Miss Buddha

by Ulf Wolf

  He was embraced, and to some degree perverted, by those who held personal power as the highest goal of mankind.

  Schopenhauer

  Hegel’s successors, however, rejected Hegel’s stated faith in reason and progress. Arthur Schopenhauer, for one, in The World as Will and Idea (1819) argued that existence is fundamentally irrational and simply an expression of blind, meaningless force—a force he equated with the human will to live and reproduce. But will, he held, entails continuous striving and inevitably results in disappointment and suffering.

  Given this bleak assessment, Schopenhauer offered two avenues of escape from irrational (though some would call it rational) will: through the contemplation of art, which enables one to endure the tragedy of life, and through the renunciation of will and of the striving for happiness.

  It is significant to note that Schopenhauer was one of the first Western philosophers to be influenced by Indian philosophy, then beginning to appear in European translations. The influence of Buddhist thought, for example, appears in his sense that the world is suffering which can be overcome only through renunciation.

  Nietzsche

  Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) continued the revolt against reason initiated by the romantic movement, but he rather scornfully repudiated what he felt was Schopenhauer’s resigned attitude. Instead, Nietzsche advocated the values of vitality and strength, and the supremacy of a purely egoistic existence.

  He also scorned the Christian and democratic ideas of the equal worth of human beings, maintaining that it was up to the aristocrat to refuse to subordinate himself to a state or cause, thereby achieving self-realization and greatness.

  For Nietzsche, the power to be strong was the greatest value in life. However, although Nietzsche did indeed valued geniuses over dictators, according to many subsequent critics, his beliefs helped bolster the ideas of the National Socialists (Nazis) who gained control of Germany in the 1930s.

  Kierkegaard

  Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) developed his own, subtle philosophy of life, a philosophy that was not appreciated—if even comprehended—until a century after it was formed.

  His was a philosophy of a literary, religious, and self-revealing (rather than systematic) character and his views stressed the importance of experiences that the intellectual mind judges as unwanted or absurd, including the experiences of angst and “fear and trembling” (which was to become the title of one of his books).

  Such experiences, he held, lead first to despair and eventually to religious revelation and faith. Kierkegaard expressed this process by the religious person commanded by God to sacrifice his own most cherished treasures, as was Abraham when ordered to sacrifice his son Isaac in the Old Testament.

  Although Abraham does not understand this quite absurd, if Godly, request, he decides to obey in an act of blind commitment. And it is such terrible experiences, Kierkegaard claimed, that teaches us that our relationship to God is absolute (though some would say blind) and all else relative.

  What is most significant in a person’s life, Kierkegaard concluded, are the decisions born of such ethical crises.

  Bentham and Mill, Utilitarians

  Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), who were both economists as well as philosophers, were to dominate English philosophy in the 19th century.

  Bentham’s contribution was the ethical principle of utilitarianism—in essence: what is useful is good—and Mill then carried it further and refined the doctrine.

  Just as Kant had argued a rational principle of moral law superior to individual desire—by which people’s conduct ought to be governed—the utilitarians argued an ethical principle superior to the self-interest of the individual.

  They based this principle on the assumption that, first of all, we all desire happiness; secondly, that we have to find that happiness in society, and, as a consequence, we all have a vested interest in society’s general happiness.

  This led to the position that whatever produces the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people is most useful for all.

  Mill, in elaborating and refining this principle, partly abandoned the greatest good idea and instead maintained that one should consider the quality, or type, of pleasure as well as the quantity.

  Karl Marx and Marxism

  Karl Marx, and his collaborator Friedrich Engels accepted the basic form of Hegel’s dialectic of history, but then made crucial modifications to it.

  For them history was not a matter of Absolute Spirit developing, but a development of the material conditions governing humanity’s economic existence. In their view—which became known as historical materialism—the history of society is a history of class struggle in which the ruling class uses religion and other traditions and institutions, as well as its economic power, to, basically, suppress and dominate the working classes—which, if history is to be believed, is not too far off the mark.

  Human culture, according to Marx, is dependent on economic (material) conditions and serves economic ends. Religion, he concluded, is “the opiate of the masses” that serves the political end of suppressing mass revolution.

  Marx’s theory of revolution, history, economics, and politics—claiming to have proved that the long history of oppression would end only when the masses rise up and usher in a revolution that will create a classless utopian society—laid the philosophical groundwork for Communism, and motivated the Russian Revolutions of 1917, the Communist victory in China in 1949, and the Cuban Revolution of 1959.

  Pragmatism

  Toward the end of the 19th century, pragmatism continued what the empiricist had begun by basing knowledge on experience. As a result, pragmatism became the most vital American school of thought of its time.

  To the pragmatists, ideas only demonstrate their value insofar as they enrich human experience. All other ideas are more or less worthless, speculative fluff.

  The founder of this movement, and who gave the movement its name, was Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914). Two other philosophers also made significant contributions: the psychologist and religious thinker William James (1842-1910)—brother of famed author Henry James—and John Dewey (1859-1952), an educator, and a psychologist as well.

  Peirce formulated a very pragmatic theory of knowledge and advocated a “laboratory philosophy” whereby researchers should only investigate and clarify knowledge that is gained either through everyday experience or through scientific inquiry.

  By restricting the realm of meaningful questions to those that concern experience, Peirce hoped to introduce scientific logic into metaphysics.

  He also advanced a theory of truth as agreement, and defined such truth as that which an ideal community of researchers could agree upon. Now, one could object that there is no such thing as an “ideal community of researchers” hence no chance of truth according to Pierce.

  As for traditional philosophy, Peirce maintained that many such concepts have no practical use and thus are meaningless.

  Whereas Peirce sought to isolate the exact meaning of terms and ideas and so sought to make metaphysics a precise and pragmatic discipline, James and Dewey applied the principles of pragmatism to develop a more comprehensive philosophy.

  Like Peirce, James held that the meaning of ideas lies in their practical consequences. If an idea has no practical uses, then it is meaningless.

  Accordingly, James focused on the power of true ideas to offer individuals, rather than scientific researchers, practical guidance in handling problems that arise in everyday experience. Truth, according to James, resides in those experiences that enable common people to successfully navigate the challenges and demands of the world.

  Dewey, on the other hand, focused more on the cooperative process in which human beings, as intelligent and social beings (when and where that happens to be the case), create and revise ideas about the world.

  One such process, according to Dewey, was scientific inquiry. Another was active
participation in just and democratic social and political communities. Based on his postulates and on his research, Dewey concluded that there are only two sure guides for intelligent behavior: science and democracy.

  20th Century Philosophy

  A potpourri of methods, interests, and styles of argumentation marked 20th-century philosophy and was to prove both fruitful and destructive.

  This diversity, and the divisions that arose as a result of it, proved fruitful in that new topics arose and new ways developed for discussing these topics philosophically. It proved destructive, however, as philosophers ceased to address the man on the street, or even the enthusiastic amateur, and instead began to write for a narrow audience of the likeminded, and not only ignored the common man as inconsequential but often also derided philosophical styles different from their own.

  In the decades following World War II (1939-1945), a significant division arose between what was now termed the “continental” philosophers, who worked on the European continent, and philosophers in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia.

  Deconstruction and other postmodern theories followed existentialism and phenomenology on the continent, whereas the Americans, Britons, and Australians worked in the analytic tradition.

  Toward the end of the century this conflict eased as interest shifted from earlier disputes, and more philosophers now began exploring common roots instead of conflicts between the postmodern and the traditional.

  Phenomenology

  It was the German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) who founded the movement that was to be known as phenomenology. Husserl’s view was that the philosopher’s mission was to describe and analyze phenomena as they occur, whether such phenomena are objective or subjective, emphasizing careful observation and interpretation of our conscious perceptions of things.

  First, he held, we must pay more attention to what we are conscious of. We must perceive far more carefully and intensely than we do in everyday life. We must, in a word, be more mindful about our surroundings.

  Secondly, we must then reflect upon these observations and interpret them without preconceptions. Husserl maintained that the only way to solve philosophical problems was through a logical analysis of the data emerging from such a “phenomenological study” of the contents of the mind.

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger further developed phenomenology and its emphasis on pure description. For them, however—Plato smiling in the wings—all perceptual experience references something beyond and independent of our perception of it.

  Existentialism

  Heidegger also had a significant hand in existentialism. The existentialist, by definition, focuses on the personal: on individual existence, subjectivity, and choice.

  Its two central doctrines hold that there is no such thing as a fixed human essence structuring our lives and, further, that our choices are always and only determined by free will.

  According to existentialism, we determine or create our individual selves by the choices we make in life. This, of course, implies that human beings have enormous freedom. In fact, existentialists asserted human free will is so powerful that it overwhelms many individuals, who then “flee freedom” by falsely assuming religion, science, or other external factors as shackles to limit that freedom—a flight, also, from responsibility.

  Apart from Heidegger, prominent existentialist thinkers include Simone de Beauvoir and her companion Jean-Paul Sartre, philosopher, novelist, and playwright.

  Analytic Philosophy

  By the end of the First World War, another flavor of philosophy rose to prominence in the United Kingdom: The Analytic. This movement shifted its investigative focus from philosophy’s traditional questions of life and truth and what existence is about to those of language, which the movement claimed was now philosophy’s proper purview.

  Most analytic philosophers asserted that a significant number of issues prominent in the history of philosophy are, in fact, unimportant or even meaningless because they arose when philosophers misunderstood or misused language.

  Analytic philosophy, then, is squarely based upon the assumption that a careful analysis of language and its use in describing philosophical concepts can clear up these problems and confusions.

  Naturally, if we hold widely divergent definitions of various key concepts, and then perhaps widely divergent definitions of the words constituting the original definitions, yes, then communication will suffer serious difficulties, and disagreements and arguments will surely ensue.

  One can question, however, to what degree earlier philosophers simply cross-defined each other, or whether the Analytical Movement was simply putting linguistic blinders on because they could not face the more (and bleeding) realistic issues at hand.

  Be that as it may, the two founding fathers of Analytic Philosophy were British philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell and Austrian-born British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

  Russell, quite naturally and strongly influenced by the precision of his first love, mathematics, wished to construct a logical language so precise that it would, beyond discussion or argument, reflect the nature of the world.

  He reasoned that what he called the “surface grammar” of everyday language in the streets masks a true, and infinitely more precise, “logical grammar,” a thorough knowledge of which is a prerequisite to understanding the true (philosophical and logical) meaning of statements.

  Russell and many of his colleagues and followers went so far as to assert that any complex statement can be reduced to simple components; should such a statement’s internal logic not permit such distillation and reduction, then it must be meaningless—quite an assumption, if I may say so.

  Russell’s view was to be central to the founding of the so-called Vienna Circle, a group of analytic philosophers active from about 1920 to 1950, led by Rudolf Carnap and Moritz Schlick.

  The members of the Vienna Circle were all scientists or mathematicians as well as philosophers, and their musings and speculations originated the movement known as Logical Positivism. They speculated that the clarification of meaning is philosophy’s job one, and that all meaningful statements are either scientifically (or experientially) verifiable statements about the world or else logical tautologies (self-evident propositions).

  According to the Vienna Circle, the discovery of new facts belonged to science and science alone, and metaphysics—the subsequent construction of comprehensive truths about reality—was nothing but pretentious pseudo-science.

  Wittgenstein, who studied with Russell at Cambridge, was perhaps the most important of the analytic philosophers, eclipsing even his famous colleague. Like Russell, he distrusted ordinary, day-to-day language. In his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (published in 1921) Wittgenstein declared that “philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts.”

  Indeed, philosophy’s function, he believed, was to monitor the use of language by reducing complex statements to their elementary components and by rebuffing all attempts to misuse words in creating the illusion of philosophical depth—something he though fraudulent.

  “What can be said at all can be said clearly,” he said, “and what we cannot talk about [clearly] we must consign to silence.”

  The Tractatus did make important contributions not only to the philosophy of language and logic, but also to the philosophy of mathematics.

  Granted, the account of language in Wittgenstein’s later work was much richer and more sophisticated than that in the Tractatus, but Wittgenstein never abandoned his radical early views on the nature of philosophy as outlined in the Tractatus.

  The Constructivists vs. the Descriptivists

  As the Analytic Movement took hold and grew, different ideas emerged about how best to proceed with philosophical analysis. A group called constructivists, inspired by Russell, the early writings of Wittgenstein, and the logical positivists, argued that the solutions to philosophical problems lie in using tools of logic to c
reate more precise technical vocabularies.

  Again, all down to language.

  Two leading representatives of this movement were the American philosophers Nelson Goodman and W. V. Quine. Quine saw language and logic as themselves embodying theories about reality, rather than consisting of theory-neutral tools of analysis.

  By contrast, the Descriptivists (formed and roused primarily by the British philosophers G. E. Moore, Gilbert Ryle, and John Austin) maintained that philosophical analysis should focus on the careful study of the everyday usage of crucial terms, since that would more closely approached agreed upon truth (among people in general).

  Although the more radical formulations of analytic philosophy from the first half of the 20th century are no longer heeded by the philosophical community, analytic philosophy actually continues to flourish.

  In fact, many later philosophers adopted ideas, methods, or values from this movement, including the Americans Donald Davidson, Hilary Putnam, and Saul Kripke. Additionally, Analytic Philosophy has widely influenced the training and practices of philosophers today.

  This has brought both good and ill in its wake. On the one hand, its tenets have led to a renewed commitment to clarity, concision, incisiveness, and to new depth in philosophical thinking and writing.

  On the other hand, it has also brought many philosophers to such difficult and obscure technical language (in direct opposition to the tenets of the school, one would be forgiven for thinking) that their ideas are accessible to only a small community of specialists—a pattern that usually spells doom for the school so afflicted.

  Postmodern Philosophy

  Despite the Analytics call for simplified language and terminology, the opposite seems to be the order of the day in many postmodern philosophical texts, although the difficulties and convolutions in this case are more often than not intentional and reflect specific postmodern claims about the nature of language and meaning—that there is no meaning and that truth (if there were such a thing) cannot be communicated.