极简哲学史 A Quick History of Philosophy - 3
19th Century Philosophy
In the Modern period, Kantianism gave rise to the German Idealists, each of whom had their own interpretations of Kant's ideas. Johann Fichte, for example, rejected Kant's separation of "things in themselves" and things "as they appear to us" (which he saw as an invitation to Skepticism), although he did accept that consciousness of the self depends on the existence of something that is not part of the self (his famous "I / not-I" distinction). Fichte's later Political Philosophy also contributed to the rise of German Nationalism. Friedrich Schelling developed a unique form of Idealism known as Aesthetic Idealism (in which he argued that only art was able to harmonize and sublimate the contradictions between subjectivity and objectivity, freedom and necessity, etc), and also tried to establish a connection or synthesisbetween his conceptions of nature and spirit.
Arthur Schopenhauer is also usually considered part of the German Idealism and Romanticism movements, although his philosophy was very singular. He was a thorough-going pessimist who believed that the "will-to-life" (the drive to survive and to reproduce) was the underlying driving force of the world, and that the pursuit of happiness, love and intellectual satisfaction was very much secondary and essentially futile. He saw art (and other artistic, moral and ascetic forms of awareness) as the only way to overcome the fundamentally frustration-filled and painful human condition.
The greatest and most influential of the German Idealists, though, was Georg Hegel. Although his works have a reputation for abstractness and difficulty, Hegel is often considered the summit of early 19th Century German thought, and his influencewas profound. He extended Aristotle's process of dialectic (resolving a thesis and its opposing antithesis into a synthesis) to apply to the real world - including the whole of history - in an on-going process of conflict resolution towards what he called the Absolute Idea. However, he stressed that what is really changing in this process is the underlying "Geist" (mind, spirit, soul), and he saw each person's individual consciousness as being part of an Absolute Mind (sometimes referred to as Absolute Idealism).
Karl Marx was strongly influenced by Hegel's dialectical method and his analysis of history. His Marxist theory (including the concepts of historical materialism,class struggle, the labor theory of value, the bourgeoisie, etc), which he developed with his friend Friedrich Engels as a reaction against the rampant Capitalism of 19th Century Europe, provided the intellectual base for later radical and revolutionary Socialism and Communism.
A very different kind of philosophy grew up in 19th Century England, out of the British Empiricist tradition of the previous century. The Utilitarianism movement was founded by the radical social reformer Jeremy Bentham and popularized by his even more radical protegé John Stuart Mill. The doctrine of Utilitarianism is a type of Consequentialism (an approach to Ethics that stresses an action's outcome or consequence), which holds that the right action is that which would cause "the greatest happiness of the greatest number". Mill refined the theory to stress the quality not just the quantity of happiness, and intellectual and moral pleasures over more physical forms. He counseled that coercion in society is only justifiable either to defend ourselves, or to defend others from harm (the "harm principle").
19th Century America developed its own philosophical traditions. Ralph Waldo Emerson established the Transcendentalism movement in the middle of the century, rooted in the transcendental philosophy of Kant, German Idealism and Romanticism, and a desire to ground religion in the inner spiritual or mental essence of humanity, rather than in sensuous experience. Emerson's student Henry David Thoreau further developed these ideas, stressing intuition, self-examination, Individualism and the exploration of the beauty of nature. Thoreau's advocacy of civil disobedience influenced generations of social reformers.
The other main American movement of the late 19th Century was Pragmatism, which was initiated by C. S. Peirce and developed and popularized by William Jamesand John Dewey. The theory of Pragmatism is based on Peirce's pragmatic maxim, that the meaning of any concept is really just the same as its operational or practical consequences (essentially, that something is true only insofar as it works in practice). Peirce also introduced the idea of Fallibilism (that all truths and "facts" are necessarily provisional, that they can never be certain but only probable).
James, in addition to his psychological work, extended Pragmatism, both as a method for analyzing philosophic problems but also as a theory of truth, as well as developing his own versions of Fideism (that beliefs are arrived at by an individual process that lies beyond reason and evidence) and Voluntarism (that the will is superior to the intellect and to emotion) among others. Dewey's interpretation of Pragmatism is better known as Instrumentalism, the methodological view that concepts and theories are merely useful instruments, best measured by how effective they are in explaining and predicting phenomena, and not by whether they are true or false (which he claimed was impossible). Dewey's contribution to Philosophy of Education and to modern progressive education (particularly what he called "learning-by-doing") was also significant.
But European philosophy was not limited to the German Idealists. The French sociologist and philosopher Auguste Comte founded the influential Positivismmovement around the belief that the only authentic knowledge was scientific knowledge, based on actual sense experience and strict application of the scientific method. Comte saw this as the final phase in the evolution of humanity, and even constructed a non-theistic, pseudo-mystical "positive religion" around the idea.
The Dane Søren Kierkegaard pursued his own lonely trail of thought. He too was a kind of Fideist and an extremely religious man (despite his attacks on the Danish state church). But his analysis of the way in which human freedom tends to lead to "angst" (dread), the call of the infinite, and eventually to despair, was highly influential on later Existentialists like Heidegger and Sartre.
The German Nietzsche was another atypical, original and controversial philosopher, also considered an important forerunner of Existentialism. He challenged the foundations of Christianity and traditional morality (famously asserting that "God is dead"), leading to charges of Atheism, Moral Skepticism, Relativism and Nihilism. He developed original notions of the "will to power" as mankind's main motivating principle, of the "Übermensch" ("superman") as the goal of humanity, and of "eternal return" as a means of evaluating one's life, all of which have all generated much debate and argument among scholars.
20th Century Philosophy
20th Century philosophy has been dominated to a great extent by the rivalrybetween two very general philosophical traditions, Analytic Philosophy (the largely, although not exclusively, anglophone mindset that philosophy should apply logical techniques and be consistent with modern science) and Continental Philosophy(really just a catch-all label for everything else, mainly based in mainland Europe, and which, in very general terms, rejects Scientism and tends towardsHistoricism).
An important precursor of the Analytic Philosophy tradition was the Logicismdeveloped during the late 19th Century by Gottlob Frege. Logicism sought to show that some, or even all, of mathematics was reducible to Logic, and Frege's work revolutionized modern mathematical Logic. In the early 20th Century, the British logicians Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead continued to champion his ideas (even after Russell had pointed out a paradox exposing an inconsistency in Frege's work, which caused him, Frege, to abandon his own theory). Russell and Whitehead's monumental and ground-breaking book, "Principia Mathematica"was a particularly important milestone. Their work, in turn, though, fell prey to Kurt Gödel's infamous Incompleteness Theorems of 1931, which mathematically proved the inherent limitations of all but the most trivial formal systems.
Both Russell and Whitehead went on to develop other philosophies. Russell's work was mainly in the area of Philosophy of Language, including his theory of Logical Atomism and his contributions to Ordinary Language Philosophy. Whiteheaddeveloped a metaphysical approach known as Process Philosophy, which posited ever-changing subjective forms to complement Plato's eternal forms. Their Logicism, though, along with Comte's Positivism, was a great influence on the development of the important 20th Century movement of Logical Positivism.
The Logical Positivists campaigned for a systematic reduction of all human knowledge down to logical and scientific foundations, and claimed that a statement can be meaningful only if it is either purely formal (essentially, mathematics and logic) or capable of empirical verification. The school grew from the discussions of the so-called "Vienna Circle" in the early 20th Century (including Mauritz Schlick, Otto Neurath, Hans Hahn and Rudolf Carnap). In the 1930s, A. J. Ayer was largely responsible for the spread of Logical Positivism to Britain, even as its influence was already waning in Europe.
The "Tractatus" of the young Ludwig Wittgenstein, published in 1921, was a text of great importance for Logical Positivism. Indeed, Wittgenstein has come to be considered one of the 20th Century's most important philosophers, if not themost important. A central part of the philosophy of the "Tractatus" was the picture theory of meaning, which asserted that thoughts, as expressed in language, "picture" the facts of the world, and that the structure of language is also determined by the structure of reality. However, Wittgenstein abandoned his early work, convinced that the publication of the "Tractatus" had solved all the problems of all philosophy. He later re-considered and struck off in a completely new direction. His later work, which saw the meaning of a word as just its use in the language, and looked at language as a kind of game in which the different parts function and have meaning, was instrumental in the development of Ordinary Language Philosophy.
Ordinary Language Philosophy shifted the emphasis from the ideal or formal language of Logical Positivism to everyday language and its actual use, and it saw traditional philosophical problems as rooted in misunderstandings caused by the sloppy use of words in a language. Some have seen Ordinary Language Philosophyas a complete break with, or reaction against, Analytic Philosophy, while others have seen it as just an extension or another stage of it. Either way, it became a dominant philosophic school between the 1930s and 1970s, under the guidance of philosophers such as W. V. O. Quine, Gilbert Ryle, Donald Davidson, etc.
Quine's work stressed the difficulty of providing a sound empirical basis where language, convention, meaning, etc, are concerned, and also broadened the principle of Semantic Holism to the extreme position that a sentence (or even an individual word) has meaning only in the context of a whole language. Ryle is perhaps best known for his dismissal of Descartes' body-mind Dualism as the "ghost in the machine", but he also developed the theory of Philosophical Behaviourism (the view that descriptions of human behavior need never refer to anything but the physical operations of human bodies) which became the standard view among Ordinary Language philosophers for several decades.
Another important philosopher in the Analytic Philosophy of the early 20th century was G. E. Moore, a contemporary of Russell at Cambridge University (then the most important center of philosophy in the world). His 1903 "Principia Ethica"has become one of the standard texts of modern Ethics and Meta-Ethics, and inspired the movement away from Ethical Naturalism (the belief that there exist moral properties, which we can know empirically, and that can be reduced to entirely non-ethical or natural properties, such as needs, wants or pleasures) and towards Ethical Non-Naturalism (the belief that there are no such moral properties). He pointed out that the term "good", for instance, is in fact indefinable because it lacks natural properties in the way that the terms "blue", "smooth", etc, have them. He also defended what he called "common sense" Realism (as opposed to Idealism or Skepticism) on the grounds that common sense claims about our knowledge of the world are just as plausible as those other metaphysical premises.
On the Continental Philosophy side, an important figure in the early 20th Centurywas the German Edmund Husserl, who founded the influential movement of Phenomenology. He developed the idea, parts of which date back to Descartes and even Plato, that what we call reality really consists of objects and events ("phenomena") as they are perceived or understood in the human consciousness, and not of anything independent of human consciousness (which may or may not exist). Thus, we can "bracket" (or, effectively, ignore) sensory data, and deal only with the "intentional content" (the mind's built-in mental description of external reality), which allows us to perceive aspects of the real world outside.
It was another German, Martin Heidegger (once a student of Husserl), who was mainly responsible for the decline of Phenomenology. In his groundbreaking "Being and Time" of 1927, Heidegger gave concrete examples of how Husserl's view (of man as a subject confronted by, and reacting to, objects) broke down in certain (quite common) circumstances, and how the existence of objects only has any real significance and meaning within a whole social context (what Heidegger called "being in the world"). He further argued that existence was inextricably linked with time, and that being is really just an ongoing process of becoming (contrary to the Aristotelian idea of a fixed essence). This line of thinking led him to speculate that we can only avoid what he called "inauthentic" lives (and the anxiety which inevitably goes with such lives) by accepting how things are in the real world, and responding to situations in an individualistic way (for which he is considered by many a founder of Existentialism). In his later work, Heidegger went so far as to assert that we have essentially come to the end of philosophy, having tried out and discarded all the possible permutations of philosophical thought (a kind of Nihilism).
The main figurehead of the Existentialism movement was Jean-Paul Sartre (along with his French contemporaries Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty). A confirmed Atheist and a committed Marxist and Communist for most of his life, Sartre adapted and extended the work of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger, and concluded that "existence is prior to essence" (in the sense that we are thrust into an unfeeling, godless universe against our will, and that we must then establish meaning for our lives by what we do and how we act). He believed that we always have choices (and therefore freedom) and that, while this freedom is empowering, it also brings with it moral responsibility and an existential dread (or "angst"). According to Sartre, genuine human dignity can only be achieved by our active acceptance of this angst and despair.
In the second half of the 20th Century, three main schools (in addition to Existentialism) dominated Continental Philosophy. Structuralism is the broad belief that all human activity and its products (even perception and thought itself) are constructed and not natural, and that everything has meaning only through the language system in which we operate. Post-Structuralism is a reaction to Structuralism, which stresses the culture and society of the reader over that of the author). Post-Modernism is an even less well-defined field, marked by a kind of "pick'n'mix" openness to a variety of different meanings and authorities from unexpected places, as well as a willingness to borrow unashamedly from previous movements or traditions.
The radical and iconoclastic French philosopher Michel Foucault, has been associated with all of these movements (although he himself always rejected such labels). Much of his work is language-based and, among other things, he has looked at how certain underlying conditions of truth have constituted what was acceptable at different times in history, and how the body and sexuality are cultural constructs rather than natural phenomena. Although sometimes criticized for his lax standards of scholarship, Foucault's ideas are nevertheless frequently cited in a wide variety of different disciplines.
Mention should also be made of Deconstructionism (often called just Deconstruction), a theory of literary criticism that questions traditional assumptions about certainty, identity and truth, and looks for the underlying assumptions (both unspoken and implicit), as well as the ideas and frameworks, that form the basis for thought and belief. The method was developed by the Frenchman Jacques Derrida (who is also credited as a major figure in Post-Structuralism). His work is highly cerebral and self-consciously "difficult", and he has been repeatedly accused of pseudo-philosophy and sophistry.
