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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who by making increasingly accurate conjectures as to the laws governing the

regular succession of natural events is able to increase his ability to predict

them and so to control his environment.

The second, idealist position, argues that the world exists only in being

an object of human thought; it exists only by virtue of man’s

conceptualization of it. In the form in which Kant expressed this position the

thought that constitutes the material, physical world, is that of a transcendent

mind, of which the actual minds of humans are merely vehicles.

There is also a third, dialectical, form of anthropocentrism, which,

although it did not emerge fully until the 19th century, was prefigured in the

works of Vico and Herder. From this standpoint the relation between man and

nature is regarded as an integral part to the dynamic whole of which it is a

part. The world is what it is as a result of being lived in and transformed by

human beings, while people, in turn, acquire their character from their

existence in a particular situation within the world. Any thought about the

world is concerned with a world as lived through a subject, who is also part of

the world about which he thinks. There is no possibility of transcendence in

thought to some external, non-worldly standpoint. Such a position wants both

to grant the independent existence of the world and to stress the active and

creative role of human beings within it. It is within this relatively late form of

humanism – which arose from a synthesis of elements of the Kantian position,

with the insights of the Italian Giambattista Vico and the German Johann

Gottfried von Herder – that philosophical anthropology in the third sense can

be located.

Vico’s Scienza nuova (1725; The New Science of Giambattista Vico)

announced not so much a new science as the need to recognize a new form of

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scientific knowledge. He argued (against empiricists) that the study of man

must differ in its method and goals from that of the natural world. This is

because the nature of man is not static and unalterable; a person’s own efforts

to understand the world and adapt it to his needs, physical and spiritual,

continuously transform that world and himself. Each individual is both the

product and the support of a collective consciousness that defines a particular

moment in the history of the human spirit. Each epoch interprets the sum of its

traditions, norms, and values in such a way as to impose a model for behavior

on daily life as well as on the more specialized domains of morals and religion

and art. Given that those who make or create something can understand it in a

way in which mere observers of it cannot, it follows that if, in some sense,

people make their own history, they can understand history in a way in which

they cannot understand the natural world, which is only observed by them.

The natural world must remain unintelligible to man; only God, as its creator,

fully understands it. History, however, being concerned with human actions, is

intelligible to humans. This means, moreover, that the succession of phases in

the culture of a given society or people cannot be regarded as governed by

mechanistic, causal laws. To be intelligible these successions must be

explicable solely in terms of human, goal-directed activity. Such

understanding is the product neither of sense perception nor of rational

deduction but of imaginative reconstruction. Here Vico asserted that, even

though a person’s style of thought is a product of the phase of culture in which

he participates, it is nonetheless possible for him to understand another culture

and the transitions between cultural phases. He assumed that there is some

underlying commonality of the needs, goals, and requirement for social

organization that makes this possible.

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Herder denied the existence of any such absolute and universally

recognized goals. This denial carried the disturbing implication that the

specific values and goals pursued by various human cultures may not only

differ but also may not all be mutally compatible. Hence, not only may

cultural transitions not all be intelligible, but conflict may not be an attribute

of the human condition that can be eliminated. If this is so, then the notion of

a single code of precepts for the harmonious, ideal way of life, which

underlies mainstream Western thought and to which – whether they know it or

not – all human beings aspire, could not be sustained. There will be many

ways of living, thinking, and feeling, each self-validating but not mutually

compatible or comparable nor capable of being integrated into a harmonious

pluralistic society.

The 19th Century

The 19th century was a time of greatly increased activity in the sciences

of man. There was a correspondingly rapid development of various

disciplines, but this was accompanied by increasing specialization within

disciplines. Perhaps the most significant theme, common to all branches of

science, was the declining influence of religion. The philosophers of the

Enlightenment had concurred in thinking that the transcendence of God

doomed to failure any attempt to encompass him within the framework of

human discourse. Theological discourse was thus only human discourse.

Herder had stated, “It is necessary to read the Bible in a human manner, for it

is a book written by men for men.” Even so, he insisted, “The fact that

religion is integrally human is a profound sign in recognition of its truth.” But

with human truth the only available truth, such a line was hard to maintain,

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and by the late 19th century the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche had

announced that God was dead.

But the death of God also meant that the essence of God in every man

was dead – that which was common to all and that in virtue of which the

individual transcended the natural, material world and his purely biological

nature. Also dead was the part of a person that recognized universal God-

given ideals of reason and truth, goodness and beauty. There thus emerged

views of man that, while integrating him more thoroughly with the natural

world – treating his incarnation as an essential aspect of his condition – had to

come to terms with the consequences for science, morality, and the study of

man himself of the removal of a transcendent support for belief in absolute

standards or ideals.

The presumption of a fixed human nature was undercut at the level of

natural history by the emergence and eventual acceptance of evolutionary

biology. This added a historical, developmental dimension to the natural

history of man, which complimented developmental views of culture and of

man as a culturally constituted being. But more importantly, evolutionary

biology made man a direct descendant of nonhuman primates and suggested

that the gift of reason, which so many had seen as establishing a gulf between

man and animal, might too have developed gradually and might indeed have a

physiological basis.

Even though Buffon had tied classification to the ability to reproduce,

and had thus introduced a temporal dimension into the characterization of

species, he had retained the idea of stable species. But a static classification

could not explain the dynamic relations between isolated species. A primitive

time line of natural history thus developed. The relationship of families led to

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the idea of filiation between them according to an order of succession. The

interpretation of fossils aroused impassioned debates. From them have arisen

concepts of mutation (the process by which thegenetic material of a cell is

altered), transformism (the theory that one species is changed into another),

and evolution. These concepts, already being formulated in the 18th century,

were clarified in the work of Lamarck and Darwin.

The evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859)

differed from that of Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck in that it proposed a

mechanistic, nonpurposive account of evolution as the product of the natural

selection of randomly produced genetic mutations (survival of the fittest).

Advantageous characteristics acquired by an individual were not, as Lamarck

had thought, inherited and therefore could not play a role in evolutionary

development.

The theme of continuity with the rest of the natural world was one that

was also to be found in the very different, antiscientific thought of

Romanticism, which was one of the reactions to the rise of the doctrine of

mechanism and to the Industrial Revolution for which it was held responsible.

The experience of the Industrial Revolution was crucial to most 19th-century

thought about man. Reactions to this experience can be put into three broad

categories. There were those who saw in industrialization the progressive

triumph of reason over nature, making possible the march of civilization and

the moral triumph of reason over animal instinct. This was a view that

continued the spirit of the Enlightenment, with its confidence in reason and

the ability to advance through science. Into this category can be put the

English philosopher John Stuart Mill, a stout defender of liberal

individualism. Mill’s philosophy was in many respects a continuation of that

of Hume but with the addition of Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian view that the

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foundation of all morality is the principle that one should always act so as to

produce the greatest happiness of the greatest number. This ethical principle

gives a prominent place to the sciences of man (which are conceived as being

parallel in method to the natural sciences), their study deemed necessary for

an empirical determination of the social and material conditions that produce

the greatest general happiness. This is a non-dialectical, naturalistic

humanism, which gives primacy to the individual and stresses the importance

of his freedom. For Mill, all social phenomena, and therefore ultimately all

social changes, are products of the actions of individuals.

The humanist opponents of capitalist industrialization fall into two

groups, both presuming some form of dialectical humanism: those who, like

Marx, retained a faith in the scientific application of reason and those who,

like Goethe and Schiller, fundamentally questioned the humanity of

mechanistic science and the technology it spawned.

The Romantics questioned the instrumental conception of the relation

between man and nature, which is fundamental to the thinking behind much

technological science. They insisted on an organic relation between man and

the rest of nature. It is not man’s place outside of nature that is emphasized but

his situation within it. Equally central to this view was a recognition of the

historicity of human culture and a rejection of any conception of a fixed,

determined human nature on which a science of man parallel in structure to

the natural sciences (i.e., a science with laws, whether empirical or rational,

that determine the actions and the historical development of mankind) could

be based. There was a continued commitment to the perspective of the

individual, and his creative relation with the world, an orientation that was

carried over into the philosophical anthropology of 20th-century

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phenomenologists and existentialists, with their critiques of modern industrial

science.

The Marxist opposition to capitalist industrialization is not to

industrialization as such but to capitalist forms of it. This opposition is

founded on socialism, which stresses the role of social structures; it is at the

level of society – its structures and its economic base of production – that the

course of history can be understood. Marx emphasized the importance of

labour and work in man’s relation both to the natural and to the social worlds

in which he finds himself and which condition his ability to realize himself

through these relationships. He deplored the loss of humanity associated with

capitalist industrialization, which was manifest in the alienating conditions

under which members of the working class were treated as objects and thus

deprived of their full status as human subjects by their industrial masters.

Nonetheless, he retained a faith in scientific knowledge and in the possibility

of a scientific understanding of history by integrating its economic, social, and

political aspects. Marx argued, however, that it was not reason but revolution

that would cause the overthrow of the capitalist system.

Common to all of these reactions is that whether they privileged reason

or not they did not seek to validate the claims of reason – and hence the claims

of science – by reference to a rational God. But with this transcendent

guarantor removed, the question of the objectivity of rational standards and of

the commonality of human thought structures became pressing. The Cartesian

starting point focused attention on thought as a sequence of ideas, knowable

only to the individual concerned. Animals, even if capable of uttering

structured sound sequences, were denied linguistic abilities on the ground that

these sound sequences could not be the expressions of thoughts and could not

have meaning; lacking minds, animals also lack ideas, the thoughts that give

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words their meaning. According to this view, words are simply conventionally

established vehicles for the communication of thoughts that exist prior to, and

independent of, their linguistic expression. However, if it is not assumed that

human minds are all instantiations of a single transcendent mind, or that

although individual they were created from a common pattern, this account of

linguistic communication must appear inadequate. Since according to

Cartesianism introspection is the only route to awareness of ideas, each person

can only ever be aware of his own ideas, never of those of another. He could

never know that his attempts to communicate succeed in calling up in another

person’s mind ideas similar to those in his own. Some new way of looking at

linguistic communication was required, and this could be nothing short of a

new starting point, a new way of thinking about thought itself.

The 20th Century: Emergence of Philosophical Anthropology

The mood of the late 19th century, which has also dominated 20th-

century philosophy, can be characterized as anti-psychologistic – a rejection

of introspective, idea-oriented ways of thinking about thought, which presume

that thought is prior to language. This fundamental reorientation had

implications for every other aspect of the study of man. The writers of the late

19th and early 20th centuries who most influenced subsequent philosophical

thought about man were Gottlob Frege, Edmund Husserl, Ferdinand de

Saussure, and Sigmund Freud. Each helped to transform one of the three

reactions to the Industrial Revolution outlined above, to bring it into accord

with the new, anti-psychologistic orientation: Frege influenced the empiricist,

scientific reaction; Husserl the Romantic; and Saussure and Freud the

scientific Socialist.

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Frege and Empiricist Anthropology

Frege argued that if language is to be a vehicle for the expression of

objective, scientific knowledge of the world, then the meaning (cognitive

content) of a linguistic expression must be the same for all users of the

language to which it belongs and must be determined independently of the

psychological states of any individual. A word may call up a variety of ideas

in the mind of an individual user, but these are not part of its meaning. Such

associations may be important to the poet but are irrelevant to the scientist.

The function of language in the expression of scientific knowledge is to

represent an independently existing world. The meanings of linguistic

expressions must thus derive from their relation to the world, not from their

relation to the minds of language users. Similarly, logic – embodying the

principles of reasoning and the standards of rationality – must be concerned

not with laws of human thought, but with laws of truth. The principles of

correct reasoning must be justified by reference to the function of language in

representing the world correctly or incorrectly rather than by reference to

human psychology.

It is for his work on formal logic, which stemmed from these ideas, that

Frege is renowned, because it opened the way for the mechanical reproduction

of reasoning processes, which was crucial to the development of information

processing by computers and for devices capable of artificial intelligence.

Frege argued that the principles of deductive reasoning are purely formal

principles, which means that their correct application does not depend on an

ability to understand the sentences involved, so long as they have been put

into the correct logical form. To give an account of the meaning of a sentence

requires that it be analyzed so as to reveal its logical form. The logical

analysis of everyday and scientific language thus becomes a primary focus of

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philosophical activity, hence the name “analytic philosophy” for the tradition,

predominating in Great Britain, North America, and Australasia that can be

regarded as post-Fregean philosophy. In this tradition the focus is on the

analysis of rational, human thought, where it is presumed that the only correct

way to do this is to analyze the logical structure of language.

Thus language has replaced God as the locus of rationality and of

principles of reason; and the language-world relation has taken over many of

the roles previously played by the God-world relation. The individual

participates in a rationality that is independent of him to the extent that he is a

language user. The position assumes that standards of rationality are absolute,

since they are seen as necessarily governing the meaning structures of all

languages. The linguist Noam Chomsky proposed a thesis that was regarded

as being complimentary to this philosophical position, namely that of a

universal grammar – a formal structure that underlies all languages, no matter

how diverse their grammatical forms seem on the surface. Moreover, he

suggested that all humans have the same innate capacity to learn language,

which explains why it is that they all structure their languages, and hence their

thought, in the same way.

A further assumption (christened the “principle of charity” by the

American philosopher Donald Davidson) is that all humans are rational and

that the majority of human behavior is to be explained as rational, given the

beliefs and desires of the person concerned. This, together with the view that

language is the locus of rationality and the embodiment of thought, leads to

the view that the primary objective of the sciences of man is to interpret the

language of a community under study so as to attribute beliefs and desires to

its members on the basis of what they say, and so give some explanation of

their behavior. The interpretation is deemed incorrect if the attributed beliefs