite and rebel against the owners to overthrow them and capture the means of production. For a transition period, there will be the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ but soon this phase will pass and will produce a classless society, in which the means of production will be owned by all. The policy to be followed in this society will be “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”[5] “The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.”[6]

It must be noted that Marx was a believer of historical necessity, history was deterministic for him. He believed that the communism was the next stage in the dialectical movement of history. He did not merely advocate communism, he predicted and prophesied it like a prophet. Communism was primarily to be a child of a determinisitc historical process, not the realisation of a pre-determined moral philosophy; though it cannot be denied that philosophy of communism does have an ethical side as well. The rise of socialism was imminent and inevitable for Marx and Engels, and nothing could stop it. “A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism”[7].

Marx called himself an atheist and believed religion to be a human fabrication. He was of the view that religion was invented as response to the alienation in the material life, and once man is emancipated from this alienation, religion will itself die away. Many of his views on religion have almost become proverbial. “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”[8]

Engels said in the funeral address of Marx:
“His mission in life was to contribute in one way or another to the overthrow of capitalistic society… And he fought with a passion, a tenacity and a success which few could rival… and consequently was the best-hated and most culminated man of his time… his name and his work will endure through the ages.”[9]

And, indeed, more than a century has passed since Marx’s death, but Marxism is still one of the most dominating political philosophies of our times.

--------------------------
Footnotes:

[1] Karl Marx, Thesis on Feuerbach, no. 11
[2] Karl Marx, A contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Preface
[3] Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
[4] Karl Marx, Capital, vol 1, ch 10.
[5] Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme
[6] Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
[7] Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto, opening sentence
[8] Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Preface
[9] Friedrich Engels, quoted in I. Berlin, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment, OUP 1978, page 206

Pragmatism and William James

2008-07-02T12:54:00.001+06:00

(1842-1910)

In the late nineteenth century, Pragmatism emerged as America’s first major contribution to philosophy. And like the people of the new country itself, this philosophical movement was concerned more with real problems of life, and “cash-values” of ideas rather than abstract, absolute philosophical issues. Pragmatism was founded by Peirce, it gained popularity through James, and it was applied to a diversity of social arenas by Dewey. This philosophy emerged in the 1860s through the discussion of persons belonging to different fields like science, mathematics, philosophy and psychology. The informal group of thinkers known as The Metaphysical Club in Cambridge, Massachusetts is considered as the birth place of Pragmatism, and this club included people like Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, Oliver W. Holmes and Chauncey Wright. One of the prominent concerns of this philosophy is to treat philosophical issues in a ‘scientific’ manner. Pragmatism is therefore concerned with what ‘works’ in actual practice rather than what idle, metaphysical speculation leads us to believe.

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) is credited with first using the term Pragmatism. It was taken from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in which ‘pragmatic’ is used to describe a judgment for which there is no objective evidence but one is practically certain about it. Peirce considers a belief to be a basis of action. To say that a person believes in something is to say that he has a habit of acting in a particular way under certain circumstances. Peirce also inverted the positions of ‘truth’ and ‘inquiry’. It was previously believed that it is the purpose of inquiry to discover the truth, but Peirce said that it is the other way round. Truth is something which is an outcome of an inquiry which is conducted in a proper, scientific way. Peirce saw pragmatism as a way to clarify ideas, and he attempted to clarify many of ideas like belief, truth and inquiry. Peirce conceived of belief as ‘a habit of action’, enquiry as ‘a process of fixing belief’ considering the scientific method to the only reliable method to fix beliefs, truth as the opinion at which the scientific community arrives at after proper enquiry, and reality as ‘the object of that opinion’[1]. Peirce also believed in the doctrine of fallibilism, i.e. no belief is absolutely certain, and is subject to change, amendment and replacement.

Peirce’s ideas were taken up and modified by the famous American psychologist and philosopher William James (1842-1910), who was the brother of the famous novelist Henry James. James believed that an idea was true if it worked in practice, “it is true if it satisfies, is verifiable and verified in experience.”[2] Peirce was not happy with James’s modification of his philosophy because James had introduced subjective elements into it. James said that an idea was said to have a meaning only if a person’s believing it to be true or false would lead him to behave in different ways, i.e. an idea has a meaning only if it brings a difference in conduct. This was unacceptable to Peirce, because this was against the scientific way of thinking, and because Peirce believed the reality was independent of human speculation. But James on the other hand believed that “reality is malleable and subject to change in accordance with human desires, so therefore is truth”[3]. Peirce was troubled by this, and so he renamed his philosophy as ‘pragmaticism’, commenting that it was a term ‘ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers’ referring to the fact that James had kidnapped ‘pragmatism’. However, it was James whose views gained fame and popularity while Peirce was generally ignored.

So, pragmatism, as we know it, is basically founded by William James. James was influenced by science as well as religion, and both these elements are visible in his works. His major works are Principles of Psychology, The Will to Believe, The Varieties of Religious Experience, and Pragmatism. James dedicated the book Pragmatism to John Stuart Mill, saying that pragmatism applied the same concept of utility to truth, which Mill had applied to good in his theory of utilitarianism.

James believed that it was necessary to determine the “cash-value” of any idea i.e. what difference would it make to a person’s life if that idea were true. In judging various philosophical arguments, it is vital to compare the cash-value of the philosophical positions of both sides. If one of them yields results of more “cash-value” then it is to be preferred but if all possibilities have no significant practical difference at all, then the whole dispute is idle and useless. For example, if it is practically meaningless to either believe in A or B, and that it makes no difference to our lives if we believed in either A or B, then a pragmatist would say that the issue is useless.

James says, “The whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definite difference it will make to you and me, at definite instants of our life, if this world-formula or that world-formula be the true one.”[4]

Theories and philosophies are therefore “instruments” which we employ in our lives to solve problems, and their truth is to be judged in terms of how successful they are in solving those problems. An idea is true if it works in our lives, an idea is false if it doesn’t. Pragmatism does not offer certain specific results, but rather it is a method of obtaining results that will vary from occasion to occasion. “No particular results then, so far, but only an attitude of orientation, is what the pragmatic method means. The attitude of looking away from first things, principles, ‘categories,’ supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts.”[5]

It is clear that Pragmatism aims at giving a new definition of ‘truth’. James maintained that as practical men the scientific concepts because they ‘work’ in practice. Therefore, we must apply the same criteria to all aspects of philosophy. The test of the truthfulness of a belief is not in conformity with a ‘Fact’ because it is unachievable, or as some pragmatists like James would say, it doesn’t exist independent of human thought. The test is the success of the idea in practical matters. A belief is therefore ‘true’ if it brings benefit to us in real life. Truth is what is convenient and successful in practice. Diane Collinson writes, “Truth, for him, is not a fixed and unchanging absolute that is independent of human cognition of it but is invented or created by means of human activity.”[6]

James comes up with a pluralistic conception of universe; “experience is not an object that we examine; instead there is just a ‘humming-buzzing confusion’ out of which we differentiate various aspects that we call ‘ourselves’, ‘physical objects’ etc.”[7] This differentiation is made with reference to particular problems that we face in experience. There is no fixed reality independent of humans to be unveiled or uncovered by experience. The world changes and grows as our knowledge changes and grows.

James has a special interest in religious issues and he believed that application of pragmatism could help resolve a number of issues. It was not an issue of whether a particular religious belief corresponded with some ‘independent, objective reality’ but rather it was matter of which attitude worked best in life. James argued that most religious beliefs pass this pragmatic test of being successful in practice, and are therefore ‘true’; they allow people to live a happy and contended life. If the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in life, then ‘God exists’.

Another famous and influential philosophical idea of James is ‘the will to believe’. Skeptics had maintained that in cases in which there is no conclusive as to either option, none of which can be proved, it is better to maintain an agnostic attitude and to suspend decision on that issue. James, however, believes that in cases in which a conclusive answer is not possible, and the decision is of such nature that it will affect the person’s whole life [such as the existence of God] then it is better to make a decision on non-rational grounds, on the basis of passion or volition, on the basis of will to believe.

On the psychological side, James denied the existence of ‘consciousness’ as a separate and distinct entity. He doesn’t deny the existence of thoughts or that our thoughts may perform a function which may be called ‘being conscious’. What he is denying is the idea of a consciousness as a thing in contrast with material objects. He believes that there is only one primal stuff or material of which this whole world is made up. This view, known as ‘neutral monism’, maintains that the building material of the world is neither matter nor mind, but something anterior to both and out of which both mind and matter are formed. James calls this primal stuff as ‘pure experience’.

[Bertrand Russell, applying Einstein’s General Relativity to this neutral monism, believes this primal stuff to be ‘events’ in space-time. What was previously thought of as ‘particles’ in physics was substituted by a series of events. Matter was, then, just a convenient way of collecting events into a bundle. Russell argued that mind too is a way of grouping events. Events are classified into mind or matter according to the causal relations between them. Some events may belong only to material group, some only to mental group, while some may belong to both groups, and are therefore at once mental and material.]

American philosopher and educator John Dewey (1859-1952) became the leader of pragmatism after William James’s death. But while James is interested in applying pragmatism to religion, Dewey’s outlook is scientific and social. His pragmatic theory came to be known as Instrumentalism. Dewey concerned himself with broader social issues like education. It was out of Dewey’s philosophy that the idea of ‘progressive education’ emerged in the world of education. Dewey believed that education should not consist of imposing a mass of facts and information on the minds of students, but rather education should be ‘pragmatic’, it should teach them how to deal with problems i.e. the education should be based on the method of problem solving. This type of education would train a child in living a successful life in the practical and scientific world of today.

Despite the popular appeal of pragmatism, pragmatism is not without its critics. First of all, it stands in clear opposition to all the philosophers who consider reality to exist independently of human speculation. In increasing the degree of truth of an idea, we are approximating an ideal that is determined by the Fact existing in reality, not by its practical utility. It is of more benefit to believe in Hinduism in a Hindu society and in Judaism in a Jewish society, then does it mean that Hinduism is ‘true’ in former and ‘false’ in latter? James says that if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily, then God exists, but the hypothesis of Santa Clause may also work satisfactorily. Does it follow that Santa Clause exists? A belief is supposed to be true on the basis of its causes, not its effects. The fact that Columbus existed is true because there was a real man Columbus in the world in the past, not because belief in Columbus is of practical benefit to us.

Then Pragmatism says that the truth of an idea is determined by whether it ‘works’ in practice or not. But at which exact point can we tell whether an idea has worked or not. Suppose that consequences of an action are beneficial for a short time, but after that its consequences become harmful. The industrialization has greatly increased the comfort of human life, but it has also destroyed the environment and produced harmful consequences like global warming. So has the industrialization ‘worked’ in practice? In response to this, pragmatists say that not only the short-term consequences but also the long-term consequences are to be considered. But we might not be aware of the long-term consequences of a particular action… does that mean that we would have to wait indefinitely to decide whether a particular idea has worked or not?
Pragmatism in its original form might not have survived, but many of its central ideas have been accepted, modified and applied by contemporary philosophers like W. V. O. Quine, and Richard Rorty. Hence, in many ways, pragmatism is still alive and influential even today.

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Footnotes:

[1] One Hundred Twentieth- Century Philosophers, entry on ‘Peirce’ written by Andrew Reck, Routledge New York 1998, page 152.
[2] One Hundred Twentieth- Century Philosophers, entry on ‘Pragmatism’ written by Marcus Singer, Routledge New York 1998, page 233.
[3] Ibid
[4] What is Pragmatism, from series of eight lectures dedicated to the memory of John Stuart Mill, A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, in December 1904, from William James. Lecture II What Pragmatism Means.
[5] Ibid
[6] Diane Collinson, Fifty Major Philosophers, (Routledge, London, 1998), page 116
[7] Philosophy Made Simple, Richard H. Popkin and Avrum Stroll ,Doubleday & Company, Inc. USA, page 174

Henri Louis Bergson

2008-07-02T12:48:00.001+06:00

(1859-1941)

The philosopher and writer, Henri Louis Bergson (1859-1941) was the leading French philosopher at the start of 20th century and is well remembered for the eloquence and style of his writings. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927 "in recognition of his rich and vitalizing ideas and the brilliant skill with which they have been presented". His philosophy is a revolt against materialism and advocates the idea of creative evolution. His masterpiece is L'Évolution créatrice (Creative Evolution), which brought him worldwide fame. Per Hallström, President of the Nobel Committee of the Swedish Academy describes it as “a poem of striking grandeur, a cosmogony of great scope and unflagging power, without sacrificing a strictly scientific terminology….one always derives from it, without any difficulty, a strong aesthetic impression.”[1]

Bergson is well known for his ability to replace argument by the introduction of metaphor and analogy. His views have been expressed in several different books. In Time and Free Will and Matter and Memory is concerned with the study of consciousness. Talking about the relation of mind and body, Bergson believes the distinction to be only a matter of degree, and not that of a kind. In Creative Evolution Bergson has developed his philosophy of time and applied it to life and to the process of evolution, giving new insights regarding this concept. In Laughter he gave a theory of comedy which is of importance in aesthetics and literary criticism. In his later life, Bergson is said to have developed an inclination towards Catholicism but there is no evidence that he actually converted. He was also associated with the League of Nations, and had an important political role to play there.

Creative Evolution presents a drama of conflicts between two antagonistic forces. Bergson believes that the world is divided into life and matter, which he views as two opposing motions. Life is a force, an impetus, a vital impulse to which matter is a resistance, an inertia to be overcome, and life is forever fighting to free itself from the heavy chains of matter. The two forces are caught up in each other, chained and intermingled. They are prisoners of each other and are forever trying to break free. It is this conflict between the two that results in evolution, and the product of the two are branched at different levels. Evolution is the growth and progress of the impulse of life, but unlike the mechanistic Darwinian evolution, which maintains that the future is determined by past conditions, Bergson believes evolution to be truly creative, like the work of an artist. There is a novelty in evolution; it can’t be predicted. Life innovates and creates at every step, at every corner of evolution. Future is created by the life’s impulse to new creation, the élan vital, which is as novel as an artist.

Life first divided itself into plants and animals, but later in animals there was another dichotomy of intellect and instinct. It is instinct that works in ants and honeybees and allows them to create anthills and beehives with such perfection. Instinct at its best, Bergson calls, intuition. At the top of the chain of evolution is man, in whom intelligence is dominant and instinct has been suppressed but it nevertheless exists, hiding in the consciousness which binds all life in the current of ‘living time’ or ‘duration’. Intellect was developed by life to understand the matter, the solid inert things. It can only think in terms of separateness and discontinuity. It was not designed to understand life, and hence is naturally unable to comprehend the reality of life. It can’t grasp the continuous flow of things, the becoming of life. To perceive the nature of life, we must rely upon intuition as our guide.

An important element of Bergson’s philosophy is his philosophy of time. He gives the name ‘space’ to the separateness of things as they appear to intellect (In reality, Bergson maintains, nothing is separate. Everything is a part of a continuous stream of becoming with no static ‘states’) and the name ‘time’ or ‘duration’ to the continuity as revealed to intuition. Bergson believes mathematical time to be illusory because it treats time in terms of ‘instants’. Hence, mathematical time is really a form of ‘space’. ‘Time’ is, in fact, a continuous growth in which future is unpredicted. Time is not an abstract mathematical concept. It is deeply connected with life and human self. Perhaps it might be better called ‘living time’. This duration cannot be understood by reason, which is incapable of doing so, but rather perceived by an introspected and concentrated consciousness which turns inwards towards its origin. It is in this living time that evolution takes places, that creativity appears and in which free will manifests itself. In it there is originality and nothing is quite repeated again.

In the later part of Bergson’s life, around the time of Second World War, his philosophy began to fade out of the philosophical scenario and it was no longer a dominant school of thought. Although philosophers like Sartre openly accepted the influence of Bergson on their own philosophy but it was especially Gilles Deleuze's Bergsonism in 1966 that reawakened a growing interest in Bergson’s philosophy. His influence has been aptly put forth by Per Hallström: “We are indebted to him, nevertheless, for one achievement of importance: by a passage he has forced through the gates of rationalism, he has released a creative impulse of inestimable value, opening a large access to the waters of living time, to that atmosphere in which the human mind will be able to rediscover its freedom and thus be born anew.”[2]

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Footnotes:

[1] Presentation Speech by Per Hallström on December 10, 1928, from Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1969

[2] Ibid

Logical Analysis and Betrand Russell

2008-07-02T12:45:00.002+06:00

(1872-1970)

Logical Analysis emerged as an important philosophy in the early 20th century and is still the dominant school of philosophy in most universities of the English speaking world. Logical analysis attempts to resolve philosophical disputes by clarifying language and analysing the expressed in ordinary assertions. Restating a philosophical problem in precise logical terminology, instead of everyday language, is likely to reveal its possible solution. Hence, it aims to resolve problems which emerge as a result of linguistic confusion. This philosophical movement has emerged along two lines of development. One is the advancement in mathematical logic, particularly with the development of symbolic logic by Russell and Frege in contrast to Aristotelian logic. The second line is an increasing concern towards the philosophy of linguistics, the ways in which misuse of language leads to philosophical problems.

English philosophers G. E. Moore (1873 – 1958) and Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) are generally seen as the founders of contemporary analytic philosophy, while the founders of modern symbolic logic are the mathematician Gottlob Frege (1848-1925) and Bertrand Russell. Russell, along with A. N. Whitehead (1861-1947), wrote the monumental work Principia Mathematica, in which he showed that all of arithmatic could be deduced from a restricted set of logical axioms. Russell’s work was soon eclipsed by that of Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) who became the central figure of analytical philosophy with his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Logical analysis gave rise to the movement known as Logical Positivism, whose proponents believed that the task of philosophy was to analyze problems to determine whether they belonged to the domain of logic or science, or whether they were ‘meaningless’.

We can consider Russell’s theory of descriptions as an illustration of this analytic technique. Description is a phrase in which an object or a person is specified by any of the properties or qualities associated with it or him, and not by a name. For example, ‘George W. Bush’ is a name, while ‘the present President of America’ is a description. Descriptions had caused a lot of confusion among philosophers. For instance, Meinong was of the opinion that as we can truly say “The golden mountain does not exist” there must be such an object as the ‘golden mountain’ although it must be a non-existent object. Similarly, when we say “The round square does not exist” it appears as if we are attributing some kind of existence to the ‘round square’, that there is a thing, the round square, which does not exist.

The theory of descriptions overcame these difficulties with an analysis of the propositions and maintained that the grammatical structure of a proposition is different from its logical structure. For example, when it is said “Scott is the author of Waverly” it logically means
“One and only one person wrote Waverly and that man was Scott.”
Or in a more logical manner,
“There is an entity c such that the statement ‘x wrote Waverly’ is true if x is c and false otherwise; morover c is Scott.”
And in symbolic notation,
($x){[Wx · (y)(Wy É y=x)] · Sx}

When this theory is applied to statements like “The golden mountain does not exist” it is seen on analysis that the ‘golden mountain’ is not being mentioned when this statement is said. Its logical structure is:

“There is no entity c such that ‘x is golden and mountainous’ is true when x is c, but not otherwise.”
[In simple words, it means something like ‘There is no object in the world which corresponds to the description of being golden and mountainous’.]

In this manner, analysis removes the confusions associated with the descriptions. (We have seen an application of this theory on the Ontological argument.)

There is a famous mathematical problem known as Russell’s paradox which was discovered by Russell in the course of writing Principia Mathematica. There are some sets which are members of themselves, and there are some sets which are not members of themselves [such as a null set]. Russell asks to consider the set of all sets which are not members of themselves. The questions arises, is this set a member of itself?
First consider a possibility that it is a member of itself. But how can it be a member of this set, because the set contains only those sets which are not members of themselves.
So, let us consider the second possibility that it is not a member of itself, but if it is not a member of itself, it is a set which is not a member of itself, and therefore should be included in the set of all sets which are not members of themselves! As obvious, this is indeed a very puzzling paradox. A number of philosophers proposed answers to this paradox, including Russell himself, but which solution is correct is still a matter of debate.

On the metaphysical side, Russell had presented a form of Logical Atomism. But since Logical Atomism found its most complete statement in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, we’ll deal with it in the chapter on Wittgenstein.

For the general public, Bertrand Russell is not famous for his mathematical philosophy but rather for his social and literary writings. Russell was a very prolific writer and wrote a large number of books and essays in his life. He is well known as a social critic, an educational innovator, a champion of intellectual, social and sexual freedom, and an active campaigner for peace and human rights.

Russell was a pacifist in the First World War and due to his constant opposition to the war, which he saw as sheer madness on part of both sides, he was not only dismissed from Trinity College but was also imprisoned for six months. Later, Russell was greatly concerned about the development of atomic weapons after the Second World War and believed that an atomic war would result in the extermination of the human race.

Russell’s religious views provoked a diversity of responses from the people. While they were extremely influential in helping reduce the dogmatism of religion, they also faced extreme opposition from the conservative, religious classes of the society. These religious ideas, expressed in Why I am not a Christian, were generally concerned with outlining the harmful social aspects of organized religion. He showed that there were not sufficient proofs for the existence of God and analyzed how the Christian beliefs affected the social life. His early essay on religion A Free Man’s Worship is now regarded as a masterpiece of prose.

His work on sexual ethics and his bold criticism of the traditional sexual morality in Marriage and Morals put Russell in social and legal trouble, when he was prevented from taking up the teaching post at City College New York in 1940. He was an excellent writer and his eloquent writings such as What I Have Lived For and A Liberal Decalogue brought him extreme popularity and fame. Russell was awarded the Order of Merit in 1949 followed by the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950 "in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought".

Russell’s colleague and friend, G. E. Moore was also a very influential philosopher of analytical tradition. During the youth of Russell and Moore, Idealism was the dominant school of philosophy in the British and American circles, and Moore was instrumental in breaking this hold of Idealism. In The Refutation of Idealism Moore showed that the essential principle upon which Idealism stands is Berkeley’s "to be is to be perceived." And this principle in itself is not necessarily true, because it is not an analytical statement. Hence, Idealists assume with any sufficient evidence the necessary truth of their basic principle.

Later Moore wrote A Defence of Common Sense in which he expressed the view that the ordinary, common sense beliefs humans have about the world are to be accepted at face value, such as the view that an objective world exists and that other humans also exist in this world apart from one’s own self. The purpose of analytical philosophy is to explain the precise implications of the truth of such beliefs. This has given rise to the popular image of Moore as a philosopher of plain common sense, which is a bit of injustice to Moore’s brilliance.

Moore’s work on ethics, Principia Ethica, is one of the most influential works on ethics. In it, Moore expounded a version of Ethical Intuitionism, defining ‘good’ to be “a simple, non-natural, indefinable quality that good things have”. That is to say, we recognize good through intuition but we cannot define it. Moore considered it an error to associate ‘good’ with some other natural property, such as pleasure, and called it the "naturalistic fallacy". All such attempts are still unsafe from the Open Question, which states, “Is this really good?” For example, when a hedonist says that “Good is Pleasure”, the Open Question immediately arises in a person’s mind, “Is Pleasure always Good?” The Open Question is the indication that all attempts to associate good with some natural property are erroneous.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

2008-07-02T12:44:00.001+06:00

(1889-1951)

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), the Austrian-British philosopher, is considered by many to be the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. His thoughts and views brought revolutionary changes in the philosophical scenario not only once but twice, as he himself went through two philosophical phases of his life. The first phase being culminated in his masterpiece Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), which also earned him his doctorate, and the second being marked by his posthumously published Philosophical Investigations (1953).

Wittgenstein was born in 1889 in Austria in a family of Jewish descent. But he was baptized as a Roman Catholic and was given a Roman Catholic burial by his friends upon his death. Wittgenstein had initially decided to pursue a career in aeronautical engineering but engineering led him to an interest in mathematics, which in turn showed him the path to fundamental philosophical questions regarding mathematics and logic. He visited the mathematician Gottlob Frege and at his advice began to study with Bertrand Russell at Cambridge. He was deeply influenced by Russell, and Wittgenstein in turn influenced Russell. Russell was at that time becoming more interested in social, political and religious issues, and saw in Wittgenstein a successor who would carry on his work in analytical philosophy. Although Wittgenstein was in the company of most shinning academics at Cambridge, he felt the need of solitude for philosophical reflection. So in 1913 he retreated to a remote village in Norway, and devoted himself with full concentration on his philosophy. During the First World War, Wittgenstein fought in the war and also wrote Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Russell wrote an introduction to the book and claimed that the book "certainly deserves ... to be considered an important event in the philosophical world." Interestingly, however, Wittgenstein was very unsatisfied with the introduction that Russell had written and thought that it contained fundamental misunderstandings of the Tractatus. Wittgenstein believed that by treating philosophical issues as problems of language, he has solved all philosophical problems in Tractatus and there was nothing left for philosophers to do. True to his conviction, Wittgenstein abandoned philosophy for nearly a decade, first working as a school teacher and then as a gardener’s assistant. Later he was contacted by Moritz Schlick, who was one of the leading members of the Vienna Circle. The Tractatus had been a great influence on the development of Logical Positivism, and some of the members of Vienna Circle began to meet with Wittgenstein for philosophical discussion. But they failed to make Wittgenstein a part of the Vienna Circle, because Wittgenstein believed that they had fundamentally misunderstood the Tractatus. However, as a result of these discussions, Wittgenstein began to have doubts regarding his earlier work, and returned to Cambridge in 1929. On Russell’s advice he presented the Tractatus as his doctoral thesis. It was examined by Russell and Moore; at the end of the thesis defense, Wittgenstein clapped the two examiners on the shoulder and said, "Don't worry, I know you'll never understand it." Moore commented in the examiner's report: "In my opinion this is a work of genius; it is, in any case, up to the standards of a degree from Cambridge." Wittgenstein was therefore appointed as a lecturer and was made a fellow of Trinity College. During this philosophically fertile period, Wittgenstein published nothing. The notes he delivered to his class were later published as The Blue and Brown Books. G.E. Moore sat in Wittgenstein’s lectures during the early thirties and also published a summary of his notes. After G. E. Moore's resignation in 1939, Wittgenstein, whose philosophical brilliance was beyond doubt and obvious to everyone, was appointed to the chair of Philosophy at Cambridge. In 1945 Wittgenstein prepared the book Philosophical Investigations for publication which contained his changed philosophical views, but withdrew it at the last minute, and it was published only after his death. He died of Prostate cancer in 1951. It is said that his last words before death were "Tell them I've had a wonderful life."

To understand Wittgenstein, we will first have to understand the philosophical context in which he lived. Since he was deeply influenced by Russell and Frege, many of the issues which Wittgenstein deals with are related to the ideas of these two philosophers. Frege and Russell are beyond doubt the founders of modern analytical philosophy or modern logic, and they believed that logic had a central role to play in philosophy. One of the main themes of Russell’s logical philosophy was that the grammatical structure of a proposition is different from its logical structure, and that many metaphysical problems arise just because of ignoring this division.

Like Russell, the ‘early’ Wittgenstein looked forward to the formation of an ideal, logical language which would be free of the vagueness and errors of the everyday language. In Tractatus, Wittgenstein has shown what such a logical language can and cannot be used to say.

The Tractatus begins with metaphysics: The world is the totality of facts, not of things. What a fact is, we would learn as we move on. So, Wittgenstein believes that the world is made up of facts, and not of objects.

Wittgenstein moves forward using the idea of a picture. A picture is a model of reality. Pictures depict the world. They represent it. To know whether a picture is true or false, we have to compare it with the real world. If the two match, the picture is true. If they don’t, the picture is false. But it is impossible to tell from the picture alone that it is true.

The world consists of facts, and we become aware of these facts by virtue of our thoughts. And these thoughts are a logical picture of the facts. And just like a picture depicts reality, our thoughts are also a depiction of the world.

The question arises: What is thought? Wittgenstein answers: A thought is a proposition with a sense. We become aware of our thoughts only by virtue of the propositions; the sentences which constitute the language we speak. An important point to note here regarding Wittgenstein’s view of language is that Wittgenstein believes that a name means its object. This is the representational view of language. For example, the name ‘table’ means the object ‘table’ which is in front of me at the moment. This point is importance because we will see how Wittgenstein later disagreed with his previous view of language.

So, the world consists of facts, which are pictured in our thoughts, and our thoughts manifest themselves through propositions. The totality of propositions is language. So, the reality, the thoughts and the language share a common structure, which is fully expressible in logical terms. And therefore, an ideal language would be a picture of reality. Just like a picture is true or false in virtue of its relation to reality, a proposition is true or false in virtue of its corresponding to reality. If a proposition corresponds to reality, it is true. If it does not, it is false. The totality of true propositions is the whole of natural science.

The nature of the picturing relationship cannot be stated because it is not a fact or an object, it can only be shown. Even though the relation cannot be articulated, it is possible to see it, and it must hold if language is to represent the way the world is.

The language, we find, is made up of Molecular sentences, which can be broken down to simpler Atomic sentence. An atomic sentence cannot be further broken down to a simpler sentence. For example, “Alex is a human” is an atomic sentence. You can’t make any simpler sentence out of it. But “Alex and Jane are going to the cinema” is a molecular sentence. You’ll see on analysis that it is made up of two sentences, “Alex is going to the cinema” and “Jane is going to the cinema.” So, a molecular sentence is made up of atomic sentences and logical connectives. An atomic sentence is always in the subject-predicate form. For example, “James is mortal”. James is the subject, and being mortal is the predicate. The subject, the noun, as we discussed before, refers to a particular object or person in the world, while the predicate is the property associated with that object.

As we mentioned before, the language is a picture of reality. So that means the logical structure of language is also the logical structure of the reality. Therefore, just as language consists of Atomic Sentences, the reality consists of Atomic Facts. For every proper name there is a corresponding entity, and for every predicate there is a corresponding property. So, a fact consists of an object and its property. This is called Logical Atomism.

Only those sentences which upon analysis can be broken down to Atomic sentences are meaningful and make sense. A sentence which does not lead to an atomic sentence upon analysis is simply nonsense because it doesn’t picture any atomic fact. This is because only factual states of affairs, which can be pictured, can be represented by meaningful propositions. Anything else would not represent any factual state of affair, and therefore would be nonsense. And this is where the impact of Tractatus begins to appear, because Wittgenstein believes that most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophy are not false, but nonsensical. Upon analysis, they don’t lead to atomic sentences reflecting atomic facts. Wittgenstein says that most of the propositions and questions of philosophers arise from our failure to understand the logic of our language. Most of the statements that we find in metaphysics, ethics and aesthetics are nonsensical. They contain propositions which cannot picture anything. This does not mean that anything that cannot be said is insignificant because there are some things, which cannot be said, but which can only be shown, such as the logical form of the world and the pictorial form.

Mathematics and logic are true, but they are senseless, because they are tautologies. They are true by virtue of repeating the same thing in different words. They don’t give any new information about the world. So, even though they are true, they are senseless. Keep the distinction between Senseless and Non-sense. The statements of metaphysics are neither true, nor false, but nonsense. Mathematics is true, but senseless.

So what remains of philosophy now? Wittgenstein believes that philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries. Simply, the purpose of philosophy is analysis.

What about the great questions of life? The questions of meaning? What is meaning of this world? The questions of ethics: What is good? What is bad? There can be no propositions of ethics, since it cannot be formulated in a logical language, and therefore there are also no ethical facts. That means, if this world has any sense, it must lie outside the world. If there are any ethical realities, they are outside the world, and therefore beyond our reach.

In fact, applying Wittgenstein’s own strict standards to his Tractatus, the propositions of Tractatus itself are rendered meaningless. He himself wrote that he who understands him will recognize them as nonsense. Because to say that language pictures facts is to try to give a picture of the pictorial relation which holds between statement and fact, which is erroneous since this pictorial relation shows itself, and what shows itself cannot be said. He called his metaphysics important nonsense which helped one to recognize it as nonsense. (“He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up it.”) And Tractatus ends with the somber (and quite famous) conclusion: What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.

Later Wittgenstein began to have doubts regarding what he had expressed in Tractatus and therefore returned to Cambridge to work again. He realized that the problem with logical analysis was that it demanded too much precision. A narrow approach such as this could not tackle the varieties of linguistic usage. A variety of grammatical forms may be employed to present the same basic idea. Wittgenstein abandoned the ideal of developing an ideal formal language that would accurately picture the world because he now believed that such a goal was not only impossible to achieve but also completely wrong. The vagueness of everyday language is not to be seen as problem to be solved, but as a factor which contributes to the richness of language.

Wittgenstein believes that words serve different functions, and that people play different ‘language games’. Meaning of a word just is its use. We don’t define words by reference to things but only in the way they are used. It is wrong to attempt to fix the meaning of a particular expression by linking it referentially to things in the world. The link between reality and language is reduced to a special case. “The meaning of a word or phrase or proposition is nothing other than the set of (informal) rules governing the use of the expression in actual life.”[1] Wittgenstein asks his reader to try and define ‘game’. However, there is no definition that can properly explain all the ‘games’ from football to solitaire and chess to the games children play in the grounds. It is not that it is impossible to define ‘game’ but that it has no definition, and more importantly, we don’t need to define it in order to use it successfully in ordinary life. The meaning of a word is just the way it is used. Wittgenstein’s attention also moved to meaningfulness of gestures, questions, orders, greetings, guesses etc, and he catalogued cases in which meaning of a sentence was independent of the precision and determinacy of words.

Language is developed and formed as an attempt to cope with everyday problems, and functions satisfactorily within the context in which it has arisen. The problems arise when language tries to explain something outside its sphere, something for which it had not evolved to describe. There are bound to be complications when language aims to comprehend something beyond the domain of everyday life. We can easily ask, understand and answer the questions like “What time is it?” but when asked, “What is time?” we will find the ordinary language incapable of giving a proper answer. Although it is a perfectly valid question in traditional metaphysics, Wittgenstein shows that it is in fact not a question at all, since it is a question for which there is no answer.

The rules of this everyday language, Wittgenstein maintains, are neither right nor wrong, neither true nor false. They are just rules of the language-game a particular society has decided to use to serve their needs.

The purpose of philosophy, therefore, is not to try and answer these questions, but to show that they are not really valid questions. Philosophy is to be thought of as therapy, something by means of which we are to relieve the bewilderment produced by the misuse of language, by showing that questions, which preoccupy the philosophers, are only the result of linguistic confusion.

Gilbert Ryle (1900-1976) was another philosopher of analytical tradition, who paid great emphasis on the use and misuse of ordinary language in philosophy, although in a very different way from Wittgenstein. I am describing him here because it is convenient for me to do so.
Ryle is well known for his criticism on Cartesian dualism; he claims that the Cartesian view is guilty of making ‘category mistakes’, that is, the Cartesian has been mislead by systematically misleading expressions. Ryle calls the Cartesian dualism as a philosophy of ‘ghost in the machine’. The Cartesian wrongly assumes that certain words and expressions like “knowing”, “believing”, “inferring” represent the different states of a shadowy entity inside humans called ‘mind’, while these words, in fact, refer to different aspects of behavior. Nicholas Everitt explains, “Realizing that talk about the mind is not talk about a physical entity, the Cartesian concludes that it must be talk about a non-physical entity, failing to realize that it is not talk about an entity of any kind.” [2]Expressions which seem to represent the working of a person’s mind actually refer to different aspects of a person’s behavior. When we say that a painter was painting thoughtfully, we are saying something about the manner in which the painter was painting, not that there was some process called ‘thinking’ going on in his ‘mind’. If we pay attention to the proper usage of these expressions, the Cartesian fallacy will become apparent.

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Footnotes:

[1] Garth Kemerling, Philosophy Pages,
http://www.philosophypages.com/hy/6s.htm
[2] One Hundred Twentieth- Century Philosophers, entry on Ryle written by Nicholas Everitt, Routledge New York 1998, page 178

Logical Positivism: Schlick, Carnap, A. J. Ayer

2008-07-02T12:42:00.001+06:00

Strongly influenced by the Tractatus of Wittgenstein, a group of philosophers in Vienna in 1920s initiated a movement which came to be known as Logical Positivism, and the group of philosophers became famous as the Vienna Circle. The Vienna Circle was led by Moritz Schlick (1882–1936), the professor at University of Vienna, and other leading members included people like Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970), Otto Neurath and Friedrich Waismann. A. J. Ayer (1910-1989) belonged to the circle as a young man and later became one of its most enthusiastic spokesmen in the English-speaking world.

It is said that Logical Positivism began when Wittgenstein wrote in Tractatus that philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. And this single sentence does summarize the whole of logical positivism. Logical Positivists believed that the purpose of philosophy was not to produce new propositions describing the universe or reality, but rather, the purpose was to analyze the existing propositions to find out whether the statement is mathematical, scientific or nonsensical. The Vienna Circle believed that a significant proposition has to be either a proposition of formal logic or a proposition of science. Any other statement would simply be nonsensical; not true, not false, but nonsensical. If it had any meaning at all, it would be ‘poetic’ or ‘emotive’ but not cognitive. To the logical positivists, “God exists in the heavens” is as nonsensical as “Bong shong in the dock pock.”

The Logical Positivists took up the analytic/synthetic distinction. As we already know, an analytic proposition is one which is necessarily true, because its truth follows from its meaning i.e. it would be self-contradictory to deny it. “All bachelors are unmarried men” is an analytic statement. A synthetic proposition is one which is not analytic and which requires empirical investigation for the establishment of its validity. “All bachelors go to theatre on Saturdays” is a synthetic statement. It might be true, but you can’t tell that just by the analysis of the statement itself. On the other hand, analytic statements do not tell us anything about the world. The statement “The blue pen is of blue colour” despite being true doesn’t tell us whether a blue pen exists in the world or not. But the statement “The blue pen is lying on my desk”, if true, does tell us something about the world. In other words, analytic propositions are trivial but synthetic propositions are informative.

Now the problem arises, how can we tell whether a particular synthetic proposition is significant or not, whether it is meaningful or nonsensical? To answer this, the logical positivists formulated the Verifiability Criterion of Meaning. Any statement which passed this criterion would be significant. If it failed, it would either be analytic, or nonsensical. This criterion has been stated in different ways by different philosophers. Simply, the criterion says that a proposition will be significant only if it is possible to verify or falsify that proposition by observation. If an observation could be described which would show whether the proposition is true or false, then the proposition is significant, otherwise it is meaningless. For example, if a person claimed that the universe and everything in it is expanding uniformly, such that all our standards of measurement are also expanding uniformly along with it, then there is no possible way by which we can actually find out whether this is true or not. All the people, all the buildings, all the planets would have expanded in the same proportion, so there would be no observable difference at all. If you wish to measure the length of an iron rod which is expanding, and simultaneously the measuring rule is expanding in the same proportion, then there is no way that you can measure the increase in the length of the iron rod using that measuring rule. That is to say, a statement like “The universe is expanding uniformly” is meaningless.

Here it would be important to note that in order for a proposition to be significant, it has to be verifiable in principle, not in practicality. For example, it is not possible at the moment to verify the statement “There are little green men living on Mars” because we have not gone to Mars yet. But, it is possible in principle to verify this statement. We can describe the conditions under which this statement would be true or false. If we send a mission to Mars and the astronauts find little green men living there, then the statement would be true, and if they do not find any little green men, then the statement would be false. In either case, the statement is significant. But is there any possible way by which you can verify the statement, even in principle, that “God exists in the heavens”? No, there isn’t. So the statement is insignificant.

The implications are, of course, disastrous for the traditional philosophy. Because the propositions of ethics, metaphysics and theology are not verifiable by experiments, hence they are either trivially analytic or they are nonsensical. And so, the logical positivists claim, the purpose of philosophy is to not make statements about the nature of reality; that is the purpose of science. The purpose of philosophy is to analyze a problem, and to show that either it belongs to logic and mathematics, or it belongs to science, or it is altogether insignificant. But to solve these problems is not the task of philosophy.

The biggest problem faced by logical positivism has been that it has never been possible to explain the verifiability criterion, which is central to the whole logical positivism, accurately enough to describe where exactly science ends and metaphysics begins. There have been repeated attempts and repeated failures in trying to draw the line at the ‘right place’. And then, the logical analyst W. Van O Quine has shown that the distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions is no longer valid, and that this distinction is more of a convention than an intrinsic division between the propositions. Garth Kemerling writes, “Quine has argued that no strict distinction can be maintained, since the analyticity of any proposition can be denied, with suitable revisions of the entire system of language in which it is expressed.”[1] Due to these reasons, logical positivism lost its influence by the 1960s.

--------------------------
Footnotes:

[1] Garth Kemerling, Philosophy Pages,
http://www.philosophypages.com/dy/a4.htm#ansy

Existentialism and Jean-Paul Sartre

2008-07-02T12:40:00.003+06:00

(1905-1980)

Existentialism is a philosophical and literary movement of the 19th and 20th century which began as a revolt against the traditional philosophy, especially that of Hegel, gained massive support and appreciation in Europe after the Second World War. It is difficult to give a neat and precise definition of the term because of the marked diversity of views and opinions of philosophers and writers associated with this movement. And the confusion is increased by the fact that many thinkers famous as Existentialists themselves denied the label of Existentialist, for example, Heidegger and Camus. And we must also keep in mind that Existentialism not only encompasses philosophers, but also writers like Dostoevsky and Kafka who do not have a well-defined philosophical view of the world. Kaufmann writes “… it becomes plain that one essential feature shared by all these men is their perfervid individualism. The refusal to belong to any school of thought, the repudiation of the adequacy of any body of beliefs whatever, and especially of systems, and a marked dissatisfaction with traditional philosophy as superficial, academic; and remote from life - that is the heart of existentialism.” [1] However, even though we may not have a sharp and clear definition of the term, certain common views and themes can be observed in this movement. The common theme among the existentialists is the emphasis on individual existence, leading to subjectivity, individual freedom, choice and responsibility, and such emotions like despair, aguish, dread and nausea. The question central to existentialism is “What does it mean to exist as a human being, and what are its implications on life?”

Prominent existentialists include Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), Karl Jaspers (1883-1969), Jean Paul Sartre (1905-1980), Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) and Albert Camus (1913-1960). Existentialists have been divided into two groups: the religious or Christian existentialists and the atheist existentialists. Atheistic existentialists deny the existence of any determining factor such as God in human life, and therefore believe in absolute human freedom and responsibility. Christian existentialists, like Kierkegaard, attempt to describe the relationship of man with God. However, this existence of God does not impose a meaning or a reality to the person’s existence. The individual still suffers from the anguish of deciding for himself and making his own choices.

Existentialism attempts to describe our desire for rational decisions despite living in an irrational world. To be born in this world is to find one abandoned and responsible for one’s existence, and to realize with anguish that the reality is devoid of meaning. Although an individual is bound to perish and die, he can invent purposes and projects which will give meaning to his existence, which is otherwise meaningless-in-itself. The term ‘Existentialism’ was coined by Gabriel Marcel and first popularized by the French philosopher and writer, Jean-Paul Sartre.

Although existential attitude can be seen in past thinkers like Saint Augustine and Blaise Pascal, Kierkegaard is almost undisputedly accepted as the founder of the movement.

Søren Kierkegaard (1813 – 1855) was a Danish philosopher and theologian, who was religious to the point of being neurotic. His father was of a very stern religious nature, and his deep sense of sin greatly influenced Kierkegaard, and the impressions of his childhood remained forever in his life. An important event in the development of Kierkegaard was his meeting with Regine Olsen, a girl whom he began to love deeply and proposed in 1840. However, one year later he broke off the engagement. The exact reasons are still uncertain. Kierkegaard mentions in his journals that he took this decision because his melancholic nature made him unsuitable for marriage. There is sufficient evidence to support the view that Kierkegaard never fully recovered from his passionate love for Regine. Later in life he wrote a serious of different books under different pseudonyms. Even though his style was eloquent, forceful and passionate, the writings were largely ignored in his own life. He was regarded as an eccentric by the people around him. His intense criticism of the Danish Church also earned him much disapproval from the religious establishment.

Kierkegaard was greatly repelled by the Hegelian concern for the Whole, with its intoxication with the Absolute. He saw the individual being sacrificed in this utterly rational philosophy, and felt that the reality of individual existence had evaporated. Kierkegaard thought that Hegel in his search for the Absolute had forgotten that he was first and foremost a man. He writes about the Hegelian professor, “While the ponderous Sir Professor explains the entire mystery of life, he has in distraction forgotten his own name; that he is a man, neither more nor less, not a fantastic three-eighths of a paragraph.”[2]

He used strange pseudonyms for his works like Johannes Climacus, Johannes de Silentio and Anti-Climacus, whom he had created to represent different ways of thinking. He also did this because he didn’t want to associate himself with the ideas present in these works. This creates a difficulty to ascertain what Kierkegaard really believed in, and what he was just arguing for as part of a pseudo-author's position. Kierkegaard’s philosophy is perhaps presented most clearly in Philosophical Fragments.

The central question with which Kierkegaard is concerned is, “Is there a purpose to human life?” And in his works, as he explores the answer to this question, he presents an image of human life as full of anguish and uncertainty, absurdity and meaninglessness.

The starting point for Kierkegaard is an old problem posed by Socrates in a dialogue of Plato, Meno. Socrates raised the question: can we learn what we do not know? He argued that if we really did not know it, we would not be able to recognize the knowledge when it is learned. If a person does not know that 3 times 9 is 27, how does he recognize 27 as the true answer when he learns it. The conclusion which Socrates had derived from it was that we do not learn anything new, but what is thought to be ‘learning’ is merely a ‘recollection’ of all the true knowledge that is already present inside us.

Kierkegaard accepts that the question raised by Socrates is a valid one, but doesn’t accept the solution. He presents his own answer. Kierkegaard says that learning is possible, but in learning, a strange miraculous thing occurs. There is a moment of enlightenment which changes the person, makes him different in such a way that he is now able to recognize a truth, of which he was ignorant previously. Kierkegaard calls the source of this enlightenment as God. It is only God’s involvement into human life that makes learning possible.

However, Kierkegaard says that if this moment of enlightenment has to be effective, man has to desire it, but since he is ignorant, he must desire it without knowing at all what it entails, or what would it be like. Kierkegaard gives an example. Suppose a mighty king wants to marry a girl, but can only marry her if the girl loves him for himself, and not because of any other reason like money or power. Now, to make sure that the girl does not fall in love with him because of his wealth or power, he has to conceal these things from the girl. Similarly, to make the moment of enlightenment effective for us, God has to conceal the benefits of enlightenment from the people so that the person would not desire it because of its potential benefits, but desire it for the sake of enlightenment itself.

Kierkegaard is extremely skeptic of reason and says that it is impossible to achieve objective, necessary knowledge about things related to human life. He said that the only escape was to recognize our miserable condition of total ignorance, and to a have blind, irrational faith in God, that God would bring us out of this chaos of ignorance. Kierkegaard accepts that necessary, objective knowledge is possible in mathematics, but that knowledge is just about concepts like ‘points’, ‘lines’ and ‘circles’ that if they existed, then they would obey these rules. But there is no such existential system of necessary truths about human life.

And now we are face to face with the human predicament: we have no knowledge at all about the purpose and meaning of human life, and yet we have a dire need of such knowledge to live our lives. Either we can remain in our state of utter skepticism, or, as Kierkegaard advises, we can take a leap of faith, a ‘leap into absurdity’, an irrational belief that there is something called ‘God’ who can give us enlightenment if we desire it. We can never know if this decision was correct. It could be the wrong decision. But this is the ‘risk’ of faith which we must take.

Since Kierkegaard was a Protestant, he believed that the moment of enlightenment had taken place in human history in the form of Incarnation of Jesus, with the coming of God to earth in human form and sacrificing himself for the believers. But God created the situation in which it was impossible to recognize him as God, save by faith. The contemporaries of Jesus saw him as a man, just like they were. And yet, they had to choose whether to believe or not to believe in him. Reason is helpless and silent in such situations. “I believe because it is absurd” Kierkegaard quotes the famous medieval saying.

Kierkegaard took the Biblical Abraham as his hero. Abraham was ordered by God to sacrifice his son. It was an order that was brutal and meaningless according to human reason and standards, but Abraham took the leap of faith and emerged successful from this test. Kierkegaard’s ‘Knight of Faith’ is someone who believes and acts in virtue of the absurd, someone who sticks to a belief even in the light of over-whelming contrary evidence.

And here it is necessary to stress that Kierkegaard believed in subjective truth, that every individual must find the truth of his own life; a fact that is perhaps revealed by his choice of using different pseudonyms for his different works. He wrote in his Journal "The thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die."[3]

Kierkegaard said that there were three stages in human life. First is the Aesthetic, in which the individual cares only for his personal happiness. The second is Ethical or Social, the stage of a good citizen, in which the person realises his duties to the society and carries them out. The third and highest stage is Existential in which the person recognizes the absurdity of his life and takes the leap of faith.

Perhaps now we can appreciate why Wittgenstein called Kierkegaard "by far, the most profound thinker of the nineteenth century".

Along with Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche is also recognized as one of the founders of Existentialism. He died too early to be a part of this movement, and it is unsure whether he would have accepted this label. Unlike Kierkegaard, Nietzsche is atheistic, and proclaims the ‘death of God’. But like Kierkegaard, he too emphasizes the passion and anxiety of an individual man. A number of similarities can be seen between the two: both were highly critical of the rational and idealistic structures of philosophy. Both wrote in an unsystematic manner and with a passionate, intense literary style. Both recognized the harmful effects of organized religion on society. In comparison with Kierkegaard’s Knight of Faith, we have Nietzsche’s Superman, the acme of Nietzsche’s will to power, an idealised person who defines his own morality. Kierkegaard takes the character of Abraham for the portrayel of his ideas and Nietzsche uses the character of Zarathustra. Kierkegaard speaks contemptuously of the ‘crowd’ while Nietzsche expresses his hatred for the ‘herd’. Such similarities indicate that Nietzsche too had Existential elements in his philosophy. However, it is be remembered that Nietzsche is a multi-faceted philosopher, and to reduce him to any one label such as existentialist or postmodernist would surely fall short of an accurate description of Nietzsche’s philosophy. Kaufmann writes, “Existentialism suggests only a single facet of Nietzsche's multifarious influence, and to call him an existentialist means in all likelihood an insufficient appreciation of his full significance… Existentialism without Nietzsche would be almost like Thomism without Aristotle; but to call Nietzsche an existentialist is a little like calling Aristotle a Thomist.”

The German philosopher Karl Jaspers holds an important position in the history of Existentialism, as he was the connection between the existential philosophy of the 19th century and the existential philosophy of the 20th century. He coined the term “Existenzphilosophie” — the philosophy of existence – which was a forerunner of the term existentialism. The basic ideas which Kierkegaard and Nietzsche had presented were further developed in the philosophy of Karl Jaspers. Just like these two philosophers, Jaspers had a great contempt for traditional philosophy and especially the manner in which philosophy was taught at universities. Jaspers wrote many books and papers but his works were not systematic elaborations of his own philosophy but were meant to encourage debate. He was not trying anyone to convince a philosophy but forcing them to think about their own existence and what were its implications. Jaspers believed that there are two states of being: Dasein and Existenz. Jaspers used the term Dasein to represent the minimal form of existence, the existence from a scientific and objective point of view. Existenz is the subjective state of Being. Jaspers strongly believes in decision making and freedom, but he accepts that there are limits to freedom, which exist as ‘boundary situations’ in the form of death, suffering, guilt, chance, and conflict. Jaspers considers that in order to analyze oneself one needs to consider his interaction with the society. Unless we know what others think and expect of us, we cannot decide who we are or what we want to be. Jaspers, therefore, presents a view in which all people depend upon society for self-definition, even if the act of definition is a rejection of society’s values; a rebel gains his identity as a rebel by virtue of his opposition to the established norms of society. No one is truly separate from society. As a result, individuals experience a constant sensation of conflict: a desire to define the self freely while requiring society for that definition. Like Kierkegaard, Jaspers too believes in a ‘leap of faith’; a free choice to believe in an existence greater than that detected by science.

Martin Heidegger was another German philosopher whose work on phenomenological ontology was extremely important in the development of Existentialism. And even though Heidegger denied being an Existentialist, his name has become an integral part of all list of Existentialists. Many scholars consider Heidegger’s role in the formation of existentialism to be even greater than that of Kierkegaard, and Heidegger is sometimes described as a ‘reluctant father of existentialism’[4]. However, Heidegger is also quite difficult to understand, so it is beyond my ability to do due justice to his status.

Heidegger based his philosophy upon the study of Being and the method he used was that of phenomenology. Phenomenology is the study of the way in which things appear or are present to consciousness. According to Heidegger, a concept must be defined without using itself as reference. And therefore “Being” was defined as a collection of concepts.

Heidegger believed that ‘human being’ -- not human beings, or the human individual, but Being as the abstract noun -- is comprised of four components: concern, being-toward-death, existence, and moods. Dasein is the act of "being there" in essence. And here we must take care because Heidegger uses Dasein in a different sense from that used by Jaspers.

Concern is the ability to care about oneself and one’s existence. Being-towards-death represents the view that the only proof that an individual understands existence is the understanding and acceptance of death. The moment one accepts death is the moment when essence is properly realized. Understanding that life is finite enhances the importance of all further decisions. Existence, or Existenz, represents knowing that one exists and is not static, but rather changing with time. And, moods are reactions to other beings, which further allow a person to define himself.

Being-there, Dasein, can be expressed in several fashions. Here I will only mention two of the modes: Authenticity and Inauthenticity. Authenticity represents the choice of self, when you yourself decide what you want to be. Inauthenticity is its opposite, when you let others define who you are or when you work to fit in the definitions prepared by other people.

The French philosopher Jean- Paul Sartre is certainly the most famous and stimulating figure of Existentialism, and it is primarily to him that Existentialism owes its fame. Since Sartre was the first major philosopher to accept the label of Existentialist, it is sometimes argued that Existentialism should be confined to the philosophy of Sartre alone. He was born in Paris, and taught philosophy till World War II, when he was called in military service and during the service he was caught and imprisoned by the Germans. During and after the war, he became increasingly interested in socialism and developed his own version of Marxist sociology. His last major philosophical work Critique of Dialectical Reason was an attempt to reconcile Existentialism and Marxism. Sartre wrote not only philosophical works but also short stories, novels and plays. He refused to accept the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964, believing that Nobel Prize is a bourgeoisie institution and accepting it would compromise his integrity as a socialist thinker. Sartre’s most important philosophical work is Being and Nothingness. His famous lecture Existentialism is a Humanism provides an easy summary of his basic philosophy, but Sartre later expressed his dissatisfaction over the contents of this lecture and regretted the fact that he had published it. His philosophical novel Nausea is of paramount importance in existential literature, and his trilogy of novel Roads to Freedom is accepted as a twentieth century classic. Among his short stories, The Wall is of great importance as it represents many of his ideas of anguish, despair, choice and responsibility. Among his plays No Exit is prominent and also contains his famous quote: "Hell is other people".

Being and Nothingness is Sartre’s most important philosophical document on existentialism. Sartre is concerned with answering the question, ‘What is it like to be a human being?’ In this book he describes that ‘human reality’ consists of two modes of existence: as Being and as Nothingness. Human beings exist both as an In-itself (en-soi) and For-itself (pour-soi). In-itself is the object, the opaque thing lacking consciousness. For-itself is the consciousness; it is not a thing; it is not what it is conscious of. A thing has no consciousness of itself. It simply exists.

In the novel Nausea, the hero Antoine Roquentin is over-whelmed by the existence of things. And the realization of this brute existence of things, that objects are there without any meaning at all, evokes a feeling of nausea in him. On the shore he picks up a pebble and is sickened by its existence. “I remember better what I felt the other day on the sea-shore when I was holding that pebble. It was a sort of sweet disgust. How unpleasant it was! … it passed from the pebble into my hands… a sort of nausea in hands.”[5] This nausea is actually the realization of contingency of existence, that there is no reason why things exists, that things just happen to be there; the fact that the world is absurd.

The awareness of this contingency of the world, of its ridiculous nature, Diane Collinson explains, ‘generates a desire of the For-itself to exist with the fullness of being of an existing thing, but without contingency and without any loss of consciousness’; An idea which is not possible because ‘Consciousness can never become a thing and remain consciousness.’[6] Sartre calls the fusion of Being and Nothingness as ‘an unrealistic totality’ and an ideal ‘which can be called God’[7].

The first and most necessary fact of existentialism is that for humans, existence precedes essence. Consider any article of manufacture, say a paper knife. It was made by a worker who had a conception of it in his mind. It was made to serve a definite purpose, which was already present before the knife was created. No person would make a paper knife without knowing what it is for. That is, the essence of paper knife comes before its existence.

Since Sartre was an atheist, he rejected the notion of a God creating man like an artisan creates a paper knife. There is no abstract human essence or human nature because there is no creator; humans are not carefully designed artifacts made by a God. Man’s existence comes before his essence. A man first exists and finds himself in this world without any pre-determined purpose. He defines himself; he determines his own purpose of life. He constructs his own essence. Each individual simply is; what he will be, he decides himself. Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. In this drama of life, man is forced to invent for him the character he is going to play, and what lines he is going to speak; there is no predetermined script. “We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards.”[8]

I am free to determine my own life. I can choose what purpose and aim my life is to have. But this immense freedom brings a profound responsibility. I am totally responsible for my life. Nothing has been imposed on me from outside, there is no God, no determinism; there are no excuses for what I choose to make of myself.

A man is not just responsible for his own life, his own individuality but he is also responsible for all men. When a man chooses for himself, he chooses for everyone. When a person does any act, such as when he decides to marry, he is advocating monogamy as a practice for the whole humanity. Nothing can be better for one person until it is better for all. “What we choose is always the better, and nothing can be better for us unless it can be better for all…. In fashioning myself, I fashion man”[9].

This leads to anguish, which is a profound and intense awareness of one’s responsibility, because he is not just choosing for himself, he is legislating for the whole mankind. This anguish is well known to the persons who have held some responsibility. But in this dilemma of choice, there is no external authority to which one can turn for help. It is I, and I alone who can make the decision. Hence, I am bound to feel abandonment. This abandonment is an affirmation of the fact that there is no God. There is no God deciding things. It is I alone. With the inexistence of God, all hope of finding objective ethical values in the world is lost. There are no moral rules, everything is permitted. “Man is condemned to be free”, condemned because he did not ask for this choice, he didn’t desire this freedom. This liberty was imposed on him, and now he is responsible for it. One finds oneself alone, without any excuse. We cannot overcome this abandonment with anyone’s advice, because by choosing the person from whom to take advice, I already know, more or less, what he is going to advise.

But as I realize the intense anguish and responsibility, I also realize that my own powers and abilities are inadequate for the purpose. Hence, I am overwhelmed by a feeling of despair. We are forced to make a choice and follow a path of which we ourselves are uncertain. We cannot guarantee where it would lead us, and yet, we will be responsible for any thing, good or bad, which we encounter on it.

A man is nothing but the sum of his actions. He is what he has made of himself, not what he could have been. To believe that I faced unfavorable circumstances or that I was unlucky, and if I had been given the opportunity, I would have done excellent is self-deception for an existentialist. By thinking so I am deceiving myself. Man exists only in so far as he realizes himself. He is nothing else but what his life is. Why should we say about a person that had he lived he would have made a great achievement, when it is precisely this achievement, which he did not make? One is to be judged by what he is, not by possibilities, which were not fulfilled.

Sartre denies the existence of any human nature. “Although it is impossible to find in each and every man a universal essence that can be called human nature, there is nevertheless a human universality of condition.”[10]

For an existentialist, a moral choice is like a work of art. Like the creation of a piece of art, there is nothing predetermined. One can judge a painting only when it is complete. Just as an artist has the creativity and freedom to create whatever he desires, a man is not bound by any a priori moral laws. All abstract ethical theories breakdown when applied to real and concrete situations. An individual is forced to invent a law whenever he encounters a moral choice. There are no objective values to look up to. You have to make your own painting on the canvas of your life.

An important element of Sartre’s philosophy is ‘mauvaise foi’ translated as ‘bad faith’ or ‘self-deception’. It involves not being true to oneself and attempting to elude responsibilty by making different excuses. For example, a person may believe that his actions and choices have a basis in his sub-conscious or unconscious, and that he has no control over them. But by thinking so he is only deceiving himself in an attempt to escape from the sense of responsibilty. Similarly, one may believe in an unalterable fate decreed by an omnipotent God and that his life is already determined. This too is mauvaise foi. Ultimately there are only two choices: sincerety or self-deception, to be or not to be. In bad faith, we deceive ourselves, lie to ourselves. However, it must be noted that Sartre is not declaring ‘bad faith’ as morally bad. Sartre is not advocating a moral theory. The choice of entering into bad faith is as free a choice as any other choice. Sartre is just describing how men behave, not how they should behave.

In the Critique of Dialectical Reason Sartre presents a synthesis of Marxism and Existentialism, and here he also repudiates many of his previous view of absolute freedom. In the Critique he recognizes that there are many barriers for complete personal freedom. “… let no one interpret me as saying that man is free in all situations.”[11]

The French Journalist Michael Rybalka divided the intellectual development of Sartre into three phases using the phrase ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ to represent the three kinds of philosophies to which Sartre adhered: Existentialism, from mid-30s; Marxism, from Second World War; and Anarchism in the last few years before his death in 1980. However, this classification despite useful is an over-simplification. Sartre remained an existentialist all his life, even when he was a Marxist.[12] Sartre’s marxism was not a pure marxism; it might be called ‘humanistic marxism’. He was aware of how actual marxism had produced practical results that crushed the aspirations of human individuals. He didn’t consider it only as a problem of political practice, but sees it as an actual flaw in marxist political theory. However, it is to be noted that Sartre came to declare existentialism to be a mere ‘footnote to Marxism’, hence greatly reducing its value.

Simone de Beauvoir was a French existentialist novelist, and after meeting Sartre she became his lifelong friend and associate, and contributed a great deal to the expression of existentialism. Her works were also crucial for the development of feminism. Her most important work in this regard is The Second Sex, which reveals how a woman is treated as ‘Other’. Beauvoir outlines how the literary, social, political and religious traditions have created a world in which it is natural to think of woman as a naturally inferior sex. She argues for women's equality, while insisting on the reality of the sexual difference. She applied existentialism to feminism, and just as Sartre had denied any eternal ‘human nature’, Beauvoir denied the distinction of ‘male nature’ or ‘female nature’. “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” is one of the most famous lines from The Second Sex. Her literary works were read as an echo of Sartre’s philosophy in her own life, but now, gradually, her status as a separate philosopher is being recognized.

Sartre and Beauvoir had a very interesting relationship between them. In 1928, Sartre failed his exit exam and was forced to take it again. This however introduced him to Beauvoir who was in the session behind him. And the two found in each other their intellectual match. This time in the exist exam, Sartre came first and Beauvoir came second. And this is how they remained for the rest of their lives; One before the other. Both were deeply in love with each other and were great friends. But they never married. Sartre once did propose to Beauvoir but she refused. Despite the fact that they both had different affairs with other persons, they were never able to break away from each other, and remained in this unconventional love affair till Sartre died. Both greatly influenced each other’s philosophical development, and it is now thought that many of the concepts in Satre’s Being and Nothingness were the result of Beauvoir’s influence[13].

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Footnotes:

[1] Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre by Walter Kaufmann
[2] Quoted in Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder, Page 379, Berkeley Books, New York, 1996
[3] Dru, Alexander. The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, Oxford University Press, 1938
[4] Crowell, Steven, "Existentialism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2006 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = .
[5] J P Sartre, Nausea, quoted in Diane Collinson, Fifty Major Philosophers, (Routledge, London, 1998), page 159
[6] Diane Collinson, Fifty Major Philosophers, (Routledge, London, 1998), page 159
[7] J P Sartre, Being and Nothingness, quoted in Diane Collinson, Fifty Major Philosophers, (Routledge, London, 1998), page 159
[8] J P Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, trans by Philip Mairet (Mathuen, London 1975), page 26
[9] Ibid, page 29
[10] Ibid, page 46
[11] J P Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, quoted in Diane Collinson, Fifty Major Philosophers, (Routledge, London, 1998), page 162
[12] Jean Paul Sartre: Basic Writings Edited by Stephen Priest (Routledge, New York, 2001)
[13] See appendix for details of their relationship

Albert Camus (1913-1960) and Absurdism

2008-07-02T12:39:00.000+06:00

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”[1] The statement reveals one of the dilemmas of the philosophy of Absurd [also called as Absurdism] which Camus sought to answer. The Algerian-born French thinker Albert Camus was one of the leading thinkers of Absurdism. He was actually a writer and novelist with a strong philosophical bent. Absurdism is an off-shoot of Existentialism and shares many of its characteristics. Camus himself was labeled as an ‘Existentialist’ in his own life, but he rejected this title. He was not the first to present the concept of Absurd but it was owing to him that this idea gained popularity and influence, and it transformed into a proper philosophical movement of Absurdism. His famous novels include The Stranger [also translated as The Outsider] and The Fall, while The Myth of Sisyphus is his most important book with regard to his philosophy of the Absurd. He was one of the youngest people to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, when he became a Nobel Laureate in 1957. It is an ironic fact that he died in a car accident in 1960, as he had once remarked that the most absurd way to die would be in a car accident. Camus was a friend of Sartre and worked with him for quite some time, but the two got separated over the issue of communism, as Sartre was a Marxist while Camus opposed it believing that this would lead to totalitarianism.

The foundations of the concept of Absurd can be traced back to the deeply religious Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, also regarded as the fore-father of Existentialism. Kierkegaard describes the Absurd as a situation in life which all thee rational and thinking abilities of a person are unable to tell him which course of action to adopt in life, but in this very uncertainty he is forced to act or make a decision. He has to do something but his reason offers him no help. He writes in one of his journals: “What is the Absurd? It is, as may quite easily be seen, that I, a rational being, must act in a case where my reason, my powers of reflection, tell me: you can just as well do the one thing as the other, that is to say where my reason and reflection say: you cannot act and yet here is where I have to act...”[2]

Since the beginning, thinkers have strived to find out the meaning to life and have pondered over the purpose and objective of this universe. Either they have concluded that this life is meaningless and purposeless, or they have taken refuge in some faith and religious belief such as the existence of God to make-up for this apparent lack of meaning. Even in the latter case, the question arises: what is the purpose of God? And it is this question which a believer has no answer to, as Kierkegaard pointed out, rendering belief in God (or any other religious authority) as absurd. Hence there exists an absurdity which can not be eliminated.

Camus believed in the first scenario: a life intrinsically devoid of meaning and purpose. He refuses to accept any meaning that is beyond this existence. “I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know the meaning… What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms.”[3]

But if life is absurd, what is the point of living on? Why shouldn’t we commit suicide and hasten our fate? Using the Greek myth of Sisyphus as a metaphor, Camus attempts to answer this question and present an alternative to suicide. How to live with the consciousness of this absurdity of life is the central question of Camus’s philosophy. “Does the absurd dictate death?”[4] Camus believes that the answer is no. The appropriate response to the experience of Absurd, Camus suggests, is to live in full consciousness of it. He rejects all those things which erase the consciousness of absurd, such as religious faith, suicide and Existentialism.

Camus begins with a criticism on Existentialism. He says that Existentialists recognize initially that this life is absurd and meaningless, but they then take an ‘existential leap’ or a ‘leap of faith’ and attribute a fabricated meaning to their existence, and often they deify the Absurd. Camus calls it a ‘philosophical suicide’. For example, about Chestov he writes: “[When] Chestov discovers the fundamental absurdity of all existence, he does not say ‘This is absurd’, but rather ‘This is God’”[5]. And he says about Kierkegaard “Kierkegaard likewise takes the leap. His childhood having been so frightened by Christianity, he ultimately returns to its harshest aspect. For him too, antinomy and paradox become the criteria of the religious.”[6] And in contrast, Camus believes that “The absurd… does not lead to God… the absurd is sin without God.”[7]

Sisyphus was a clever and devious character in Greek mythology, who had an excessive zeal for life. He managed to deceive Death as well as Hades but ultimately he was caught, and for his audacity, he was condemned forever to push a heavy boulder up a mountain slope, and only to see it roll back again to the valley each time it reached the top. “They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.”[8]

Camus imagines Sisyphus laboriously rolling the heavy rock, exerting his full strength to the top of the hill. But then he watches the stone roll back, all his measureless effort wasted, and now he will have to push it up again. Sisyphus walks down the slope towards the rock. And it is in this descent that Camus’s interest in focused. “It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.”[9]

Why does this account of Sisyphus arouse dreadfulness in us? Is it because the endless futility of Sisyphus’s toil evokes horror? But then, do we not realize that this myth is a metaphor for our very lives. Our lives too are spent in a useless working routine, whose end even we are not aware of. But it doesn’t shock us like Sisyphus’s punishment because we are not conscious of it. “If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd.”[10]

Yet, Sisyphus is superior to his fate because he has accepted. He will remain in torment and despair as long as he has hope or dream for something better. But once he has realized that this is what his life is, and what it will remain, and there is nothing better at all to look forward to, he will no longer be tormented by the absurdity of his existence. And this would be the key to his happiness. Camus ends his essay with the words, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” But why must we imagine Sisyphus to be happy? Is it some sort of a necessary conclusion? Let us consider the scenario: Sisyphus has fully accepted the reality of his life, the fact that it is absurd. Now if he is not happy, it would mean that life is not intrinsically happy; that happiness can only be found by some sort of an illusion, by means of an escape from reality. We have to believe Sisyphus to be happy if we wish to believe in genuine happiness, a happiness that is real because it is an outcome of the awareness of the reality of life itself.

We must note here that although Camus sees life as absurd and ultimately irrational, he does not advocate a stoic acceptance of the difficulties and problems of life. Camus believed life to be valuable and worth-defending, and all his life he did engage in different activities to help the poor and the oppressed.

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Footnotes:

[1] The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus, Page 11, Penguin Modern Classics
[2] Søren Kierkegaard, Journals, 1849
[3] The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus, Penguin Modern Classics, Page 51
[4] Ibid, Page 16
[5] Ibid, Page 37
[6] Ibid, Page 39-40
[7] Ibid, Page 42
[8] Ibid, Page 107
[9] Ibid, Page 108-109
[10] Ibid, Page 109

Karl Popper

2008-07-02T12:35:00.002+06:00

(1902-1994)

The Austrian philosopher, Sir Karl Raimund Popper, radically changed the way science is perceived by the philosophical community and it is impossible to ignore his views regarding what is known as the philosophy of science. The primary problem with which Popper is concerned is the demarcation between the science and the non-science. What are the characteristics of a theory or an idea which leads us to classify it as scientific or non-scientific? Why is it that Spinoza’s view of the universe is considered as metaphysics, while Einstein’s theory of Relativity is considered as a scientific theory?

Many earlier thinkers had considered induction to be the distinguishing characteristic of a scientific theory. These people believed that scientists made observations and then formed a scientific theory to explain these observations. Then there were certain philosophers among the logical positivists, who believed that a scientific theory had the property of verification. That is, the theory made a certain predication, and if that prediction matched with the observation, it meant that the theory was verified as true.

Karl Popper, however, rejected this classical observationalist-inductivist account of science. Popper did not believe that scientists really used induction to make scientific theories, or if they used it, its role was not central. Scientists do not begin, Popper thinks, with observations but rather with problems. All observations are selective and theory-laden - there are no pure or theory-free observations. And since a certain theory precedes observation, how can it be said that it is observation which is the first step in the formation of a new scientific theory? In this way Popper repudiates inductive method as the proper mechanism by which scientific theories are formed, and therefore induction is not the distinguishing character of a scientific idea.

Popper denied the idea that any scientific theory can ever be verified as true. To the contrary, Popper believed that the only sure test of a theory being as scientific was its quality of being potentially falsified. A theory is to be considered scientific only and only if it is capable of being falsified.

Why a scientific theory cannot be verified is because of its universality. Referring to the example we discussed in Hume, let us consider a statement like ‘All crows are black’. Now this is a statement which can never be verified by no matter how many observations we make, because the hypothesis of crows being black extends to all existing crows, which may be beyond the reach of our observation. And therefore, this statement can never be conclusively verified. Discovering a black crow every time we make an observation does not confirm the theory, but only makes it more probable; the confirmation is only provisional. On the other hand, this statement can be conclusively rejected or falsified. It would take a single observation of a white crow [or red, or any other colour] to finally prove that this theory is wrong. This asymmetry between verification and falsification is central to Popper’s account of science i.e. a theory can be falsified but not verified.

A genuine scientific theory is therefore one which is prohibitive, i.e. it prohibits certain observations or events, which if happen would falsify the theory. Any theory which doesn’t contain any criteria of its falsification, and therefore explains everything, cannot be called as scientific. This can be explained by a rather crude example. Let us think of a doctor who is testing a new medicine as a treatment of a certain disease. The doctor begins to treat the patients of this disease by giving them this new medicine. Now, whenever a patient survives the disease and is cured, the doctor thinks of it as proof that the medicine has the healing properties. On the other hand, if the patient under treatment dies, the doctor assumes that the stage of the disease was too severe for the patient to be cured. Just think for a moment under the light of what has been written in this chapter what is wrong with this methodology. The answer is that the doctor has left no room at all for the falsification of his theory that the medicine had a curative effect. He has thought up of no potential observation which would prove that the medicine is not working. By forming this all-encompassing theory, his approach is no longer scientific. It is quite possible the patients who survived the disease did because of their own natural immunity rather than by any aid of the medicine. It is also possible that the medicine might even have a negative effect on the patient, and that the medicine might have even contributed to the deaths of the unfortunate patients. As obvious, if this principle of falsification is ignored, it can lead to all sorts of pseudo-sciences.

The famous astrophysicist Stephen Hawkings explains this view in this manner:
“…a scientific theory is a mathematical model that describes and codifies the observations we make. A good theory will describe a large range of phenomena on the basis of a few simple postulates and will make definite predictions that can be tested. If the predictions agree with the observations, the theory survives that test, though it can never be proved to be correct. On the other hand, if the observations disagree with the predictions, one has to discard or modify the theory.”[1]

“Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis: you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of the experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory. On the other hand, you can disprove a theory by finding even a single observation that disagrees with the predictions of the theory.”[2]

Another important aspect of Popper’s scientific view is that Popper considers the formation of a scientific hypothesis a creative and imaginative process. There is just no ‘scientific method’ by which a scientist can form a hypothesis. He has to be original and creative, and to use his imagination. It shows the role creativity and imagination has to play in the progress of science. Great scientific theories like theory of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are the result of the spontaneous and intuitive ideas of the scientists. It is this creative aspect of Popper’s scientific method which has been admired by the scientists, and has also been a factor leading to the popularity of this point of view.

In Popper’s terminology, a ‘basic statement’ is to be treated as a particular observation report. A genuine scientific theory, therefore, divides a class of basic statements into two non-empty sub-classes.
1) The class of basic statements which the theory prohibits, and whose occurrence would disprove the theory. Therefore these are the potential falsifiers.
2) The class of basic statements with which the theory is consistent, and which do not verify the theory.
[This is just the expression of the logical asymmetry between verification and falsification, as explained above.]

Popper now faces the task of explaining the growth of science as observed in history on the basis of his scientific method. Popper believes that science advances in an evolutionary manner, on the principle of selection and the survival of the fittest. It is a game of conjectures and refutations. Popper describes this with a formula:

PS1 -> TT -> EE -> PS2

In a response to any problem situation [PS1] the scientists present a number of tentative theories [TT]. These theories are now subject to critical examination and vigorous attempts of falsification. This is called error elimination [EE], and is a selective process which selects those theories which survive the critical tests posed by the investigators. The theories which are falsified are therefore rejected, and only the fittest of theories are allowed to go on. The theories which survive falsification are not true but only more fit. This leads to a gradual evolution towards more and more interesting problems [PS2] and the process of selection and falsification is carried on at each step. It is in this evolutionary manner that science advances, Popper believes.

Popper is perhaps unusual among contemporary philosophers in the sense that he accepts the validity of Hume’s denial of Induction. However, he does not share the resulting skepticism. Hume said that just because we have observed that A follows B does not mean that A will always follow B. Popper accepts that it is not necessary that A follow B, but we can theorize that A will follow B. If A follows B in all our observations, then although this theory is not verified, it has also not been falsified.
So, although it cannot be shown that sun will necessary rise tomorrow, we can make a theory that it will. If the sun doesn’t rise, the theory will be conclusively falsified. And if it does, the theory will be provisionally verified.
Similarly, although it can’t be shown that all crows are black, we can theorize that they are. If we observe a white crow, the theory will be falsified, otherwise it will survive.

There are a number of criticisms on Popper’s ideas. The immediate, perhaps the most effective is the realization of the picture of science it leads. The common sense view that the growth of science is a gradual accumulation of truth about the world is overthrown by this philosophy. Science is not an accumulation of truths, but rather an accumulation of unfalsified theories about the world, which may or may not conform to the Reality. Worse, this means that we can never prove that we have found a theory which really does explains things as they are. Even if our theory was correct, there is no way we could ever find out! What can be more destructive to science than this very realization that science does not offer us the truth regarding the world in which we live? John Searle writes:
“Most scientists do not, I think, realize how anti-scientific Popper’s views actually are. On Popper’s conception of science and the activity of scientists, science is not an accumulation of truths about nature, and the scientist does not arrive at truth about nature, rather all that we have in sciences are a series of so far unrefuted hypotheses.”[3]

One of the criticisms put forth is that Popper has clearly mentioned that there are no pure observations; observations are always ‘theory-laden’. The question arises that if the observations themselves are associated with theories, how can they be used to conclusively falsify another theory? For the Popper’s mechanism to work, it must be possible to conclusively verify the basic propositions as true or false, which would in turn lead to the falsification of the theory which prohibits them. But if it can’t be determined in the first place whether these basic propositions are actually true or false, the falsification becomes impossible to determine. In other words, unless it is shown that potential falsifiers are actual falsifiers, the falsification cannot be conclusive.

Here we must also understand that no theory is present in isolation but rather in association with many other theories. In case when an observation does not match with the prediction, any of the theories in the whole package can be wrong. So, which element of the package should the scientists consider to be falsified? Popper’s answer was that those theories which are more generally applicable are to be preferred, as they are more fit. As an example, he cited the discovery of Neptune. Slight disturbances in the orbit of Uranus were discovered which did not match with the predictions of Newtonian mechanics. But this did not falsify the Newton’s theory, because there was another theory associated with this case, which was of lesser value i.e. the idea that solar system has seven planets. Since the latter was of lesser general applicability as compared to Newton’s theory of Gravitation, it was this which was thought to be at fault. Adams and Leverrier showed that the disturbances in the orbit of Uranus could be explained by the presence of an eighth planet. They even calculated the precise location of the hypothetical planet, which was discovered exactly where they have proposed. This was hailed as a great triumph of Newton’s theory.

However, there is the objection raised by Popper’s own student Imre Lakatos that Popper assumes that there are such things as critical tests, which can conclusively falsify a theory. Popper had elaborated his idea of the critical test with his favourite example of the discovery of Neptune. In Popper’s view, the disturbances in the orbit of Uranus and subsequent explanation in terms of the eighth planet had posed a ‘critical test’ for the Newton’s theory which has passed with flying colours. Lakatos, however, denied that this was a critical test of falsification in the Popperian sense. He poses the question: what if the eighth planet had not been discovered? Would that have counted as a falsification of the Newton’s theory? Obviously, this would not been considered as a conclusive falsification of the Newtonian mechanics. There could have been a large number of other factors at work. There might have been an error in calculation, or the experiment might have been carried out properly, or it is also possible that there were a number of possible solutions to the disturbances of orbit of Uranus, apart from the presence of an eighth planet. The point is that theories like that of Newton can never be falsified as a result of isolated, individual non-confirmations. An experimental non-confirmation of a theory does not necessarily mean its falsification. In fact, such theories are highly resistent to falsification. Lakatos showed that generally applicable theories are falsified, not by critical tests as Popper had thought, but by the continuous incapability of the theory to explain the results of research programs and the theories are rejected only when the gap between the theory and the results of the research programs becomes unacceptable.

So it can be said that Popper’s view of falsification by means of critical tests is too neat to be applicable in actual scientific practice, although it contains many aspects which are quite valid, and whose significance and value is undeniable.

In ethics, Popper believed in a view called ‘negative utilitarianism’, which he developed in his work The Open Society and it’s Enemies. Utilitarianism seeks to increase the maximize good by increasing the happiness of the people, setting its goal as ‘greatest happiness of the greatest number of people’. But Popper stresses the importance of minimizing evil in contrast to maximizing good, and he believes that attempts to decrease evil would produce far better results in society than simply trying to increase the happiness of people.

----------------------------
Footnotes:

[1] The Universe in a Nutshell by Stephen W. Hawkings, Page 31
[2] A Brief History of Time by Stephen W. Hawkings, Page 11
[3] The Future of Philosophy, an article by John Searle.

Postmodernism

2008-07-02T12:20:00.002+06:00

Postmodernism is a difficult and complicated movement to treat, especially because there is little agreement among philosophers themselves. However, there is no doubt about the fact that there is a movement called Postmodernism and that it does have some characteristics associated which can be pointed out, even though not every postmodernist accepts them. One of the striking things about Postmodernism is its breadth and scope… it includes fields like philosophy, arts, literature, architecture, and even film and drama. This is further complicated by the deliberately obscurantist style of the postmodern writers. In fact, many people believe most of postmodernism, if not all of it, to be an empty, mindless rhetoric lacking any substance or meaning, and believe the postmodernists to be “intellectual imposters”. Despite having the title of philosophy, its influence on philosophical community has been little, most of its impact being on cultural theory, literary criticism and media. Postmodernism has aroused the strongest hostility from the philosophers of the analytical camp, who fail to understand what these postmodernists write at all which might be called philosophy. To give the readers an idea of the jargon-filled pseudo-scientific obscurantist style of postmodern writings, it’d be better to present a quotation from Félix Guattari, one of the recognized postmodernists:

“We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously.”[1]

So, it is not surprisingly that analytical philosophers dismiss postmodern writing as meaningless rubbish. It might be true to a great extent, and I believe it to be so, nevertheless, I feel that there are certain ideas related to postmodernism which are worthy of being noticed, and it will be my attempt to present those ideas in a simple, clear manner, divorced from their obscure style of postmodern writing.

As obvious from the name, postmodernism is some sort of a response to modernism. Now of course, the question arises: what is modernism? Unfortunately, there is no simple answer to this as well. A proper answer would involve a dive in the world of art and literature, and would include a study of people like Woolf, Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Proust, and Kafka. However, at the risk of great over-simplification, I’d like my readers to assume for the moment that modernism is roughly the same as the Enlightenment Project; the French intellectual movement of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with protagonists like Voltaire. Also known as the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment thinkers believed that reason and science can produce objective knowledge and universal truths about the world and that employment of these will lead to the progress and perfection of human institutions and society. In simple words, the cure of all human dilemmas is the use and application of reason. Postmodernism, on the other hand, is simply disgusted by this worship of reason, and believes that the ideals of enlightenment have failed and that reason and science has not just led humans to prosperity but also led to horrific things like Auschwitz and the Holocaust.

In the political sense, postmodernism was born after the 1968 Paris événements, a series of events beginning with a student strike, but becoming intense enough to paralyse the whole country. The thinkers like Jean-François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard lost faith in the Marxist theory (or Marxist ‘metanarrative’, as Lyotard would later call it) because the French Communist Party was believed to have played a part in defusing the revolutionary situation and siding with the government. The politics of postmodernism is, therefore, generally Post-marxist, i.e. disillusionment with the Marxist system of thought. [Exceptions are there, like Frederic Jameson.]

On the linguistic side, Postmodernism can be called as ‘post-structuralism’. Post-structuralism is a theory of literary criticism often associated with Postmodernism; it is a reaction against Structuralism, which treats language as a system, with set rules and procedures. Structuralism believes that there is a deeper, underlying structure in language. Ferdinand de Saussure, the first major exponent of structuralism, believed that there is a distinction between a deeper level of langue, which are the rules and procedures in a natural language, and a superficial level of parole, the chain of words which these rules generate. Using this methodology, structuralists believed that all aspects of social life have an underlying structure. For example, Lévi Strauss believed that different myths from different primitive societies have a deeper, underlying structure which is common to all myths. Post-structuralism denies the very existence of any such deeper underlying structure, be it language or social life. A text has no stable meaning, and its meaning is also indeterminate. Derrida is the most recognized exponent of post-structuralism, whom we shall see in detail.

In many ways, Nietzsche is the great grand-daddy of postmodernism, and his writings have been one of the greatest influences on postmodernists. His nihilism and perspectivism make the postmodern ideas look strangely familiar. Like the postmodernists, Nietzsche shares hostility towards science, and believes science to be metaphors of language which have been solidified by the people into accepted truths. And there are many places where Nietzsche has touched upon the idea of the dissolution of the distinction between ‘real’ and ‘apparent’ world, and he refers to being as “the last breath of a vaporizing reality”.[2]

The story begins officially with Jean-François Lyotard (1924 –1998), and his book The Postmodern Condition (1979). Lyotard says that the introduction of computer and its extensive use has changed the very nature of knowledge. Knowledge is no longer preferred by its appeal to truth, but rather by its efficiency; the ability of being converted into digital form. Knowledge that cannot be translated into the digital language of computer will not survive and endure. It will be eliminated.

Lyotard introduces the distinction between scientific discourses and narrative discourses. Narrative discourses are like popular stories, myths or even philosophies that are found in different cultures. These myths, these narrative discourses legitimize themselves. For example, the Greek myth of Chaos giving birth of Gaea does not seek to prove itself by external evidence; it legitimizes itself. Scientific discourses on the other hand need evidence to prove its statements. Its theories need to be verified, or as Popper said, falsified to be accepted as scientific. Therefore, science cannot legitimize its own activities. Questions like “Why should society encourage science and its research work?” transcend the scientific discourse. So what does science do? It turns to narrative to legitimize itself! There are two particular such narratives which Lyotard considers most important: The Enlightenment and the Hegelian philosophy. The former is a political narrative while the latter is a philosophical narrative. In Enlightenment we have the narrative that use of reason will lead to a society of happy and liberated individuals. In Hegel’s philosophy, we have the ideal of the unification of all knowledge. Lyotard calls these ‘Grand Narratives’ or ‘Metanarratives’; narratives which encompass and explain all the other little narratives. These two are not the only Grand Narratives. Other examples can include Marxism and Christianity.

So, it is the metanarratives of Enlightenment and Hegel’s philosophy which legitimize science, or rather, used to legitimize science. Because Lyotard says that since the Second World War, people have lost their belief in these Grand Narratives. The holocaust has shown that science can lead to persecution and oppression instead of freedom and liberation. And on the Hegelian ideal of unification of knowledge has also been lost, because science has now indulged in paradoxical concepts like an electron can pass from one orbit to another without crossing the space in between. Science is no longer concerned with discovering the laws of nature, but rather with deciding which theory or what kind of research works better. Without the support of these metanarratives, science is now forced to legitimize itself; just like a myth!

This is how Lyotard describes postmodernism: it is incredulity towards Grand Narratives. People have lost their faith in all-encompassing theories which have the ability to explain everything. Instead, there is now a collage, a carnival of contradicting and conflicting micronarratives, little narratives, or language games[3] which explain a limited number of things, and which make no claim of representing the reality.

But this raises an interesting criticism: Is not the narrative that people have lost faith in Grand Narratives a Grand Narrative itself? And indeed, it is one of the criticisms leveled against Lyotard’s postmodernism. By attempting to explain the postmodern condition, postmodernism itself becomes an all-encompassing theory, something which it is trying to demolish in the first place.

Frederic Jameson (1934– ) believes postmodernism to be the ‘cultural logic of late capitalism’ i.e. the social manifestations of the period of late capitalism, in which there is unrestricted of multinational corporations. Since Jameson is a Marxist, he believes that the world is governed by historical forces and also in the Hegelian idea that every age has a spirit. So, the spirit of the late capitalist society is postmodernism. Jameson says that postmodernism is trying to deny this very idea of a historic awareness, while a historical consciousness is what we severely need at the moment to avert the fragmentation of postmodernism. Or, in other words, Jameson believes that the cure lies in Marxism.

Jameson is also remembered for his distinction between parody and pastiche. In modernism there was still a concept of unified identity, even though it may have been an alienated. And since there was an identity, it could imitated by parody. But in the postmodern world, the identity and language has been fragmented. All unity is lost. And with the loss of unified identity, parody has also disappeared. What we are left with is a pastiche—a random pasting together of images from different sources.

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) is another philosopher identified with the movement of postmodernism. Foucault has basically presented a philosophical analysis of history leading up to the present time. He terms it ‘archeology’, which is a large-scale philosophical analysis of social practices (or ‘discourses’) in history. Foucault has given special attention to how madness has been perceived throughout history and how attitudes to sexuality have changed. He believes that these archaeologies show discontinuities, in which the social perception changes very radically in a short period of time. For example, after the Enlightenment there was a drastic change in the way insanity and madness was viewed. What would have been an acceptable behaviour in the medieval times suddenly became ‘insane’ according to the growing cult of reason, and need was felt for such insane individuals to be confined and locked away. Foucault calls it ‘The Great Confinement’. Foucault denies the possibility of writing history from a purely objective point of view. Such a task is impossible because it will require a point of reference outside the flow of history. Foucault sees all such attempts by the academics as cases of ‘transcendental narcissism’. Foucault was also interested in the relationship of power and knowledge. He believes that it is erroneous to analyze power at large levels, like that of the state. Power exists only at a micro-level; there is only micropolitics of power. Power is exercised at small, local levels; a prison, a hospital, a university, a house, these are all such examples. And since power exists locally, the only way to resist it is to resist it locally. Being a homosexual, Foucault was aware of how power exercised at local levels leads to the repression of such individuals. He often faced administrative restrictions from the university owing to his sexual affairs. Unfortunately, Foucault was also only of early victims of AIDS, when he died of this disease in 1984, being the first high profile French personality to have been an HIV victim.

Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) is one of the important postmodernist thinkers; especially his ideas of simulacra and hyperreality have gained a lot of popularity. Baudrillard argues that in our postmodern world, the simulacra (the copies of real objects or events) have replaced the reality; they have become more real than reality itself. He gives the reference to a short story by Borges in which the cartographers of a kingdom produce a map so detailed and exact that it ends up covering the whole geographic territory, and hence becomes the reality. Similarly, we are living in a world of media images and simulacra which have become more real than reality – they have created their own ‘hyperreality’. The images of Madonna have become more real than Madonna herself. Baudrillard calls it the ‘death of reality’, which should not be taken literally as meaning that reality doesn’t exist, but rather that simulacra have become more real than the reality. An interesting example is given by Jim Powell: In an episode of Beavis and Butthead, the two are watching TV, and they see on the screen that police breaks its way into an apartment—their apartment!—and busts them, but they are so immersed in watching the TV that they don’t even realize that the whole event is taking place live. “Life has become TV, and TV, life. TV watches us, and we watch TV watching over us.”[4] It is in this way that the distinction between reality and simulation is lost; Douglas Kellner writes “in the media and consumer society, people are caught up in the play of images, spectacles, and simulacra, that have less and less relationship to an outside, to an external "reality," to such an extent that the very concepts of the social, political, or even "reality" no longer seem to have any meaning.”[5] The film Matrix by the Wachowski brothers is thought to have been inspired by Baudrillard’s philosophy of Simulacra and hyperreality.

Baudrillard created a lot of controversy by his famous claim that the Gulf War ‘did not take place’. On one hand we can take it as saying that what we saw as the Gulf War was actually just a play of media images, visuals and spectacles. But what Baudrillard meant was perhaps that there was little difference in the political scenario before and after the war (a claim for which he has been strongly criticized): Saddam remained the sovereign and retained most of his military and political power, and hence, in a sense, there was no war.

Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) was a very famous and controversial Algerian-born French philosopher who has in many ways replaced the image of Jean-Paul Sartre as the top French intellectual celebrity, being the founder of the notorious ‘Deconstruction’. Deconstruction has risen up a whole storm of controversy and discussion, and responses differ from passionate advocacy to hostile denial. However, whatever its philosophical status may be, there is no doubt that deconstruction has emerged as one of the most influential ideas of our times.

Philosophers debate heatedly about how to define Deconstruction. Derrida himself said that any attempts to define deconstruction as ‘Deconstruction is X’ will simply miss the point. However, it can be seen as a certain way of reading a text. And here I must mention that a ‘text’ is not just a text (written material), but it could be anything… it could be a painting, it could be a song, it could even be a video. Anyhow, for simplicity, we shall consider only written material as text. Derrida criticizes western philosophy for its unacknowledged belief in a ‘metaphysics of presence’, a view that a text has a stable meaning that can be determined unambiguously. In contrast, Derrida advocates an interpretation of text in which there is a continual play of difference.

In my attempt to explain Deconstruction in an easy and clear manner, I run the risk of over-simplification, but this is the best that I can do to make the horribly obscure writings on Deconstruction somewhat understandable. All texts and cultures have a polarity: There is a Centre which tends to repress and marginalize the Other. For example, in a male-dominated society, Male is the centre while Female is the Other. In an Islamic society Islam is the centre while all non-Islamic faiths are the Other. The Centre is given a privileged position while the Other is ignored and pushed away. Similarly, texts have a Centre and an Other. This centre constitutes the dominant interpretation which has been preferred, while the other is an alternative explanation which has been suppressed and ignored. Deconstruction aims to reveal this polarity of the text and then show that multiple interpretations are possible, all of which are valid, and that there is no single meaning.

In his humorous and highly enjoyable article How To Deconstruct Almost Anything - My Postmodern Adventure[6], Chip Morningstar explains how he has understood the methodology of Deconstruction. He describes it in 5 steps.

Step 1: Select a text. As I have explained before, text could be anything from a writing to a movie. For simplicity, I will choose a few lines from a poem I had written.

‘O my dear beloved
I wait for you
In the darkness of night again
And I wait
Not because you have become a habit
But because I do care for you’[7]

Step 2: Decide what the text says. I will take these lines as saying that the poet is revealing to his lover that his attachment to her is not because of the fact that she has become a ‘habit’, that he waits to meet her even in the darkness not because he has simply gotten used to meeting her, not because meeting with her has become a part of his routine, but because he really does care for her, that he really does love her.

Step 3: Identify within the reading a distinction of some sort. The distinction in this text is between
attachment to lover as a habit, and
attachment to lover as a matter of sincere concern and love

Though other distinctions might also be discovered in these lines, but this is the most obvious one.

Step 4: Convert your chosen distinction into a "hierarchical opposition". This is to say that one of the components of the distinction is usually given greater privilege than the other. Here we can see that attachment to lover as a matter of sincere concern is given more privilege by the people, and the idea of attachment to lover as a habit is seen with scorn and displeasure.

Step 5 -- Derive another reading of the text which reverses the polarity of the opposites. That is, find a way to interpret the text which contradicts and opposes the original interpretation. This is the crucial part of Deconstruction, and this is what philosophers are adept in doing in a number of styles. The more obscure and oblique the style is, the more it will be appreciated among the postmodernists. But since we are not concerned with the appreciation of postmodern critics, but rather with understanding and clarity, I’ll do this in a very simple way:

“Why does the poet feel the need to emphatically state that his intentions for meeting with his beloved are governed by sincere concern and love, rather than as a matter of routine? It is as if he is trying to convince his lover of the purity of his love, but if his love is pure, why does he even feel this need? Is it because he is subconsciously aware that his attachment to his lover is in fact a mere habit, but he is trying to hide this fact from himself and his lover by this emphatic statement? Hence, this text raises the very question in the reader’s mind (and perhaps lover’s mind as well!) which it is trying to suppress: the fact that the poet’s love is a mere outcome of habit.”

As you can see, this interpretation is in total contradiction with the superficial or more obvious interpretation. But which of these is the true interpretation? Derrida says that both of these interpretations are true and equally valid. (It is a usual practice in Deconstruction to consider only the text and the author is ignored. Hence, even though I am the author of that poem myself, and of course, I would know what my intentions were when I wrote those lines, but in deconstructing the lines, I considered only the text, and ignored myself, the author.) Now that you have seen both interpretations, none of them remains dominant. The text has been ‘decentrised’. It has lost its Centre, and therefore there is now a free play of meaning. The reader will see the meaning of the poem fluctuating between the two interpretations. Jim Powell describes “There is no central configuration that attempts to freeze the play of the system, no marginal one, no privileged one, no repressed one. According to Derrida, all language and all texts are, when deconstructed, like this. And so is human thought, which is always made up of language. He says we should continuously attempt to see this free play in all our language and texts.”[8] And Stuart Sim writes, “The end result is a form of philosophy which looks closer to game playing than to traditional philosophical argument.”[9]

One of the implications of Deconstruction is that, if language is fragmented, then it means that people, who think it terms of language, would also be fragmented. “If the sentence breaks down, so does the psyche. So does our experience of past, present and future.”[10] Hence, it might be said that the disease of modernism was alienation and paranoia, while the disease of postmodernism is Schizophrenia.

When the University of Cambridge decided to give an honorary doctorate to Derrida, there was a huge controversy raised by the faculty, and 18 philosophers from different institutions, including the famous logical analyst W. V. Quine, signed a letter of protest saying that Derrida's work "does not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigor". And it accuses Derrida of “translating into the academic sphere tricks and gimmicks similar to those of the Dadaists or of the concrete poets.” And that his writings consist merely of elaborate jokes and puns like "logical phallusies"[11]. However, despite all this hostile criticism, Derrida has gone a long way in establishing himself as an important thinker, and the popularity he has achieved is a proof of that.

One of the ideas that is commonly heard in discussions about postmodernism is the idea of ‘death of philosophy’. Since postmodernism has fragmented, deconstructed and destroyed everything, what remains now? “Jürgen Habermas, for example, argues that the abandonment of any commitment to universal reason on the part of poststructuralist thinkers like Foucault ultimately leads to the end of philosophy, and to any possibility of being able to discriminate between the claims of competing theories or discourses.”[12] [My italics]

For a summary of postmodernism, I think there is no better way than to borrow from Ihab Hassan’s table of schematic differences between modernism and postmodernism. Some of the differences that he mentions are[13]:

----------------------

Footnotes:

[1] Quoted in the article ‘Postmodernism Disrobed’ by Richard Dawkins
http://richarddawkins.net/article,824,Postmodernism-Disrobed,Richard-Dawkins-Nature
[2] Aylesworth, Gary, "Postmodernism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2005 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = .
[3] Echoes of Wittgenstein!
[4] Postmodernism – For Beginners by Jim Powell, Orient Longman, page 64
[5] Kellner, Douglas, "Jean Baudrillard", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2007 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = .
[6] http://www.fudco.com/chip/deconstr.html
[7] Sacrifice, published in Us Magazine, 24 November 2006
[8] Postmodernism – For Beginners by Jim Powell, Orient Longman, page 106
[9] One Hundred Twentieth- Century Philosophers, entry on Derrida written by Stuart Sim, Routledge New York 1998, page 44
[10] Postmodernism – For Beginners by Jim Powell, Orient Longman, page 107
[11] Barry Smith, et al., "Open letter against Derrida receiving an honorary doctorate from Cambridge University" The Times [London]. May 9, 1992.
http://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/elljwp/againstdsdegree.htm
[12] One Hundred Twentieth- Century Philosophers, entry on Foucault written by Stuart Sim, Routledge New York 1998, page 59
[13] Hassan "The Culture of Postmodernism" Theory, Culture, and Society, V 2 1985, 123-4
[Cited in http://www.as.ua.edu/ant/Faculty/murphy/436/pomo.htm]

The Existentialist Couple: Sartre and Beauvoir

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It is interesting to know that Jean-Paul Sartre, the famous existentialist philosopher and political activist, failed in his first attempt at his agrégation, a form of exit exam which qualifies a person for a teaching post, in 1928. Failing this was a blow to the young Sartre, especially because he considered himself to be the brightest mind of Ecole Normale Supérieure. But fate has its strange ways, and this failure proved to be of monumental importance in Sartre’s life—it gave him a chance to meet Simone de Beauvoir. Their intimate and enigmatic relationship would later produce a whole cultural and philosophical revolution.

Beauvoir began to study for her aggregation in 1929, and her boyfriend René Maheu introduced her to a study group, of which Sartre was also a part. The two, recognizing in each other their intellectual match, were instantly attracted. Beauvoir was a beautiful, intelligent woman. Sartre was not that handsome, but he had a sort of aggressive male ugliness that becomes charismatic. And even though Beauvoir was having a relationship with Maheu, she fell in love with Sartre, and they began to study together in the group. When the results of the next agrégation came, Sartre was placed first and following very closely, Beauvoir got the second position. It is now widely believed that Sartre was given the first position simply because he was a male; the examiners agreed that she was strictly the better philosopher. And we must also consider the fact Sartre was giving the exam for the second time, while it was the first attempt for Beauvoir. And Beauvoir also got the distinction for becoming the youngest person ever to obtain the agrégation in philosophy. In a sense, their destiny was revealed right then: this is how the two would remain together throughout their lives. And even though Beauvoir was probably the sharper and more intelligent of the two, Sartre would acquire a greater fame as a philosopher.

There is no doubt in the fact that the two were in love with each other. Beauvoir wrote in her Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, “Sartre corresponded exactly to the dream companion I had longed for since I was fifteen: he was the double in whom I found all my burning aspirations raised to the pitch of incandescence. I should always be able to share everything with him…” However, their relationship was also one of the most unconventional of relationships. The two felt that their relationship transcended the social institution of marriage, and therefore the two never married. This was explained by Beauvoir herself: “The comradeship that welded our lives together made a superfluous mockery of any other bond we might have forged for ourselves.”

Their love affair is well-known for its complexity. Sartre had proposed a pact to Beauvoir: The two would have individual, separate lives. They would be free to have other relationships. They could have affairs with other people. But they would share everything with each other, every detail of their liaisons. This was the kind of soul marriage they had. As Sartre explained to Beauvoir, “What we have is an essential love; but it is a good idea for us also to experience contingent love affairs.” This statement by Sartre is perhaps the best philosophical description of their relationship. Maybe it was the rebellious nature of Beauvoir and her desire to escape from the bourgeoisie culture of her family which attracted her to this settlement, but she must surely have realized that this pact gave a license to Sartre to be unfaithful.

Sartre was indeed famous as a Don Juan, as a seducer of women, and surely preferred the company of women, especially pretty and charming ones. Bianca Bienenfeld, one of the countless women with whom Sartre had had affairs, wrote about him, “Just as a waiter plays the role of a waiter, Sartre played to perfection the role of a man in love.” This allusion to waiter is perhaps one of the most sophisticated criticisms of the disparity between Sartre’s life and philosophy. Sartre has used the example of a waiter to elaborate his concept of mauvaise foi (‘bad faith’ or self-deception) that the waiter pretends that this particular role of café waiter determines his every action and attitude, but the truth is that he has chosen to behave in this way, and by doing so he lets himself be defined by the role society has given him.

Beauvoir’s works were often read and seen as an echo of Sartre’s philosophy, perhaps also because of Beauvoir’s own insistence on being called ‘Sartre’s disciple’. Beauvoir’s utter devotion to Sartre, even at the cost of her status as an original philosopher is incomprehensible. Edward and Kate Fullbrook have argued that it was Beauvoir, and not Sartre, who was the intellectual force behind some of the key existential ideas. Beauvoir and Sartre worked closely throughout their lives, and Beauvoir edited all books Sartre wrote, and Sartre read Beauvoir’s works before they got published. It has now been discovered that Sartre had read a manuscript of Beauvoir’s novel She came to Stay before he started writing the masterpiece of existentialism, Being and Nothingness. And therefore Beauvoir’s employment of concepts like bad faith was not under the influence of Sartre, but rather, vice versa. It was Sartre who took these ideas from Beauvoir. Existentialism was the child of the love of Sartre and Beauvoir.

The pact between Sartre and Beauvoir was supposed to be equal; both were free to have as many affairs they wanted. But it seems that in real life Sartre was far more equal than Beauvoir was. While Sartre was continuously engaged in an endless succession of affairs, Beauvoir responded with relatively few but longer-lasting relationships. It is quite evident that Beauvoir suffered from jealousy; the autobiographical writings of Beauvoir express a hyperbolic love for a man who was never sexually faithful to her. Although she had several love affairs, it is clear from her writings that she would have gladly given them all up if she could have Sartre all for herself. And yet, despite everything she achieved in her life as a writer, philosopher and feminist, Beauvoir is content to state, “Our relationship was the greatest achievement of my life.”

Suggestions for further study

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Books:

History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell, Routledge, London
Story of Philosophy by Will Durrant, Pocket Books
Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder, Berkeley Books, New York
Philosophy Made Simple, by Richard H. Popkin and Avrum Stroll, Doubleday & Company, Inc. USA
Fifty Major Philosophers, by Diane Collinson, Routledge, London
One Hundred Twentieth- Century Philosophers, Routledge New York
An Outline of Western Philosophy, by C B Armstrong

Online Resources:

Philosophy Pages by Garth Kemerling
http://www.philosophypages.com
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
http://www.iep.utm.edu/
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
http://plato.stanford.edu/
Squashed Philosophers by Glyn Hughes
http://www.btinternet.com/~glynhughes/squashed/index.htm
Galilean Library
http://www.galilean-library.org
Spark Notes
http://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy

Comments

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If you have any comments or suggestions about the website and the philosophical content, please post them here. Thank you.
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Updates

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Placing a text on internet has an advantage: it can be modified and improved if an error is pointed out. Since my book is far from being free from faults and some mistakes, i have decided to make changes in the text if i come to know of any erroneous statement.

On this page, i will keep a track of the changes i make in the text (apart from typing n grammatical mistakes) based on the interaction with the readers.

1) I had written in the chapter on Spinoza: "Most modern philosophers have expressed a positive opinion of Spinoza’s character, with the, perhaps sole, exception of Nietzsche." I got this impression about Nietzsche's opinion of Spinoza from Russell mainly. He writes in History of Western Philosophy, page 734, "Speaking of Spinoza he [Nietzsche] says: 'How much of personal timidity and vulnerability does this masquerade of a sickly recluse betray!' Exactly the same may be said of him, with the less reluctance since he has not hesitated to say it of Spinoza." But Qasim Aziz pointed out that this was a erroneous approach to Nietzsche, and that in reality Nietzsche admired Spinoza, and he presented this to prove his point:

'Nietzsche's letter to Overback, Sils-Maria, July 30, 1881: Postcard to Franz Overbeck

''I am utterly amazed, utterly enchanted! I have a precursor, and what a precursor! I hardly knew Spinoza: that I should have turned to him just now,was inspired by "instinct." Not only is his overtendency like mine—namely to make all knowledge the most powerful affect—but in five main points of his doctrine I recognize myself; this most unusual and loneliest thinker is closest to me precisely in these matters: he denies the freedom of the will, teleology, the moral world-order, the unegoistic, and evil. Even though the divergencies are admittedly tremendous, they are due more to the difference in time, culture, and science.''

http://www.geocities.com/thenietzschechannel/nlett1881.htm

I found it convincing, so i have removed the reference to Nietzsche from the chapter on Spinoza. Thank you Qasim for your correction.

2) In the chapter on Berkeley, the statement that Berkeley is regarded as the founder of Idealism has been replaced, because the statement is erroneous. If Idealism has a founder, Plato would be considered to be so. (Thank you, Dr. Ahmad Arsalan, for the correction.)

Reader, you too can help me improve this book. Email me at awaisaftab@gmail.com or drop a comment. I'd be most grateful. Thank you.