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Adventures in Philosophy |
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Select: Leo Tolstoy - Shadworth Hollway Hodgson - Wilhelm Dilthey - Eugen Dühring Samuel Butler - Eduard von Hartmann - Emile Boutroux - Rudolf Eucken - Vilfredo Pareto Thomas Garrigue Masaryk - Theodor Lipps - C. Lloyd Morgan - Alexius von Meinong Henri Poincaré - Paul Natorp - Julien Benda - Richard Wahle |
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Diagrams The Development of Modern and Recent Philosophical Thought Major Influences on American Social Thought Unclassified Recent Philosophers In Resurrection (1899), the third of Tolstoy's (picture) great novels, the author summarized the experiences of his life by asserting his conviction that in every human being a spiritual and altruistic principle is working against an animal and egoistic one "which is ready to sacrifice the well-being of the whole world to one's own comfort." The defeat of the animal in man by the spirit, which was identified by Tolstoy with conscience, is the underlying principle in all Tolstoy's works, as well as the aim of his life. The antagonism between spirit and animal is the standard of valuing which Tolstoy applied to modern humanity and civilization, and he has not concealed that he himself could not stand its test. Tolstoy was a rigorous moralist but he far from simplified the things his moral judgment condemned. His art penetrated into the inner secrets of a society and of persons despised by him. He knew what was important to an officer of the imperial bodyguard, what troubled the nerves of a lady of fashion, what lured the ambition of an official, and he showed the vanity of their hopes and apprehensions with such a power that the outstanding critics of all civilized nations agree with William Dean Howells who said that "Tolstoy's imagination leaves all tricks of fancy, all effects of art immeasurably behind." Yet it was Tolstoy's moralism that turned against his own art. Though in his youth he had been very fond of the power of literary imagination, in his later years he rejected every kind of power, not the least of which being the power of art. He had conquered the world with his novel War and Peace (1869), and he seemed to have secured this conquest by his novel Anna Karenina (1877). But in My Confession (1882) he declared: "When I had ended Anna Karenina my despair reached such a height that I could do nothing but think of the horrible condition in which I found myself. I saw only one thing, Death. Everything else was a lie." Tolstoy saw only one way out of his crisis, namely the strict obeyance to the Sermon on the Mount which, according to him, involves social repentance, religious purification, radical opposition to the interests and institutions of the world, rejection of property, power, war, oath and political statutes. He fought the Church because, while ruling the world, it was dominated by the world. He revered Christ but did not look back to the events narrated in the New Testament. He was looking forward, expecting the coming kingdom of God and the end of the rule of earthly power. Every philosophy was to Tolstoy an evil in so far as it tried to form a system, an artificial order of thoughts. But he was interested in the efforts of some philosophers -- especially Descartes, Leibnitz, Rousseau, Kant, Schopenhauer and African Spir -- to deal with the power of evil or to know God, although he protested that no philosopher had given more than a vague idea of God. Tolstoy himself conceived of God not as a person in the proper sense of the word but rather through man's relations to God as comparable with personal loyalty, and the feeling of God as the source of love and moral law. He regarded the uneducated, poor, enslaved Russian peasant as the most reliable guide to the way to God and as the true representative of humanity. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
Shadworth Hollway Hodgson (1832-1912) S.H. Hodgson neither held any post as a university teacher nor did he ever seek one. He lived a retired, happy life, devoted to philosophy. He regarded the poets Wordsworth and Coleridge as his principal teachers, especially the latter from whom he adopted the idea of intimate union of intellectual and emotion elements in human nature, although not his identification of religious experience with theological dogma. In his principal work The Metaphysic of Experience (1898) Hodgson, by his criticism of Kant, prepared the way for New Realism. His method was to analyze the content of consciousness without any assumption concerning its origin or nature. Contrary to Kant, he did not take the existence of the ego for granted. While Kant proceeded from consciousness as a synthetic agency, Hodgson held that this agency is also part of experience and must be analyzed. He objected to empiricism in its postulating of things and persons. Against both Kant and empiricism, Hodgson insisted that neither subject nor object are warranted as initial assumptions of philosophy. From this depth of experience, Hodgson ascended to the metaphysical heights of speculation on God and the universe, but maintained that thinking about invisible reality is not a matter of knowledge but rather the consequence of moral drives. In The Radical Academy
Wilhelm Dilthey (picture) was born two years after Hegel's death. He devoted much of his energy to the task of investigating the structure of the human mind and in writing its history. This had been Hegel's purpose, but Dilthey was strongly opposed to the Hegelian system, as well as to any metaphysical inquiry into the realm of the supernatural. Hegel regarded the human mind as one of the manifestations of the cosmic spirit, and when he wrote the history of the human mind, he believed that he had recognized and defined the essence of mind. Dilthey, on the other hand, relied upon empiricism: historical facts, biographies, the extant works of great personalities, documents on the currents of cultural life, religious traditions, and social institutions supplied the answer to the question of what man really is. Dilthey, the historian of the human mind, stated that philosophical definitions were the historical documents which informed him about the mental situation of an epoch; poems, laws, and customs of that epoch did the same. He saw history as a means of comprehending man as a thinking, feeling, willing, creating being who lived in the historical stream of life. His total activities were designed to elaborate "a critique of historical reason," as necessary for the completion of Kant's three critiques. It was to be founded upon an "understanding and analyzing psychology" whose starting point was the analysis of consciousness, and whose development was necessary for understanding the way of civilization and its functional relation to the totality of spontaneous impulses, which he considered to be the stream of life. Dilthey left great and important fragments of his projected work. His academic career was extremely brilliant, but his real influence was felt only after he died. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
"Heroic materialism" characterized Eugen Dühring's (picture) philosophy. The only reality he acknowledged was the world of the natural sciences. He regarded thinking and feeling as "states of irritation of matter." He substituted ethical education for religion in the "direction of the mind." He asserted that the universe was spatially finite, and that the beginning of the formation of the world was fixable in time. He attacked capitalism, Marxism, organized Christianity and Judaism, and the faculties of the German universities. Had it not been for his blindness, he probably would have played a much more important role in German political life. In The Radical Academy
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Samuel Butler's (picture) novel Erewhon, published in 1872, has been compared with Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Voltaire's Candide. Together with The Way of All Flesh, written 1872-1885 and published posthumously in 1903, Butler's position as a master of the English novel was firmly established. It has been a matter of considerable speculation among biographers as to what caused Butler to delay publication of his second novel and forego success as a novelist. He was a man of wide interests and abilities: he painted; composed; critically examined the evidence for the Resurrection of Christ; criticized Darwin by maintaining that the principle of natural selection deprived life of its purposiveness and "banished mind from the universe"; outlined his own theory of evolution in Life and Habit (1877) and Evolution Old and New (1879); developed his ideas in Unconscious Memory (1880); and advanced a new hypothesis concerning the authorship of the Odyssey. Butler liked to call himself the "enfant terrible" of literature and science. He was fond of destroying the idols of his contemporaries and treating ironically those convictions generally classed as fundamentally important to the substance of civilization. He was often disturbed by his own destructive tendencies and suffered because his dissent differed from the common creed. Butler, though a diffident personality and daring humorist was incapable of liberating his emotions from the fear and hatred of his father, even after the latter's death. In his human relationships, he was alternately an attractive and repugnant personality. He disliked the past, despised the present, feared the future, and most of all, was terrified by the technological developments in engineering and machinery that he considered fatal to humanity. His acute penetration of the shortcomings of his time made him a great satirist, but he owed his deepest insights to his constant dismay at the independence of his own thoughts. In The Radical Academy
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Eduard von Hartmann (1842-1906) An officer in the Prussian army, Eduard von Hartmann (picture) became disabled, suffering from a nervous disease that forced him to lie on his back. After quitting military service, he studied philosophy, and soon became famous because of the great success of his Philosophie des Unbewussten (Philosophy of the Unconscious, 1869). Later, he published many other books, none of which attracted as much attention as his first work. By no means was Hartmann a precursor of modern investigation of unconscious or subconscious activities. He is rather to be regarded as one of the last constructors of systems, each of whom was immediately inspired by Schelling. Avowedly Hartmann tried to form a synthesis of Leibniz, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer and the results of modern natural sciences. What he called the Unconscious combines the qualities of Hegel's absolute spirit and Schopenhauer's blind will. It is proclaimed as the "thing in itself," the origin of the cosmic order and the mental life of the human individual. Hartmann called his system "transcendental realism" and claimed to have constructed the reliable bridge to metaphysics and, at the same time "the only possible bridge to natural science." In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
It is a rare occurrence for European scholars to hail a doctoral thesis in philosophy as a turning point in the history of thought. However, this was the case with Emile Boutroux's (picture) thesis published in 1874, De la Contingence des Lois de la Nature (On the Contingency of the Laws of Nature). Subsequently he became one of the most influential teachers of philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris; Henri Bergson was one of his many famous pupils. He demonstrated that the concept of natural law in all branches of science (from mathematics to biology) is a result rather than a principle, for it does not prove the universal reign of necessity. According to Boutroux, generally the relatively invariable relationship between causes and effects comes about because of an inadequate grasp of such true and profound realities as life and liberty. He encountered the objection that contingency connotes hazard and disorder by stating that necessity implies immutability and death. Many of Boutroux's arguments on the problem of liberty and the extent to which necessity can be admitted have become classic. He always endeavored to strengthen the conviction that man is able to act upon nature. His adherence to the ideas advanced in his first book helped to pave the way for new progress in science. When asked what the good life involved, he replied "a thought conceived in early years and developed in maturity." His opinion was internationally revered as the expression of "Europe's conscience." In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
The core of Rudolf Eucken's (picture) philosophy was that the concept of life manifests its mere existence through sensual experience, activity, and in a world of relationships comprehensible to the spirit. He explained the history of the world as a blending of reason and blind necessity. Throughout the course of history, spiritual life was evolved as a new level of reality. It was not the human individual, nor the sum of individuals, who created the new order of things and relationships, but the motion of the universe. Eucken thought that his concept corresponded more to the nature of man than that of Fichte, Schelling, or Hegel who overestimated the range of the human mind. Eucken accused positivism, materialism, and naturalism of ignoring the faculties of the mind. His colleagues, professors of philosophy at the German universities, were surprised when he was awarded the Nobel Prize (1908); they felt that the selection of candidates for the prize should be made more carefully. Eucken, however, maintained that German philosophers were indifferent to his writings; that he was popular in England, America, and China before he even began to attract attention in Germany. During World War I, Eucken professed aggressive German nationalism, and this new attitude increased the number of his German adherents. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
At the end of his life, Vilfredo Pareto (picture), a professor of political economy at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, was honored by Mussolini who had come to power. However, he remained indifferent to all Fascist eulogizers and even hinted that the Fascists misunderstood his thoughts. For a time, Pareto's ideas reached a position of power and prestige in democratic America too. Misunderstanding of Pareto's doctrines is not a little due to the fact, deplored by his most faithful admirers, that he had the habit of mentioning his most important points just casually, or even only in notes. Furthermore, he presented not a close and complete system but, rather a series of studies. What attracted Fascism to Pareto's ideas was not his doctrine itself, but some passages -- namely his great admiration of Machiavelli's The Prince, his small respect for ethics, and his contempt of metaphysics and religion. Pareto was born in Paris. He was the son of an Italian nobleman, who was a political refugee, and a French mother. When, in 1858, an amnesty allowed return to Italy, Pareto prepared himself for an engineering career and became manager of the railroad in the valley of the Arno River. In 1876, he began to write on economics and established "Pareto's Law" which tries to express the relation between the amount of income and the number of its recipients. His Manual of Political Economics (1906) was much disputed. Even more controversies were provoked by his Sociologia Generale (1916) which was translated into English under the title The Mind and Society in 1935. Pareto claimed to have raised sociology to a logico-experimental science. He stressed and explained the nonlogical factors in human actions by showing the components of social life which he divided into two principal groups -- namely, the "residues" or fundamental factors and the derivations which often are erroneous and create myths. By "residues," of which he never gave a sufficient definition, Pareto meant the unexpressed postulates, the things one considers so obvious that they need no explanation, or beliefs which are not formed by logical processes. Social evolution is determined by economic interests, psychic and ideological factors and the "circulation of the elite." Pareto was opposed to "atomistic individualism," and he declared collectivity to be "if not a person, at least a unity," and emphasized the importance of social classes. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
Thomas Garrigue Masaryk (1850-1937) The son of a blacksmith, Thomas Garrigue Masaryk (picture) became the father of a democratic people. After achieving fame as a scholar, a political economist and a historian, he became a legendary figure, the founder of a modern state. In all situations of his life, as a teacher, a member of parliament, an exile and a ruler, he proved to be a critical and constructive thinker. "Truth conquers" was Masaryk's motto. He fought for truth when he discovered the forgery of an allegedly old document, without any regard to the fact that his discovery hurt Czech national pride. He fought for truth while denouncing the manner in which the "ritual murder" trial at Polna had been conducted in 1899, and he exposed the forgeries fabricated by members of the Austro-Hungarian Legation in Belgrade in 1910. He risked his popularity, his security and his life in order to prove the tenets of his philosophy, according to which Man is bound to collaborate with God, to follow the command of his conscience and to act as an individual responsible to humanity. Equally opposed to despotism and anarchy, Masaryk was a champion of democracy, convinced that the philosophy of history is identical with the philosophy of democracy. Dissatisfied with intellectualism and mysticism, Masaryk, as a thinker, endeavored to establish an equilibrium between emotional and intellectual tendencies. As a Czech, he professed solidarity with all Slavic nations, but he was a severe critic of Russian thought. His fundamental ideas were rooted in the philosophy of enlightenment and positivism, but he was very cautious concerning Locke and Comte, notwithstanding his personal sympathies with these thinkers. He regarded the leading trends of European history as the development of the ideas of the French Revolution of 1789 but, critical as he remained of religious, social and political traditions, he always tried to awake the sense of responsibility to the maintenance and promotion of the common good and to establish new norms of human conduct in accordance with the new forms of human life, to vivify religious feelings and to justify a sober criticism, to harmonize reason and living faith. Among Masaryk's philosophical works are The Scientific and Philosophical Crisis of Contemporary Marxism (1898), The Ideals of Humanity (1902) and The Spirit of Russia (1917). In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
During the decade that preceded the outbreak of the First World War, Theodor Lipps was one of the most influential professors in the German Universities. His name attracted many students from other countries. Because of his mordant sarcasm he was dreaded as a critic, but notwithstanding his fondness for irony, he was a rigorous though by no means a narrow-minded moralist. He professed political and cultural liberalism, and was not afraid of defending freedom of thought and art in public meetings, Sometimes he defied openly his government. After experimental studies on optical illusions, Lipps adopted the notion of empathy (Einfuchlung), which had been formulated by Robert Vischer, a historian of art, and made it more and more the center of his thinking. At the same time, he enlarged its meaning and possibility of application. In particular, aesthetic experience was defined by Lipps as empathy, as a psychic process by means of which he who enjoys a work of art is enabled to penetrate into its form and essence, and into the soul of the creative artist. Consequently, Lipps was opposed to all theories of art according to which the artistic work produces the illusion of a reality, or the spectator becomes aware of an illusion. From the aesthetic empathy, Lipps proceeded to its conception as the basis of the feeling and recognition of other egos. Death prevented Lipps from further elaboration of these conceptions. In his last years he adopted some notions of Husserl. On the other hand, Lipps broached various questions with Max Scheler later tried to answer, though he did so a different way. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
As a boy, C. Lloyd Morgan (picture) had an almost exclusively literary education. He was devoted to Byron, Keats, Shelley, Moore and Scott. Then, while in college, the philosophy of Spinoza, Berkeley and Hume had a strong appeal for him. He had intended to become an engineer but, as a student, was drawn by T. H. Huxley to the interpretation of nature by biological studies. His principal interest remained fixed on the borderline of life and mind, and he became more and more convinced that a synthesis of philosophy and science was possible and necessary. Such a synthesis was, in Morgan's opinion, "bound to take a risk." The risk he took was to acknowledge things, to accept realism. Things were defined by him as "clusters of events," quite in accordance with modern physics. With his principal books Animal Life and Intelligence (1891), Habit and Instinct (1896) and Emergent Evolution (1923), Morgan has inspired biologists, psychologists and philosophers both in England, his homeland, and America. His ideas have also been accepted by outstanding French thinkers. Morgan defined evolution as a constructive scheme which shall provide for a physical realism but also for "something of at least in the same genre as Platonic realism." Emergent evolution was conceived as selective synthesis at certain critical turning points in the course of evolutionary advance. Darwin's conception of evolution as a steady, gradual process was abandoned by Morgan. On a broader basis, he developed T. H. Huxley's and G. H. Lewes's criticism of Darwin's theory and that which is called the theory of mutation. In this way he inspired Henri Bergson and Samuel Alexander, among others, at least by offering them rich material of concrete facts. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
Alexius von Meinong (1853-1920) When Meinong (picture) expressed opinions about political facts, he was convinced of being just and right. As a philosopher, however, he remained conscious that to err means to be a human being. He thought that scientists could not obtain definite results, save some fortunate exceptions that prove the rule, and that one might be satisfied with exploring more favorable starting points to broach old questions. It is true that Meinong did not claim to have found definite truth But he claimed to have established a new science, namely -- the Theory of Objects, which, as he said, was bound to fill a gap which had been left by epistemology, metaphysics and psychology. His theory of objects differs from psychology because it does not envisage the psychic acts but the objects. It differs from metaphysics since it also comprises the non-real. It differs from ontology by stressing the experience of resistance to the experiencing subject on the part of the object. It was developed by its founder to a new doctrine of perception and of value and valuing. Ethics is regarded as a part of the theory of values, and ethical values comprise moral as well as nonmoral values. Meinong, who first studied history and philology, came to philosophy, as he said, by chance and as an autodidact. He was encouraged by Franz Brentano, who later rejected many of Meinong s statements. Meinong was rather surprised when he was appointed a professor by the Austrian government. He had numerous disciples, some of whom modified Meinong's theory and brought it close to phenomenology. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
The name of Poincaré is mostly associated with the person of Raymond Poincaré who was President of the Third French Republic during the First World War. Henri Poincaré (picture) was his first cousin, and outside France he was known in the scientific world only. Eight foreign universities conferred honorary doctors' degrees upon him; twenty-one foreign academies made him their honorary member, not to mention the honors he enjoyed in his native country. Poincaré himself, however, was more satisfied with the great influence he exercised on succeeding generations through his writings and lectures. Poincaré made great strides in the history of mathematics, especially by his disquisitions on differential equations and analytical functions. The development of mechanics and astronomy owes to him admirable results concerning the capillarity, the equilibrium of fluid masses and rotating liquids, and, above all, the form of the planets. He made also very important contributions to geography and geodesy. In the field of physics, Poincaré dealt with the problems of vibration and elasticity, electricity and radioactivity, electrodynamics and gravitation, and published his views on relativity some months before Albert Einstein made known his famous theory. Poincaré's philosophical inquiries concerned especially the process of hypothesis making, the relations between the logical and empirical elements of knowledge. From the statement that for any consistent and verifiable hypotheses, he proceeded to the conclusion that the choice between them is not dictated by logic or observation but by what he called convention. According to Poincaré, the value of science lies not so much in its usefulness as in its intrinsic worth, in the elevation of the soul which the true scientist feels while working. Poincaré was a fighter for human ideals. He courageously and successfully participated in the struggle for Dreyfus by destroying the arguments of the experts who were hired by the French general staff. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
Until his late years, Natorp (picture) was a faithful follower of Hermann Cohen (see the Jewish Philosophy section). It was due to the excitement of the war years, 1914-1918, that he deviated slightly from his master's tenets and became more inclined to exalt the German national character and civilization in his book Germany's Vocation in the World (1918). Natorp's interpretation of Plato's doctrine of ideas was much discussed. So was his General Psychology (1912). More successful was his Socialpaedagogik (1899) which was re-edited several times. According to Natorp, education must influence all social and economic activities as well as schools and universities in order to realize national solidarity and social peace. In The Radical Academy
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Although Julien Benda (picture) had retired to a solitary existence prior to the collapse of France, his life was particularly endangered during the German occupation of France because he was a Jew, a defender of democracy, and an adversary of German nationalism. Throughout his lifetime, he consistently opposed the main currents of French spiritual life and fought untiringly against the cult of vagueness, subjectivism, romanticism, mystic nationalism, and the blending of other arts with music. He was a successful novelist, sensitive to poetry. He maintained the superiority of science to literature; Descartes, Kant, and Darwin to Dante and Victor Hugo; and intelligence to sensibility. He was an ardent opponent of Henri Bergson, and, although he rejected the aesthetics of Paul Valery, he adopted his phrase, "Thought by its very nature is without style." Benda's works proclaim his hatred of injustice, his contempt of skepticism, and his "ideal of disinterested values," those universal ideas which are independent of historical conditions. La Trahison des Clercs (The Treason of the Intellectuals, 1927), accused the intellectuals of disloyalty to those concepts which, according to Benda, are the basis of individual rights and mandatory for everyone who actively participates in a spiritual life. Uriel's Report, written in 1926 with cruel objectivity, is a satirical picture of humanity. Exercise of a Man Buried Alive (1947) violently attacks almost all French celebrities, except Paul Claudel. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
Proceeding from extreme positivism, Wahle, once a professor of philosophy at the Universities of Czernovitz and Vienna, pronounced in his Tragicomedy of Wisdom (1925) his death sentence on philosophy. He acknowledged only "definite, agnostic, absolute critique of knowledge" and psychology as surviving, or rather he maintained that critiques of knowledge, logic and psychology have nothing to do with philosophy. As a consequence of his fundamental attitude, Wahle did not recognize the ego as a nucleus of forces but only as a changing whirl or as some stitches in the texture of the universe. But in his Formation of Character (1928) he made important contributions to modern characterology. Wahle's devastating criticism of philosophers has spared only very few such as Spinoza, Hume and Herbert, whose works he praised as useful. In The Radical Academy
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