Western philosophy
History of Western philosophy from its development among the ancient
Greeks to the present.
Modern philosophy
Modern philosophy » The 19th century » Independent and irrationalist
movements
At the end of the 19th century there was a flowering of many independent
philosophical movements. Although by then Hegel had been nearly
forgotten in Germany, a Hegelian renaissance was under way in England,
led by T.H. Green, F.H. Bradley, and Bernard Bosanquet. Bradley’s
Appearance and Reality (1893) constituted the high-water mark of the
rediscovery of Hegel’s dialectical method. In America a strong reaction
against idealism fostered the pragmatic movement, led by Charles
Sanders
Peirce and William James. Peirce, a logician, held that the function of
all inquiry is to eradicate doubt and that the meaning of a concept
consists of its practical consequences. James transformed Peirce’s
pragmatic theory of meaning into a pragmatic theory of truth; in his The
Will to Believe (1897), he asserted that human beings have a right to
believe even in the face of inconclusive evidence and that, because
knowledge is essentially an instrument, the practical consequences of a
belief are the real test of its truth: true beliefs are those that work.
Meanwhile, in Austria, Franz Brentano (1838–1917), who taught at the
University of Vienna from 1874 to 1895, and Alexius Meinong (1853–1920),
who taught at Graz, were developing an empirical psychology and a theory
of intentional objects that were to have considerable
influence upon the new movement of phenomenology.
However, it was not any of these late 19th-century developments but
rather the emphasis on the irrational, which started almost at the
century’s beginning, that gave the philosophy of the period its peculiar
flavour. Hegel, despite his commitment to systematic metaphysics, had
nevertheless carried on the Enlightenment tradition of faith in human
rationality. But soon his influence was challenged from two different
directions. The Danish Christian thinker Søren Kierkegaard criticized
the logical pretensions of the Hegelian system; and one of his
contemporaries, Arthur Schopenhauer, himself a German idealist and
constructor of a bold and imaginative system, contradicted Hegel by
asserting that the irrational is the truly real.
Kierkegaard’s criticism of Hegel was an appeal to the concrete as
against the abstract. He satirized Hegelian rationalism as a perfect
example of “the academic in philosophy”—of detached, objective, abstract
theorizing and system building that was blind to the realities of human
existence and to its subjective, living, emotional character. What a
human being requires in life, said Kierkegaard, is not infinite inquiry
but the boldness of resolute decision and commitment. The human essence
is not to be found in thinking but in the existential conditions of
emotional life, in anxiety and despair. The titles of three of
Kierkegaard’s books—Fear and Trembling (1843), The Concept of Dread
(1844), and The Sickness unto Death (1849)—indicate his preoccupation
with states of consciousness quite unlike cognition.
For a short time Schopenhauer competed unsuccessfully with Hegel at
the University of Berlin; thereafter he withdrew to spend the rest of
his life in battle against academic philosophy. His own system, though
orderly and carefully worked out, was expressed in vivid and engaging
language. Schopenhauer agreed with Kant that the world of appearances,
of phenomena, is governed by the conditions of space, time, and
causality. But he held that science, which investigates the phenomenal
world, cannot penetrate the real world behind appearances, which is
dominated by a strong, blind, striving, universal cosmic Will that
expresses itself in the vagaries of human instinct, in sexual striving,
and in the wild uncertainties of animal behaviour. Everywhere in nature
one sees strife, conflict, and inarticulate impulse; and these, rather
than rational processes or intellectual clarity, are humankind’s true
points of contact with ultimate reality.
Friedrich Nietzsche, the third member of the irrationalist
triumvirate, was a prolific but unsystematic writer, presenting his
patchwork of ideas in swift atoms of thought. Nietzsche viewed the task
of the philosopher as destroying old values, creating new ideals, and
through them erecting a new civilization. He agreed with Schopenhauer
that mind is an instrument of instinct to be used in the service of life
and power, and he held that illusion is as necessary to human beings as
truth. Nietzsche spent much time analyzing emotional states such as
resentment, guilt, bad conscience, and self-contempt.
Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche provided for the 19th
century a new, nonrational conception of human nature, and they viewed
the mind not as open to rational introspection but as dark, obscure,
hidden, and deep. But above all they initiated a new style of
philosophizing. Schopenhauer wrote like an 18th-century essayist,
Kierkegaard was a master of the methods of irony and paradox, and
Nietzsche used aphorism and epigram in a self-consciously literary
manner. For them, the philosopher should be less a crabbed academician
than a man of letters.

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T. H. Green
British educator and philosopher
born April 7, 1836, Birkin, Yorkshire, Eng.
died March 26, 1882, Oxford, Oxfordshire
Main
English educator, political theorist, and Idealist
philosopher of the so-called Neo-Kantian school. Through his
teaching, Green exerted great influence on philosophy in
late 19th-century England. Most of his life centred at
Oxford, where he was educated, elected a fellow in 1860,
served as a lecturer, and in 1878 was appointed professor of
moral philosophy. His lectures provided the basis for his
most significant works, Prolegomena to Ethics (1883) and
Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation,
published in the collected Works, 3 vol. (1885–88).
Green’s metaphysics begins with the question of man’s
relation to nature. Man, he said, is self-conscious. The
simplest mental act involves consciousness of changes and of
distinctions between the self and the object observed. To
know, Green asserted, is to be aware of relations between
objects. Above man—who can know only a small portion of such
relations—is God. This “principle which renders all
relations possible and is itself determined by none of them”
is an eternal self-consciousness.
Green based his ethics on the spiritual nature of man. He
maintained that man’s determination to act upon his
reflections is an “act of will” and is not externally
determined by God or any other factor. According to Green,
freedom is not the supposed ability to do anything desired
but is the power to identify one’s self with the good that
reason reveals as one’s own true good.
Green’s political philosophy enlarged upon his ethical
system. Ideally, political institutions embody the
community’s moral ideas and help develop the character of
individual citizens. Although existing institutions do not
fully realize the common ideal, the analysis that exposes
their deficiencies also indicates the path of true
development. His original view of personal self-realization
also contained the notion of political obligation, for
citizens intent upon realizing themselves will act as if by
duty to improve the institutions of the state. Because the
state represents the “general will” and is not a timeless
entity, citizens have the moral right to rebel against it in
the state’s own interest when the general will becomes
subverted.
Green’s influence on English philosophy was complemented
by his social influence—in part through his efforts to bring
the universities into closer touch with practical and
political affairs and in part through his attempt to
reformulate political liberalism so that it laid more stress
on the need for positive actions by the state than on the
negative rights of the individual. His address “Liberal
Legislation and Freedom of Contract” (1881) gave early
expression to ideas central to the modern “welfare state.”
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F. H. Bradley
British philosopher
born Jan. 30, 1846, Clapham, Surrey, Eng.
died Sept. 18, 1924, Oxford
Main
influential English philosopher of the absolute Idealist
school, which based its doctrines on the thought of G.W.F.
Hegel and considered mind to be a more fundamental feature
of the universe than matter.
Elected to a fellowship at Merton College, Oxford, in
1870, Bradley soon became ill with a kidney disease that
made him a semi-invalid for the rest of his life. Because
his fellowship involved no teaching duties and because he
never married, he was able to devote the major part of his
life to writing. He was awarded Britain’s Order of Merit,
the first English philosopher to receive the distinction.
In his early work Bradley participated in the growing
attack upon the Empiricist theories of English thinkers such
as John Stuart Mill and drew heavily on Hegel’s ideas. In
Ethical Studies (1876), Bradley’s first major work, he
sought to expose the confusions apparent in Mill’s doctrine
of Utilitarianism, which urged maximum human happiness as
the goal of ethical behaviour. In The Principles of Logic
(1883), Bradley denounced the deficient psychology of the
Empiricists, whose logic was limited, in his view, to the
doctrine of the association of ideas held in the human mind.
He gave Hegel due credit for borrowed ideas in both books,
but he never embraced Hegelianism thoroughly.
Bradley’s most ambitious work, Appearance and Reality: A
Metaphysical Essay (1893), was, in his own words, a
“critical discussion of first principles,” meant “to
stimulate inquiry and doubt.” The book disappointed his
followers, who expected a vindication of the truths of
religion. While reality is indeed spiritual, he maintained,
a detailed demonstration of the notion is beyond human
capacity. If for no other reason, the demonstration is
impossible because of the fatally abstract nature of human
thought. Instead of ideas, which could not properly contain
reality, he recommended feeling, the immediacy of which
could embrace the harmonious nature of reality. His admirers
were disappointed as well by his discussion of worship and
the soul. He declared that religion is not a “final and
ultimate” matter but, instead, a matter of practice; the
philosopher’s absolute idea is incompatible with the God of
religious men.
The effect of Appearance and Reality was to encourage
rather than to dispel doubt, and the following that Bradley
had gained through his work in ethics and logic became
disenchanted. Thus, the most influential aspect of his work
has been the negative and critical one because of his skill
as a polemical writer. Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore, who
led the attack on Idealism, both benefitted from his sharp
dialectic. Modern critics value him less for his conclusions
than for the manner in which he reached them, via a ruthless
search for truth. In addition to original work in
philosophical psychology, Bradley wrote The Presuppositions
of Critical History (1874) and Essays on Truth and Reality
(1914). His psychological essays and minor writings were
combined in Collected Essays (2 vol., 1935).
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Bernard Bosanquet
British philosopher
born June 14, 1848, Alnwick, Northumberland, Eng.
died Feb. 8, 1923, London
Main
philosopher who helped revive in England the idealism of
G.W.F. Hegel and sought to apply its principles to social
and political problems.
Made a fellow of University College, Oxford, in 1870,
Bosanquet was a tutor there until 1881, when he moved to
London to devote himself to philosophical writing and to
work on behalf of the Charity Organisation Society. He was
professor of moral philosophy at St. Andrews University in
Scotland (1903–08).
Although Bosanquet owed much to Hegel, his first writings
were influenced by the 19th-century German philosopher
Rudolf Lotze, whose Logik and Metaphysik he had edited in
English translation in 1884. The fundamental principles of
such early works as Knowledge and Reality (1885) and Logic
(1888) were further explicated in his Essentials of Logic
(1895) and Implication and Linear Inference (1920), which
stress the central role of logical thought in systematically
addressing philosophical problems.
Bosanquet’s debt to Hegel is more evident in his works on
ethics, aesthetics, and metaphysics. Having translated in
1886 the introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy of Fine Art, he
proceeded to his own History of Aesthetic (1892) and Three
Lectures on Aesthetic (1915). Both reflect his belief that
aesthetics can reconcile the natural and the supernatural
worlds. As elsewhere in his work, Bosanquet revealed his
distaste for the materialism of his day and favoured the
neo-Hegelian antidote, which held that everything considered
to be real is a manifestation of a spiritual absolute.
Bosanquet’s ethical and social philosophy, particularly
the practical work Some Suggestions in Ethics (1918), shows
a similar desire to view reality coherently, as a concrete
unity in which pleasure and duty, egoism and altruism are
reconciled. He asserted that the same passion shown by Plato
for the unity of the universe reappeared in Christianity as
the doctrine of the divine spirit manifesting itself in
human society. Social life requires a communal will that
both grows out of individual cooperation and maintains the
individual in a state of freedom and social satisfaction.
This view is expounded in Philosophical Theory of the State
(1899) and in Social and International Ideals (1917).
Basing his metaphysics on Hegel’s concept of the dynamic
quality of human knowledge and experience, Bosanquet
emphasized the interrelated character of the content and the
object of human thought. Thought, he wrote in Three Chapters
on the Nature of Mind (1923), is “the development of
connections” and “the sense of the whole.”
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Charles Sanders Peirce
American philosopher and scientist
born Sept. 10, 1839, Cambridge, Mass., U.S.
died April 19, 1914, near Milford, Pa.
Main
American scientist, logician, and philosopher who is noted
for his work on the logic of relations and on pragmatism as
a method of research.
Life.
Peirce was one of four sons of Sarah Mills and Benjamin
Peirce, who was Perkins professor of astronomy and
mathematics at Harvard University. After graduating from
Harvard College in 1859 and spending one year with field
parties of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, Peirce
entered the Lawrence Scientific School of Harvard
University, from which, in 1863, he graduated summa cum
laude in chemistry. Meanwhile, he had reentered the Survey
in 1861 as a computing aide to his father, who had
undertaken the task of determining, from observations of
lunar occultations of the Pleiades, the longitudes of
American survey points with respect to European ones. Much
of his early astronomical work for the Survey was done in
the Harvard Observatory, in whose Annals (1878) there
appeared his Photometric Researches (concerning a more
precise determination of the shape of the Milky Way Galaxy).
In 1871 his father obtained an appropriation to initiate
a geodetic connection between the surveys of the Atlantic
and Pacific coasts. This cross-continental triangulation
lent urgency to the need for a gravimetric survey of North
America directed toward a more precise determination of the
Earth’s ellipticity, a project that Charles was to
supervise. In pursuit of this project, Peirce contributed to
the theory and practice of pendulum swinging as a means of
measuring the force of gravity. The need to make accurate
measurements of lengths in his pendulum researches, in turn,
led him to make a pioneer determination of the length of the
metre in terms of a wavelength of light (1877–79). Between
1873 and 1886 Peirce conducted pendulum experiments at about
20 stations in Europe and the United States and (through
deputies) at several other places, including Grinnell Land
in the Canadian Arctic.
Though his experimental and theoretical work on gravity
determinations had won international recognition for both
him and the Survey, he was in frequent disagreement with its
administrators from 1885 onward. The amount of time he took
for the careful preparation of reports was ascribed to
procrastination. His “Report on Gravity at the Smithsonian,
Ann Arbor, Madison, and Cornell” (written 1889) was never
published, because of differences concerning its form and
content. He finally resigned as of the end of 1891, and,
from then until his death in 1914, he had no regular
employment or income. For some years he was a consulting
chemical engineer, mathematician, and inventor.
Peirce was elected a fellow of the American Academy of
Arts and Sciences in 1867 and a member of the National
Academy of Sciences in 1877. He presented 34 papers before
the latter from 1878 to 1911, nearly a third of them in
logic (others were in mathematics, physics, geodesy,
spectroscopy, and experimental psychology). He was elected a
member of the London Mathematical Society in 1880.
Work in logic.
Though Peirce’s career was in physical science, his
ambitions were in logic. By the age of 31, he had published
a number of technical papers in that field, besides papers
and reviews in chemistry, philology, the philosophy of
history and of religion, and the history of philosophy. He
had also given two series of Harvard University lectures and
one of Lowell Institute lectures, all in logic. Though
Peirce aspired to a university chair of logical research, no
such chair existed, and none was created for him: the day of
logic had not yet come. His nearest approach to this
ambition occurred at Johns Hopkins University, where he held
a lectureship in logic from 1879 to 1884 while retaining his
position in the Survey.
Logic in its widest sense he identified with semiotics,
the general theory of signs. He laboured over the
distinction between two kinds of action: sign action, or
semiosis, and dynamic, or mechanical, action. His major
work, unfinished, was to have been entitled A System of
Logic, Considered as Semiotic.
Although he made eminent contributions to deductive, or
mathematical, logic, Peirce was a student primarily of “the
logic of science”—i.e., of induction and of what he referred
to as “retroduction,” or “abduction,” the forming and
accepting on probation of a hypothesis to explain surprising
facts. His lifelong ambition was to establish abduction and
induction firmly and permanently along with deduction in the
very conception of logic—each of them clearly distinguished
from the other two, yet positively related to them. It was
for the sake of logic that Peirce so diversified his
scientific researches, for he considered that the logician
should ideally possess an insider’s acquaintance with the
methods and reasonings of all the sciences.
Work in philosophy
Peirce’s Pragmatism was first elaborated in a series of
“Illustrations of the Logic of Science” in the Popular
Science Monthly in 1877–78. The scientific method, he
argued, is one of several ways of fixing beliefs. Beliefs
are essentially habits of action. It is characteristic of
the method of science that it makes its ideas clear in terms
first of the sensible effects of their objects, and second
of habits of action adjusted to those effects. Here, for
example, is how the mineralogist makes the idea of hardness
clear: the sensible effect of x being harder than y is that
x will scratch y and not be scratched by it; and believing
that x is harder than y means habitually using x to scratch
y (as in dividing a sheet of glass) and keeping x away from
y when y is to remain unscratched. By the same method Peirce
tried to give equal clarity to the much more complex,
difficult, and important idea of probability. In his Harvard
lectures of 1903, he identified Pragmatism more narrowly
with the logic of abduction. Even his evolutionary
metaphysics of 1891–93 was a higher order working hypothesis
by which the special sciences might be guided in forming
their lower order hypotheses; thus, his more metaphysical
writings, with their emphases on chance and continuity, were
but further illustrations of the logic of science.
When Pragmatism became a popular movement in the early
1900s, Peirce was dissatisfied both with all of the forms of
Pragmatism then current and with his own original exposition
of it, and his last productive years were devoted in large
part to its radical revision and systematic completion and
to the proof of the principle of what he by then had come to
call “pragmaticism.”
His “one contribution to philosophy,” he thought, was his
“new list of categories” analogous to Kant’s a priori forms
of the understanding, which he reduced from 12 to 3:
Quality, Relation, and Representation. In later writings he
sometimes called them Quality, Reaction, and Mediation; and
finally, Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. At first he
called them concepts; later, irreducible elements of
concepts—the univalent, bivalent, and trivalent elements.
They appear in that order, for example, in his division of
the modalities into possibility, actuality, and necessity;
in his division of signs into icons, indexes, and symbols;
in the division of symbols into terms, propositions, and
arguments; and in his division of arguments into abductions,
inductions, and deductions. The primary function of the new
list was to give systematic support to this last division.
Peirce was twice married: first in 1862 to Harriet
Melusina Fay, who left him in 1876, and second in 1883 to
Juliette Pourtalai (née Froissy). There were no children of
either marriage. For the last 26 years of his life, he and
Juliette lived on a farm on the Delaware River near Milford,
Pa. He called himself a bucolic logician, a recluse for
logic’s sake. He lived his last years in serious illness and
in abject poverty relieved only by aid from such friends as
William James.
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William James
American psychologist and philosopher
born Jan. 11, 1842, New York, N.Y., U.S.
died Aug. 26, 1910, Chocorua, N.H.
Main
American philosopher and psychologist, a leader of the
philosophical movement of Pragmatism and of the
psychological movement of functionalism.
Early life and education
James was the eldest son of Henry James, an idiosyncratic
and voluble man whose philosophical interests attracted him
to the theology of Emanuel Swedenborg. One of William’s
brothers was the novelist Henry James. The elder Henry James
held an “antipathy to all ecclesiasticisms which he
expressed with abounding scorn and irony throughout all his
later years.” Both his physical and his spiritual life were
marked by restlessness and wanderings, largely in Europe,
that affected the training of his children at school and
their education at home. Building upon the works of
Swedenborg, which had been proffered as a revelation from
God for a new age of truth and reason in religion, the elder
James had constructed a system of his own that seems to have
served him as a vision of spiritual life. This philosophy
provided the permanent intellectual atmosphere of William’s
home life, to some degree compensating for the undisciplined
irregularity of his schooling, which ranged from New York to
Boulogne, Fr., and to Geneva and back. The habits acquired
in dealing with his father’s views at dinner and at tea
carried over into the extraordinarily sympathetic yet
critical manner that William displayed in dealing with
anybody’s views on any occasion.
When James was 18 years of age he tried his hand at
studying art, under the tutelage of William M. Hunt, an
American painter of religious subjects. But he soon tired of
it and the following year entered the Lawrence Scientific
School of Harvard University. From courses in chemistry,
anatomy, and similar subjects there, he went to the study of
medicine in the Harvard Medical School; but he interrupted
this study in order to accompany the eminent naturalist
Louis Agassiz, in the capacity of assistant, on an
expedition to the Amazon. There James’s health failed, and
his duties irked him. He returned to the medical school for
a term and then during 1867–68 went to Germany for courses
with the physicist and physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz,
who formulated the law of the conservation of energy; with
Rudolf Virchow, a pathologist; with Claude Bernard, the
foremost experimentalist of 19th-century medicine; and with
others. At the same time he read widely in the psychology
and philosophy then current, especially the writings of
Charles Renouvier, a Kantian Idealist and relativist.
The acquaintance with Renouvier was a focal point in
James’s personal and intellectual history. He seems from
adolescence to have been a delicate boy, always ailing, and
at this period of his stay in Germany he suffered a
breakdown, with thoughts of suicide. When he returned home
in November 1868, after 18 months in Germany, he was still
ill. Though he took the degree of M.D. at the Harvard
Medical School in June 1869, he was unable to begin
practice. Between that date and 1872 he lived in a state of
semi-invalidism in his father’s house, doing nothing but
reading and writing an occasional review. Early in this
period he experienced a sort of phobic panic, which
persisted until the end of April 1870. It was relieved,
according to his own statement, by the reading of Renouvier
on free will and the decision that “my first act of free
will shall be to believe in free will.” The decision carried
with it the abandonment of all determinisms—both the
scientific kind that his training had established for him
and that seems to have had some relation to his neurosis and
the theological, metaphysical kind that he later opposed in
the notion of “the block universe.” His revolutionary
discoveries in psychology and philosophy, his views
concerning the methods of science, the qualities of men, and
the nature of reality all seem to have received a definite
propulsion from this resolution of his poignant personal
problem.
Interest in psychology
In 1872 James was appointed instructor in physiology at
Harvard College, in which capacity he served until 1876. But
he could not be diverted from his ruling passion, and the
step from teaching physiology to teaching psychology—not the
traditional “mental science” but physiological
psychology—was as inevitable as it was revolutionary. It
meant a challenge to the vested interests of the mind,
mainly theological, that were entrenched in the colleges and
universities of the United States; and it meant a definite
break with what Santayana called “the genteel tradition.”
Psychology ceased to be mental philosophy and became a
laboratory science. Philosophy ceased to be an exercise in
the grammar of assent and became an adventure in
methodological invention and metaphysical discovery.
With his marriage in 1878, to Alice H. Gibbens of
Cambridge, Mass., a new life began for James. The old
neurasthenia practically disappeared. He went at his tasks
with a zest and an energy of which his earlier record had
given no hint. It was as if some deeper level of his being
had been tapped: his life as an originative thinker began in
earnest. He contracted to produce a textbook of psychology
by 1880. But the work grew under his hand, and when it
finally appeared in 1890, as The Principles of Psychology,
it was not a textbook but a monumental work in two great
volumes, from which the textbook was condensed two years
later.
The Principles, which was recognized at once as both
definitive and innovating in its field, established the
functional point of view in psychology. It assimilated
mental science to the biological disciplines and treated
thinking and knowledge as instruments in the struggle to
live. At one and the same time it made the fullest use of
principles of psychophysics (the study of the effect of
physical processes upon the mental processes of an organism)
and defended, without embracing, free will.
Interest in religion
The Principles completed, James seems to have lost interest
in the subject. Creator of the first U.S. demonstrational
psychological laboratory, he disliked laboratory work and
did not feel himself fitted for it. He liked best the
adventure of free observation and reflection. Compared with
the problems of philosophy and religion, psychology seemed
to him “a nasty little subject” that he was glad to have
done with. His studies, which were now of the nature and
existence of God, the immortality of the soul, free will and
determinism, the values of life, were empirical, not
dialectical; James went directly to religious experience for
the nature of God, to psychical research for survival after
death, to fields of belief and action for free will and
determinism. He was searching out these things, not arguing
foregone conclusions. Having begun to teach ethics and
religion in the late 1880s, his collaboration with the
psychical researchers dated even earlier. Survival after
death he ultimately concluded to be unproved; but the
existence of divinity he held to be established by the
record of the religious experience, viewing it as a
plurality of saving powers, “a more of the same quality” as
oneself, with which, in a crisis, one’s personality can make
saving contact. Freedom he found to be a certain looseness
in the conjunction of things, so that what the future will
be is not made inevitable by past history and present form;
freedom, or chance, corresponds to Darwin’s “spontaneous
variations.” These views were set forth in the period
between 1893 and 1903 in various essays and lectures,
afterward collected into works, of which the most notable is
The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
(1897). During this decade, which may be correctly described
as James’s religious period, all of his studies were
concerned with one aspect or another of the religious
question.
His natural interest in religion was reinforced by the
practical stimulus of an invitation to give the Gifford
Lectures on natural religion at the University of Edinburgh.
He was not able to deliver them until 1901–02, and their
preparation focussed his labours for a number of years. His
disability, involving his heart, was caused by prolonged
effort and exposure during a vacation in the Adirondacks in
1898. A trip to Europe, which was to have taken up a
sabbatical year away from university duties, turned into two
years of invalidism. The Gifford Lectures were prepared
during this distressful period. Published as The Varieties
of Religious Experience (1902), they had an even greater
acclaim as a book than as articles. Cautious and tentative
though it was, the rich concreteness of the material and the
final summary of the evidence—that the varieties of
religious experience point to the existence of specific and
various reservoirs of consciousness-like energies with which
we can make specific contact in times of trouble—touched
something fundamental in the minds of religionists and at
least provided them with apologetic material not in conflict
with science and scientific method. The book was the
culmination of James’s interest in the psychology of
religion.
Career in philosophy
James now explicitly turned his attention to the ultimate
philosophic problems that had been at least marginally
present along with his other interests. Already in 1898, in
a lecture at the University of California on philosophical
conceptions and practical results, he had formulated the
theory of method known as Pragmatism. Originating in the
strict analysis of the logic of the sciences that had been
made in the middle 1870s by Charles Sanders Peirce, the
theory underwent in James’s hands a transforming
generalization. He showed how the meaning of any idea
whatsoever—scientific, religious, philosophical, political,
social, personal—can be found ultimately in nothing save in
the succession of experiential consequences that it leads
through and to; that truth and error, if they are within the
reach of the mind at all, are identical with these
consequences. Having made use of the pragmatic rule in his
study of religious experience, he now turned it upon the
ideas of change and chance, of freedom, variety, pluralism,
and novelty, which, from the time he had read Renouvier, it
had been his preoccupation to establish. He used the
pragmatic rule in his polemic against monism and the “block
universe,” which held that all of reality is of one piece
(cemented, as it were, together); and he used this rule
against internal relations (i.e., the notion that you cannot
have one thing without having everything), against all
finalities, staticisms, and completenesses. His classes rang
with the polemic against absolutes, and a new vitality
flowed into the veins of American philosophers. Indeed, the
historic controversy over Pragmatism saved the profession
from iteration and dullness.
Meanwhile (1906), James had been asked to lecture at
Stanford University, in California, and he experienced there
the earthquake that nearly destroyed San Francisco. The same
year he delivered the Lowell Lectures in Boston, afterward
published as Pragmatism: A New Name for Old Ways of Thinking
(1907). Various studies appeared—“Does Consciousness Exist?”
“The Thing and Its Relations,” “The Experience of
Activity”—chiefly in The Journal of Philosophy; these were
essays in the extension of the empirical and pragmatic
method, which were collected after James’s death and
published as Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912). The
fundamental point of these writings is that the relations
between things, holding them together or separating them,
are at least as real as the things themselves; that their
function is real; and that no hidden substrata are necessary
to account for the clashes and coherences of the world. The
Empiricism was radical because until this time even
Empiricists believed in a metaphysical ground like the
hidden turtle of Hindu mythology on whose back the cosmic
elephant rode.
James was now the centre of a new life for philosophy in
the English-speaking world. The continentals did not “get”
Pragmatism; if its German opponents altogether misunderstood
it, its Italian adherents—among them, of all people, the
critic and devastating iconoclast Giovanni Papini—travestied
it. In England it was championed by F.C.S. Schiller, in the
United States by John Dewey and his school, in China by Hu
Shih. In 1907 James gave his last course at Harvard. In the
spring he repeated the lectures on Pragmatism at Columbia
University. It was as if a new prophet had come; the lecture
halls were as crowded on the last day as on the first, with
people standing outside the door. Shortly afterward came an
invitation to give the Hibbert Lectures at Manchester
College, Oxford. These lectures, published in 1909 as A
Pluralistic Universe, state, in a more systematic and less
technical way than the Essays, the same essential positions.
They present, in addition, certain religious overbeliefs of
James’s, which further thinking—if the implications of the
posthumous Some Problems of Philosophy may be trusted—was to
mitigate. These overbeliefs involve a panpsychistic
interpretation of experience (one that ascribes a psychic
aspect to all of nature) that goes beyond radical Empiricism
and the pragmatic rule into conventional metaphysics.
Home again, James found himself working, against growing
physical trouble, upon the material that was partially
published after his death as Some Problems of Philosophy
(1911). He also collected his occasional pieces in the
controversy over Pragmatism and published them as The
Meaning of Truth (1909). Finally, his physical discomfort
exceeded even his remarkable voluntary endurance. After a
fruitless trip to Europe in search of a cure, he returned,
going straight to the country home in New Hampshire, where
he died in 1910.
Significance and influence
In psychology, James’s work is of course dated, but it is
dated as is Galileo’s in physics or Charles Darwin’s in
biology because it is the originative matrix of the great
variety of new developments that are the current vogue. In
philosophy, his positive work is still prophetic. The world
he argued for was soon reflected in the new physics, as
diversely interpreted, with its resonances from Charles
Peirce, particularly by Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell,
and the Danish quantum physicist Niels Bohr—a world of
events connected with one another by kinds of next-to-next
relations, a world various, manifold, changeful, originating
in chance, perpetuated by habits (that the scientist calls
laws), and transformed by breaks, spontaneities, and
freedoms. In human nature, James believed, these visible
traits of the world are equally manifest. The real specific
event is the individual, whose intervention in history gives
it in each case a new and unexpected turn. But in history,
as in nature, the continuous flux of change and chance
transforms every being, invalidates every law, and alters
every ideal.
James lived his philosophy. It entered into the texture
and rhythms of his rich and vivid literary style. It
determined his attitude toward scientifically unaccepted
therapies, such as Christian Science or mind cure, and
repugnant ideals, such as militarism. It made him an
anti-imperialist, a defender of the small, the variant, the
unprecedented, the weak, wherever and whenever they
appeared. His philosophy is too viable and subtle, too
hedged, experiential, and tentative to have become the dogma
of a school. It has functioned rather to implant the germs
of new thought in others than to serve as a standard old
system for others to repeat.
Horace M. Kallen
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Franz Brentano
German philosopher
in full Franz Clemens Brentano
born January 16, 1838, Marienberg, Hesse-Nassau [Germany]
died March 17, 1917, Zürich, Switzerland
Main
German philosopher generally regarded as the founder of act
psychology, or intentionalism, which concerns itself with
the acts of the mind rather than with the contents of the
mind. He was a nephew of the poet Clemens Brentano.
Brentano was ordained a Roman Catholic priest (1864) and
was appointed Privatdozent (unsalaried lecturer) in
philosophy (1866) and professor (1872) at the University of
Würzburg. Religious doubts, exacerbated by the doctrine of
papal infallibility (1870), led to his resignation from his
post and the priesthood (1873).
Brentano then began writing one of his best-known and
most influential works, Psychologie vom empirischen
Standpunkte (1874; “Psychology from an Empirical
Standpoint”), in which he tried to present a systematic
psychology that would be a science of the soul.
Concerned with mental processes, or acts, he revived and
modernized the scholastic philosophical theory of
“intentional existence,” or, as he called it, “immanent
objectivity”; in psychical phenomena, he held, there is a
“direction of the mind to an object” (e.g., one sees
something). The object seen is said to “inexist” within the
act of seeing or to have “immanent objectivity.” He
suggested that, fundamentally, the mind can refer to objects
by perception and ideation, including sensing and imagining;
by judgment, including acts of acknowledgment, rejection,
and recall; and by loving or hating, which take into account
desires, intentions, wishes, and feelings. The ideas
expressed in the Psychologie formed the credo of his
followers and became the starting point of their work.
In 1874 Brentano was appointed professor at the
University of Vienna. His decision to marry in 1880 was
blocked by Austrian authorities, who refused to accept his
resignation from the priesthood and, considering him still a
cleric, denied him permission to marry. He was forced to
resign his professorship, and he moved with his wife to
Leipzig. The following year he was allowed to return to the
University of Vienna as a Privatdozent, and he remained
there until 1895. He enjoyed wide popularity with his
students, among whom were psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud,
psychologist Carl Stumpf, philosopher Edmund Husserl, and
Tomáš Masaryk, the founder of modern Czechoslovakia. Another
major work of Brentano’s, Untersuchungen zur
Sinnespsychologie (“Inquiry into Sense Psychology”),
appeared in 1907. Completing his early masterwork was Von
der Klassifikation der psychischen Phänomene (1911; “On the
Classification of Psychological Phenomena”).
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Alexius Meinong
Austrian philosopher and psychologist
born July 17, 1853, Lemberg, Galicia, Austrian Empire
[now Lviv, Ukraine]
died Nov. 27, 1920, Graz, Austria
Main
Austrian philosopher and psychologist remembered for his
contributions to axiology, or theory of values, and for his
Gegenstandstheorie, or theory of objects.
After studying under the philosophical psychologist Franz
Brentano from 1875 to 1878 in Vienna, he joined the faculty
of philosophy at the University of Graz, where he remained
as a professor from 1889 until his death. With Brentano he
helped promote the Austrian school of values but eventually
dissented from Brentano’s views on epistemology.
In his major work, Über Annahmen (1902; “On
Assumptions”), Meinong discussed the assumptions men make in
believing they know or do not know a particular truth. Like
Brentano, Meinong considered intentionality, or the
direction of attention to objects, to be the basic feature
of mental states. Yet he drew his own distinction between
two elements in every experience of the objective world:
“content,” which differentiates one object from another, and
“act,” by which the experience approaches its object.
Anticipating the work of the Phenomenologists, Meinong
maintained that objects remain objects and have a definite
character and definite properties (Sosein) even if they have
no being (Sein). Thus, “golden mountain” is an object
existing as a concept, even though no golden mountains exist
in the world of sense experience. Bertrand Russell was among
those influenced by this aspect of Meinong’s thought. Like
every other type of object knowable by different mental
states, values could also be classified as objects existing
independently of the experience of values and of the world
of sense experience. Two examples of value feeling are
Seinsfreude, the experience of joy in the existence of a
particular object, and Seinsleid, the experience of sadness
at the object’s existence.
Meinong’s Gegenstandstheorie is discussed in his
Gesammelte Abhandlungen, 2 vol. (1913–14; “Collected
Treatises”), and in John N. Findlay, Meinong’s Theory of
Objects (1933). His other important writings include Über
Möglichkeit und Wahrscheinlichkeit (1915; “On Possibility
and Probability”) and Über emotionale Präsentation (1917).
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Søren Kierkegaard
Danish philosopher
in full Søren Aabye Kierkegaard
born May 5, 1813, Copenhagen, Den.
died Nov. 11, 1855, Copenhagen
Main
Danish philosopher, theologian, and cultural critic who was
a major influence on existentialism and Protestant theology
in the 20th century. He attacked the literary,
philosophical, and ecclesiastical establishments of his day
for misrepresenting the highest task of human
existence—namely, becoming oneself in an ethical and
religious sense—as something so easy that it could seem
already accomplished even when it had not even been
undertaken. Positively, the heart of his work lay in the
infinite requirement and strenuous difficulty of religious
existence in general and Christian faith in particular.
A life of collisions
Kierkegaard’s life has been called uneventful, but it was
hardly that. The story of his life is a drama in four
overlapping acts, each with its own distinctive crisis or
“collision,” as he often referred to these events. His
father, Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, was a prosperous but
retired businessman who devoted the later years of his life
to raising his children. He was a man of deep but gloomy and
guilt-ridden piety who was haunted by the memory of having
once cursed God as a boy and of having begun his family by
getting his maid pregnant—and then marrying her—shortly
after the death of his first wife. His domineering presence
stimulated young Søren’s imaginative and intellectual gifts
but, as his son would later bear witness, made a normal
childhood impossible.
Kierkegaard enrolled at the University of Copenhagen in
1830 but did not complete his studies until 1841. Like the
German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
(1770–1831), whose system he would severely criticize,
Kierkegaard entered university in order to study theology
but devoted himself to literature and philosophy instead.
His thinking during this period is revealed in an 1835
journal entry, which is often cited as containing the germ
of his later work:
The thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to
find the idea for which I can live and die.…What is truth
but to live for an idea?
While a student at the university, Kierkegaard explored
the literary figures of Don Juan, the wandering Jew, and
especially Faust, looking for existential models for his own
life.
The first collision occurred during his student days: he
became estranged both from his father and from the faith in
which he had been brought up, and he moved out of the family
home. But by 1838, just before his father’s death, he was
reconciled both to his father and to the Christian faith;
the latter became the idea for which he would live and die.
Despite his reference to an experience of “indescribable
joy” in May of that year, it should not be assumed that his
conversion was instantaneous. On the one hand, he often
seemed to be moving away from the faith of his father and
back toward it at virtually the same time. On the other
hand, he often stressed that conversion is a long process.
He saw becoming a Christian as the task of a lifetime.
Accordingly, he decided to publish Sygdommen til døden
(1849; Sickness unto Death) under a pseudonym (as he had
done with several previous works), lest anyone think he
lived up to the ideal he there presented; likewise, the
pseudonymous authors of his other works often denied that
they possessed the faith they talked about. Although in the
last year of his life he wrote, “I dare not call myself a
Christian,” throughout his career it was Christianity that
he sought to defend by rescuing it from cultural captivity,
and it was a Christian person that he sought to become.
After his father’s death, Kierkegaard became serious
about finishing his formal education. He took his doctoral
exams and wrote his dissertation, Om begrebet ironi med
stadigt hensyn til Socrates (On the Concept of Irony, with
Constant Reference to Socrates), completing it in June of
1841 and defending it in September. In between, he broke his
engagement with Regine Olsen, thus initiating the second
major collision of his life. They had met in 1837, when she
was only 15 years old, and had become engaged in 1840. Now,
less than one year later, he returned her ring, saying he
“could not make a girl happy.” The reasons for this action
are far from clear.
What is clear is that this relationship haunted him for
the rest of his life. Saying in his will that he considered
engagement as binding as marriage, he left all his
possessions to Regine (she did not accept them, however,
since she had married long before Kierkegaard died). It is
also clear that this crisis triggered a period of
astonishing literary productivity, during which Kierkegaard
published many of the works for which he is best known:
Enten-Eller: et livs-fragment (1843; Either/Or: A Fragment
of Life), Gjentagelsen (1843; Repetition), Frygt og baeven
(1843; Fear and Trembling), Philosophiske smuler (1844;
Philosophical Fragments), Begrebet angest (1844; The Concept
of Anxiety), Stadier paa livets vei (1845; Stages on Life’s
Way), and Afsluttende uvidenskabelig efterskrift (1846;
Concluding Unscientific Postscript). Even after
acknowledging that he had written these works, however,
Kierkegaard insisted that they continue to be attributed to
their pseudonymous authors. The pseudonyms are best
understood by analogy with characters in a novel, created by
the actual author to embody distinctive worldviews; it is
left to the reader to decide what to make of each one.
Kierkegaard had intended to cease writing at this point
and become a country pastor. But it was not to be. The first
period of literary activity (1843–46) was followed by a
second (1847–55). Instead of retiring, he picked a quarrel
with The Corsair, a newspaper known for its liberal
political sympathies but more famous as a scandal sheet that
used satire to skewer the establishment. Although The
Corsair had praised some of the pseudonymous works,
Kierkegaard did not wish to see his own project confused
with that of the newspaper, so he turned his satirical
skills against it. The Corsair took the bait, and for months
Kierkegaard was the target of raucous ridicule, the greatest
butt of jokes in Copenhagen. Better at giving than at
taking, he was deeply wounded, and indeed he never fully
recovered. If the broken engagement was the cloud that hung
over the first literary period, the Corsair debacle was the
ghost that haunted the second.
The final collision was with the Church of Denmark
(Lutheran) and its leaders, the bishops J.P. Mynster and
H.L. Martensen. In his journals Kierkegaard called Sickness
unto Death an “attack upon Christendom.” In a similar vein,
Anti-Climacus, the pseudonymous author of Indøvelse i
Christendom (1850; Training in Christianity), declared the
need “again to introduce Christianity into Christendom.”
This theme became more and more explicit as Kierkegaard
resumed his writing career. As long as Mynster, the family
pastor from his childhood, was alive, Kierkegaard refrained
from personal attacks. But at Mynster’s funeral Martensen,
who had succeeded to the leadership of the Danish church,
eulogized his predecessor as a “witness to the truth,”
linking him to the martyrs of the faith; after this
Kierkegaard could no longer keep silent. In December 1854 he
began to publish dozens of short, shrill pieces insisting
that what passed as Christianity in Denmark was counterfeit
and making clear that Mynster and Martensen were responsible
for reducing the religion to “leniency.” The last of these
pieces was found on Kierkegaard’s desk after he collapsed in
the street in October 1855.
Stages on life’s way
In the pseudonymous works of Kierkegaard’s first literary
period, three stages on life’s way, or three spheres of
existence, are distinguished: the aesthetic, the ethical,
and the religious. These are not developmental stages in a
biological or psychological sense—a natural and
all-but-automatic unfolding according to some DNA of the
spirit. It is all too possible to live one’s life below the
ethical and the religious levels. But there is a
directionality in the sense that the earlier stages have the
later ones as their telos, or goal, while the later stages
both presuppose and include the earlier ones as important
but subordinate moments. Kierkegaard’s writings taken as a
whole, whether pseudonymous or not, focus overwhelmingly on
the religious stage, giving credence to his own
retrospective judgment that the entire corpus is ultimately
about the religious life.
The personages Kierkegaard creates to embody the
aesthetic stage have two preoccupations, the arts and the
erotic. It is tempting to see the aesthete as a cultured
hedonist—a fairly obvious offshoot of the Romantic
movement—who accepts the distinction made by Immanuel Kant
(1724–1804) between artistic and sensuous pleasure while
combining them in a single existential project. But in one
of the essays of Either/Or, the aesthete sees boredom as the
root of all evil and is preoccupied with making life
interesting; and the famous seducer in the same volume seems
less concerned with sex than with the fascinating spectacle
of watching himself seduce his victim.
This clue helps one both to define the aesthetic stage
and to see what a stage or sphere of existence in general
is. What the various goals of aesthetic existence have in
common is that they have nothing to do with right and wrong.
The criteria by which the good life is defined are premoral,
unconcerned with good and evil. A stage or sphere of
existence, then, is a fundamental project, a form of life, a
mode of being-in-the-world that defines success in life by
its own distinctive criteria.
What might motivate an aesthete to choose the ethical?
The mere presence of guardians of the good, who are willing
to scold the aesthete’s amorality as immorality, is too
external, too easily dismissed as bourgeois phariseeism.
Judge William, the representative of the ethical in
Either/Or, tries another tack. The aesthete, he argues,
fails to become a self at all but becomes, by choice, what
David Hume (1711–76) said the self inevitably is: a bundle
of events without an inner core to constitute identity or
cohesion over time. Moreover, the aesthete fails to see that
in the ethical the aesthetic is not abolished but ennobled.
Judge William presents marriage as the scene of this
transformation, in which, through commitment, the self
acquires temporal continuity and, following Hegel, the
sensuous is raised to the level of spirit.
In Fear and Trembling this ethical stage is
teleologically suspended in the religious, which means not
that it is abolished but that it is reduced to relative
validity in relation to something absolute, which is its
proper goal. For Plato (c. 428–c. 348 bc) and Kant, ethics
is a matter of pure reason gaining pure insight into eternal
truth. But Hegel argued that human beings are too deeply
embedded in history to attain such purity and that their
grasp of the right and the good is mediated by the laws and
customs of the societies in which they live. It is this
Hegelian ethics of socialization that preoccupies Judge
William and that gets relativized in Fear and Trembling. By
retelling the story of Abraham, it presents the religious
stage as the choice not to allow the laws and customs of
one’s people to be one’s highest norm—not to equate
socialization with sanctity and salvation but to be open to
a voice of greater authority, namely God.
This higher normativity does not arise from reason, as
Plato and Kant would have it, but is, from reason’s point of
view, absurd, paradoxical, even mad. These labels do not
bother Kierkegaard, because he interprets reason as human,
all too human—as the rationale of the current social order,
which knows nothing higher than itself. In the language of
Karl Marx (1818–83), what presents itself as reason is in
fact ideology. Kierkegaard interprets Abrahamic faith as
agreeing with Hegel and Marx about this historical finitude
of reason, and, precisely because of this, he insists that
the voice of God is an authority that is higher than the
rationality of either the current establishment (Hegel) or
the revolution (Marx). Against both Hegel and Marx,
Kierkegaard holds that history is not the scene in which
human reason overcomes this finitude and becomes the
ultimate standard of truth.
Three dimensions of the religious life
The simple scheme of the three stages becomes more complex
in Concluding Unscientific Postscript. The fundamental
distinction is now between objectivity and subjectivity,
with two examples of each. Objectivity is the name for
occupying oneself with what is “out there” in such a way as
to exempt oneself from the strenuous inward task of becoming
a self in the ethico-religious sense. One example is the
aesthetic posture, presented in earlier work; the other is
the project of speculative philosophy, to which this text
devotes major attention. The target is Hegelian philosophy,
which takes the achievement of comprehensive, absolute
knowledge to be the highest human task.
But, it is argued in the first place, speculative
philosophy cannot even keep its own promises. It purports to
begin without presuppositions and to conclude with a final,
all-encompassing system. The very idea that thought should
be without presuppositions, however, is itself a
presupposition, and thus the system is never quite able to
complete itself. The goal of objective knowledge is
legitimate, but it can never be more than approximately
accomplished. Reality may well be a system for God, but not
for any human knower.
Secondly, even if speculative philosophy could deliver
what it promises, it would have forgotten that the highest
human task is not cognition but rather the personal
appropriation or embodiment of whatever insights into the
good and the right one is able to achieve. Becoming a self
in this way is called existence, inwardness, and
subjectivity. This use of existence as a technical term for
the finite, human self that is always in the process of
becoming can be seen as the birth of existentialism.
The two modes of subjectivity are not, as one might
expect, the ethical and the religious stages. One does not
become a self simply through successful socialization.
Besides, in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, ethics
is treated as already recontextualized in a religious rather
than merely a social context. So the two modes of
ethico-religious subjectivity are “Religiousness A” and
“Religiousness B.” The fact that the latter turns out to be
Christianity should not lead one to think that the former is
some other world religion. It is rather the generic
necessary condition for any particular religion and, as
such, is available apart from dependence on the revelation
to be found in any particular religion’s sacred scriptures.
Socrates (c. 470–399 bc), here distinguished from the
speculative Plato, is the paradigm of Religiousness A.
Religiousness A is defined not in terms of beliefs about
what is “out there,” such as God or the soul, but rather in
terms of the complex tasks of becoming a self, summarized as
the task of being simultaneously related “relatively” to
relative goods and “absolutely” to the absolute good.
Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms refer to the absolute good
variously as the Idea, the Eternal, or God. As the generic
form of the religious stage, Religiousness A abstracts from
the “what” of belief to focus on the “how” that must
accompany any “what.” The Hegelian system purports to be the
highest form of the highest religion, namely Christianity,
but in fact, by virtue of its merely objective “how,” it
belongs to a completely different genus. It could not be the
highest form of Christianity, no more than a dog could be
the world’s prettiest cat.
There is something paradoxical about Religiousness A.
Socratic ignorance—the claim of Socrates that he is the
wisest of men because, while others think that they know, he
knows that he does not—reflects the realization that the
relation of the existing, and thus temporal, individual to
the eternal does not fit neatly into human conceptual
frameworks. But Christianity, as Religiousness B, is more
radically paradoxical, for the eternal itself has become
paradoxical as the insertion of God in time. In this way the
task of relating absolutely to the absolute becomes even
more strenuous, for human reason is overwhelmed, even
offended, by the claim that Jesus is fully human and fully
divine. In the Concluding Unscientific Postscript there is
an echo of Kant’s admission, “I have therefore found it
necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for
faith”—though Kantian faith has a very different “what.”
Some writings of Kierkegaard’s second literary period
extend the analyses of the first. For example, the two
halves of Sickness unto Death can be read as reprising
Religiousness A and B, respectively, in a different voice.
But several texts, most notably Kjerlighedens gjerninger
(1847; Works of Love), Training in Christianity, Til
selvprøvelse (1851; For Self-Examination), and Dømmer selv!
(1851; Judge for Yourselves!), go beyond Religiousness B to
what might be called “Religiousness C.” The focus is still
on Christianity, but now Christ is no longer just the
paradox to be believed but also the paradigm or prototype to
be imitated.
These works present the second, specifically Christian,
ethics that had been promised as far back as The Concept of
Anxiety. They go beyond Hegelian ethics, which only asks one
to conform to the laws and customs of one’s society. They
also go beyond the religion of hidden inwardness, whether A
or B, in which the relation between God and the soul takes
place out of public view. They are Kierkegaard’s answer to
the charge that religion according to his view is so
personal and so private as to be socially irresponsible.
Faith, the inward God-relation, must show itself outwardly
in works of love.
The first half of Works of Love is a sustained reflection
on the biblical commandment “You shall love your neighbour
as yourself” (Matthew 22:36). This commanded love is
contrasted with erotic love and friendship. Through its
poets, society celebrates these two forms of love, but only
God dares to command the love of neighbours. The celebrated
loves are spontaneous: they come naturally, by inclination,
and thus not by duty. Children do not have to be taught to
seek friends; nor, at puberty, do they need to be commanded
to fall in love. The celebrated loves are also preferential:
one is drawn to this person but not to that one as friend or
lover; something in the other is attractive or would satisfy
one’s desire if the relation could be established. Because
they are spontaneous and preferential, Kierkegaard calls the
celebrated loves forms of “self-love.”
This is not to say that every friend or lover is selfish.
But, by their exclusionary nature, such relations are the
self-love of the “We,” even when the “I” is not selfish in
the relation. Here one sees the political ramifications of
commanded love, for an ethics that restricts benevolence to
one’s own family, tribe, nation, race, or class expresses
only the self-love of the We.
By contrast, commanded love is not spontaneous, and it
needs to be commanded precisely because it is not
preferential. Another person need not be attractive or
belong to the same We to be one’s neighbour, whom one is to
love. Even one’s enemy can be one’s neighbour, which is a
reason why society never dares to require that people love
their neighbours as they do themselves. For the Christian,
this command comes from Christ, who is himself its
embodiment to be imitated.
One could hardly expect the literary and philosophical
elite to focus on the strenuousness of faith as a personal
relation to God unsupported by reason, or on the
strenuousness of love as responsibility to and for one’s
neighbour unsupported by society’s ethos. That task was the
responsibility of the church—a responsibility that, in
Kierkegaard’s view, the church had spectacularly failed to
fulfill. As these themes came more clearly into focus in his
writings, the attack upon Christendom with which his life
ended became inevitable.
Kierkegaard says that his writings as a whole are
religious. They are best seen as belonging to the prophetic
traditions, in which religious beliefs become the basis for
a critique of the religious communities that profess them.
The 20th-century theologies that were influenced by
Kierkegaard go beyond the tasks of metaphysical affirmation
and ethical instruction to a critique of complacent piety.
In existential philosophies—which are often less overtly
theological and sometimes entirely secular—this element of
critique is retained but is directed against forms of
personal and social life that do not take the tasks of human
existence seriously enough. Thus, Friedrich Nietzsche
(1844–1900) complains that his secular contemporaries do not
take the death of God seriously enough, just as Kierkegaard
complains that his Christian contemporaries do not take God
seriously enough. Likewise, the German existential
phenomenologist Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) describes how
people make life too easy for themselves by thinking and
doing just what “they” think and do. And Jean-Paul Sartre
(1905–80), the leading representative of atheistic
existentialism in France, calls attention to the ways in
which people indulge in self-deceiving “bad faith” in order
to think more highly of themselves than the facts warrant.
Merold Westphal
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Arthur Schopenhauer
German philosopher
born Feb. 22, 1788, Danzig, Prussia [now Gdańsk, Pol.]
died Sept. 21, 1860, Frankfurt am Main
Main
German philosopher, often called the “philosopher of
pessimism,” who was primarily important as the exponent of a
metaphysical doctrine of the will in immediate reaction
against Hegelian idealism. His writings influenced later
existential philosophy and Freudian psychology.
Early life and education.
Schopenhauer was the son of a wealthy merchant, Heinrich
Floris Schopenhauer, and his wife, Johanna, who later became
famous for her novels, essays, and travelogues. In 1793,
when Danzig came under Prussian sovereignty, they moved to
the free city of Hamburg. Arthur enjoyed a gentlemanly
private education. He then attended a private business
school, where he became acquainted with the spirit of the
Enlightenment and was exposed to a Pietistic attitude
sensitive to the plight of man. In 1803 he accompanied his
parents for a year on an extensive journey through Belgium,
England, France, Switzerland, and Austria.
The sudden death of his father in April 1805 precipitated
a decisive change in his life. His mother and his young
sister Adele moved to Weimar, where his mother succeeded in
joining the social circle of the poets J.W. von Goethe and
Christoph Martin Wieland (often called the German Voltaire).
Arthur himself had to remain in Hamburg for more than a
year, yet with more freedom to engage in the arts and
sciences. In May 1807 he was finally able to leave Hamburg.
During the next two years, spent in Gotha and Weimar, he
acquired the necessary academic preparation for attendance
at a university.
In the fall of 1809 he matriculated as a student of
medicine at the University of Göttingen and mainly attended
lectures on the natural sciences. As early as his second
semester, however, he transferred to the humanities,
concentrating first on the study of Plato and Immanuel Kant.
From 1811 to 1813 he attended the University of Berlin
(where he heard such philosophers as J.G. Fichte and
Friedrich Schleiermacher, with little appreciation); and in
Rudolstadt, during the summer of 1813, he finished his
dissertation, which earned him the doctor of philosophy
degree from the University of Jena.
Active maturity.
The following winter (1813–14) he spent in Weimar, in
intimate association with Goethe, with whom he discussed
various philosophical topics. In that same winter the
Orientalist Friedrich Majer, a disciple of Johann Gottfried
Herder, introduced him to the teachings of Indian
antiquity—the philosophy of Vedānta and the mysticism of the
Vedas (Hindu scriptures). Later, Schopenhauer considered
that the Upaniṣads (philosophic Vedas), together with Plato
and Kant, constituted the foundation on which he erected his
own philosophical system.
In May 1814 he left his beloved Weimar after a quarrel
with his mother over her frivolous way of life, of which he
disapproved. He then lived in Dresden until 1818,
associating occasionally with a group of writers for the
Dresdener Abendzeitung (“Dresden Evening Newspaper”).
Schopenhauer finished his trea tise Über das Sehn und die
Farben (1816; “On Vision and Colours”), supporting Goethe
against Isaac Newton.
His next three years were dedicated exclusively to the
preparation and composition of his main work, Die Welt als
Wille und Vorstellung (1819; The World as Will and Idea).
The fundamental idea of this work—which is condensed into a
short formula in the title itself—is developed in four books
composed of two comprehensive series of reflections that
include successively the theory of knowledge and the
philosophy of nature, aesthetics, and ethics.
The first book begins with Kant. The world is my
representation, says Schopenhauer. It is only comprehensible
with the aid of the constructs of man’s intellect—space,
time, and causality. But these constructs show the world
only as appearance, as a multiplicity of things next to and
following one another—not as the thing in itself, which Kant
considered to be unknowable. The second book advances to a
consideration of the essences of the concepts presented. Of
all the things in the world, only one is presented to a
person in two ways: he knows himself externally as body or
as appearance, and he knows himself internally as part of
the primary essence of all things, as will. The will is the
thing in itself; it is unitary, unfathomable, unchangeable,
beyond space and time, without causes and purposes. In the
world of appearances, it is reflected in an ascending series
of realizations. From the blind impulses in the forces of
inorganic nature, through organic nature (plants and
animals) to the rationally guided actions of men, an
enormous chain of restless desires, agitations, and drives
stretch forth—a continual struggle of the higher forms
against the lower, an eternally aimless and insatiable
striving, inseparably united with misery and misfortune. At
the end, however, stands death, the great reproof that the
will-to-live receives, posing the question to each single
person: Have you had enough?
Whereas the first two books present the will in an
affirmative mode, the last two, dealing with aesthetics and
ethics, surpass them by pointing to the negation of the will
as a possible liberation. Evoking as their leading figures
the genius and the saint, who illustrate this negation,
these books present the “pessimistic” world view that values
nonbeing more highly than being. The arts summon man to a
will-less way of viewing things, in which the play of the
passions ceases. To the succession of levels achieved by the
realizations of the will corresponds a gradation of levels
in the arts, from the lowest—the art of building
(architecture)—through the art of poetry to the highest of
arts—music. But the arts liberate a person only momentarily
from the service of the will. A genuine liberation results
only from breaking through the bounds of individuality
imposed by the ego. Whoever feels acts of compassion,
selflessness, and human kindness and feels the suffering of
other beings as his own is on the way to the abnegation of
the will to life, achieved by the saints of all peoples and
times in asceticism. Schopenhauer’s anthropology and
sociology do not, in the manner of Hegel, commence with the
state or with the community; they focus upon man—patient,
suffering man who toils by himself—and show him certain
possibilities of standing his ground and of living together
with others.
The book marked the summit of Schopenhauer’s thought. In
the many years thereafter, no further development of his
philosophy occurred, no inner struggles or changes, no
critical reorganization of basic thoughts. From then onward,
his work consisted merely of more detailed exposition,
clarification, and affirmation.
In March 1820, after a lengthy first tour of Italy and a
triumphant dispute with Hegel, he qualified to lecture at
the University of Berlin. Though he remained a member of the
university for 24 semesters, only his first lecture was
actually held; for he had scheduled (and continued to
schedule) his lectures at the same hour when Hegel lectured
to a large and ever-growing audience. Clearly, he could not
successfully challenge a persistently advancing philosophy.
Even his book received scant attention. For a second time
Schopenhauer went on a year-long trip to Italy, and this was
followed by a year of illness in Munich. In May 1825 he made
one last attempt in Berlin, but in vain. He now occupied
himself with secondary works, primarily translations.
Scholarly retirement in Frankfurt.
During his remaining 28 years, he lived in Frankfurt, which
he felt to be free from the threat of cholera, and left the
city only for brief interludes. He had finally renounced his
career as a university professor and lived henceforth as a
recluse, totally absorbed in his studies (especially in the
natural sciences) and his writings. His life now took on the
shape that posterity first came to know: the measured
uniformity of the days; the strict, ascetic lifestyle
modeled after Kant; the old-fashioned attire; the tendency
to gesticulative soliloquy.
His leisure, though, was not idle. In 1836, after 19
years of “silent indignation,” he published his short
treatise Über den Willen in der Natur (On the Will in
Nature), which skillfully employed the queries and findings
of the rapidly expanding natural sciences in support of his
theory of the will. The preface for the first time openly
expressed his devastating verdict on the “charlatan” Hegel
and his clique. He also published essays.
The second edition of The World as Will and Idea (1844)
included an additional volume but failed to break what he
called “the resistance of a dull world.” The little weight
that Schopenhauer’s name carried became evident when three
publishers rejected his latest work. Finally, a rather
obscure Berlin bookseller accepted the manuscript without
remuneration. In this book, which brought the beginning of
worldwide recognition, Schopenhauer turned to significant
topics hitherto not treated individually within the
framework of his writings: the work of six years yielded the
essays and comments compiled in two volumes under the title
Parerga und Paralipomena (1851). The Parerga (“Minor Works”)
include fragments concerning the history of philosophy; the
famous treatise “Über die Universitäts-Philosophie”; the
enigmatically profound “Transzendente Spekulation über die
anscheinende Absichtlichkeit im Schicksale des Einzelnen”
(“Transcendent Speculation on the Apparent Premeditation in
Personal Fate”); the “Versuch über das Geistersehn und was
damit zusammenhängt” (“Essay on Ghost-seeing and Its Related
Aspects”)—the first investigation, classification, and
critical reflection concerning parapsychology; and the
“Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit” (“Aphorisms on Practical
Wisdom”), a serene and brilliant account garnered from his
long life. The Paralipomena (“Remnants”), or as Schopenhauer
called them “separate, yet systematically ordered thoughts
on various subjects,” included essays on writing and style,
on women, on education, on noise and sound, and on numerous
other topics.
During the last years of his life, he added the finishing
touches to most of his works. Even a third edition of The
World as Will and Idea, containing an exultant preface,
appeared in 1859 and, in 1860, a second edition of his
Ethics. Soon after Schopenhauer’s sudden and painless death,
Julius Frauenstädt published new and enlarged editions, with
many handwritten additions, of the Parerga and Paralipomena
(1862), On the Fourfold Root (1864), the essay On the Will
in Nature (1867), the treatise on colours (1870), and
finally even a fourth edition of his main work (1873). Later
that same year Frauenstädt published the first complete
edition of his works in six volumes.
Influence.
During this time, the actual impact and influence of
Schopenhauer began to spread. By turning away from spirit
and reason to the powers of intuition, creativity, and the
irrational, his thought has affected—partly via
Nietzsche—the ideas and methods of vitalism, of life
philosophy, of existential philosophy, and of anthropology.
Through his disciple Julius Bahnsen and through Eduard von
Hartmann’s philosophy of the unconscious, the connection to
modern psychology and to Sigmund Freud and his school can be
established. The philosophy of history of Jacob Burckhardt,
a Swiss cultural historian, also proceeds from Schopenhauer.
Within the German cultural realm, Schopenhauer’s influence
on music and literature brings to mind such diverse names as
Richard Wagner, Hans Pfitzner, Wilhelm Busch, Gerhart
Hauptmann, Frank Wedekind, and Thomas Mann. Since 1911 the
Schopenhauer Society in Frankfurt am Main has been dedicated
to the study, exposition, and dissemination of
Schopenhauer’s philosophy.
Arthur Hübscher
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Friedrich Nietzsche
German philosopher
born Oct. 15, 1844, Röcken, Saxony, Prussia [now in
Germany]
died Aug. 25, 1900, Weimar, Thuringian States
Main
German classical scholar, philosopher, and critic of
culture, who became one of the most influential of all
modern thinkers. His attempts to unmask the motives that
underlie traditional Western religion, morality, and
philosophy deeply affected generations of theologians,
philosophers, psychologists, poets, novelists, and
playwrights. He thought through the consequences of the
triumph of the Enlightenment’s secularism, expressed in his
observation that “God is dead,” in a way that determined the
agenda for many of Europe’s most celebrated intellectuals
after his death. Although he was an ardent foe of
nationalism, anti-Semitism, and power politics, his name was
later invoked by Fascists to advance the very things he
loathed.
The early years
Nietzsche’s home was a stronghold of Lutheran piety. His
paternal grandfather had published books defending
Protestantism and had achieved the ecclesiastical position
of superintendent; his maternal grandfather was a country
parson; his father, Carl Ludwig Nietzsche, was appointed
pastor at Röcken by order of King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of
Prussia, after whom Friedrich Nietzsche was named. His
father died in 1849, before Nietzsche’s fifth birthday, and
he spent most of his early life in a household consisting of
five women: his mother Franziska, his younger sister
Elisabeth, his maternal grandmother, and two maiden aunts.
In 1850 the family moved to Naumburg on the Saale River,
where Nietzsche attended a private preparatory school, the
Domgymnasium. In 1858 he earned a scholarship to
Schulpforta, Germany’s leading Protestant boarding school.
He excelled academically at Pforta, received an outstanding
classical education there, and, having graduated in 1864,
went to the University of Bonn to study theology and
classical philology. Despite efforts to take part in the
university’s social life, the two semesters at Bonn were a
failure, owing chiefly to acrimonious quarrels between his
two leading classics professors, Otto Jahn and Friedrich
Wilhelm Ritschl. Nietzsche sought refuge in music, writing a
number of compositions strongly influenced by Robert
Schumann, the German Romantic composer. In 1865 he
transferred to the University of Leipzig, joining Ritschl,
who had accepted an appointment there.
Nietzsche prospered under Ritschl’s tutelage in Leipzig.
He became the only student ever to publish in Ritschl’s
journal, Rheinisches Museum (“Rhenish Museum”). He began
military service in October 1867 in the cavalry company of
an artillery regiment, sustained a serious chest injury
while mounting a horse in March 1868, and resumed his
studies in Leipzig in October 1868 while on extended sick
leave from the military. During the years in Leipzig,
Nietzsche discovered Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy, met
the great operatic composer Richard Wagner, and began his
lifelong friendship with fellow classicist Erwin Rohde
(author of Psyche).
The Basel years (1869–79)
When a professorship in classical philology fell vacant in
1869 in Basel, Switz., Ritschl recommended Nietzsche with
unparalleled praise. He had completed neither his doctoral
thesis nor the additional dissertation required for a German
degree; yet Ritschl assured the University of Basel that he
had never seen anyone like Nietzsche in 40 years of teaching
and that his talents were limitless. In 1869 the University
of Leipzig conferred the doctorate without examination or
dissertation on the strength of his published writings, and
the University of Basel appointed him extraordinary
professor of classical philology. The following year
Nietzsche became a Swiss citizen and was promoted to
ordinary professor.
Nietzsche obtained a leave to serve as a volunteer
medical orderly in August 1870, after the outbreak of the
Franco-Prussian War. Within a month, while accompanying a
transport of wounded, he contracted dysentery and
diphtheria, which ruined his health permanently. He returned
to Basel in October to resume a heavy teaching load, but as
early as 1871 ill health prompted him to seek relief from
the stultifying chores of a professor of classical
philology; he applied for the vacant chair of philosophy and
proposed Rohde as his successor, all to no avail.
During these early Basel years Nietzsche’s ambivalent
friendship with Wagner ripened, and he seized every
opportunity to visit Richard and his wife, Cosima. Wagner
appreciated Nietzsche as a brilliant professorial apostle,
but Wagner’s increasing exploitation of Christian motifs, as
in Parsifal, coupled with his chauvinism and anti-Semitism
proved to be more than Nietzsche could bear. By 1878 the
breach between the two men had become final.
Nietzsche’s first book, Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem
Geiste der Musik (1872; The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit
of Music), marked his emancipation from the trappings of
classical scholarship. A speculative rather than exegetical
work, it argued that Greek tragedy arose out of the fusion
of what he termed Apollonian and Dionysian elements—the
former representing measure, restraint, harmony, and the
latter representing unbridled passion—and that Socratic
rationalism and optimism spelled the death of Greek tragedy.
The final 10 sections of the book are a rhapsody about the
rebirth of tragedy from the spirit of Wagner’s music.
Greeted by stony silence at first, it became the object of
heated controversy on the part of those who mistook it for a
conventional work of classical scholarship. It was
undoubtedly “a work of profound imaginative insight, which
left the scholarship of a generation toiling in the rear,”
as the British classicist F.M. Cornford wrote in 1912. It
remains a classic in the history of aesthetics to this day.
By October 1876 Nietzsche requested and received a year’s
sick leave. In 1877 he set up house with his sister and
Peter Gast, and in 1878 his aphoristic Menschliches,
Allzumenschliches (Human, All-Too-Human) appeared. Because
his health deteriorated steadily he resigned his
professorial chair on June 14, 1879, and was granted a
pension of 3,000 Swiss francs per year for six years.
Decade of isolation and creativity (1879–89)
Apart from the books Nietzsche wrote between 1879 and 1889,
it is doubtful that his life held any intrinsic interest.
Seriously ill, half-blind, in virtually unrelenting pain, he
lived in boarding houses in Switzerland, the French Riviera,
and Italy, with only limited human contact. His friendship
with Paul Rée was undermined by 1882 by their mutual if
unacknowledged affection for Lou Salomé (author, later the
wife of the Orientalist F.C. Andreas, mistress of the poet
Rainer Maria Rilke, and confidant of Sigmund Freud) as well
as by Elisabeth Nietzsche’s jealous meddling.
Nietzsche’s acknowledged literary and philosophical
masterpiece in biblical narrative form, Also sprach
Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra), was published between
1883 and 1885 in four parts, the last part a private
printing at his own expense. As with most of his works it
received little attention. His attempts to set forth his
philosophy in more direct prose, in the publications in 1886
of Jenseits von Gut und Böse (Beyond Good and Evil) and in
1887 of Zur Genealogie der Moral (On the Genealogy of
Morals), also failed to win a proper audience.
Nietzsche’s final lucid year, 1888, was a period of
supreme productivity. He wrote and published Der Fall Wagner
(The Case of Wagner) and wrote a synopsis of his philosophy,
Die Götzen-Dämmerung (Twilight of the Idols), Der Antichrist
(The Antichrist), Nietzsche contra Wagner (Eng. trans.,
Nietzsche contra Wagner), and Ecce Homo (Eng. trans., Ecce
Homo), a reflection on his own works and significance.
Twilight of the Idols appeared in 1889, Der Antichrist and
Nietzsche contra Wagner were not published until 1895, the
former mistakenly as book one of The Will to Power, and Ecce
Homo was withheld from publication until 1908, 20 years
after its composition.
Collapse and misuse
Nietzsche collapsed in the streets of Turin, Italy, in
January 1889, having lost control of his mental faculties
completely. Bizarre but meaningful notes he sent immediately
after his collapse brought Franz Overbeck to Italy to return
Nietzsche to Basel. Nietzsche spent the last 11 years of his
life in total mental darkness, first in a Basel asylum, then
in Naumburg under his mother’s care and, after her death in
1897, in Weimar in his sister’s care. He died in 1900.
Informed opinion favours a diagnosis of atypical general
paralysis caused by dormant tertiary syphilis.
The association of Nietzsche’s name with Adolf Hitler and
Fascism owes much to the use made of his works by his sister
Elisabeth. She had married a leading chauvinist and
anti-Semite, Bernhard Förster, and after his suicide in 1889
she worked diligently to refashion Nietzsche in Förster’s
image. Elisabeth maintained ruthless control over
Nietzsche’s literary estate and, dominated by greed,
produced collections of his “works” consisting of discarded
notes, such as Der Wille zur Macht (1901; The Will to
Power). She also committed petty forgeries. Generations of
commentators were misled. Equally important, her enthusiasm
for Hitler linked Nietzsche’s name with that of the dictator
in the public mind.
Nietzsche’s mature philosophy
Nietzsche’s writings fall into three well-defined periods.
The early works, The Birth of Tragedy and the four
Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen (1873; Untimely Meditations),
are dominated by a Romantic perspective influenced by
Schopenhauer and Wagner. The middle period, from Human,
All-Too-Human up to The Gay Science, reflects the tradition
of French aphorists. It extols reason and science,
experiments with literary genres, and expresses Nietzsche’s
emancipation from his earlier Romanticism and from
Schopenhauer and Wagner. Nietzsche’s mature philosophy
emerged after The Gay Science.
In his mature writings Nietzsche was preoccupied by the
origin and function of values in human life. If, as he
believed, life neither possesses nor lacks intrinsic value
and yet is always being evaluated, then such evaluations can
usefully be read as symptoms of the condition of the
evaluator. He was especially interested, therefore, in a
probing analysis and evaluation of the fundamental cultural
values of Western philosophy, religion, and morality, which
he characterized as expressions of the ascetic ideal.
The ascetic ideal is born when suffering becomes endowed
with ultimate significance. According to Nietzsche the
Judeo-Christian tradition, for example, made suffering
tolerable by interpreting it as God’s intention and as an
occasion for atonement. Christianity, accordingly, owed its
triumph to the flattering doctrine of personal immortality,
that is, to the conceit that each individual’s life and
death have cosmic significance. Similarly, traditional
philosophy expressed the ascetic ideal when it privileged
soul over body, mind over senses, duty over desire, reality
over appearance, the timeless over the temporal. While
Christianity promised salvation for the sinner who repents,
philosophy held out hope for salvation, albeit secular, for
its sages. Common to traditional religion and philosophy was
the unstated but powerful motivating assumption that
existence requires explanation, justification, or expiation.
Both denigrated experience in favour of some other, “true”
world. Both may be read as symptoms of a declining life, or
life in distress.
Nietzsche’s critique of traditional morality centred on
the typology of “master” and “slave” morality. By examining
the etymology of the German words gut (“good”), schlecht
(“bad”), and böse (“evil”), Nietzsche maintained that the
distinction between good and bad was originally descriptive,
that is, a nonmoral reference to those who were privileged,
the masters, as opposed to those who were base, the slaves.
The good/evil contrast arose when slaves avenged themselves
by converting attributes of mastery into vices. If the
favoured, the “good,” were powerful, it was said that the
meek would inherit the earth. Pride became sin. Charity,
humility, and obedience replaced competition, pride, and
autonomy. Crucial to the triumph of slave morality was its
claim to being the only true morality. This insistence on
absoluteness is as essential to philosophical as to
religious ethics. Although Nietzsche gave a historical
genealogy of master and slave morality, he maintained that
it was an ahistorical typology of traits present in
everyone.
“Nihilism” was the term Nietzsche used to describe the
devaluation of the highest values posited by the ascetic
ideal. He thought of the age in which he lived as one of
passive nihilism, that is, as an age that was not yet aware
that religious and philosophical absolutes had dissolved in
the emergence of 19th-century Positivism. With the collapse
of metaphysical and theological foundations and sanctions
for traditional morality only a pervasive sense of
purposelessness and meaninglessness would remain. And the
triumph of meaninglessness is the triumph of nihilism: “God
is dead.” Nietzsche thought, however, that most men could
not accept the eclipse of the ascetic ideal and the
intrinsic meaninglessness of existence but would seek
supplanting absolutes to invest life with meaning. He
thought the emerging nationalism of his day represented one
such ominous surrogate god, in which the nation-state would
be invested with transcendent value and purpose. And just as
absoluteness of doctrine had found expression in philosophy
and religion, absoluteness would become attached to the
nation-state with missionary fervour. The slaughter of
rivals and the conquest of the earth would proceed under
banners of universal brotherhood, democracy, and socialism.
Nietzsche’s prescience here was particularly poignant, and
the use later made of him especially repellent. For example,
two books were standard issue for the rucksacks of German
soldiers during World War I, Thus Spoke Zarathustra and The
Gospel According to St. John. It is difficult to say which
author was more compromised by this gesture.
Nietzsche often thought of his writings as struggles with
nihilism, and apart from his critiques of religion,
philosophy, and morality he developed original theses that
have commanded attention, especially perspectivism, will to
power, eternal recurrence, and the superman.
Perspectivism is a concept which holds that knowledge is
always perspectival, that there are no immaculate
perceptions, and that knowledge from no point of view is as
incoherent a notion as seeing from no particular vantage
point. Perspectivism also denies the possibility of an
all-inclusive perspective, which could contain all others
and, hence, make reality available as it is in itself. The
concept of such an all-inclusive perspective is as
incoherent as the concept of seeing an object from every
possible vantage point simultaneously.
Nietzsche’s perspectivism has sometimes been mistakenly
identified with relativism and skepticism. Nonetheless, it
raises the question of how one is to understand Nietzsche’s
own theses, for example, that the dominant values of the
common heritage have been underwritten by an ascetic ideal.
Is this thesis true absolutely or only from a certain
perspective? It may also be asked whether perspectivism can
be asserted consistently without self-contradiction, since
perspectivism must presumably be true in an absolute, that
is a nonperspectival sense. Concerns such as these have
generated much fruitful Nietzsche commentary as well as
useful work in the theory of knowledge.
Nietzsche often identified life itself with “will to
power,” that is, with an instinct for growth and durability.
This concept provides yet another way of interpreting the
ascetic ideal, since it is Nietzsche’s contention “that all
the supreme values of mankind lack this will—that values
which are symptomatic of decline, nihilistic values, are
lording it under the holiest names.” Thus, traditional
philosophy, religion, and morality have been so many masks a
deficient will to power wears. The sustaining values of
Western civilization have been sublimated products of
decadence in that the ascetic ideal endorses existence as
pain and suffering. Some commentators have attempted to
extend Nietzsche’s concept of the will to power from human
life to the organic and inorganic realms, ascribing a
metaphysics of will to power to him. Such interpretations,
however, cannot be sustained by reference to his published
works.
The doctrine of eternal recurrence, the basic conception
of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, asks the question “How well
disposed would a person have to become to himself and to
life to crave nothing more fervently than the infinite
repetition, without alteration, of each and every moment?”
Presumably most men would, or should, find such a thought
shattering because they should always find it possible to
prefer the eternal repetition of their lives in an edited
version rather than to crave nothing more fervently than the
eternal recurrence of each of its horrors. The person who
could accept recurrence without self-deception or evasion
would be a superhuman being (Übermensch), a superman whose
distance from the ordinary man is greater than the distance
between man and ape, Nietzsche says. Commentators still
disagree whether there are specific character traits that
define the person who embraces eternal recurrence.
Nietzsche’s influence
Nietzsche once wrote that some men are born posthumously,
and this is certainly true in his case. The history of
20th-century philosophy, theology, and psychology are
unintelligible without him. The German philosophers Max
Scheler, Karl Jaspers, and Martin Heidegger laboured in his
debt, for example, as did the French philosophers Albert
Camus, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. Existentialism
and deconstructionism, a movement in philosophy and literary
criticism, owe much to him. The theologians Paul Tillich and
Lev Shestov acknowledged their debt as did the “God is dead”
theologian Thomas J.J. Altizer; Martin Buber, Judaism’s
greatest 20th-century thinker, counted Nietzsche among the
three most important influences in his life and translated
the first part of Zarathustra into Polish. The psychologists
Alfred Adler and Carl Jung were deeply influenced, as was
Sigmund Freud, who said of Nietzsche that he had a more
penetrating understanding of himself than any man who ever
lived or was ever likely to live. Novelists like Thomas
Mann, Hermann Hesse, André Malraux, André Gide, and John
Gardner were inspired by him and wrote about him, as did the
poets and playwrights George Bernard Shaw, Rainer Maria
Rilke, Stefan George, and William Butler Yeats, among
others. Nietzsche is certainly one of the most influential
philosophers who ever lived; and this is due not only to his
originality but also to the fact that he was the German
language’s most brilliant prose writer.
Bernd Magnus
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