Ridling Zaine. Philosophy: Then and Now. A look back at 26 centuries of thought

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Ridling, Philosophy Then and Now: A Look Back at 26 Centuries of Thought

118

Later Marxism continued this concern with practical issues, because it

represented the basic Marxist conception of what philosophy is and ought to

be. For Marxism (like Pragmatism) tried to assimilate theoretical issues to

practical needs. It asserted the basic unity of theory and practice by finding

that the function of the former was to serve the latter. Marx and Lenin both

held that theory was always in fact expressive of class interests; consequently,

they wished philosophy to be transformed into a tool for furthering the class

struggle: not abstractly to discover the truth but concretely to forge the

intellectual weapons of the proletariat was philosophy’s dominant task. Thus

philosophy became inseparable from ideology.

Since the discovery and publication in 1927 and 1932 of some of Marx’s

early writings, many have sensed a breath of fresh air in Marxist

philosophizing outside Russia. The concern of the young Marx with

alienation, with a theory of the nature of man, and with moral values has given

Marxism a new humanistic dimension and has inspired some notable

revisionist thinking in Poland, Hungary, and the Balkan region.

Analytic Philosophy

Logical Positivism

Logical Positivism, or Logical Empiricism, the earliest branch of

modern Analytic philosophy, was jointly inspired by Hume and by the new

logic of Russell and Whitehead, authors of the Principia Mathematica (3 vol.,

1910-13). The school, formally instituted at the University of Vienna in a

seminar of Moritz Schlick in 1923, continued there as the Vienna Circle until

1938. Its great period began in 1926 when Rudolf Carnap, who became a

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leading semanticist and philosopher of science, arrived at the University. Its

manifesto of 1929, Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung: Der Wiener Kreis

(“Scientific Conception of the World: The Vienna Circle”), and its journal

Erkenntnis (“Knowledge”), founded a year later, marked its self-

consciousness as a philosophical movement.

Logical Positivism’s basic contribution has been a profound alteration in

the conception of the role that philosophy itself must play. Philosophy, it

claimed, must henceforth be scientific. It should seek less a content than a

function: it should produce not complicated pictures of the world but clear

thinking. This was best stated by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Tractatus

Logico-Philosophicus (1922), first published as Logische-philosophische

Abhandlung (1921):

The object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thoughts.

Philosophy is not a theory but an activity. A philosophical work consists

essentially of elucidations. The result of philosophy is not a number of

“philosophical propositions,” but to make propositions clear.

Despite this emphasis upon philosophy as a pure activity, Logical

Positivism did propound, at the same time, a series of revolutionary theses:

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All meaningful discourse consists either of (a) the formal

sentences of logic and mathematics or (b) the factual propositions

of the special sciences;

Any assertion that claims to be factual has meaning only if

it is possible to say how it might be verified;

3. Metaphysical assertions, coming under neither of the two

classes of (1), are meaningless;

4. All statements about moral, aesthetic, or religious values

are scientifically unverifiable and meaningless.

Logical Positivism’s radical denial of the meaningfulness of

metaphysics and of assertions of value at first produced something of a

philosophical scandal. But meanwhile Bertrand Russell and his student

Wittgenstein (who had emigrated from Austria) were propounding similar

doctrines in England; and, after the Nazis overran Austria and Carnap, Hans

Reichenbach (a Berlin Positivist), and many others from the Vienna Circle

moved to America, this philosophy proved remarkably influential in the

Anglo-American world. The Logical Positivists were mainly interested in

three basic themes: logic, language, and perception. Whereas Russell began

with logic, turned to problems of perception, and ended with semantics,

Carnap, having begun with perception in Der logische Aufbau der Welt (1928;

The Logical Structure of the World), turned to problems of semantics in

Logische Syntax der Sprache (1934; The Logical Syntax of Language) and

ended with logic in Meaning and Necessity (1947). But of these three themes

it was that of language that proved most enduring. This emphasis Logical

Positivism shared with its successor, Linguistic Analysis.

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Linguistic Analysis

Sometimes called “ordinary language” Analysis or even “Oxford

philosophy” from its later stronghold, this movement was, in fact, largely the

product of two philosophers of the first half of the 20th century who were

associated with the University of Cambridge, G.E. Moore (1873-1958) and

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951). Moore made the examination of the

assertions of other men philosophically popular – i.e., the practice of directing

the philosopher’s critical energies to the mistakes of his contemporaries. The

major subjects of his interest were ethics and the theory of knowledge; his

thought was always Realistic and commonsensical, and he introduced into

philosophy an unbelievably precise and closely applied analytical method. It

was Moore’s passion for clarity and his infinite pains “to get everything

exactly right” that served as moral inspiration to a succeeding generation of

younger men who had attended his Cambridge lectures over a span of 30

years.

Wittgenstein had begun as a kind of adjunct to the Vienna Circle. There

was a time when his philosophical position was much like that of Russell and

Carnap; but as he later became more sceptical of the foundations of

mathematics and logic, his interest turned from logic and artificial language

systems toward a critical examination of ordinary natural language. This

change was principally registered in his Philosophical Investigations,

posthumously published in 1953, which has become the true bible of

Linguistic Analysis. For it is here that Wittgenstein showed how a man’s

entire world is constituted by his linguistic experience and suggested that “all

philosophy is critique of language.” Wittgenstein thought that to ask “Why do

we use this particular word or expression?” was the crucial philosophical

question since a focusing of philosophy not upon the world but upon the

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mechanisms of linguistic use would solve most of the perplexities that have

plagued philosophizing. Thus Linguistic philosophy was to perform a

therapeutic function.

Wittgenstein’s example found many followers in the United States and,

particularly, in England. There philosophers Gilbert Ryle, J.L. Austin, and

P.F. Strawson have examined “category mistakes,” “systematically misleading

expressions,” “mental-conduct concepts” (such as “other minds”), and all of

the major “perception words” such as “looking,” “seeing,” “sensing,”

“feeling,” and the like. The effect of this concentration not upon things or

ideas but upon words has, for members of this school, turned the customary

works on ethics, aesthetics, or the philosophy of religion into treatises entitled

“The Language of Ethics” or “The Language of Aesthetics” or “The Language

of Religion.” And these efforts are all, in Wittgenstein’s terms, “a battle

against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”

Continental Philosophy

The Analytic philosophy that by the mid-1970s had come to dominate

Anglo-American philosophical thinking for almost half a century has had

comparatively little influence on the continent of Europe. There the

metaphysical and speculative traditions have remained strong; and in the

1950s and 1960s the interest in both, but particularly in Phenomenology,

posed an increasing threat to philosophical Analysis in Britain and the United

States. Continental philosophy may be divided into Phenomenology and

Existentialism, but the division is not sharp. Thinkers such as Martin

Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty combine the two

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strands. And the phenomenological method has been one of the formative

forces in Existentialism.

Phenomenology of Husserl and Others

Edmund Husserl (1859-1939), a German mathematician turned

philosopher, was the true father of Phenomenology. He was an extremely

complicated and technical thinker whose views changed considerably over the

years. His chief contributions were the phenomenological method, developed

early, and the concept of the life-world, appearing only in his later writings.

Husserl proposed the phenomenological method as a technique for conducting

phenomenological analyses – that is, for making possible “a descriptive

account of the essential structures of the directly given.” The emphasis here is

upon the immediacy of experience, the attempt to isolate it and set it off from

all assumptions of existence or causal influence and to lay bare its actual

intrinsic structure; for it is this structure that constitutes its essence.

Phenomenology restricts the philosopher’s attention to the pure data of

consciousness uncontaminated by metaphysical theories or scientific

assumptions. Husserl’s concept of the life-world expressed this same idea of

immediacy. It is the individual’s personal world as directly experienced, with

the ego at the center and with all of its vital and emotional colorings.

With the appearance of the Jahrbuch für Philosophie und

Phänomenologische Forschung (1913-30; “Annual for Philosophical and

Phenomenological Research”), under Husserl’s chief editorship, his personal

philosophizing flowered into an international movement. Its two most notable

adherents were Max Scheler, a scholar of life-philosophy, whose Formalismus

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in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik (“Formalism in Ethics and the

Material Value-Ethics”) was published in the Jahrbuch (1913-16), and the

ontological Existentialist Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), whose famous Sein

und Zeit (Being and Time) appeared in the Jahrbuch in 1927. Despite the

differences in their individual philosophies their work showed clearly the

influence of the phenomenological method: in Scheler’s careful explorations

of the role that emotion plays in men’s moral values and in his descriptive

analyses of the human attitudes of resentment, sympathy, and love; and in

Heidegger’s startlingly original investigations of human existence with its

unique dimensions of being-in-the-world, dread, care, and being toward death.

In all of these painstaking and enormously detailed inquiries, however, both

Scheler and Heidegger held to the phenomenological principle that philosophy

is not empirical but is the strictly self-evident insight into the structure of

experience. Later, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a French student of philosophical

psychology, in his Phénoménologie de la perception (1945; The

Phenomenology of Perception), took over Husserl’s conception of the life-

world and used the notions of the lived body and its facticity to build up a

hierarchical order of man’s lived experience.

Existentialism of Jaspers and Sartre

Continental Existentialism, true to its roots in Kierkegaard and

Nietzsche, is oriented toward two major themes: (1) the analysis of human

Being and (2) the centrality of human choice. Thus its chief theoretical

energies are devoted to ontology and decision. Existentialism as a philosophy

of human existence found its best spokesman in the German Karl Jaspers, who

came to philosophy from medicine and psychology. As a philosophy of

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human decision, its spokesman was the French philosopher and playwright

Jean-Paul Sartre. These two preoccupations of Existentialism lead to two

different conceptions of philosophy’s function.

For Jaspers (1883-1969), as for Dewey, the aim of philosophy is

practical; for Dewey, however, it guides human doing, whereas for Jaspers its

purpose is the achievement of human Being. Philosophizing is an inner

activity by which the individual finds and becomes himself: it is a revelation

of Being. It is an attempt to answer the question of what man is and what he

can become; and this activity, wholly unlike that of science, is one of mere

thought, through the “inwardness” of which a man becomes aware of the

deepest levels of Being.

But if, for Jaspers, philosophy is devoted to “the illumination of

existence,” that illumination is achieved when a person recognizes that human

existence is revealed most profoundly in his experience of those “extreme”

situations that define the human condition – conflict, guilt, suffering, and

death. It is in man’s confrontation with these extremes that he achieves his

existential humanity.

Sartre (1905-80), too, has some concern for man’s Being and his dread

before the threat of Nothingness. But Sartre finds the essence of this Being in

man’s liberty – in his duty of self-determination and his freedom of choice –

and therefore spends much time in describing the human tendency toward

“bad faith” – reflected in man’s perverse attempts to deny his own

responsibility and to flee from the truth of his inescapable freedom. Sartre,

like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, considered himself less an academic

philosopher than a man of letters and also wrote novels and plays that assert

the Existential dogma of human freedom and explore the inexhaustible

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mechanisms of bad faith. It is not that Sartre overlooks the legitimate series of

obstacles to freedom a human being has to face in the givens of place, past,

environment, fellowmen, and death; but his Existentialist bias demands that

man surmount these limitations by acts of conscious decision. For only in acts

of freedom does human existence achieve authenticity.

Conclusion

It seems clear that, in the 50 years around the mid-20th century,

philosophizing has become uncommonly concerned with problems of

language, symbolism, and communication. Renaissance philosophy was

primarily preoccupied with nature, with an external physical world and the

objects contained within it. The Enlightenment turned to the mind that knows

the world; its philosophy spoke of the genesis of ideas, the relation of

concepts, the quality of appearances. But 20th-century philosophizing largely

states its problems in terms of symbolic manipulation and the characteristics

of words.

Nor is this merely the preoccupation of Analytical philosophy: Dewey

was interested in social communication; Whitehead wrote a little volume on

Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect (1927); Heidegger turned to poetry and the

etymology of words for the revelation of Being; Ernst Cassirer, a German

Neo-Kantian, produced a “philosophy of symbolic forms”; and Jaspers tried to

decipher the meanings reflected in human speech and gesture.

Apart from this underlying tendency there seems little prospect for

philosophical unification. The scientific and the metaphysical tempers still

pursue their opposite courses, and the subjectivity of Existentialism and the

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objectivity of Logical Positivism still express their opposition in mutual

contempt. Thus, in the contemporary philosophical universe, multiplicity and

division still reign.