The Philosophy Book
Page 37
Structuralism’s contribution to philosophy was not enthusiastically received by philosophers in the English-speaking world, who viewed the work at best with suspicion, and largely with derision. Within a philosophical tradition of linguistic analysis, continental structuralism seemed ultimately simplistic—although it was often written in impenetrable prose that belied its literary roots.
The squabbles of philosophers did not inspire the popular culture of the time. This may have been because postmodernism was largely incomprehensible to the general public. Their most common experience of it was postmodern art, which was highly conceptual and accompanied by knowing references by an intellectual elite. It seemed to deliberately exclude any possibility of mass appreciation, and became seen as an abstract philosophy only enjoyed by professional academics and artists, and out of touch with the world most people lived in. The public, as well as businesses and governments, wanted more down-to-earth guidance from philosophy.
A more practical approach
Though postmodern philosophy may not have found favor with the majority of the general public, some philosophers of the period chose to focus on more pressing social, political, and ethical questions that had more relevance to people’s everyday lives. Thinkers in postcolonial Africa such as Frantz Fanon began to examine race, identity, and the problems that were inherent in any struggle for liberation. Later thinkers, such as Henry Odera Oruka, would begin to amass a new history of African philosophy, questioning the rules governing philosophy itself, and what it should include.
Continuing in the tradition of Simone de Beauvoir’s existential feminist philosophy, French philosophers such as Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray added a postmodern perspective to feminism, but other thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic left postmodernism completely to one side. Some, such as American philosopher John Rawls and Germany’s Jürgen Habermas, returned to examining important everyday concepts in depth, such as justice and communication.
The more practical approach to philosophy in the 21st century has led to a renewed public interest in the subject. There is no way of predicting what direction it will take, but philosophy is certain to continue to provide the world with thought-provoking ideas.
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Philosophy of language
APPROACH
Semiotics
BEFORE
380 BCE Plato’s Symposium is the first sustained philosophical discussion of love in the West.
4th century CE St Augustine of Hippo writes extensively on the nature of love.
1916 Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics establishes modern semiotics and the study of language as a series of signs.
1966 French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan looks at the relationship between Alcibiades, Socrates, and Agathon in his Écrits.
AFTER
1990s Julia Kristeva explores the relationship between love, semiotics, and psychoanalysis.
T he strangest, but most popular, book written by philosopher and literary critic Roland Barthes is A Lover’s Discourse. As the French title, Fragments d’un discours amoureux, suggests, this is a book told in fragments and snapshots, somewhat like the essay One-Way Street by the German philosopher Walter Benjamin. A Lover’s Discourse is not so much a book of philosophy as it is a love story; but it is a love story without any real story. There are no characters, and there is nothing in the way of a plot. There are only the reflections of a lover in what Barthes calls “extreme solitude.”
At the very beginning of the book, Barthes makes clear that a plot is not possible, because the solitary thoughts of a lover come in outbursts that are often contradictory and lack any clear order. As a lover, Barthes suggests, I might even find myself plotting against myself. The lover is somebody who might be affectionately described as having “lost the plot.” So instead of using a plot, or narrative, Barthes arranges his book like an extraordinary encyclopaedia of contradictory and disordered outbursts, any of which might serve as the point the reader might suddenly exclaim, “That’s so true! I recognize that scene…”
The language of love
It is in this context that Barthes suggests “language is a skin.” Language, at least the language of the lover, is not something that simply talks about the world in a neutral fashion, but it is something that, as Barthes says, “trembles with desire.” Barthes writes of how “I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words.” Even if I write cool, detached philosophy about love, Barthes claims, there is buried in my philosophical coolness a secret address to a particular person, an object of my desire, even if this somebody is “a phantom or a creature still to come.”
Barthes gives an example of this secret address (although not, it should be said, in the context of a particularly detached philosophical discussion) from Plato’s dialogue, The Symposium. This is an account of a discussion on the subject of love that takes place in the house of the poet Agathon. A statesman called Alcibiades turns up to the discussion both late and drunk, and sits down on a couch with Agathon and the philosopher Socrates. The drunken speech he gives is full of praise for Socrates, but it is Agathon that Alcibiades desires; it is against Agathon, so to speak, that Alcibiades’ language is rubbing.
But what of the language that we use when talking of other things? Is only the lover’s language a skin that trembles with hidden desire, or is this also true of other types of language? Barthes does not tell us, leaving us to consider the idea for ourselves.
"Every lover is mad."
Roland Barthes
The lover’s language is like a skin, says Barthes, which is inhabits by the lover. Its words are able to move the beloved—and only the beloved—in an almost physical or tactile way.
ROLAND BARTHES
Barthes was born in Cherbourg, France, in 1915. He attended the University of Sorbonne in Paris from 1935, graduating in 1939, but by this time he had already contracted the tuberculosis that would afflict him for the remainder of his life. His illness made it difficult to acquire teaching qualifications, but it exempted him from military service during World War II. After the war, having finally qualified as a teacher, he taught in France, Romania, and Egypt. He returned to live in France full time in 1952, and there started to write the pieces that were collected together and published under the title Mythologies in 1957.
Barthes’ reputation grew steadily through the 1960s, in France and internationally, and he taught both at home and abroad. He died at the age of 64, when he was run over by a laundry van after lunching with President Mitterrand.
Key works
1957 Mythologies
1973 The Pleasure of the Text
1977 A Lover’s Discourse
See also: Plato • St Augustine of Hippo • Ferdinand de Saussure • Walter Benjamin • Jacques Derrida • Julia Kristeva
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Philosophy of science
APPROACH
Analytic philosophy
BEFORE
4th century BCE Aristotle defines human beings as “political animals”, suggesting that not only are we natural beings, but that the creation of culture is a part of our nature.
1st century BCE Roman poet Titus Lucretius Carus writes On the Nature of the Universe, exploring the natural roots of human culture.
1859 Naturalist Charles Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species, arguing that all life has evolved through a process of natural selection.
AFTER
1980s onward Richard Dawkins and Mary Midgley
debate the implications of Darwinism for our view of human nature.
In her book Beast and Man, published in 1978, the British philosopher Mary Midgley assesses the impact the natural sciences have on our understanding of human nature. It is often claimed that the findings of the sciences, particularly those of palaeontology and evolutionary biology, undermine our views of what it is to be human. Midgley wants to address these fears, and she does so by stressing both the things that set us apart from other animals and the things that we share with the rest of the animal kingdom.
One of the questions that she tackles is that of the relationship between nature and culture in human life. Her concern is to address the fact that many people see nature and culture as somehow opposed, as if culture is something non-natural that is added onto our animal natures.
Midgley disagrees with the idea that culture is something of a wholly different order to nature. Instead, she wants to argue that culture is a natural phenomenon. In other words, we have evolved to be the kinds of creatures who have cultures. It could be said that we spin culture as naturally as spiders spin webs. If this is so, then we can no more do without culture than a spider can do without its web: our need for culture is both innate and natural. In this way, Midgley hopes both to account for human uniqueness, and also to put us in the larger context of our evolutionary past.
"We mistakenly cut ourselves off from other animals, trying not to believe we have an animal nature."
Mary Midgley
See also: Plato • Aristotle • Ludwig Wittgenstein
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Philosophy of science
APPROACH
History of science
BEFORE
1543 Nicolaus Copernicus publishes On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, leading to a paradigm shift in our view of the solar system.
1934 In The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Karl Popper defines “falsifiability” as a criterion for science.
AFTER
1975 Paul Feyerabend writes Against Method, advocating “epistemological anarchism.”
1976 In Proofs and Refutations, Imre Lakatos brings together Karl Popper’s “falsificationism” and the work of Kuhn.
Today Rival interpretations of quantum phenomena yield rival paradigms of the subatomic world.
American physicist and historian of science Thomas Kuhn is best known for his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published in 1962. The book is both an exploration of turning points in the history of science and an attempt to set out a theory of how revolutions in science take place.
Paradigm shifts
Science, in Kuhn’s view, alternates between periods of “normal science” and periods of “crisis.” Normal science is the routine process by which scientists working within a theoretical framework—or “paradigm”—accumulate results that do not call the theoretical underpinnings of their framework into question. Sometimes, of course, anomalous, or unfamiliar, results are encountered, but these are usually considered to be errors on the part of the scientists concerned—proof, according to Kuhn, that normal science does not aim at novelties. Over time, however, anomalous results can accumulate until a crisis point is reached. Following the crisis, if a new theory has been formulated, there is a shift in the paradigm, and the new theoretical framework replaces the old. Eventually this framework is taken for granted, and normal science resumes—until further anomalies arise. An example of such a shift was the shattering of the classical view of space and time following the confirmation of Einstein’s theories of relativity.
Nicolaus Copernicus’s claim that Earth orbits the Sun was a revolution in scientific thinking. It led to scientists abandoning the belief that our planet is at the center of the universe.
See also: Francis Bacon • Rudolf Carnap • Karl Popper • Paul Feyerabend • Richard Rorty
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Political philosophy
APPROACH
Social contract theory
BEFORE
c.380 BCE Plato discusses the nature of justice and the just society in The Republic.
1651 Thomas Hobbes sets out a theory of social contract in his book Leviathan.
1689 John Locke develops Hobbes’s theory in his Second Treatise of Government.
1762 Jean-Jacques Rousseau writes The Social Contract. His views are later adopted by French revolutionaries.
AFTER
1974 Robert Nozick criticizes Rawls’ “original position” in his influential book Anarchy, State, and Utopia.
2001 Rawls defends his views in his last book, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement.
In his book A Theory of Justice, first published in 1971, political philosopher John Rawls argues for a re-evaluation of justice in terms of what he calls “justice as fairness.” His approach falls into the tradition known as social contract theory, which sees the rule of law as a form of contract that individuals enter into because it yields benefits that exceed what they can attain individually. Rawls’ version of this theory involves a thought experiment in which people are made ignorant of their place in society, or placed in what he calls the “original position” in which the social contract is made. From this Rawls establishes principles of justice on which, he claims, all rational beings should agree.
The original position
Imagine that a group of strangers is marooned on a desert island, and that, after giving up hope of being rescued, they decide to start a new society from scratch. Each of the survivors wants to further their own interests, but each also sees that they can only do so by working together in some way—in other words, by forming a social contract. The question is: how do they go about establishing the principles of justice? What rules do they lay down? If they are interested in a truly rational and impartial justice, then there are countless rules that have to be discounted immediately. For example, the rule “If your name is John, you must always eat last”, is neither rational nor impartial, even if it may be to your advantage if your name is “John.”
In such a position, says Rawls, what we need to do is cast a “veil of ignorance” over all the facts of our lives, such as who we are, and where we were born, and then ask what kind of rules it would be best for us to live by. Rawls’ point is that the only rules that could rationally be agreed on by all parties are ones that genuinely honor impartiality, and don’t, for example, take race, class, creed, natural talent, or disability into account. In other words, if I don’t know what my place in society will be, rational self-interest compels me to vote for a world in which everyone is treated fairly.
Rationality versus charity
It is important to note that for Rawls this is not a story about how justice has actually arisen in the world. Instead, he gives us a way of testing our theories of justice against an impartial benchmark. If they fail to measure up, his point is that it is our reason, and not simply our charity, that has failed.
The representation of justice as a blindfolded lady with a set of scales expresses the idea that no-one is above the law.
JOHN RAWLS
John Rawls was born in 1921 in Maryland, USA. He studied at Princeton University, then joined the army and served in the Pacific during World War II. After the war, in which he saw the ruins of Hiroshima, he resigned from the army and returned to studying philosophy, earning his PhD from Princeton in 1950.
Rawls undertook further study at Oxford University, where he met philosopher Isaiah Berlin, before returning to the US to teach. After a period at Cornell and MIT, he moved to Harvard, where he wrote A The
ory of Justice. While at Harvard, he also taught up-and-coming philosophers Thomas Nagel and Martha Nussbaum.
In 1995 Rawls suffered the first of several strokes, but continued working until his death in 2002.
Key works
1971 A Theory of Justice
1993 Political Liberalism
1999 The Law of Peoples
2000 Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy
2001 Justice as Fairness: A Restatement
See also: Plato • Thomas Hobbes • John Locke • Jean-Jacques Rousseau • Noam Chomsky
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Aesthetics
APPROACH
Analytic philosophy
BEFORE
c.380 BCE Plato’s Republic explores the relationship between art forms and political institutions.