The Philosophy Book
Page 26
Marxist states of the 20th century promoted themselves as utopias. They produced a proliferation of paintings and statues glorifying the achievements of their happy, newly liberated citizens.
Lasting influence
Despite the criticism and crises that Marx’s theories have provoked, his ideas have been hugely influential. As a powerful critic of commercial capitalism, and as an economic and socialist theorist, Marx is still considered relevant to politics and economics today. Many would agree with the 20th-century Russian-British philosopher, Isaiah Berlin, that the The Communist Manifesto is “a work of genius.”
KARL MARX
The most famous revolutionary thinker of the 19th century was born in the German city of Trier. The son of a Jewish lawyer who had converted to Christianity, Marx studied law at Bonn University, where he met his future wife, Jenny von Westphalen. He then studied at the University of Berlin, before working as a journalist. The favor he bestowed on democracy in his writing led to censorship by the Prussian royal family, and he was forced into exile in France and Belgium. During this time he developed a unique theory of communism in collaboration with his German compatriot Friedrich Engels.
Marx returned to Germany during the 1848–49 revolutions, but after they were quashed he lived in exile in London for the rest of his life. He and his wife lived in extreme poverty, and when Marx died stateless at the age of 64, there were only 11 mourners at his funeral.
Key works
1846 The German Ideology
1847 The Poverty of Philosophy
1848 The Communist Manifesto
1867 Das Kapital: Volume 1
See also: Niccolò Machiavelli • Jean-Jacques Rousseau • Adam Smith • Georg Hegel • Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach • Friedrich Nietzsche
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Political philosophy
APPROACH
Non-conformism
BEFORE
c.340 BCE Aristotle claims that the city-state is more important than the individual.
1651 Thomas Hobbes says that society without strong government reverts to anarchy.
1762 In The Social Contract, Jean-Jacques Rousseau proposes government by the will of the people.
AFTER
1907 Mahatma Gandhi cites Thoreau as an influence on his campaign of passive resistance in South Africa.
1964 Martin Luther King is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his campaign to end racial discrimination through civil disobedience and noncooperation.
Almost a century after Jean-Jacques Rousseau claimed that nature was essentially benign, American philosopher Henry Thoreau developed the idea further, arguing that “all good things are wild and free”, and that the laws of man suppress rather than protect civil liberties. He saw that political parties were necessarily one-sided, and that their policies often ran contrary to our moral beliefs. For this reason, he believed it was the individual’s duty to protest against unjust laws, and argued that passively allowing such laws to be enacted effectively gave them justification. “Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it,” as he said about English grammar, but the principle runs through his political philosophy too.
In his essay Civil Disobedience, written in 1849, Thoreau proposes a citizen’s right to conscientious objection through non-cooperation and non-violent resistance—which he put into practice by refusing to pay taxes that supported the war in Mexico and perpetuated slavery.
Thoreau’s ideas contrasted sharply with those of his contemporary Karl Marx, and with the revolutionary spirit in Europe at the time, which called for violent action. But they were later adopted by numerous leaders of resistance movements, such as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King.
Mahatma Gandhi’s campaign of civil disobedience against British rule in India included the Salt March of 1930, undertaken in protest against unjust laws controlling salt production.
See also: Jean-Jacques Rousseau • Adam Smith • Edmund Burke • Karl Marx • Isaiah Berlin • John Rawls
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Epistemology
APPROACH
Pragmatism
BEFORE
17th century John Locke challenges rationalism by tracing the origin of our ideas to sense impressions.
18th century Immanuel Kant argues that speculation about what lies beyond our experience is meaningless.
AFTER
1890s William James and John Dewey take up the philosophy of pragmatism.
1920s Logical positivists in Vienna formulate the theory of verification—that the meaning of a statement is the method by which it is verified.
1980s Richard Rorty’s version of pragmatism argues that the very notion of truth can be dispensed with.
Charles Sanders Peirce was the scientist, logician, and philosopher of science who pioneered the philosophical movement known as pragmatism. Deeply sceptical of metaphysical ideas—such as the idea that there is a “real” world beyond the world we experience—he once asked his readers to consider what is wrong with the following theory: a diamond is actually soft, and only becomes hard when it is touched.
Peirce argued that there is “no falsity” in such thinking, for there is no way of disproving it. However, he claimed that the meaning of a concept (such as “diamond” or “hard”) is derived from the object or quality that the concept relates to—and the effects it has on our senses. Whether we think of the diamond as “soft until touched” or “always hard” before our experience, therefore, is irrelevant. Under both theories the diamond feels the same, and can be used in exactly the same way. However, the first theory is far more difficult to work with, and so is of less value to us.
This idea, that the meaning of a concept is the sensory effect of its object, is known as the pragmatic maxim, and it became the founding principle of pragmatism—the belief that the “truth” is the account of reality that works best for us.
One of the key things Peirce was trying to accomplish was to show that many debates in science, philosophy, and theology are meaningless. He claimed that they are often debates about words, rather than reality, because they are debates in which no effect on the senses can be specified.
"Nothing is vital for science; nothing can be."
Charles Sanders Peirce
See also: John Locke • Immanuel Kant • William James • John Dewey • Richard Rorty
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Epistemology
APPROACH
Pragmatism
BEFORE
1843 John Stuart Mill’s A System of Logic studies the ways in which we come to believe something is true.
1870s Charles Sanders Peirce describes his new pragmatist philosophy in How to Make Our Ideas Clear.
AFTER
1907 Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution describes reality as a flow rather than a state.
1921 Bertrand Russell explores reality as pure experience in The Analysis of Mind.
1925 John Dewey develops a personal version of pragmatism, known as “instrumentalism”, in Experience and Nature.
Over the course of the 19th century, as the United States began to find its feet as an independent nation, philosophers from New England such as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson gave a recognizably American slant to European Romantic ideas. But it was the following generation of philosophers, who lived almost a century after the Declaration of Independence, that came up with something truly original.
The first of these, Charles Sanders Peirce, proposed a theory of knowledge he called pragmatism, but his work was hardly noticed at the time; it fell to hi
s lifelong friend William James—godson to Ralph Emerson—to champion Peirce’s ideas and develop them further.
Truth and usefulness
Central to Peirce’s pragmatism was the theory that we do not acquire knowledge simply by observing, but by doing, and that we rely on that knowledge only so long as it is useful, in the sense that it adequately explains things for us. When it no longer fulfils that function, or better explanations make it redundant, we replace it. For example, we can see by looking back in history how our ideas about the world have changed constantly, from thinking that Earth is flat to knowing it to be round; from assuming that Earth is the center of the universe, to realizing that it is just one planet in a vast cosmos. The older assumptions worked perfectly adequately as explanations in their time, yet they are not true, and the universe itself has not changed. This demonstrates how knowledge as an explanatory tool is different from facts. Peirce examined the nature of knowledge in this way, but James was to apply this reasoning to the notion of truth.
For James, the truth of an idea depends on how useful it is; that is to say, whether or not it does what is required of it. If an idea does not contradict the known facts—such as laws of science—and it does provide a means of predicting things accurately enough for our purposes, he says there can be no reason not to consider it true, in the same way that Peirce considered knowledge as a useful tool irrespective of the facts. This interpretation of truth not only distinguishes it from fact, but also leads James to propose that “the truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process.” Any idea, if acted upon, is found to be true by the action we take; putting the idea into practice is the process by which it becomes true.
James also thinks that belief in an idea is an important factor in choosing to act upon it, and in this way belief is a part of the process that makes an idea true. If I am faced with a difficult decision, my belief in a particular idea will lead to a particular course of action and so contribute to its success. It is because of this that James defines “true beliefs” as those that prove useful to the believer. Again, he is careful to distinguish these from facts, which he says “are not true. They simply are. Truth is the function of the beliefs that start and terminate among them.”
"Every way of classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular purpose."
William James
The idea of a flat Earth served well as a “truth” for several thousand years, despite the fact that Earth is a sphere. James claims that an idea’s usefulness determines its truthfulness.
The right to believe
Every time we try to establish a new belief, it would be useful if we had all the available evidence and the time to make a considered decision. But in much of life we do not have that luxury; either there is not enough time to examine the known facts, or there is not enough evidence, and we are forced to a decision. We have to rely on our beliefs to guide our actions, and James says that we have “the right to believe” in these cases.
James explains this by taking the example of a man lost and starving in a forest. When he sees a path, it is important for him to believe that the path will lead him out of the forest and to habitation, because if he does not believe it, he will not take the path, and will remain lost and starving. But if he does, he will save himself. By acting on his idea that the path will lead him to safety, it becomes true. In this way our actions and decisions make our belief in an idea become true. This is why James asserts “act as if what you do makes a difference”—to which he adds the typically concise and good-humored rider, “it does.”
We must, however, approach this idea with caution: a shallow interpretation of what James is saying could give the impression that any belief, no matter how outlandish, could become true by acting upon it—which of course is not what he meant. There are certain conditions that an idea must fulfil before it can be considered a justifiable belief. The available evidence must weigh in its favor, and the idea must be sufficient to withstand criticism. In the process of acting upon the belief, it must continually justify itself by its usefulness in increasing our understanding or predicting results. And even then, it is only in retrospect that we can safely say that the belief has become true through our acting upon it.
Religious belief can bring about extraordinary changes in people’s lives, such as the healing of the sick at places of pilgrimage. This occurs regardless of whether or not a god actually exists.
Reality as a process
James was a psychologist as well as a philosopher, and he sees the implications of his ideas in terms of human psychology as much as in the theory of knowledge. He recognized the psychological necessity for humans to hold certain beliefs, particularly religious ones. James thinks that while it is not justifiable as a fact, belief in a god is useful to its believer if it allows him or her to lead a more fulfilled life, or to overcome the fear of death. These things—a more fulfilled life and a fearless confrontation of death—become true; they happen as the result of a belief, and the decisions and actions based upon it.
Along with his pragmatic notion of truth, James proposes a type of metaphysics that he calls “radical empiricism.” This approach takes reality to be a dynamic, active process, in the same way that truth is a process. Like the traditional empiricists before him, James rejected the rationalist notion that the changing world is in some way unreal, but he also went further to state that “for pragmatism, [reality] is still in the making”, as truth is constantly being made to happen. This “stream” of reality, he believes, is not susceptible to empirical analysis either, both because it is in continual flux and because the act of observing it affects the truth of the analysis. In James’s radical empiricism, from which both mind and matter are formed, the ultimate stuff of reality is pure experience.
"The pragmatic method means looking away from principles and looking towards consequences."
William James
Continuing influence
Pragmatism, proposed by Peirce and expounded by James, established America as a significant center for philosophical thought in the 20th century. James’s pragmatic interpretation of truth influenced the philosophy of John Dewey, and spawned a “neopragmatist” school of thought in America that includes philosophers such as Richard Rorty. In Europe, Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein were indebted to James’s metaphysics. His work in psychology was equally influential, and often intimately connected with his philosophy, notably his concept of the “stream of consciousness”, which in turn influenced writers such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce.
WILLIAM JAMES
Born in New York City, William James was brought up in a wealthy and intellectual family; his father was a famously eccentric theologian, and his brother Henry became a well-known author. During his childhood he lived for several years in Europe, where he pursued a love of painting, but at the age of 19 he abandoned this to study science. His studies at Harvard Medical School were interrupted by the ill health and depression that were to prevent him from ever practicing medicine, but he eventually graduated and in 1872 took a teaching post in physiology at Harvard University. His increasing interest in the subjects of psychology and philosophy led him to write acclaimed publications in these fields, and he was awarded a professorship in philosophy at Harvard in 1880. He taught there until his retirement in 1907.
Key works
1890 The Principles of Psychology
1896 The Will to Bel
ieve
1902 The Varieties of Religious Experience
1907 Pragmatism
See also: John Stuart Mill • Charles Sanders Peirce • Henri Bergson • John Dewey • Bertrand Russell • Ludwig Wittgenstein • Richard Rorty
INTRODUCTION
Toward the end of the 19th century, philosophy once again reached a turning point. Science, and particularly Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution (1859), had thrown into doubt the idea of the universe as God’s creation, with humankind as the peak of his creative genius. Moral and political philosophy had become entirely human-centered, with Karl Marx declaring religion “the opiate of the people.” Following in the footsteps of Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche believed that Western philosophy, with its roots in Greek and Judaeo-Christian traditions, was ill-equipped to explain this modern world view. He proposed a radical new approach to finding meaning in life, one that involved casting aside old values and traditions. In doing so, he set the agenda for much of the philosophy of the 20th century.