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Adventures in Philosophy |
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Select: Thomas Carlyle - Antoine Augustine Cournot - Gustav Theodor Fechner Augustus De Morgan - David Friedrich Strauss - Charles Darwin Henry James, Sr. - George Boole - Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau George Henry Lewes - Francesco De Sanctis |
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The writings of Thomas Carlyle (picture) differ considerably from those of Locke, Hume, Pope, Fielding, Macaulay, and John Stuart Mill. For Carlyle wrote emotionally; his language expressed passion, love, hate, enthusiasm, or scorn; nothing left him unmoved. He was a bitter enemy of the Age of Reason, and detested cold logic, intellectual abstraction, and scientific aloofness. Although not an orthodox Protestant, he classed himself as a Christian for whom faith was the source of wisdom and the standard of criticism for life and art. Society, as he conceived it, was the brotherhood of men and the union of souls. He categorized political constitutions, class distinctions, political parties, and trade unions as the artificial products of human arrogance. He distrusted material progress, opposed the advances of modern civilization, and scoffed at the diseases and misfortunes of modern life. He maintained that the latter were curable, provided mankind was guided by great men. He derided universal suffrage, even though he sympathized with the Chartist movement. He preferred a kind of patriarchal feudalism to the governmental regulation of wages, or the bargaining process between management and labor. Surely he was not a misanthrope, for he sincerely desired: the improvement of human conditions, a continuing spiritual development, and increased education for the masses. He asserted that great men would serve as the instruments by which those things would be accomplished, that they were the real trustees of the common interests of human happiness and could not be judged by the moral standards of the middle and lower classes. His theories led him to exalt Frederick William I of Prussia, the soldier king, whose principles became the tenets of fascism, and to praise the regime and wars of his son, Frederick II. A great admirer of German poetry and metaphysics, he considered both to be imbued with the true Christian spirit. Until his death he remained an optimist, always hoping for those events which would lead mankind back to a true Christian way of life. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
Antoine Augustine Cournot (1801-1877) Modesty and resignation are the repetitious themes of Cournot's philosophy (picture). His concept of truth was founded upon probability rather than certainty. He renounced those inquiries into what other philosophers terms the essence of truth. He was satisfied with investigating the rule of truth in the development of the sciences and determined to find the most adequate expression for that kind of truth instrumental in the promotion of scientific research His efforts to determine the foundation of human knowledge were not directed to an analysis of general human faculties, but to a study of those principles which make for progress in the positive sciences. The major conclusions of Cournot's reflections were that chance is a positive factor in the sum total of reality; that contingency maintained its position beside order; and that the total continuity of evolution could not be proved. He believed that man could approach truth even though he might not be able to attain it and elaborated this point of view in his books: Considérations sur la Marche des Idées (1872) and Traité de L'Enchanement des Idées Fondamentales dans les Sciences et dans L'Histoire (A Treatise on the Relationships of the Fundamental Concepts in the Sciences and History, 1881). In his early years, Cornot was a tutor in the house of Marchalie Gouvion St. Cyr; later, he became an important dignitary, but regardless of his position, he always led a modest and unpretentious existence. He declined to head a school, and for that reason, his philosophy was neglected for a long time. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801-1887) When Gustav Theodor Fechner (picture) studied medicine, he regarded the world from a mechanistic point of view and almost became an atheist. Then he read Lorenz Oken's Philosophy of Nature. This disciple of Schelling influenced him to become a firm theist. Fechner called his philosophy an "offshoot from the tree of Schelling, though growing far away from the mother tree." He ignored Kant completely. As a professor of physics and chemistry, he contended that the natural sciences can only offer partial knowledge and demand completion by a metaphysical-idealistic interpretation of nature. But he also proved to be a staunch empiricist by founding psycho-physics and experimental aesthetics. He was a native of Lusatia, whose population was largely composed of Slavs, who were inclined toward mysticism. Fechner himself turned for a while from empiricism to speculations about the supernatural, but then returned again to empiricism. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
Augustus De Morgan (1806-1871) Augustus De Morgan (picture) made a number of important contributions to an algebra of logic, and his laws of the propositional calculus have been widely discussed. He is also acknowledged as the founder of the logic of relations. However, the author of Formal Logic (1847) never renounced his claims of promoting metaphysics in no lesser degree than he did mathematics and logic. For more than thirty years, De Morgan, as professor at University College in London, acted and taught in accordance with his principle that positive theism must be made the basis of psychological explanation, and that, in elucidating mathematical principles, it is necessary to refer to an intelligent and disposed Creator when mental organization is to be dealt with as effect of a cause. Although a convinced theist, De Morgan never joined a religious congregation. He was a staunch adversary of religious discrimination and was fond of his nonconformism. He renounced his professorship in 1866, when James Martineau was denied a chair at University College because he was a Unitarian. De Morgan, who was admired for his "reading algebra like a novel," was an intimate friend of George Boole who shared his views on mathematics as well as those on religion and ethics. In The Radical Academy
Elsewhere On The Internet
David Friedrich Strauss (1808-1874) Before Strauss (picture) published his Life of Jesus (1835), it seemed that the authority of the Christian faith was defended in Germany far more efficiently than it had been during the preceding century. Hegel and Scheiermacher, bitterly opposed to one another, had produced a synthesis of Christian religion and modern thought that was supposed to satisfy all spiritual needs of German intellectuals, not to mention that pressure was exercised by more orthodox theologians who used to denounce really or allegedly un-Christian opinions, and by the governments which were always ready to punish the expression of such opinions. The appearance of Strauss' book had the effect of a bombshell and changed the situation completely. It made Germany the arena of a religious struggle whose violence was unheard of since the end of the Thirty Years War. Strauss, without denying the historical existence of Jesus, inexorably criticized the sources of the New Testament, proved their inner contradictions in principal and minor points, and demonstrated that many reports on the life of Jesus, narrated in the Gospels, were entirely unreliable, products of, as he said, "mythical" literature which, to a large extent, was patterned on tales and sayings of the Old Testament. The synthesis of theology and science was destroyed, and could not be saved either by orthodox theologians who called for the police or by rightist Hegelians who protested that Strauss had misunderstood their master. The book that made Strauss famous, destroyed his happiness. He was not a fighter, and the permanent hostilities which culminated in an open revolt of the people of Zurich, where he had been appointed professor, undermined his health. But his sense of truth remained unshattered. In his Doctrine of the Christian Faith (1840), Strauss definitely broke with Christian theology and Christianity completely. His frankness surpassed that of the most daring thinkers in Germany previous to him. He maintained his standpoint in his later works, especially in his The Old Faith and the New (1872), while flatly answering "No" to the question "Can we still be Christians?" and trying to harmonize the doctrine of Ludwig Feuerbach with Darwinism. Certainly, this last work of a tired, constantly persecuted and physically suffering man has many weak points. But it did not deserve the violent attack made by Friedrich Nietzsche who ignored that Strauss, at least in his early writings, had accomplished that which Nietzsche himself demanded from a valiant thinker. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
The age-old dispute between Biblical cosmology and modern natural science was completely overshadowed by Charles Darwin's (picture) Origin of Species (1859) which resulted in innumerable arguments on evolution. Darwin's earlier book and his Descent of Man (1871) revolutionized biology and deeply affected philosophy, historical perspectives, religious controversies, and political, social, and economic criteria. Darwin, humble, of delicate health, and adverse to publicity, upheld Christian behavior, though he had abandoned theism. He had never intended to provoke religious or philosophical debates. The aim of his special studies, which occupied him for more than twenty-five years, was to show that higher species had come into existence as a result of the gradual transformation of lower species; that the process of transformation could be explained through the selective effects of the natural environment upon organisms. His theory was based upon the propositions that all organisms and instincts are variable, that the gradual perfection of any organism or instinct is the result of an adaptation to the environment, and that the general struggle for existence (which Darwin considered to be the powerful method of selection) allowed only those organisms which were fit for adaptation to survive. Heredity continued this survival and reproduction of parental and ancestral qualities for many epochs. Darwin stated that although natural selection was the essential factor, it was not the sole factor in transformation. He admitted the possibility of inheriting acquired characteristics; this was denied by later Darwinists. Darwin did not exclude man from his theory that the higher organisms are the result of long processes of transformation which began with the lowest on the scale. His work was based upon painstaking observation. His principle of the struggle for existence was not based upon his primary studies of nature. For years, he had sought for a principle by means of which he could arrange the collected facts. Neither his thoughts as a natural scientist nor his observations of nature led him to this. Malthus' Essay on Population which Darwin read (1838) clarified for him the entire problem of variation in plants and animals. Malthus maintained that more individuals are born than are able to survive and that the capability of adaptation to the environment is the reason for the survival of the fittest. This principle, borrowed by Darwin from a political economist, has become one of the most disputed portions of his theory. Since the appearance of the Origin of Species, Darwinism and evolutionism have become synonymous. It was Herbert Spencer, to whom Darwin fondly referred as "our philosopher," who characterized Darwin's theory as evolutionism, and to which Darwin agreed. Darwin's concept of evolution is entirely different from other evolutionary theories which assumed a metaphysical entity as the evolving or directing power. Natural selection, regardless of whether it is valid, was conceived and kept by Darwin, free from any metaphysics. Darwin's hypothesis that transformation or evolution proceeds by minute gradations, has been disputed by Thomas Huxley, who, despite this dissension, was an important champion of Darwinism. Most modern biologists share Huxley's views on this question. In The Radical Academy
Elsewhere On The Internet
What made Henry James, Sr. (picture), the father of the great philosopher William and the great novelist Henry James, critical of the existing order was not the accident which caused amputation of one of his legs and impaired him permanently, but the wealth of his family which seemed to grant him undue favor. His revolt against the existing social system led him to enthusiastic adherence to the views of the French socialist Fourier. His opposition to Presbyterian orthodoxy made him a radical religious individualist who combined ideas of enlightenment with Swedenborg's mysticism. James never ceased to fight for his ideals, but during the last thirty years of his life the care of the education and progress of his sons became his dominant interest. He published The Church of Christ Not an Ecclesiasticism (1854) and other works on religion and morality. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
Compared with other philosophers, it was relatively late in his lifetime that George Boole (picture) began to specialize in the field that ultimately made him famous. At the age of sixteen, he taught school in an English provincial town; by the time he was twenty, he had opened his own school; at thirty, he began to concentrate upon mathematics. In 1847 he published a pamphlet, The Mathematical Analysis of Logic, which contained the principal ideas he later developed in his book, Laws of Thought (1854). This book marks the beginning of symbolic logic, a new and efficient method of formal logic, designed to avoid the ambiguities of ordinary language. Boole recognized that the canonical forms of Aristotelian syllogism are really symbolical, but less perfect than the symbolism of mathematics. Furthermore, he realized that ordinary language is an inadequate medium for the expression of ideas. He tried to devise a symbolic language, the terms of which would express exactly what he thought. He was less interested in reducing logic to mathematics than in employing symbolic language and notation in a wide generalization of purely logical processes. He organized deductive logic as an algebra, interpretable spatially and proportionally. With this, he paved the way for Frege, Peano, Bertrand Russell, Whitehead, Hilbert, and others. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau (1816-1882) Not only in his youth but in later years, Gobineau (picture) was enthralled by dreams of his miraculous greatness. He felt that he was the descendant of Vikings and condottieri, and in the midst of the plain 19th century he planned to astonish humanity by his leadership in war on sea and land. Reality forced him to acquiesce in a more modest conduct of life. But, after a short period of difficulty, he did not reject nepotism on his behalf, and, due to the protection of high-ranking relatives, he became a diplomat who could afford to visit, or stay in, many countries, from Germany to Persia, from Sweden to Brazil. All these favors could not overcome Gobineau's feelings of tediousness, his disdain of modern civilization which he regarded as decadent and doomed. In his book The Inequality of Human Races (1855-57), which was ignored in his native country, France, but hailed in Germany, Gobineau expressed his longing for and admiration of the Teutons who had once conquered Europe, shaped its civilization, and surpassed all other peoples in beauty, physical strength and spiritual creativeness. The restitution of Teutonic supremacy was considered by Gobineau as the only way to salvation. Although he carefully declined to identify modern Germans with his ideal Teutons, Gobineau's doctrine became favorite reading in Pan-German circles, above all in Richard Wagner's Bayreuth and at the court of Emperor William II who was initiated into Gobineau's doctrine by Prince Philip Eulenburg, an intimate friend of Gobineau's. A "Gobineau-Society," founded in Germany, continued to propagate his ideas until Hitler's accession. Gobineau also wrote novels and dramatic scenes in which he displayed artistic skill. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
George Henry Lewes (1817-1878) Victorian morality was challenged by George Henry Lewes (picture) who, from 1854 until his death, lived with May Ann Evans, the novelist known by the name of George Eliot. Lewes also broke through the moral framework of British life of his time on other occasions, but he knew how to maintain his social credit. He was a versatile, enterprising and often successful man of letters, the founder of the Fortnightly Review, which became of primary importance in British literary and political life and still exists, the author of a popular biography of Goethe, biographer of Robespierre, a novelist and playwright, an anatomist and physiologist, and more gifted than trained thinker. His Biographical History of Philosophy (1845) met with great applause. His Problems of Life and Mind in four volumes (1874-79) became, despite its weak points, of major significance to the history of modern thought, although not all of those who were indebted to it have admitted the fact. Lewes was inspired by Comte, whose philosophy he dealt with in Comte's Philosophy of the Sciences (1853). His first aim was to disentangle from philosophy all the metaphysical elements which he considered insoluble and meaningless, and to restate its problems in a form corresponding to terms of experience. Later Lewes admitted metaphysics as a science of highest generalities. His principal interest was directed to the question of what the conscious life means and how it is connected with the body. He criticized the mechanical interpretation of organic processes and introduced the concept of emergence which became important to C.L. Morgan, Broad and other thinkers. He also stressed the social factor in the development of the mind and tried to show its way of working. These efforts led him to form a new concept of the general mind and to connect biological, sociological and spiritual terms of evolution. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
Francesco De Sanctis (1817-1883) In the 1848 revolution in Naples, when the revolutionaries struggled against the king's troops, one barricade, in particular, attracted wide attention. It was led by Francesco De Sanctis (picture), then the director of a boys' school, who commanded and organized his pupils as a company of trained soldiers. When the revolution was defeated, De Sanctis was imprisoned for more than four years. He utilized this period of enforced idleness to study the philosophy of Hegel and to translate several German works into Italian. Upon his release, he earned his living as a private tutor and freelance writer; he later became a professor at Zurich, Switzerland, with the German Hegelian, Friederich Theodor Vischer, and the historian, Jacob Burckhardt, as his colleagues. When the unified kingdom of Italy was achieved, King Victor Emmanuel II appointed De Sanctis minister of public education (1861), and he was later made professor of comparative literature at the University of Naples (1871). There, De Sanctis had many faithful disciples, among whom Benedetto Croce was the most outstanding. De Sanctis' chief contribution was to aesthetics. Although he remained a Hegelian, he did not found his aesthetic views upon ideas; instead he concentrated upon form. He stated that living form was the essence of art, rather than the ideal or beauty. He opposed all psychological approaches to the arts, especially poetry, and insisted upon formal analysis. His influence upon Italian literary criticism remained strong up to the present time. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
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