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

368

“reckoning,” from deductive calculations carried out on the names that the

thinker has assigned to them. True knowledge is thus not merely a priori but

also analytic. Yet it all concerns material and sensible existences: everything

that exists is a body.

The most elaborate and influential presentation of Empiricism was made

by John Locke (1632-1704), an early Enlightenment philosopher, in the first

two books of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). All

knowledge, he held, comes from sensation or from reflection, by which he

meant the introspective awareness of the workings of man’s own mind. Locke

confused the two issues of the nature of concepts and the justification of

beliefs. His Book I, though titled “Innate Ideas,” is largely devoted to refuting

innate knowledge. And even so, he later admitted that much substantial

knowledge – in particular, that of mathematics and morals – is a priori. He

argued that infants know nothing; that if men are said to know innately what

they are capable of coming to know, then all knowledge is, trivially, innate;

and that no beliefs whatever are universally accepted. Locke was more

consistent about the empirical character of all man’s concepts and displayed in

detail the ways in which simple ideas can be combined to form complex ideas

of what has not in fact been experienced. One group of dubiously empirical

concepts – those of unity, existence, and number – he took to be derived both

from sensation and from reflection. But he allowed one a priori concept – that

of substance – which the mind adds, seemingly from its own resources, to its

conception of any regularly associated group of perceptible qualities.

Bishop George Berkeley (1685-1753), a theistic Idealist and opponent of

Materialism, applied Locke’s Empiricism about concepts to refute Locke’s

account of man’s knowledge of the external world. He drew and embraced the

inevitable conclusion that material things are simply collections of perceived

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ideas, a position that ultimately leads to phenomenalism; i.e., to the view that

reality is nothing but sensations. He accounted for the continuity and

orderliness of the world by supposing that its reality is upheld in the

perceptions of an unsleeping God. The theory of spiritual substance involved

in Berkeley’s position seems to be vulnerable, however, to most of the same

objections as those that he posed against Locke.

The Scottish sceptical philosopher David Hume (1711-76) fully

elaborated Locke’s Empiricism and used it reductively to argue that there can

be no more to man’s concepts of body, mind, and causal connection than what

occurs in the experiences that he has of them. For Hume all necessary truth is

formal or conceptual, determined by the relations of identity and exclusion

that hold between ideas.

Voltaire imported Locke’s philosophy into France; and its Empiricism,

in a very stark form, is the basis of sensationalism, in which all of the

constituents of human mental life are analyzed in terms of sensations alone.

A genuinely original and clarifying attempt to resolve the controversy

between Empiricists and their opponents was made in the critical philosophy

of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), drawing upon Leibniz and Hume. With the

dictum that, although all knowledge begins with experience it does not all

arise from experience, he established a clear distinction between the innate

and the a priori. He held that there are a priori concepts, or categories –

substance and cause being the most important – and also substantial or

synthetic a priori truths. Although not derived from experience, the latter

apply to experience. A priori concepts and propositions do not relate to a

reality that transcends experience; they reflect, instead, the mind’s way of

organizing the amorphous mass of sense impressions that flow in upon it.

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Lockean Empiricism prevailed in 19th-century England until the turn to

Hegel occurred in the last quarter of the century. To be sure, the Scottish

philosophers who followed Hume but avoided his sceptical conclusions

insisted that man does have substantial a priori knowledge. But the philosophy

of John Stuart Mill (1806-73), logician, economist, and Utilitarian moralist, is

thoroughly Empiricist. He held that all knowledge worth having, including

mathematics, is empirical. The apparent necessity of mathematics, according

to Mill, is the result of the unique massiveness of its empirical confirmation.

All real knowledge for Mill is inductive and empirical; and deduction is

sterile. On similar lines, the philosopher of evolution Herbert Spencer (1820-

1903) offered another explanation of the apparent necessity of some of man’s

beliefs: they are the well-attested empirical beliefs of his ancestors from

whom he has inherited them, an evolutionary revival of the doctrine of

innateness. Two important mathematicians and pioneers in the philosophy of

modern physics, W.K. Clifford (1845-79) and Karl Pearson (1857-1936),

defended radically Empiricist philosophies of science, anticipating the Logical

Empiricism of the 20th century.

In Contemporary Philosophy

The most influential Empiricist of the 20th century was the great British

philosopher and logician Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), who at first was

Lockean in his theory of knowledge – admitting both synthetic a priori

knowledge and concepts of unobservable entities. Ludwig Wittgenstein

(1889-1951), the influential pioneer of the school of Linguistic Analysis,

convinced Russell that the truths of logic and mathematics are analytic; and

Russell then came to believe, with Hume, that the task of philosophy is to

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analyze all concepts in terms of what can be directly present to the senses. In

this spirit, he tried to show that even the concepts of formal logic are

ultimately empirical though the experience that supplies them may be

introspective instead of sensory.

Doctrines developed through the collaboration of Russell and

Wittgenstein yielded the Logical Positivism of the German philosopher

Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970) and of the Vienna Circle, a discussion group in

which that philosophy was worked out. The Empiricism of Logical Positivism

is especially evident in its restatement of the fundamental thesis of Hume’s

philosophy in a form known as “the verification principle,” which recognizes

as meaningful and synthetic only those sentences that are in principle

verifiable by reference to sense experience.

Criticism and Evaluation

The earliest expressions of Empiricism in ancient Greek philosophy

were those of the Sophists. In reaction to them Plato presented the

Rationalistic view that man has only “opinion” about changing, perceptible,

existing things in space and time; that “knowledge” can be had only of

timeless, necessary truths; and that the objects of knowledge – the unchanging

and imperceptible forms or universals (such as “Bed,” “Man,” etc.) – are the

truly real. The circles and triangles of geometrical “knowledge,” in this view,

are quite different in their perfect exactness from the approximately circular

and triangular things present to man’s senses. In the Phaedo, Plato expounded

a theory of literally innate ideas; man, for example, has a conception of exact

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“equality,” which, since it could not have been supplied by the senses, must

have been acquired by the soul before it was embodied.

Aristotle agreed with Plato that knowledge is of the universal but held

that such universal forms should not be conceived as “separated” from the

matter embodying them. This belief does not make Aristotle an Empiricist,

although he was certainly a less extreme Rationalist than Plato. Aristotle took

the Rationalist view that every science or body of knowledge must resemble

Euclidean geometry in consisting of deductions from first principles that are

self-evidently and necessarily true and that, although the senses acquaint man

with the sensible forms of things, he cannot have knowledge of them unless

reason is brought into play to acquaint him with their intelligible forms as

well.

The Stoic view of “common notions,” or beliefs that are held by all men

– a Rationalistic element in an otherwise Empirical school of thought – was

expanded during the early medieval period by the Christian Platonist St.

Augustine (CE 354-430), a thoroughgoing Rationalist. The Stoic common

notions, Augustine held, are truths that God has implanted in the human mind

through direct illumination.

Although the early modern expression of Empiricism in the 17th century

by Francis Bacon heralded the scientific age, its influence was lessened by his

failure to appreciate the revolutionary use of mathematics that comprised the

genius of Galileo’s new physics and, even more fundamentally, by his

underestimation of the need for imaginative conjecture in the formation of

scientific hypotheses to restrict the overwhelming number of facts that would

otherwise have to be handled. In contrast to Bacon’s view, the philosopher

and mathematician René Descartes (1596-1650), his contemporary and one of

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the principal founders of modern thought, developed a comprehensive

Rationalism that was more immediately influential. For Descartes all clear and

distinct ideas, and in particular those of philosophy and of geometrical

physics, are innate; sense experience is at most the agency that elicits ideas

already present in the mind. In principle, all knowledge is a priori and

demonstrable by pure reasoning, but in practice, because of man’s finite

intellect, it is necessary to rely on experience to confirm propositions for

which rational proof is beyond reach. In England innate ideas and knowledge

were defended by Edward Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1582-1648), precursor

of Deism, and by a school of Puritan Humanists known as the Cambridge

Platonists. The case for innate ideas, however, is hard to establish; there can

be in the nature of the case little actual evidence that one can possess concepts

before having had some relevant experience.

In the second half of the 17th century, the Empiricist views of John

Locke were similarly controverted by a systematic thinker and man of affairs,

G.W. Leibniz, who examined Locke’s views in minute detail in his book

Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain (1704, published 1765; Eng.

trans., New Essays, 1916), arguing that ideas can be virtually innate in a less

trivial sense than Locke allowed. Interpreting Locke’s notion of reflection as

reasoning rather than as introspection, Leibniz supposed that Locke was more

of a Rationalist than he really was.

In contemporary philosophy, there are thinkers who, though broadly

sympathetic to Positivism, have voiced reservations about its more

specifically Empiricist elements. One important philosopher of science, Karl

Popper, has rejected the inductivism that views the growth of empirical

knowledge as the result of a mechanical routine of generalization. To him it is

falsifiability by experience that makes a statement empirical. An influential

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American philosopher and logician, W.V. Quine, has been critical of the

Logical Empiricists’ frequent recourse to the concept of meaning and has

rejected the sharp distinction they make between analytic and factual truths,

on which most of contemporary Empiricism rests. For Quine, both human

concepts and beliefs are the joint outcome of experience and conventional

decision, and he denies that the role of the two factors can be readily

distinguished as Empiricists assert.

The theory of knowledge has been the central discipline in philosophy

since the 17th century, and its most basic issue is that between Empiricism

and Rationalism, an issue that is still being actively debated. On the one hand,

the idea that science rests on substantial but nonempirical presuppositions has

been put in question by the fact that in some areas it seems to get along

without them: without conservation in cosmology, without causality in

quantum physics. On the other hand, the traditional theory of the innate

powers of the mind has been reanimated by the considerations underlying the

theory of language offered by Noam Chomsky, a generative grammarian, who

holds that the learning of language is too rapid and too universal to be

attributed entirely to an empirical process of conditioning. The basic strength

of Empiricism consists in its recognition that human concepts and beliefs

apply to a world outside oneself, and that it is by way of the senses that this

world acts upon the individual. The question, however, of just how much the

mind itself contributes to the task of processing its sensory input is one that no

simple argument can answer.

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Existentialism

The various philosophies (dating from about 1930) that have been

referred to by the term Existentialism have in common an interpretation of

human existence in the world that stresses its concreteness and its problematic

character.

Nature of Existentialist Thought and Manner

According to Existentialism: (1) Existence is always particular and

individual – always my existence, your existence, his existence. (2) Existence

is primarily the problem of existence (i.e., of its mode of being); it is,

therefore, also the investigation of the meaning of Being. (3) This

investigation is continually faced with diverse possibilities, from among

which the existent (i.e., man) must make a selection, to which he must then

commit himself. (4) Because these possibilities are constituted by man’s

relationships with things and with other men, existence is always a being-in-

the-world – i.e., in a concrete and historically determinate situation that limits

or conditions choice. Man is therefore called Dasein (“being there”) because

he is defined by the fact that he exists, or is in the world and inhabits it.

With respect to the first point, that existence is particular, Existentialism

is opposed to any doctrine that views man as the manifestation of an absolute

or of an infinite substance. It is thus opposed to most forms of Idealism, such

as those that stress Consciousness, Spirit, Reason, Idea, or Oversoul.

Secondly, it is opposed to any doctrine that sees in man some given and

complete reality that must be resolved into its elements in order to be known

or contemplated. It is thus opposed to any form of objectivism or scientism

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since these stress the crass reality of external fact. Thirdly, Existentialism is

opposed to any form of necessitarianism; for existence is constituted by

possibilities from among which man may choose and through which he can

project himself. And, finally, with respect to the fourth point, Existentialism is

opposed to any solipsism (holding that I alone exist) or any epistemological

Idealism (holding that the objects of knowledge are mental), because

existence, which is the relationship with other beings, always extends beyond

itself, toward the being of these entities; it is, so to speak, transcendence.

Starting from these bases, Existentialism can take diverse and

contrasting directions. It can insist on the transcendence of Being with respect

to existence, and, by holding this transcendence to be the origin or foundation

of existence, it can thus assume a theistic form. On the other hand, it can hold

that human existence, posing itself as a problem, projects itself with absolute

freedom, creating itself by itself, thus assuming to itself the function of God.

As such, Existentialism presents itself as a radical atheism. Or it may insist on

the finitude of human existence – i.e., on the limits inherent in its possibilities

of projection and choice. As such, Existentialism presents itself as a

humanism.

From 1940 on, with the diffusion of Existentialism through continental

Europe, its directions have developed in terms of the diversity of the interests

to which they are subject: the religious interest, the metaphysical (or nature of

Being) interest, the moral and political interest. This diversity of interests is

rooted, at least in part, in the diversity of sources on which Existentialism has

drawn. One such source has been the subjectivism of the 4th-5th-century

theologian St. Augustine, who exhorted man not to go outside himself in the

quest for truth, for it is within him that truth abides. “If you find that you are

by nature mutable,” he wrote, “transcend yourself.” Another source has been

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the Dionysian Romanticism of Nietzsche, who exalted life in its most

irrational and cruel features and made this exaltation the proper task of the

“higher man,” who exists beyond good and evil. Still another source has been

the nihilism of Dostoyevsky, who, in his novels, presented man as continually

defeated as a result of his choices and as continually placed by them before

the insoluble enigma of himself. As a consequence of the diversity of these

sources, Existentialist doctrines have focused on several aspects of existence.

They have focused, first, on the problematic character of the human

situation, through which man is continually confronted with diverse

possibilities or alternatives, among which he may choose and on the basis of

which he can project his life.

Second, the doctrines have focused on the phenomena of this situation

and especially on those that are negative or baffling, such as the concern or

preoccupation that dominates man because of the dependence of all his

possibilities upon his relationships with things and with other men; the dread

of death or of the failure of his projects; the “shipwreck” upon insurmountable

“limit situations” (death, the struggle and suffering inherent in every form of

life, the situation in which everyone daily finds himself); the guilt inherent in

the limitation of choices and in the responsibilities that derive from making

them; the boredom from the repetition of situations; the absurdity of man’s

dangling between the infinity of his aspirations and the finitude of his

possibilities.

Third, the doctrines have focused on the intersubjectivity that is inherent

in existence and is understood either as a personal relationship between two

individuals, I and thou, such that the thou may be another man or God, or as