IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Ontology
APPROACH
Existentialism
BEFORE
1641 In his Meditations, René Descartes argues that there are two worlds: the world of mind and the world of matter.
Early 1900s Edmund Husserl establishes phenomenology. He claims that philosophers must look at the world anew, putting all preconceptions aside.
AFTER
1920s Martin Heidegger explores questions about what our existence means for us, citing Ortega as an influence.
1930s onward Ortega’s philosophy becomes popular in Spain and Latin America, influencing philosophers Xavier Zubiri, José Gaos, Ignacio Ellacuría, and María Zambrano, among others.
Ortega y Gasset’s philosophy is about life. He is not interested in analyzing the world in a cool and detached fashion. Instead, he wants to explore how philosophy can engage creatively with life. Reason, Ortega believes, is not something passive, but something active—something that allows us to get to grips with the circumstances in which we find ourselves, and allows us to change our lives for the better.
In his Meditations on Quixote, published in 1914, Ortega writes: “I am myself and my circumstances.” Descartes said that it was possible to imagine ourselves as thinking beings, and yet to doubt the existence of the external world, including our own bodies. But Ortega says that it makes no sense to see ourselves as separate from the world. If we want to think seriously about ourselves, we have to see that we are always immersed in particular circumstances—circumstances that are often oppressive and limiting. These limitations are not only those of our physical surroundings, but also of our thoughts, which contain prejudices, and our behavior, which is shaped by habit.
While many people live without reflecting on the nature of their circumstances, Ortega says that philosophers should not only strive to understand their circumstances better, they should actively seek to change them. Indeed, he claims that the philosopher’s duty is to expose the assumptions that lie behind all our beliefs.
The energy of life
In order to transform the world and to engage creatively with our own existence, Ortega says that we must look at our lives with fresh eyes. This means not only looking anew at our external circumstances, but also looking inside ourselves to reconsider our beliefs and prejudices. Only when we have done this will we be able to commit ourselves to creating new possibilities.
However, there is a limit to the amount that we can change the world. Our habitual thinking runs deep, and even if we free ourselves enough to imagine new possibilities and new futures, our external circumstances may stand in the way of realizing these possibilities. The futures that we imagine will always collide with the reality of the circumstances in which we find ourselves. This is why Ortega sees life as a series of collisions with the future.
Ortega’s idea is challenging on both a personal and a political level. It reminds us that we have a duty to attempt to change our circumstances, even though we may encounter difficulties in doing so, and even though our attempts may not always succeed. In The Revolt of the Masses, he warns that democracy carries within it the threat of tyranny by the majority, and that to live by majority rule—to live “like everyone else”—is to live without a personal vision or moral code. Unless we engage creatively with our own lives, we are hardly living at all. This is why for Ortega, reason is vital—it holds the energy of life itself.
Every act of hope, such as celebrating Christmas on the front line in World War I, is a testament to our ability to overcome our circumstances. For Ortega, this is “vital reason” in action.
"I am myself and my circumstances."
José Ortega y Gasset
JOSÉ ORTEGA Y GASSET
José Ortega y Gasset was born in Madrid, Spain, in 1883. He studied philosophy first in Madrid, then at various German universities—where he became influenced by the philosophy of Immanuel Kant—before settling in Spain as a university professor.
Throughout his life, Ortega earned a living not only as a philosopher but as a journalist and essayist. He was also actively engaged in Spanish politics in the 1920s and 1930s, but his involvement came to an end with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. Ortega then went into exile in Argentina, where he stayed, disillusioned with politics, until 1945. After three years in Portugal, he returned to Madrid in 1948, where he founded the Institute of Humanities. He continued working as a philosopher and journalist for the remainder of his life.
Key works
1914 Meditations on Quixote
1925 The Dehumanization of Art
1930 The Revolt of the Masses
1935 History as a System
1957 What is Philosophy?
See also: René Descartes • Immanuel Kant • Edmund Husserl • Martin Heidegger • Jean-Paul Sartre
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Ethics
APPROACH
Phenomenology
BEFORE
5th century BCE Socrates claims that he is wise because he knows he is ignorant.
4th century St. Augustine of Hippo writes Confessions, which is both an autobiography and a work of philosophy.
Early 13th century Buddhist monk Shinran claims that salvation is only possible through “other power.”
1920s Martin Heidegger writes that philosophy is a matter of our relationship with our own being.
AFTER
1990s Jacques Derrida, influenced by phenomenology, explores themes such as confession and forgiveness.
Before you read on, confess! This may seem like a strange idea, but it is one that Japanese philosopher Tanabe Hajime wants us to take seriously. If we want to philosophize, Tanabe believes, we cannot do so without making a confession. But what is it that we should confess, and why? To answer these questions, we need to look at the roots of Tanabe’s philosophy in both the European and the Japanese traditions of philosophy. In terms of its European roots, Tanabe traces his thought back to the Greek philosopher Socrates who lived in the 5th century BCE. Socrates is important to Tanabe because of the way he frankly confessed that he knew nothing. According to the story, the oracle at Delphi said that Socrates was the wisest man in Athens, and Socrates, who was certain of his own ignorance, set out to prove the oracle wrong. After innumerable conversations with people in Athens, he came to the conclusion that he was indeed the wisest person in the city, because he alone could accept that he knew nothing.
The Japanese roots of Tanabe’s idea go back to the thought of the Buddhist monk Shinran, who belonged to what is known as the Pure Land school of Buddhism. Shinran’s innovation was his claim that enlightenment is impossible if we rely on our own power. Instead, we must confess our own ignorance and limitations, so that we are open to what both Shinran and Tanabe call tariki, or “other power.” In the context of Pure Land Buddhism, this other power is that of the Buddha Amitabha. In the context of Tanabe’s philosophy, confession leads to a recognition of “absolute nothingness”, and ultimately to self-awakening and wisdom.
The Buddha Amitabha, here shown between Kannon (Compassion) and Seishi (Wisdom), is the principal buddha of the Pure Land school of Buddhism, to which Shinran belonged.
Forsaking ourselves
For Tanabe, then, philosophy is not about discussing the finer points of logic, or about arguing or debating anything—it is not, in fact, an “intellectual” discipline. For Tanabe, it is something much more fundamental—a process of relating, in the deepest possible sense, to our very own being—an idea that is partly shaped by his reading of Martin Heidegger. It is only
through confessing, Tanabe believes, that we can rediscover our true being—a process he describes in directly religious terms as a form of death and resurrection. This death and resurrection is the rebirth of the mind through “other power”, and its passing from the limited view of the “self” to the perspective of enlightenment. However, this shift is not simply a preparation for philosophy—on the contrary, it is the very work of philosophy itself, which is rooted in scepticism and the “forsaking of ourselves to the grace of other power.” Philosophy, in other words, is not an activity that we engage in, but something that happens through us when we gain access to our true selves by letting go of the self—a phenomenon that Tanabe calls “action without an acting subject.”
Continual confession is, Tanabe writes, “the ultimate conclusion” to which the recognition of our limitations drives us. In other words, Tanabe asks us not to find new answers to old philosophical questions, but to re-evaluate the very nature of philosophy.
"For a problem to belong to philosophy, there must be something inconceivable in it."
Hajime Tanabe
HAJIME TANABE
Hajime Tanabe was born in Tokyo, Japan, in 1885. After studying at Tokyo University, he was appointed associate professor of philosophy at Kyoto University, where he was an active member of what became known as the Kyoto School of philosophy. In the 1920s, he spent time in Germany studying with the philosophers Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, and after his return to Japan he was appointed to the post of full professor. He was deeply affected by World War II, and when it ended in 1945 he retired from teaching philosophy. Tanabe’s book Philosophy as Metanoetics was published a year later, in 1946. After his retirement, Tanabe dedicated the remainder of his life to meditation and writing.
Key works
1946 Philosophy as Metanoetics
See also: Siddharta Gautama • Socrates • St. Augustine of Hippo • Edmund Husserl • Martin Heidegger • Jacques Derrida
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Philosophy of language
APPROACH
Logic
BEFORE
4th century BCE Aristotle sets the foundations of logic.
Late 19th century Gottlob Frege develops the foundations of modern logic.
Early 20th century Bertrand Russell develops notation that translates natural language into logical propositions.
AFTER
1920s Ideas in the Tractatus are used by philosophers of the Vienna Circle, such as Moritz Schlick and Rudolf Carnap, to develop Logical Positivism.
From 1930 Wittgenstein rejects the ideas expressed in the Tractatus, and begins to explore very different ways of viewing language.
Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is perhaps one of the most forbidding texts in the history of 20th-century philosophy. Only around 70 pages long in its English translation, the book is made up of a series of highly condensed and technical numbered remarks.
In order to appreciate the full significance of the Tractatus, it is important to set it within its philosophical context. The fact that Wittgenstein is talking about the “limits” of my language and my world sets him firmly within the philosophical tradition that stems from the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant. In The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant set out to explore the limits of knowledge by posing questions such as “What can I know?” and “What things will lie forever outside of human understanding?” One reason that Kant asked such questions was that he believed many problems in philosophy arose because we fail to recognize the limitations of human understanding. By turning our attention back onto ourselves and asking about the necessary limits of our knowledge, we can then either resolve, or even perhaps dissolve, nearly all of the philosophical problems of the past.
The Tractatus tackles the same kind of task that Kant did, but does so in a far more radical fashion. Wittgenstein states that he is setting out to make clear what can be meaningfully said. In much the same way that Kant strives to set the limits of reason, Wittgenstein wants to set the limits of language and, by implication, of all thought. He does this because he suspects that a great deal of philosophical discussion and disagreement is based on some fundamental errors in how we go about thinking and talking about the world.
"The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem."
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Logical structure
For all of their apparent complexity, Wittgenstein’s central ideas in the Tractatus are essentially based on a fairly simple principle, that both language and the world are formally structured, and that these structures can be broken down into their component parts. Wittgenstein attempts to lay bare the structures both of the world and of language, and then to show the way they relate to each other. Having done this, he attempts to draw a number of wide-reaching philosophical conclusions.
If we are to understand what Wittgenstein means when he says that limits of my language are the limits of my world, we need to ask what he means by the words “world” and “language”, because he does not use these words in the everyday sense we might expect. When he talks about language, the debt Wittgenstein owes to the British philosopher Bertrand Russell becomes apparent. For Russell, who was an important figure in the development of philosophical logic, everyday language was inadequate for talking clearly and precisely about the world. He believed that logic was a “perfect language”, which excluded all traces of ambiguity, so he developed a way of translating everyday language into what he considered a logical form.
Logic is concerned with what are known in philosophy as propositions. We can think of propositions as assertions that it is possible for us to consider as being either true or false. For example, the statement “the elephant is very angry” is a proposition, but the word “elephant” is not. According to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, meaningful language must consist solely of propositions. “The totality of propositions,” he writes, “is language.”
Knowing a little about what Wittgenstein means by language, we can now explore what he means by “the world.” The Tractatus begins with the claim that “the world is all that is the case.” This might appear to be straightforward and robustly matter-of-fact, but taken on its own, it is not entirely clear what Wittgenstein means by this statement. He goes on to write that “the world is the totality of facts, not of things.” Here we can see a parallel between the way that Wittgenstein treats language and the way he is treating the world. It may be a fact, for example, that the elephant is angry, or that there is an elephant in the room, but an elephant just by itself is not a fact.
From this point, it begins to become clear how the structure of language and that of the world might be related. Wittgenstein says that language “pictures” the world. He formulated this idea during World War I, when he read in a newspaper about a court case in Paris. The case concerned a car accident, and the events were re-enacted for those present in court using model cars and model pedestrians to represent the cars and pedestrians in the real world. The model cars and the model pedestrians were able to depict their counterparts, because they were related to each other in exactly the same way as the real cars and real pedestrians involved in the accident. Similarly, all the elements depicted on a map are related to each other in exactly the same way as they are in the landscape that the map represents. What a picture shares with that which it is depicting, Wittgenstein says, is a logical form.
It is important here to realize that we are talking about logical pictures, and not about visual pictures. Wittgenstein presents a useful example to show wh
at he means. The sound waves generated by a performance of a symphony, the score of that symphony, and the pattern formed by the grooves on a gramophone recording of the symphony all share between them the same logical form. Wittgenstein states, “A picture is laid against reality like a measure.” In this way it can depict the world.
Of course, our picture may be incorrect. It may not agree with reality, for example, by appearing to show that the elephant is not angry when the elephant is, in fact, very angry. There is no middle ground here for Wittgenstein. Because he starts with propositions that are, by their very nature, true or false, pictures also are either true or false.
Language and the world, then, both have a logical form; and language can speak about the world by picturing the world, and picturing it in a fashion that agrees with reality. It is at this point that Wittgenstein’s idea gets really interesting, and it is here that we can see why Wittgenstein is interested in the limits of language.
Consider the following idea: “You should give half of your salary to charity.” This is not picturing anything in the world in the sense meant by Wittgenstein. What can be said—what Wittgenstein calls the “totality of true propositions”—is merely the sum of all those things that are the case, or the natural sciences.
Discussion about religious and ethical values is, for Wittgenstein, strictly meaningless. Because the things that we are attempting to talk about when we discuss such topics are beyond the limits of the world, they also lie beyond the limits of our language. Wittgenstein writes, “It is clear that ethics cannot be put into language.”
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