The Philosophy Book
Page 22
Late 19th century Henry Sidgwick says that how moral an action is equates directly to the degree of pleasure it brings.
Jeremy Bentham, a legal reformer and philosopher, was convinced that all human activity was driven by only two motivating forces—the avoidance of pain and the pursuit of pleasure. In The Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), he argues that all social and political decisions should be made with the aim of achieving the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. Bentham believes that the moral worth of such decisions relates directly to their utility, or efficiency, in generating happiness or pleasure. In a society driven by this “utilitarian” approach, he claims that conflicts of interest between individuals can be settled by legislators, guided solely by the principle of creating the broadest possible spread of contentment. If everyone can be made happy, so much the better, but if a choice is necessary, it is always preferable to favor the many over the few.
One of the main benefits of his proposed system, Bentham states, is its simplicity. By adopting his ideas, you avoid the confusions and misinterpretations of more complex political systems that can often lead to injustices and grievances.
Calculating pleasure
More controversially, Bentham proposes a “felicific calculus” that can express mathematically the degree of happiness experienced by each individual. Using this precise method, he states, provides an objective platform for resolving ethical disputes, with decisions being made in favor of the view that is calculated to produce the highest measure of pleasure.
Bentham also insists that all sources of pleasure are of equal value, so that the happiness derived from a good meal or close friendship is equal to that derived from an activity that may require effort or education, such as engaging in philosophical debate or reading poetry. This means that Bentham assumes a fundamental human equality, with complete happiness being accessible to all, regardless of social class or ability.
See also: Epicurus • Thomas Hobbes • David Hume • John Stuart Mill • Henry Sidgwick
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Political philosophy
APPROACH
Feminism
BEFORE
4th century BCE Plato advises that girls should have a similar education to boys.
4th century CE Hypatia, a noted female mathematician and philosopher, teaches in Alexandria, Egypt.
1790 In Letters on Education, British historian Catherine Macaulay claims the apparent weakness of women is caused by their miseducation.
AFTER
1869 John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women argues for equality of the sexes.
Late 20th century A surge of feminist activism begins to overturn most of the social and political inequalities between the sexes in Western society.
For most of recorded history, women have been seen as subordinate to men. But during the 18th century, the justice of this arrangement began to be openly challenged. Among the most prominent voices of dissent was that of the English radical Mary Wollstonecraft.
Many previous thinkers had cited the physical differences between the sexes to justify the social inequality between women and men. However, in the light of new ideas that had been formulated during the 17th century, such as John Locke’s view that nearly all knowledge was acquired through experience and education, the validity of such reasoning was being called into question.
Equal education
Wollstonecraft argues that if men and women are given the same education they will acquire the same good character and rational approach to life, because they have fundamentally similar brains and minds. Her book, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1792, was partly a response to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile (1762), which recommends that girls be educated differently to boys, and that they learn deference to them.
Wollstonecraft’s demand that women be treated as equal citizens to men—with equal legal, social, and political rights—was still largely treated with derision in the late 18th century. But it did sow the seeds of the suffragette and feminist movements that were to flourish in the 19th and 20th centuries.
"Let woman share the rights and she will emulate the virtues of man."
Mary Wollstonecraft
See also: Plato • Hypatia of Alexandria • John Stuart Mill • Simone de Beauvoir • Luce Irigaray • Hélène Cixous
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Epistemology
APPROACH
Idealism
BEFORE
1641 René Descartes discovers that it is impossible to doubt that “I exist.” The self is therefore the one and only thing of which we can be sure.
18th century Immanuel Kant develops a philosophy of idealism and the transcendental ego, the “I” that synthesizes information. This forms the basis of Fichte’s idealism and notion of the self.
AFTER
20th century Fichte’s nationalist ideas become associated with Martin Heidegger and the Nazi regime in Germany.
1950s Isaiah Berlin holds Fichte’s idea of true freedom of the self as responsible for modern authoritarianism.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte was an 18th-century German philosopher and student of Immanuel Kant. He examined how it is possible for us to exist as ethical beings with free will, while living in a world that appears to be causally determined; that is to say, in a world where every event follows on necessarily from previous events and conditions, according to unvarying laws of nature.
The idea that there is a world like this “out there”, beyond our selves and independent of us, is known as dogmatism. This is an idea that gained ground in the Enlightenment period, but Fichte thinks that it leaves no room for moral values or choice. How can people be considered to have free will, he asks, if everything is determined by something else that exists outside of ourselves?
Fichte argues instead for a version of idealism similar to Kant’s, in which our own minds create all that we think of as reality. In this idealist world, the self is an active entity or essence that exists outside of causal influences, and is able to think and choose freely, independently, and spontaneously.
Fichte understands idealism and dogmatism to be entirely different starting points. They can never be “mixed” into one philosophical system, he says; there is no way of proving philosophically which is correct, and neither can be used to refute the other. For this reason one can only “choose” which philosophy one believes in, not for objective, rational reasons, but depending upon “what sort of person one is.”
"Think the I, and observe what is involved in doing this."
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
See also: René Descartes • Benedictus Spinoza • Immanuel Kant • Martin Heidegger • Isaiah Berlin
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Metaphilosophy
APPROACH
Reflexivity
BEFORE
c. 450 BCE Protagoras says that there are no first principles or absolute truths; “man is the measure of all things.”
1641 René Descartes claims to have found a first principle on which to build beliefs about existence when he states that “I think, therefore I am.”
AFTER
1830 Georg Hegel says that “the whole of philosophy resembles a circle of circles.”
1920s Martin Heidegger argues that philosophy is a matter of our relationship with our own existence.
1967 Jacques Derrida claims that philosophical analysis can only be made at the level of language and texts.
The German historian and poet, Friedrich Schlegel, is generally credited with introducing the use of aphorisms (short, ambiguous s
ayings) into later modern philosophy. In 1798 he observed that there was little philosophizing about philosophy (metaphilosophy), implying that we should question both how Western philosophy functions and its assumption that a linear type of argument is the best approach.
Schlegel disagrees with the approaches of Aristotle and René Descartes, saying they are wrong to assume that there are solid “first principles” that can form a starting point. He also thinks that it is not possible to reach any final answers, because every conclusion of an argument can be endlessly perfected. Describing his own approach, Schlegel says philosophy must always “start in the middle… it is a whole, and the path to recognizing it is no straight line but a circle.”
Schlegel’s holistic view—seeing philosophy as a whole—fits within the broader context of his Romantic theories about art and life. These value individual human emotion above rational thought, in contrast to most Enlightenment thinking. While his charge against earlier philosophy was not necessarily correct his contemporary, Georg Hegel, took up the cause for reflexivity—the modern name for applying philosophical methods to the subject of philosophy itself.
Philosophy is the art of thinking, and Schlegel points out that its methods affect the kind of answers it can find. Western and Eastern philosophies use very different approaches.
See also: Protagoras • Aristotle • René Descartes • Georg Hegel • Martin Heidegger • Jacques Derrida
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Metaphysics
APPROACH
Idealism
BEFORE
6th century BCE Heraclitus claims that all things pass into their opposites, an important factor in Hegel’s dialectic.
1781 Immanuel Kant publishes his Critique of Pure Reason, which shows the limits of human knowledge.
1790s The works of Johann Fichte and Friedrich Schelling lay the foundations for the school of German Idealism.
AFTER
1846 Karl Marx writes The German Ideology, which uses Hegel’s dialectical method.
1943 Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist work Being and Nothingness relies upon Hegel’s notion of the dialectic.
Hegel was the single most famous philosopher in Germany during the first half of the 19th century. His central idea was that all phenomena, from consciousness to political institutions, are aspects of a single Spirit (by which he means “mind” or “idea”) that over the course of time is reintegrating these aspects into itself. This process of reintegration is what Hegel calls the “dialectic”, and it is one that we (who are all aspects of Spirit) understand as “history.” Hegel is therefore a monist, for he believes that all things are aspects of a single thing, and an idealist, for he believes that reality is ultimately something that is not material (in this case Spirit). Hegel’s idea radically altered the philosophical landscape, and to fully grasp its implications we need to take a look at the background to his thought.
History and consciousness
Few philosophers would deny that human beings are, to a great extent, historical—that we inherit things from the past, change them, and then pass them on to future generations. Language, for example, is something that we learn and change as we use it, and the same is true of science—scientists start with a body of theory, and then go on either to confirm or to disconfirm it. The same is also true of social institutions, such as the family, the state, banks, churches, and so on—most of which are modified forms of earlier practices or institutions.
Human beings, therefore, never begin their existence from scratch, but always within some kind of context—a context that changes, sometimes radically within a single generation. Some things, however, do not immediately appear to be historical, or subject to change.
An example of such a thing is consciousness. We know for certain that what we are conscious of will change, but what it means to be conscious—what kind of a thing it is to be awake, to be aware, to be capable of thinking and making decisions—is something that we tend to believe has always been the same for everyone. Likewise, it seems plausible to claim that the structures of thought are not historical—that the kind of activity that thinking is, and what mental faculties it relies on (memory, perception, understanding, and so on), has always been the same for everyone throughout history. This was certainly what Hegel’s great idealist predecessor, Immanuel Kant, believed—and to understand Hegel, we need to know what he thought about Kant’s work.
Certain changes, such those brought about by the American Revolution, are explained by Hegel as the progress of Spirit from a lesser stage of its development to a higher stage.
Kant’s categories
For Kant, the basic ways in which thought works, and the basic structures of consciousness, are a priori—that is, they exist prior to (and so are not are not derived from) experience. This means that they are independent not only of what we are thinking about, or are conscious of, but are independent of any historical influence or development.
Kant calls these structures of thought “categories”, and these include the concepts “cause”, “substance”, “existence”, and “reality.” For example, experience may give us knowledge about the outside world, but nothing within experience itself teaches us that the outside world actually contains, for example, causes and effects. For Kant, knowledge of the basic structure of the outside world is a priori knowledge. It is only possible because we are all born with categories that supply us with a framework for experience—part of which is the assumption that there is an external world. However, Kant continues, this a priori framework means that the world as it appears is dependent upon the nature of the human mind, and does not represent the world as it really is—in other words, the world as it is “in itself.” This “world as it is in itself” is what Kant calls the noumenal world, and he claims that it is unknowable. All that we can know, according to Kant, is the world as it appears to us through the framework of the categories—and this is what Kant calls the “phenomenal” world, or the world of our everyday experience.
"To comprehend what is is the task of philosophy, for what is, is reason."
Georg Hegel
Hegel’s dialectic shows how opposites find resolution. A state of tyranny, for example, generates a need for freedom—but once freedom has been achieved there can only be anarchy until an element of tyranny is combined with freedom, creating the synthesis “law.”
Hegel’s critique of Kant
Hegel believes that Kant made great strides forward in eliminating naivety in philosophy, but that his accounts of the “world in itself” and the categories still betray uncritical assumptions. Hegel argues that Kant fails in at least two respects to be sufficiently thorough in his analysis. First of all, Hegel regards Kant’s notion of the “world in itself” as an empty abstraction that means nothing. For Hegel, what exists is whatever comes to be manifested in consciousness—for example, as something sensed or as something thought. Kant’s second failure, Hegel argues, is that he makes too many assumptions about the nature and origin of the categories.
Hegel’s task is to understand these categories without making any assumptions whatsoever, and the worst assumption that Hegel sees in Kant concerns the relationships of the categories to each other. Kant assumes that the categories are original and distinct, and that they are totally separate from each other—but for Hegel they are “dialectical”—meaning that they are always subject to change. Where Kant believes in an unchanging framework of experience, Hegel believes that the framework of experience itself is subject to change—as much, indeed, as the world
that we experience. Consciousness, therefore, and not merely what we are conscious of, is part of an evolving process. This process is “dialectical”—a concept that has a very specific meaning in Hegel’s philosophical thought.
Hegel’s dialectic
The notion of dialectic is central to what Hegel calls his immanent (internal) account of the development of things. He declares that his account will guarantee four things. First, that no assumptions are made. Second, that only the broadest notions possible are employed, the better to avoid asserting anything without justification. Third, that it shows how a general notion gives rise to other, more specific, notions. Fourth, that this process happens entirely from “within” the notion itself. This fourth requirement reveals the core of Hegel’s logic—namely that every notion, or “thesis”, contains within itself a contradiction, or “antithesis”, which is only resolved by the emergence of a newer, richer notion, called a “synthesis”, from the original notion itself. One consequence of this immanent process is that when we become aware of the synthesis, we realize that what we saw as the earlier contradiction in the thesis was only an apparent contradiction, one that was caused by some limitation in our understanding of the original notion.
An example of this logical progression appears at the beginning of Hegel’s Science of Logic, where he introduces the most general and all-inclusive notion of “pure being”—meaning anything that in any sense could be said to be. He then shows that this concept contains a contradiction—namely, that it requires the opposite concept of “nothingness” or “not-being” for it to be fully understood. Hegel then shows that this contradiction is simply a conflict between two aspects of a single, higher concept in which they find resolution. In the case of “being” and “not-being”, the concept that resolves them is “becoming.” When we say that something “becomes”, we mean that it moves from a state of not-being to a state of being—so it turns out that the concept of “being” that we started off with was not really a single concept at all, but merely one aspect of the three-part notion of “becoming.” The vital point here is that the concept of “becoming” is not introduced from “outside”, as it were, to resolve the contradiction between “being” and “not-being.” On the contrary, Hegel’s analysis shows that “becoming” was always the meaning of “being” and “not-being”, and that all we had to do was analyze these concepts to see their underlying logic.