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

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Aristotle, all human beings are the same in respect to form (that which

constitutes them as human), and their individual differences are to be

accounted for by reference to the matter in which this common form is

variously instantiated (just as the different properties of golf and squash balls

are derived from the materials of which they are made, while their common

geometrical properties are related to their similar size and shape). This being

so, it is impossible for an individual human soul to have any existence

separate from the body. Reincarnation is thus ruled out as a metaphysical

impossibility. Further, the physical differences between men and women

become philosophically significant, the sex of a person becoming a crucial

part of his or her identity.

Although Plato and Aristotle gave a different metaphysical status to

forms, their role in promoting and giving point to investigations of human

nature was very similar. They both agreed that it is necessary to have

knowledge of human nature in order to determine when and how human life

flourishes. It is through knowledge of shared human nature that we become

aware of the ideals at which we should aim, achieved by learning what

constitutes fulfillment of our distinctively human potential and the conditions

under which this becomes possible. These ideals are objectively determined

by our nature. But we are privileged in being endowed with the intellectual

capacities that make it possible for us to have knowledge of this nature.

Development of our intellectual capacities is thus a necessary part and

precondition of a fulfilled human existence.

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Medieval Period

Western medieval culture was dominated by the Christian Church. This

influence was naturally reflected in the philosophy of the period. Theology,

rather than metaphysics, tended to be given primacy, even though many of the

structures of Greek philosophy, including its metaphysics, were preserved.

The metaphysics of form and matter was readily assimilable into Christian

thought, where forms became ideas in the mind of God, the patterns according

to which he created and continues to sustain the universe. Christian theology,

however, modified the positions, requiring some sort of compromise between

Platonic and Aristotelian views. The creation story in the book of Genesis

made man a creature among other creatures, but not a creature like other

creatures; man was the product of the final act of divine initiative, was given

responsibility for the Garden of Eden, and had the benefit of a direct

relationship with his creator. The Fall and redemption, the categories of sin

and grace, thus concern only the descendants of Adam, who were given a

nature radically different from that of the animals and plants over which they

were given dominion. Man alone can, after a life in this world, hope to

participate in an eternal life that is far more important than the temporal life

that he will leave. Thus, belief in a life after death makes it impossible to

regard man as wholly a natural being and entails that the physical world now

inhabited by man is not the sole, or even the primary, reality. Yet, the

characteristically Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body also entails

that the human body cannot be regarded as being of significance only in the

mortal, physical world.

Against the background of these constraints, Christian philosophy first,

through the writings of St. Augustine, gave prominence to Platonic views. But

this emphasis was superseded in the 12th century by the Aristotelianism of St.

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Thomas Aquinas. Augustine’s God is a wholly immaterial, supremely

rational, transcendent creator of the universe. The twofold task of the

Christian philosopher, a lover of wisdom, is to seek knowledge of the nature

of God and of his own soul, the human self. For Augustine the soul is not the

entire man but his better part. There remains a Platonic tendency to regard the

body as a prison for the soul and a mark of man’s fallen state. One of the

important consequences of Augustine’s own pursuit of these two endeavors

was the emphasis he came to place on the significance of free will. He argued

that since the seat of the will was reason, when people exercise their will, they

are acting in the image of God, the supreme rational being. Thomas Aquinas,

while placing less emphasis on the will, also regarded man as acting in the

image of God to the extent that he exercises and seeks to fulfill his intelligent

nature. But he rejected the Platonic tendency to devalue the body, insisting

that it is part of the concept of man that he have flesh and bone, as well as a

soul.

But whatever the exact balance struck in the relation between the mind

and body, the view of man was first and foremost as a creature of God; man

was privileged by having been created in the image of God and given the gift

of reason in virtue of which he also has free will and must take the burden of

moral responsibility for his own actions. In order to fulfill his distinctively

human nature man must thus order his thoughts and actions in such a way as

to reflect the supremacy of religious values.

In popular medieval culture there was also, however, a strong

undercurrent of thoroughly fatalistic thought. This was reflected in the

popularity of astrology and alchemy, both of which appealed to the idea that

events on Earth are governed by the influence of the heavenly bodies.

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Renaissance

It was in the cultural context of the Renaissance, and in particular with

the Italian humanists and their imitators, that the center of gravity of reflective

thought descended from heaven to earth, with man, his nature, and his

capacities and limitations becoming a primary focus of philosophical

attention. This gave rise to the humanism that constitutes philosophical

anthropology in the second sense. Man did not thereby cease to view himself

within the context of the world, nor did he deny the existence of God; he did,

however, disengage himself sufficiently from the bonds of cosmic

determination and divine authority to become a center of interest in his own

eyes. In ancient literature the educated people of the West rediscovered a clear

conscience instead of the guilty conscience of Christianity; at the same time,

the great inventions and discoveries suggested that man could take pride in his

accomplishments and regard himself with admiration. The themes of the

dignity and excellence of man were prominent in Italian humanist thought and

can be found clearly expressed in Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s influential

De hominis dignitate oratio (Oration on the Dignity of Man), written in 1486.

In this work Pico expresses a view of man that breaks radically with Greek

and Christian tradition: what distinguishes man from the rest of creation is that

he has been created without form and with the ability to make of himself what

he will. Being without form or nature he is not constrained, fated, or

determined to any particular destiny. Thus, he must choose what he will

become. (In the words of the 20th-century existentialists, man is distinguished

by the fact that for him existence precedes essence.) In this way man’s

distinctive characteristic becomes his freedom; he is free to make himself in

the image of God or in the image of beasts.

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This essentially optimistic view of man was a product of the revival of

Neoplatonist thought. Its optimism is based on a view of man as at least

potentially a nonnatural, godlike being. But this status is now one that must be

earned; man must win his right to dominion over nature and in so doing earn

his place beside God in the life hereafter. He must learn both about himself

and about the natural world in order to be able to achieve this. This was,

however, only one of two streams of humanist thought. The other (more

Aristotelian) was essentially more pessimistic and sceptical, stressing the

limitations on man’s intellectual capacities. There is an insistence on the need

to be reconciled to the fact of man’s humanity rather than to persist in taking

seriously his superhuman pretensions and aspirations. These two differently

motivated movements to focus attention on man himself, on his nature, his

abilities, his earthly condition, and his relation to his material environment

became more clearly articulated in the 16th and 17th centuries in the

opposition between the rationalist and empiricist approaches to philosophy.

The 16th and 17th Centuries: The Rise of Scientific Thought

Rationalism versus Scepticism

The thought of Michel de Montaigne, the 16th-century French sceptical

author of the Essais (1580-95; Essays), represented one of the first attempts at

anthropological reflection (i.e., reflection centred on man, which explores his

different aspects in a spirit of empirical investigation that is freed from all ties

to dogma). Scepticism, the adoption of an empirical approach, and liberation

from dogmatic authority are linked themes stemming from the more

pessimistic views of man’s capacity for knowledge. The emphasis on man’s

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humanity – on the limited nature of his capacities – leads to a denial that he

can, even by the use of reason, transcend the realm of appearances; the only

form of knowledge available to him is experimental knowledge, gained in the

first instance by the use of the senses. The effect of this sceptical move was

twofold. The first effect was a liberation from the dogmatic authority of

claims to knowledge of a reality behind appearances and of moral codes based

on them; sceptical arguments were to the effect that human beings are so

constituted that such knowledge must always be unavailable to them. The

second effect was a renewal of attention to and interest in the everyday world

of appearances, which now becomes the only possible object of human

knowledge and concern. The project of seeking knowledge of a reality behind

appearances must be abandoned because it is beyond the scope of human

understanding. And this applies as much to man himself as to the rest of the

natural world; he can be known only experientially, as he appears to himself.

The anthropology of Montaigne began with a turning in upon himself; it

gave priority to that reality which was within. Montaigne, however, was also

witness to a renewal of knowledge brought about by numerous discoveries

that made the horizons of the traditional universe expand greatly. For him,

self-awareness already reflected an awareness of the surrounding world; it

wondered about the “savages” of America and about the cannibals that were

so different from him and yet so near; it compared the intelligence of man

with that of beasts and accepted the idea of a relationship between animal

existence and human existence. The idea that moral codes are the work of

man, rather than reflective of an objective order, opened up the possibility of

recognizing the legitimate existence of a plurality of codes and thus of the

empirical study – rather than an immediate condemnation and rejection – of

the customs of others.

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Work of Descartes

By contrast, the work of the 17th-century French philosopher René

Descartes represented a continuation of the theme of optimism about man’s

capacities for knowledge. Descartes explicitly set out, in his Meditations (first

published in 1641), to beat the Sceptics at their own game. He used their

methods and arguments in order to vindicate claims to be able to have

nonexperimental knowledge of a reality behind appearances. The Meditations

thus also begins with a turning in of Descartes upon himself but with the aim

of finding there something that would lead beyond the confines of his own

mind.

Cartesianism occupies a key position in the history of modern Western

philosophy; Descartes is treated as a founding father by most of its now

diverse traditions. His work is characteristic of the philosophical effort of the

17th century, which was engaged in a struggle to achieve a synthesis between

old established orders and the newly proclaimed freedoms that were based on

a sceptical rejection of the older orders. There are undeniable tensions in the

philosophy of this period that are the product of various unsuccessful attempts

to reconcile two very different views of man in relation to God and the world.

The first, the authoritarian view, was that inherited from medieval

philosophy and from Thomist theology. It derived its ideal of human freedom

from the Stoic conception of the wise man, who, in the 17th century was

called a man of honestas (the French concept of honnêteté). The man of

honestas seeks freedom in the discovery of and obedience to the order and law

on which the world is grounded. He believes that there is such a law, that he

has a “place” in the scheme of things, and that he is bound to his fellow

human beings by that nature through which he participates in this higher

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order. He tends to look to the authorities – whether these be church, state, or

classical texts – for knowledge of this order, for it is not to be found at the

level of experience; it is a “higher” order. His worldview is derived from a

mixture of Platonic and Aristotelian (realist) metaphysics.

The second, the libertarian view, was that of the sceptical humanists –

individualists and freethinkers, sceptical of any preestablished order, or at

least of man’s ability to know what it is or might be. The sceptical humanist is

therefore untrammeled by it.He deploys sceptical arguments to release the

individual from the constraints and demands of outer authorities. He is free to

do what he wills or desires and to make his own destiny, for there can be no

knowledge of objective norms. Human knowledge is limited to experience, to

what is sensed, and people must therefore make their own order within

experience. His view is descended from the via moderna of the medieval

philosopher William of Ockham and the nominalists.

The synthesis sought was a position that would incorporate recognition

of the individual and of his freedom under universal principles of order, a

reconciliation of will with reason. This was sought via a nonauthoritarian

conception of objective knowledge, which was the same conception that gave

rise to modern science. This required, on the one hand, arguments to combat

those of the sceptical freethinkers – arguments that demonstrated that there

was an objective order external to human thought and that humans have the

capacity not merely to know of its existence but also to discover something of

its nature. On the other hand, it was necessary to establish, against the

authorities, that each individual, insofar as he is rational, has the capacity to

acquire knowledge for himself, by the proper use of his reason. It is this

second requirement that produced numerous treatises on the scope and limits

of human understanding and on the method of acquiring knowledge. The

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focus was now firmly fixed on the nature of human thought and on the

procedures available to it.

Descartes utilized the skeptic’s own arguments to urge a meditative

turning inward. This inward journey was designed to show that each human

being can come to knowledge of his intellectual self and that as he does so he

will find within himself the idea of God, the mark of his creator, the mark that

assures him of the existence of an objective order and of the objective validity

of his rational faculties. The foundation and starting point of Cartesian

knowledge is, for each individual, within himself, in his experience of the

certainty that he must have of his own existence and in the idea of a perfect,

infinite being, in other words, an idea that he finds within himself, of a being

whose essence entails God’s existence, and of whose existence man can thus

be assured on the basis of his idea of God.

Descartes thus preserved and built on Montaigne’s emphasis on self-

consciousness, and this is what marks the changed orientation in philosophy

that constitutes philosophical anthropology in the stricter, second sense. As

the French scientist and religious philosopher Blaise Pascal realized, the

question had now become one of whether man finds within himself the basis

of loyalty to a universal order of reason and law with which his own thought

and will is continuous, or whether he finds, by inner examination, that order,

at least insofar as it can be known, is relative to his feeling, desire, and will.

The attempt to regain an objective order by looking inward apparently

fails with the failure of Descartes’s proofs of the existence of God, proofs that

his contemporaries (even those who, like Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, were

sympathetic to many aspects of the project) were quick to criticize. Reaction

to this failure was twofold. In the work of rationalist philosophers, such as

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Spinoza, Leibniz, and Malebranche, there is a return to the classical Greek

approach to philosophy through metaphysics. Empiricists, such as Locke,

Condillac, and Hume, on the other hand, retain the Cartesian, introspective

basis seeking what Hume calls a mitigated scepticism. This is a position that

recognizes essential limitations placed on human cognitive capacities by

assuming that experience is the only source of knowledge, but that affirms the

value of the knowledge so gained and seeks to define the project of natural

science as a quest for objective order within this domain.

Work of Locke

John Locke, for instance, argued that while man cannot prove that the

material world exists, his senses give him evidence affording all the certainty

that he needs. Locke’s position is, however, essentially dualist: mind and body

remain distinct even though pretensions to intellectual transcendence are

given up. Moreover, Locke regarded it as in principle impossible for humans

to have any understanding of the relation between mind and body. All

perceptions of one’s own body, as of the rest of the material world, are ideas

in one’s mind. It is impossible to adopt any vantage point outside oneself from

which to observe the correlation between a condition of one’s body and one’s

perception of this condition. Where other people are concerned, their bodies

and behavior can be observed but an observer can have no direct perception of

what is going on in their minds. There is thus a bifurcation in the study of

man. The mind and its contents are known to each person by introspection; it

is presumed that the minds of all people work in basically the same way so

that introspection provides evidence for human psychology. Other people,

their bodies, and their behavior are known by observation in exactly the same