Overview of 18th
& 19th Century Philosophy
A Study
and
Critique
The philosophers of the 18th and 19th centuries
carried forward, in the main, the theories of
Bacon, Locke, Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, and
tried to reason the world out of existence.
Existence is reduced to thoughts or idea, to
will-force or élan. This is nothing new, nor
was it new in the 18th or 19th century. It is the
core of the old Eleatic philosophy, and it is
latent in every sophist, skeptic, and relativist
theory of things and thoughts.
We shall discuss very briefly the doctrines of
Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer,
Nietzsche, Comte, Spencer, James, and Bergson, with
incidental mention of Fichte, von Schelling, Mill,
and Dewey. We shall notice the revival of Classical
Realism.
1. George Berkeley
(1695-1753), Kilkenny born, and
Protestant Bishop of Cloyne in Ireland, was
idealist in philosophy, but not in such matter of
fact things as money. He worked hard to secure a
grant from the English Government for the purpose
of founding in Bermuda a great college to train
missionaries for the conversion of America. Indeed,
he had the promise of £20,000, and, on the
strength of it, he went to Rhode Island to secure
the interest and help of New Englanders. But the
politicians failed him; the promised money was not
voted.
Perhaps his experience with practical politics
helped turn him into an utter idealist -- but no,
attractive as the thought remains, it cannot be so;
for Berkeley's significant writing was all done by
1715, and he did not visit America until 1728. His
chief philosophical work was a treatise on The
Principles of Human Understanding.
Notice how steadily the basic question, that is,
the epistemological question, held the attention of
all philosophers during the centuries of the early
modern era. And still that question was not sanely
treated nor brought to full answer. Despite their
constant cry for clarity in knowledge, the
philosophers of this time succeeded only in making
knowledge more misty and valueless.
Berkeley goes confidently to work to explain the
human mind and its relation to reality. He says
that if anything exists at all, it exists as
knowable, and there exists a mind capable of
knowing it. Further, each man's knowing is
what gives him the world he knows. The very
being of things is, for each person who
knows them, the perceiving of them:
esse est percipi, "to exist is to be
perceived."
Now, there is ultimate reality in the Divine
Mind. Each human mind somehow shares the
creative perceiving of the Divine Mind. Thus while
Berkeley is idealist, he is not utter subjectivist.
He once wrote, "I question not the existence of
anything we perceive by our senses." But he should
have added that "existence" means to him "existence
in the mind," and basically in the Divine Mind.
2. David
Hume (1711-1776), native of Edinburgh
and a product of its university, denied the
existence of all substantial reality, material or
spiritual. In his Treatise on Human Nature
he declares that man's mind is only a collection of
perceptions. These perceptions are either
impressions or ideas. Impressions are
sensations of pleasure, pain, awareness of
qualities and relations. Ideas are but the faintly
remembered images of impressions formerly
experienced. This vague philosophy has a very
modern sound: a collection of impressions collected
nowhere; contents of a mind which is not a
container. Here we have the smug unintelligibility
of the modern neo-realist's definition of mind as
"a cross-section of the environment."
Hume does not deny God, but he denies the value
of the customary proofs for God's existence, since
these are based upon a reality which he does not
accept. He is inconsistent, however, for in his
Natural History of Religion he writes: "The
whole frame of nature bespeaks an intelligent
Author."
In morals, Hume set up the public good as
the standard of right and wrong, and assigns to
feelings rather than to reason the
task of applying this ethical norm.
In summary, Hume holds that the only thing that
can be said, with full certainty, to exist are our
perceptions (impressions and ideas). In and among
these perceptions there is no causal connection;
indeed, there is no knowable causality anywhere. If
things outside us really do exist, there is no
proof of their existence available to us.
3. Immanuel
Kant (1724-1804) was a professor in
Germany, in his native city of Koenigsberg, and
read Hume's arguments with dismay, and finally
tossed them aside with contempt as "dogmatic
dreams." Hume takes away all grounds of certitude;
the best a man might have of him is a thin
probability, and this, as Kant noticed, is not
usable knowledge at all. What a man needs, said
Kant, and what he can have is truly scientific
knowledge, that is, knowledge that is
universally and necessarily true and reliable.
The experiences of the senses is individual,
and, no matter how consistently and for how long a
time the senses find a fact solid, there is always
the possibility that the next experience will show
to vary. So far Kant agrees with Hume:
sense-experience cannot give the mind more than
probability. But, said Kant, there is another
element in knowledge, an a priori and
subjective element which is anterior to
sense-experience and in no wise dependent on it.
This is the element which enables us to have true
and certain knowledge and to add item to item with
complete security in building up the edifice of
science.
We pause here to settle the meaning of important
terms. Knowledge that we obtain through experience
is a posteriori knowledge, that is,
it comes after experience and is dependent
upon it. Now, it is Aristotelian, Scholastic, and
Classical Realistic doctrine that all human
knowledge is of this type; no knowledge is born in
us; no item of knowledge exists in man except such
as has been acquired.
Kant, however, insisted on the existence of
certain "forms" or items of knowledge (space and
time, certain regulative judgments, and certain
master-ideas) as inborn and a priori.
Of course, there is a legitimate use of the terms
a priori and a
posteriori (literally "from beforehand" and
"from afterwards") in describing types of argument.
But there is no legitimate use of a
priori as a term descriptive of knowledge
itself. Kant uses the term so, and he follows the
despised Hume so far as to make the knowledge
described by this term a very part of the mind of
man, an element of its being and not merely
an element of its equipment.
To answer the basic question, "What can I know
with scientific certitude?" Kant wrote his book
The Critique of Pure Reason. In this work,
Kant assigns to man a threefold knowing-power:
sensibility, intellect, reason. Knowable things, on
the other hand, are of two classes: appearances of
things or phenomena, and essences of things
or noumena.
Man, by sensibility (that is, by his senses)
takes in the phenomena of the world about him.
Somehow, we know not how, the phenomena set his
sense-power to work; we dare not say that the
senses perceive even the phenomena as these exist
in nature; we may only say that somehow phenomena
stir the senses to act.
Now the formal constituent, the essential
element, of the sensing-power or sensibility (that
is, its character or "shape") is the twofold
determination of space-and-time. Man has
sense-experiences "here" and "now," and he recalls
them as "there" and "then." But this conditioning
of phenomena by space and time is
man's own contribution to the knowledge-act. Space
and time in no wise represent things, nor are they
things; they are the inborn a priori
element of the sensing-power.
Just as a curiously shaped bottle will take in
liquid or powder and conform the mass of the
substance taken in to its own shape, so the
sensing-power, which has the shape of
space-and-time, takes in the action of
phenomena on the senses and shapes these phenomena
accordingly. The result (that is,
phenomena-conditioned-by-space-and-time) is called
empirical intuition.
Now, just as phenomena stir the sensibility to
act, so the finished products of sensation (that
is, empirical intuitions) stir the next knowing
power, the intellect, to act. The intellect
takes in the empirical intuitions and conforms them
to its shape, its own inborn a
priori forms. These forms are four sets of
triple judgments, called the twelve
categories. These are like grooves or molds
into which the molten metal of empirical intuitions
is poured, and the resultant piece of knowledge is,
in each case, a judgment.
The four master categories (each of which has
three branches) are: quantity, quality,
relation, and modality. Thus the
judgment "A comes from B as effect from cause" is
not the objective knowing by the mind of a state of
fact; it is merely the result of the action of
intellect turning the sense-findings (or
empirical intuitions) of A and B through the groove
(or category) of relation, and through that
branch of relation called cause-effect.
Once more, just as the finished products of
sensibility (that is, empirical intuitions) stir
the intellect to the act of judging, so the
judgments of the intellect stir the reason
to its action. The innate a priori
shape of reason is determined by three
master-ideas: the idea of the self, the
idea of the not-self, the idea of the
super-self. In other words, the three
regulative ideas of reason are the ideas of self,
the world, and God. The judgments of intellect are
poured through the threefold mold of reason, and
the result is reasoned knowledge.
Now, the essential thing about knowledge, when
we attempt to fix its value on the score of truth
and certitude, centers in judgments. After
all, reason merely handles judgments and learns
from them. Upon judgments we must fix our
attention. There are two types of judgment, a
priori and a posteriori.
Looked at in another way, there are two other
types: synthetic and analytic. We
already know the meaning of a priori and a
posteriori, and indeed, according to Kant, all
judgments are a priori. We must look
at the other terms.
A judgment is rightly called synthetic
when it is "put together," for that is precisely
what the word synthetic means. If I make the
judgment, "John is sick," I have a synthetic
judgment; the predicate does not necessarily belong
to the subject, but I put it with the
subject because I have learned from John or from
his doctor that it happens to belong
there.
But if I make the judgment, "A circle is round,"
I have an analytic judgment; for by
analyzing the subject, by studying it and knowing
just what it is, I learn that the predicate used
belongs there, since a circle to be a circle
must be round.
Kant held that the only judgment which can give
absolute certitude must be a priori,
since, indeed, he admits no other type. But, he
maintains, an a priori judgment that
is analytic marks no advance in knowledge. To build
up science, there must be growth, development,
advancement. Hence there must be synthetic
judgments which are also a priori. The
synthetic a priori judgment may be
called the heart of Kant's philosophy.
And we may say now in passing that the
synthetic a priori judgment is a
contradiction in terms and in thought; it is an
impossibility. The examples offered by Kant are
either (in our terminology) a
posteriori judgments, or they are
analytic judgments. For instance, Kant says
that the judgment "five plus seven equals twelve"
is a synthetic a priori judgment. It
is nothing of the kind. It is a simple analytic
judgment. Replace the words or the figures for five
and seven and twelve by an equivalent number of
dots or strokes; you will have exactly the same
thing on either side of the equals-mark. The
judgment is as plainly analytic as "A is A."
Let us cast back a moment, and make a summing up
of the Kantian theory of human knowing:
- Phenomena of bodily things somehow stir
man's sensibility to action, and sense takes in
phenomena in its own way, shaping and
conditioning them by its innate forms of
space-and-time, thus producing empirical
intuitions.
- The empirical intuitions somehow stir man's
intellect to take them in and run them through
its forms or categories, thus producing
judgments, the truly certain and valuable
judgment always being synthetic a
priori.
- Finally, the judgments of intellect somehow
stir the reason to take them in and view them in
the light of its regulative ideas of self, the
world, and God.
Notice that the sole point of connection of
man's knowledge with reality outside the mind is
the vague influence of phenomena on the
sensing-power. From that point on, the whole
process of knowing, and its products, are man's
own. Here is idealism, here is
subjectivism with a vengeance. And Kant
plainly asserts that the noumena or essences
of things cannot be known by man. The phenomenon is
not strictly knowable, but it moves the senses to
act; the noumenon is not knowable at all. The
noumenon lies outside the reach of mortal man.
So Kant is as subjectivistic as Hume ever dared
to be. And yet this is the man who threw Hume's
book aside with the sneer, "Dogmatic dreams!" What
singular smugness could have made Kant suppose that
he was dealing with the problem of knowledge
critically and not dogmatically? Yet he
calls his system "transcendental criticism."
Since we cannot know noumena, the science of
metaphysics, the very heart of philosophy as the
Greeks and Classical Realists understand it,
becomes illusory and impossible. Is it not strange
that a man of Kant's undoubted intellectual gifts
did not notice here an absurd contradiction? Why,
he has just finished explaining to us, in great
detail, the whole nature of the human mind; and now
he concludes that we cannot know the nature of
anything! And his reasoning -- more than "slightly
foxed" as the booksellers say -- about the
character of the mind, and about the nature of
phenomena and noumena, is actually interwoven with
terms and thoughts metaphysical; yet he says that
metaphysics is illusory and impossible!
So far, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.
It will be noticed that the doctrine contained in
this work opens the way to complete skepticism, and
therewith it opens the way to a denial of moral
obligation and of purpose in human existence. For
if nothing can be known with certitude, as
skepticism maintains, then there are no certainties
in the realm of morals, religion, or social duties;
then there is no certainty that man is made for a
purpose at all, or even that man exists.
Whether Kant noticed this fact, and, as a
Lutheran, deplored it, or whether (as has been
said) his Emperor summoned him and demanded that he
furnish a philosophical basis for morals and
religion, cannot be said. But Kant wrote a second
book to supply the defects mentioned. He said that
pure reason is not enough for man; he must
live by practical reason as well.
In his first book, Kant sought the answer to the
question, "What can man know with certitude?" The
answer was, "He can have true certitude by his
synthetic a priori judgments." But
this is mere statement. The real answer to which
Kant's work inclines the thinking mind is, "Man can
know nothing with certitude."
Kant's second book, The Critique of Practical
Reason, answered the question, "Are there
certitudes, outside the reach of pure reason, that
I must recognize and act upon?" Kant answers with
an emphatic, "There are." These truths are known
with certitude by practical reason. First, a
man is aware of duty. He knows with clear
certitude that murder and stealing are wrong, and
that he has the indispensable duty of avoiding such
things. He knows that there are certain loyalties
which indicate things that he is in duty bound to
observe and do. By his practical reason, man is
aware of the inner command, "Thou shalt" and "Thou
shalt not."
This command is categorical, that is, it
is unconditional; it is not, "Do this, if you
please," "Avoid that when convenient"; it is a
matter of simple "Do" and "Avoid." Kant calls this
inner voice The Categorical Imperative. A
Christian would call it conscience, and would
explain that it is the voice of reason (the same
reason with which we work out a theorem in
geometry) pronouncing on the agreement or
disagreement of a situation (here and now to be
decided) with the norm or law of morality. Kant's
Categorical Imperative is like conscience in
its clear decision and unequivocal command; it is
entirely unlike conscience in its blindly
unreasoning assumption of authority.
First, then, man's awareness of duty is a
certitude; it is a certitude because of The
Categorical Imperative. Now, this Categorical
Imperative is a law. But a law must come
from a lawmaker. Neither I myself have set up my
Categorical Imperative (for it often orders me to
do what I should like to avoid, and to shun what I
would willingly do) nor has it come from any
earthly kind, court, or senate, for it speaks with
an authority that is absolute and not one supported
by temporal sanctions of fine or imprisonment. It
is a supreme law; it is an absolute law. It must
come then from the Supreme and Absolute Being. That
is, it must come from God. Therefore, God
Exists.
Further, the Categorical Imperative makes a man
aware, not only of duty, but of the fact that he
must freely embrace the performance of duty. He is
aware that he can disregard, although he cannot be
ignorant of, this law of conduct. In a word, he is
aware, and with true certitude, that he is a
free and responsible being. Again, man, a free
and responsible being, is aware that by freely
acting in accordance with the commands of the
Categorical Imperative he perfects himself.
And he is aware that this self-perfecting may go on
through the longest life without reaching the
limits of its capability. Therefore, he concludes,
he can go on becoming more and more perfect
forever.
In other words, man is aware of endless
existence before him; he knows he has an
immortal soul. Thus out of the cunning device
of The Categorical Imperative Kant draws the
doctrines that satisfy his Lutheranism (or his
Emperor), although his basic philosophy of
"transcendental criticism" knows nothing of these
doctrines. He sets forth, in orthodox fashion, the
practical truths of the existence of God,
the fact of moral duty, the immortality of the
soul, the freedom of the human will.
Kant wrote a third book, The Critique of the
Faculty of Aesthetic Judgment in which he
brings out the attractiveness of moral goodness in
a manner more striking than that of The Critique
of Practical Reason.
Despite errors, absurdities, and contradictions,
Kant's philosophy -- notably that of The
Critique of Pure Reason -- has exercised a
tremendous influence upon human thinking for almost
two centuries. It exhibits the roots of those
weaknesses we have come to regard as characteristic
of what is loosely called "the German
philosophy":
- It refuses to face reality (witness the
wholly subjectivistic character of
knowledge);
- It unduly stresses the ego (witness
the inner and autonomous character of knowledge
and morality);
- It proclaims the perfectibility of the
will, upon which the followers of Kant were
soon to harp most strongly -- and from Nietzsche
to Hitler we are to hear of "the will to power,"
the will which makes "the superman" and "the
master race."
A final word on Kant. In offering and defending
his low estimate of pure reason as incapable of
achieving certitude (apart from the mysterious
judgments which are synthetic a priori) Kant
appeals to his so-called "antinomies" or
"contradictions." He holds that when pure reason
tries to apply the categories in the abstract realm
of logical inference (whereas its business is to
pour findings through fixed molds) it gets beyond
itself and comes a cropper.
It finds that it can prove, with equal facility,
things directly opposed. Thus, he says, it can
prove that space is finite, and also infinite; it
can prove matter divisible and indivisible; it can
prove human freedom existent and nonexistent; it
can prove that God is necessary and also
non-necessary. In all this, and in the examples
offered in proof of it, Kant is entirely gratuitous
and sophistical.
Besides, he stands self-condemned in using
logical reasoning to establish the fact that
logical reasoning is useless. We merely mention the
"antinomies" because we discern in them an element
of materialism in the heart of an
idealistic theory. This materialism was to
appear in full form in later philosophies which
took inspiration, at least in part, from the
doctrines of Immanuel Kant.
4.
Johann Gottlieb
Fichte (1762-1814) and
Friedrich Wilhelm von
Schelling (1775-1854) were two followers
of Kant who taught that the mysterious noumenon of
Kant is the projection of an Absolute Ego.
This Ego sets up Self as against the background of
Not-Self and then realizes that after all Self and
Not-Self are truly One. Technically, we have the
thesis, the antithesis and the
synthesis of the Absolute Ego. The final
synthesis in which the Ego "composits the Self and
the Not-Self" is the developing and perfecting of
Will.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Hegel (1770-1831) was by far the most
important among the immediate followers of Kant. To
Hegel the synthesizing element which merges Self
and Not-Self is universal awareness, absolute
reason. Individual men have reason, but the human
reason is but a gleam of the Absolute Light. The
world is merely phenomenal, it is an
external expression of Absolute Reason; it is a
series of flashes and shadows cast by the Cosmic
Light of Reason.
Towards the perfect harmony of Absolute Reason
everything (as history proves) works upward, not
sweepingly, but step by step, each more perfectly
harmonizing and purifying than the preceding. In a
civil State, this drive towards Reason shows itself
under the aspect of Will. As one nation
conquers another, and then is conquered in turn, we
note the purifying and harmonizing drive towards
Reason. Such successive steps towards the ideal
were, first, the oriental State, then the Roman
State, and, last and best expression of progress,
the German State. Progress must go by conflict and
through the conquest of contradictions.
5. Arthur
Schopenhauer (1788-1860) is a name
popularly known as almost synonymous with
"pessimism." He denied the existence of happiness
for man, and felt that the best man could hope for
was an occasional relief from pain: "life is a path
of red-hot coals, with a cool spot here and there."
Schopenhauer declared that will is the very
essence of things. This will is not a force guided
by intelligence or reason; it is a blind,
irresistible drive. It is not a striving for
something as a goal; it is a drive that exists for
itself. This is a world-will. It is manifest
everywhere, in the force of gravitation and in the
most sublime tendencies of men towards their
ideals.
The apparent world is phenomenal; it is
our conception of things; it is idea which
we explain sufficiently for our needs as space,
time, causality. But there is a real world too, a
noumenal world, which is not idea but
will. The world-will is active in us; it is
very hard upon us; it makes us strive ceaselessly
for what we can never find, that is, peace, rest,
and enduring satisfaction. Thus it is a source of
pain. Man may find a partial and temporary relief
from this pain by contemplating works of art. But a
more lasting relief comes from resisting will; from
the effort to kill within oneself the desire for
continued life, health, property, comfort, friends;
from refusing the work of seeking to attain such
goals as eternal rest, heaven, moral ideals.
Schopenhauer is of the later German school in
his doctrine of all embracing will, but he is alone
among German philosophers in ascribing to the
efforts of universal will no goal, no good, no
improvement.
6. Friedrich Wilhelm
Nietzsche (1844-1900). Schopenhauer was
saddened by the pain that men must endure through
the harsh and profitless drive of world-will. But
Nietzsche was gladdened by it. For, said Nietzsche,
the pain and strife of existence are meant to
harden us, to strengthen us, to develop us so that
we may ultimately produce superman.
We should therefore be ruthless, hard,
unsympathetic; we should refuse to indulge self or
others; we should sternly cultivate the will to
power. Christianity, said Nietzsche, with its
doctrines of obedience, resignation, loving
kindness, is not the guide we require; it proclaims
a slave morality. We need no God, no supernatural
aim. The aim of true ethics is the development of
the great, the strong, the ruthless blond beast,
the superman.
We need not pause upon the absurdity of this
doctrine of Nietzsche, which, as G.K Chesterton
points out is not a philosophy of strong muscles
but of weak nerves. Indeed, Nietzsche was himself a
man of such weak nerves as to be hardly sane. It is
interesting to note that the philosophy of
ruthless will to power found itself an
expression in the ideals and the warlike actions of
many of Nietzsche's countrymen just a mere sixty
years ago.
7. Auguste
Comte (1798-1857),
John Stuart
Mill (1806-1873), and
Herbert Spencer
(1820-1903). The ethics of Nietzsche are a crude
and brutal naturalism, that is, a theory
that man needs no power but his own, and no aim
beyond this world. Naturalism is one form of
materialism which denies or disregards
everything spiritual and supernatural.
Naturalistic ethics appear in the mistaken
philosophies of all ages, proclaiming men are
naturally good, naturally directed upwards and
onwards, and urging that he be left unhindered and
undirected so that through the fullest
self-expression he may come to perfection.
The Classical Realist knows, however, than man's
nature is not perfect and that no man can be merely
natural and remain decent. A man, says Chesterton,
must be supernatural or he will be unnatural.
Nietzsche set up a naturalistic doctrine in crude
and harsh terms. The same type of doctrine was
presented more subtly by Comte, Mill, and
Spencer.
Comte says that man has passed naturally through
three intellectual stages:
- the theological stage, in which he
referred power and control to Deity;
- the metaphysical stage, in which he
sought to understand things in the general
abstractions of philosophy; and
finally,
- the true and perfect positive stage,
in which he finds all knowledge in the
mathematical and experimental sciences, chief of
which is sociology, the science of
humanity.
According to Comte, humanity is the only
God.
Mill declares that man must be guided in his
actions by utility. Actions are good or evil
in so far as they preserve us from pain or subject
us to pain (moral utilitarianism): Utility or
usefulness is not to be judged selfishly; it is to
be sought in the greatest pleasure of the greatest
number of men. We learn, for the most part, by the
method of "trial and error" in what courses of
action such utility is to be found.
Spencer discards the "trial and error" method.
He says we must study nature and adjust ourselves
to it so that we may act for the greatest pleasure
of the greatest number. We are helped in our effort
by natural evolution which tends to level
out differences among men.
All nature is marked by a steady progress "from
the homogeneous to the heterogeneous" and we must
not get ahead of this process or we shall have
trouble and pain and the world will be filled with
unrest. Nor must we be eager for absolute truth
either in science or in religion.
Truth is for us always relative, for the
ultimate always eludes our grasp. Science must be
content with the positive data which fall under
observation of the senses (sensism and positivism),
and religion (or theology) must be content to make
rules for practical conduct, leaving aside all
doctrinal and dogmatic statements about the Great
Unknown (agnosticism).
Spencer is full of self-contradiction. He
professes to know the absolute truth that absolute
truth is unknowable. He is dogmatic in his
assertion that dogmatic assertion is unseemly. He
limits science to positive sense-data, and this
very theory is not capable of either expression or
proof in terms of sense-data, and hen is, by his
own standard, a wholly unscientific theory. His
doctrine of natural evolution is a hypothesis which
he proposes as absolute truth. Indeed, Spencer
makes mankind a single organism which is
growing steadily more diversified and perfect by
the process of evolution.
8. John
Dewey (1859-1952), an American
philosopher, advanced the sensism and positivism of
Spencer, together with the agnostic and relativist
theory. Dewey thinks that philosophy must concern
itself with the discovery of practical rules to
keep men in accord with the march of events.
Philosophy is but a guide for action. True
and false are to be understood in the light
of social experience; what has proved beneficial to
man is true and good; what has been found socially
harmful is evil and false. This doctrine is usually
called pragmatism from the Greek
pragma, a deed, work, or action.
9. William
James (1842-1910) is usually regarded as
"the father of pragmatism." James teaches that the
working or workability of a thing (for man's
benefit or hurt) is the test of its good or evil,
its truth or falsity. Besides the test of
workability, two others are to be applied: any new
idea, to be true, must be in harmony with ideas
already tested and proved true; secondly, the new
idea must not conflict with accepted ideals,
especially those that are religious or moral.
James says that man's mind requires certitude in
many matters in which his mental power is not
adequate to attain it. Where the mind fails, the
will must step in and make a decision. Indeed, a
man cannot avoid such intervention of the will. If
he says, "I cannot decide; I must remain in doubt,"
he is actually willing not to decide; he, in fact,
deciding not to decide.
Now, a decision to leave important matters
unsettled is less valuable to man, less practical,
less useful, less workable, than a straightforward
affirmation or denial. Since decision must be made
in any case, it is better to have a clear decision
than a muddled one. Therefore, a man should have
"the will to believe" either one or other of the
contradictory answers to important questions. Thus
is the will invoked in the philosophic pursuit of
truth.
10. Henri
Bergson (1859-1940). James calls upon
the will to help man interpret (indeed to create)
truth. But Bergson, a French Jew, calls rather upon
man's feeling. He calls for a sympathetic
effort after truth, not a cold analysis. He says
that to know truth we must sympathetically enter
into things and know them from within. Thus we must
seek truth by intuition, by direct, sympathetic,
non-rationalized grasp. It is thus that we are
aware of self, and of self as part of a
living and pulsating nature of things, the
inner force of which (or élan vital)
is a continuously creative power.
Bergson was much influenced by the teachings of
Plotinus. In the last years of his life, leaving
the sterile philosophy of élan vital,
he recognized the truth of Catholicism, which
he called "the complete fulfillment of Judaism."
Yet he failed to enter the Catholic Church, lest
his conversion seem one of convenience to escape
the hardships of impending anti-Semitism. He did
ask, however, that a Catholic priest be present to
pray at his funeral.
11.
Conclusion. The philosophies of the last
three centuries have been, in the main, futile
vagaries, born of a fundamental misconception of
the nature of human knowledge. The
epistemological question has been the chief
point of interest, and out of the mistaken solution
of this question have come, as a natural
consequence, mistaken doctrines in the realms of
cosmology, psychology, and ethics.
The 19th century saw a notable revival, which
continues to develop vigorously to the present
moment, of the ancient sanity known as Classical
Realism in its various forms (Aristotelianism,
Scholasticism, Thomism, Contextual Realism). This
noble system which alone has historical and factual
claim to the name of the true philosophy suffered
an almost total eclipse from the late 14th to the
early 19th century
Classical Realism, the philosophia
perennis (perennial philosophy) is not made
"new" in each generation, but its insights and
doctrines are employed in studying and interpreting
the newest findings of the modern experimental
sciences.
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