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

628

and desires result in too much behavior being portrayed as irrational. There

will then be a mutual adjustment between language interpretation and the

explanation of behavior in which there can be no final separation of the two

and no such thing as a uniquely correct interpretation. There is thus no hope of

finding laws linking psychological states of belief or desire to physiological

states, even though, by maintaining that each mental event is just a physical

event under a different description, a dualism of mind and body is denied.

What remains is an irreducible dualism between physiological and

psychosocial studies of man. The situation is frequently explained by utilizing

a computer analogy (for the computer is, in this view, man creating a machine

in his own image). The relation between the structures of thought and the

body is likened to the relation between computer software and hardware; the

same hardware may be used to run different software, and the same software

may be run on different hardware. The two descriptions of computer

functioning are thus relatively independent.

In this account the consciousness of the individual plays little explicit

role, but a model of man is nevertheless implicit in the whole approach. It is

still basically the model employed by Hume, with experience consisting of

sensory stimuli. Experience of other people is thus limited to observation of

their physical and behavioral characteristics. It is on the basis of such

observations that we have to make conjectures about their mental states. What

has changed is the method of making such attributions. It is not sufficient to

argue by analogy from introspection; any attribute of rational or mental

faculties must go via an analytic interpretation of the language spoken. But

with the assumption that all languages must share a common logical structure

in virtue of their function in representing the world, there is also an inbuilt

presumption of a uniformity in the rational structure of all human thought.

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Husserl and Philosophical Anthropology

Husserl is regarded as the founder of phenomenology. He, like Frege,

wished to avoid the so-called psychologism of idea-based discussions of

thought and rejected naturalistic approaches to the study of the mind and of

what passes for rational thought. He, too, believed that laws of reasoning

needed to be validated by reference to the objects of thought, but he did not

agree that logic could be made purely formal and independent of the particular

subject matter in hand, nor did he agree that the primary focus should be on

language. Indeed, he rejected the position from which Frege started, namely,

the assumption that there is a clear separation between the knowing subject

and an independently existing reality that is the object of his knowledge. This

assumption, Husserl argued, reveals a blindness to the conditions, or

presuppositions, involved in all knowledge and already analyzed in part by

Kant. Husserl adopted Kant’s strategy but in a more radical form that was

designed to restore the in-the-worldness of the human subject.

The program of phenomenology aimed at rigorous understanding of the

life-world. Kant had explored the conditions of the possibility of experience,

and in so doing he had presumed that this experience was always that of an

“I,” a subject. Husserl also asked after the conditions for the possibility of a

consciousness that is always potentially self-conscious. He claimed that all

consciousness is intentional; i.e., is consciousness of something. The method

pursued was a phenomenal investigation of the “contents of consciousness.”

This required the investigator to “bracket off” all theories, presuppositions,

and evidence of existence, including his own existence. There could be no

dogmas. The implication was still that the individual can, in principle, abstract

from every influence of culture and environment by abstracting also from that

element of consciousness that involves awareness of self. It was presumed that

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consciousness as such had structures that would then be revealed. It is only

self-conscious thought that is culturally constituted; for Husserl, each human

individual is by necessity socially and historically conditioned by his

environment. But even so it has to be doubted whether the required

abstraction from self is possible in the sort of consciousness – i.e., reflective

rational thought – that is required of a rigorous phenomenological analysis.

Descartes and his successors had taken the self, the individual subject,

for granted and in the process inevitably had assigned to the knowing subject

a position outside, beyond, or transcending the world of which he sought

knowledge. Husserl, by putting the individual subject into the field of

philosophical investigation, paved the way for investigations of the human

condition that start with the concrete, with man’s being-in-the world. In this

respect he can also be regarded as the founder of philosophical anthropology

in the narrowest sense of the term: the personal unity of the human being

becomes both the point of departure and the goal of philosophical reflection.

The use of philosophical anthropology to characterize this approach emerged

in the first half of the 20th century with the tendency both in Germany and in

France to treat the problems of anthropology as the center of all philosophical

studies. Its emergence at this time may be seen as a reaction to the totalitarian

systems of the 20th century: Italian Fascism, Soviet Communism under Stalin,

and German Nazism were powerful ideologies calling for the annihilation of

the individual character of the person. The philosophical protests of the

German phenomenologist Max Scheler, of the Russian existentialist Nikolay

Berdyayev, of the Jewish philosophical theologian Martin Buber, and of the

French personalist Emmanuel Mounier offered answers to this challenge; the

philosophies of the person and of existence present to each individual the

means to center himself upon himself.

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Work of Heidegger

Husserl’s work not only gave rise to phenomenology but also to the

existentialist ideas of Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre. Heidegger

adopted the method of phenomenology but rejected Husserl’s refusal to allow

existence to feature in the phenomenological starting point. Heidegger argued

for a philosophy in which man’s being-in-the-world is registered, and where

this being (existence) precedes any determination of what man is (his

essence).

In his Brief über den “Humanismus” (1947; Brief Letter on Humanism),

Heidegger wrote:

Are we really on the right track toward the essence of man as

long as we set him off as one living creature among others in

contrast to plants, beasts and God?... when we do this we

abandon man to the essential realm of animalitas but attribute a

specific difference to him. In principle we are still thinking of

homo animalitas – even when anima (soul) is posited as

animus sive mens, and this in turn is later posited as subject,

person, or spirit (geist). Such positing is in the manner of

metaphysics.

Naturalistic definitions of man fail, because like all

traditional metaphysical definitions they naively assume that

we know what we mean when we say of something that it is;

i.e., when we ascribe being to it.

Humanity and the world form a whole in which neither is privileged.

The focus shifts from intentional objects of consciousness to the world itself, a

world of objects that appear (and hence exist as individualized objects) only

insofar as they have meaning and significance for human beings, by virtue of

the way in which they relate to human projects. A fallen tree branch is noticed

as firewood only by one who is in search of fuel. Similarly, events are noticed

and recorded and so become historical events but only in the light of the

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meaning that they have for the historian. This means that neither history nor

the study of man can be objective and purely factual history. History is always

a story about the past from someone who has a specific vantage point within

history.

Work of Sartre and Other Existentialists

Sartre, in L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness), tried to

tread a middle line between Husserl and Heidegger, retaining the concrete in-

the-worldness of Heidegger while restoring a place for intentional

consciousness. He hoped to provide an account of, as he put it, intentional-

consciousness-in-the-world-as-it-is-lived. Sartre’s driving belief was in human

freedom, the ability to choose not only a course of action but also what one

would become. Neither Husserl, with his already structured and regulated

consciousness, nor Heidegger, with his world that is already given meaning,

left enough room for freedom.

Sartre insisted on the dualism of being (thingness) and consciousness

(no-thingness) and of the individual in itself and for itself. The disjunction

between these is absolute: no state of the world can determine human action,

even to the extent of providing a motive, or reason, for action. If man is truly

free, the world, whether material or social, can place no constraints on him,

not even to the extent of determining what would or would not be good

reasons for following a given course of action. He must create his own values

and his own morality and take responsibility for his choices. Sartre’s critics

pointed out, however, that this total freedom dissolves into arbitrariness and

randomness. An action that is selected at whim, chosen without (or beyond)

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reason, and that recognizes no rational constraints, is more an abandonment to

fate than an assertion of freedom; where there is no basis for decision there is

simply the necessity to choose.

In his later writings, and in particular the Critique de la raison

dialectique (1960; Critique of Dialectical Reason), which attempts a

reconciliation between existentialism and Marxism, Sartre came to recognize

that there are constraints on the exercise of human freedom. He first

acknowledged that man is a creature with biological needs, who must eat,

drink, shelter, and clothe himself as a condition of being able to engage in

other kinds of activity; and, second, he saw the struggle against need as

conditioned by the fact that it takes place in conditions of scarcity. This means

that there is competition for resources and thus the ever-present likelihood that

the realization of an individual’s freedom will limit that of another. Each

individual in these conditions experiences others as possible threats to his own

freedom (i.e., he experiences alienation).

Individuals whose freedom is in this way conditioned, not just by

naturally occurring material conditions but by the materiality of human

practice, are (as Marx had said) both “subjects” and “objects” of history. But

Sartre insisted that history is only intelligible because it records a process

brought into being by human action. This rules out an understanding of

history based on a “dialectic of nature,” adopted by some Marxists whom

Sartre criticized as being dogmatists. Sartre thus rejected the idea that there

could be any naturalistic science of humanity – a science that proceeds by

discovering laws without reference to the consciousness of individuals.

History is neither a mere process (without a subject) nor the product of some

form of social, collective “subject.” But this does not mean that individuals

can be treated as wholly independent units that can be understood without

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taking into account the formative and conditioning role of their material and

social situation. It is in this work that Sartre was still facing up to, and

grappling with, the problem of the reconciliation of the demands of freedom

and reason, but in an altogether more practical and concrete way than was

done by his 17th-century predecessors.

Sartre’s abandonment of the radical freedom of Being and Nothingness

owed much to the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s

criticism of it – in Sens et non-sens (1948; Sense and Non-Sense) – as being

still a dualist philosophy of consciousness and for failing to put man truly in

the world. In Sense and Non-Sense he also expressed his view of the relation

between existentialism and Marxism:

Marx gives us an objective definition of class in terms of the effective

position of individuals in the production cycle, but he tells us elsewhere that

class cannot become a decisive historical force and revolutionary factor unless

individuals become aware of it, adding that this awareness itself has social

motives, and so on. As a historical factor, class is therefore neither a simple

objective fact, nor is it, on the other hand, a simple value arbitrarily chosen by

solitary consciousnesses.

In Merleau-Ponty’s writing there is also a clear statement of the human

presupposition that forms the basis of philosophical anthropology in this third

sense:

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I am not the result or the intersection of multiple causalities

that determine my body or my “psychism”; I cannot conceive

of myself as nothing but a part of the world, as the simple

object of biology, psychology, and sociology, nor close over

myself the universe of science. Everything that I know of the

world, even through science, I know from a viewpoint that is

my own….

One effect of the insistence that it is concrete, lived experience that must form

the starting point of philosophical anthropology is that not only must class and

its experience enter into such accounts, but so too must sex and gender. Once

the human subject, as a focus of philosophical attention, is no longer a mind

whose relation to a body is at best obscure, is no longer a pure consciousness,

but is essentially embodied and immersed in human culture, the biological

differences between the sexes and the socially constituted role differentiation

between male and female must play a part in the account of humanity.

In Simone de Beauvoir’s Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex), she

used the categories provided by Sartre to argue that to be a woman – as

distinct from a man – is to be robbed of one’s subjectivity, to be treated as an

object by men, and to have one’s conception of oneself as female defined by

men. To assert her subjectivity a woman must thus negate her femininity, to

reject the status of object for men that constitutes the feminine. A woman is

thus placed in a condition of self-alienation, with which a man does not have

to contend. In this way de Beauvoir revealed the need for a philosophy of

“man” that is also a philosophy of “woman,” a viewpoint that generally has

been acknowledged only by female writers.

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Philosophical Anthropology and Theology

Just as class and gender determine the way in which one lives in the

world and is related to the world, so too may religion. Even for those not

brought up in any religion, Western culture is still one in which religion is

significant. Philosophical anthropology must thus take the phenomenon of

religious experience seriously, in a way that empiricist anthropology does not.

But its starting point is with the constitution of a religious consciousness, and

with the conditions of the possibility of the forms of religion encountered; it

does not start with theology. There is room once again for dispute over the

possibility of any kind of transcendence. The 19th-century Danish philosopher

Søren Kierkegaard thought that man’s existence has meaning only in the

experience of grace, which inexplicably raises man up from his worthlessness.

The anguish and loneliness of mortal existence, the “wretchedness of man

without God,” is only overcome by a form of experience that confers faith in

the existence of God and hence the ultimate possibility of human

transcendence.

Philosophical anthropology in its narrowest (third) sense is founded on

an insistence that the only knowledge available to man is knowledge from his

human perspective, conditioned, as he himself is, by his situation in the world.

God cannot be invoked as a source of absolute standards of truth or of

absolute values nor to give content to the supposition that there are any. If

God exists, then the thought that there are such standards and values, even if

we cannot know of them, remains possible. This possibility was denied with

Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God; the attempt to come to terms

with this view defines the scope of most philosophical anthropology. The

view of religion that reflects the inversion which takes place was expressed by

Ludwig Feuerbach in Das Wesen des Christentums (1841; The Essence of

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Christianity), when he declared that “man is not a shadow of God; it is God

who is the shadow of man, an illusory phantasm that man nourishes out of his

own substance.”

Saussure, Freud, and Antihumanism

There were also those, however, who saw the death of God as heralding

the death of man as the focus and starting point for philosophy. Saussure, in

his Cours de linguistique général (1915; Course in General Linguistics), held,

like Frege, that the meaning of a linguistic sign, that which gives it a value for

the purposes of communication, could not be an idea in the mind of an

individual. But unlike Frege he did not concentrate on the relation between

language and an external world. Rather, he argued that the meaning of any

one linguistic sign is dependent on its relation to other signs in the language to

which it belongs; thus, the meaning of one sign is determined by its place in

the overall structure that constitutes a language. A consequence of this view is

that language becomes a closed, autonomous system. Linguistic signs do not

depend for their meaning on anything external to language. Moreover,

Saussure argued that the present meaning of a word could not be revealed by

tracing its etymology. It is only by reference to present language structures

that current meanings are determined. The language structures that become

the focus of attention are thus to be treated as autonomous from their history

(i.e., as if they had no history).

With this focus on structures and the method of studying them, Saussure

can be considered to be one of the founding figures of structuralism. This

view of meaning came to be extended from linguistic signs to all kinds of