A Short History of Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Wittgenstein

by Roger Scruton

  on the path of objective knowledge, thus starting from the representation, we shall never get beyond the representation, i.e. the phenomenon. We shall therefore remain at the outside of things; we shall never be able to penetrate into their inner nature, and investigate what they are in themselves. So far I agree with Kant. But now, as the counterpoise to this truth, I have stressed the other truth that we are not merely the knowing subject, but that we ourselves are also among those entities we require to know, that we ourselves are the thing-in-itself. Consequently, a way from within stands open to us to that real inner nature of things to which we cannot penetrate from without. It is, so to speak, a subterranean passage, a secret alliance, which, as if by treachery, places us all at once in the fortress that could not be taken from outside.

  My essence is will (Kant’s ‘practical reason’), and my immediate and non-conceptual awareness of myself is awareness of will. But I can know the will, even in my own case, only as phenomenon, since all my knowledge, including inner awareness, is subject to the form of time. At the same time (Schopenhauer does not really explain how) the true nature of will as thing-in-itself is revealed to me. I know that will is one and immutable, embodied in the transient will to live of individual creatures, but in itself boundless and eternal.

  What then is the relation of the will to the individual subject? Schopenhauer’s answer is framed in terms taken from Leibniz. I am an individual, and identified as such by means of a principium individuationis (a principle of individuation). It is only in the world of representation that such a principle can be found: things can be individuated only in space and time, and only when understood in terms of the web of causal connection. The thing-in-itself, which has neither spatial nor temporal nor causal relations, is therefore without a principle of identity. In no sense, therefore, am I identical with the will. All we can say is that will is manifest in me, trapped, as it were, into a condition of individual existence by its restless desire to embody itself in the world of representation. The will in itself is timeless and imperishable. It is the universal substratum from which every individual arises into the world of appearances, only to sink again after a brief and futile struggle for existence.

  Will manifests itself among phenomena in two ways: as individual striving and as Idea. An Idea is something like a complete conception of the will, in so far as this can be grasped in the world of representation— it corresponds to the universal, not the particular, and it is therefore only in the species that the Idea is truly present to our perception. In the natural world, therefore, the species is favoured over the individual, since in the species the will to live finds a durable embodiment, while the individual, judged in himself, is a passing and dispensable aberration. Schopenhauer expresses the point in one of his many beautiful images:

  Just as the spraying drops of the waterfall change with lightning rapidity, while the rainbow which they sustain remains immovably at rest, quite untouched by that restless change, so every Idea, i.e. every species of living beings remains entirely untouched by the constant changes of its individuals. But it is the Idea or the species in which the will-to-live is really rooted and manifests itself; therefore the will is really concerned only in the continuation of the species.

  From this premise Schopenhauer derives a masterly portrait of nature’s indifference to the individual, in terms that anticipate evolutionary biology. His pessimism, which keenly inserts itself into every niche where people seek comfort and consolation, stems in part from his sociobiology. And it is in sociobiological terms that he spells out one of the most impressive theories of sexual love in the philosophical literature. However, Schopenhauer’s pessimism has other and more metaphysical roots. According to Schopenhauer individual existence is really a kind of mistake, yet one into which the will to live is constantly tempted by its need to show itself to itself as Idea. The will falls into individuality and exists for a while trapped in the world of representation, sundered from the calm ocean of eternity that is its home. Its life as an individual (my life) is really an expiation of original sin, ‘the crime of existence itself’.

  Although intellect is in most things the slave of the will, helplessly commenting on processes that it cannot control, it has one gift within its power—the gift of renunciation. The intellect can overcome the will’s resistance to death, by showing that we have nothing to fear from death, which cannot extinguish the will, but only the veil that covers it. And though the thing which survives death is not an individual but the universal, this should not worry us, since it was the mistake of existing as an individual which caused all our suffering in the first place. In such a way Schopenhauer justifies suicide, a step that he himself showed no inclination to take.

  The will infects all our thoughts and actions. Nevertheless, we can stand back from it, hold it in abeyance and see things objectively, independently of our transient goals. Then and only then can we be content with the world, having freed ourselves from the restless desire to change it. This detachment from the will comes through art and aesthetic experience. These must therefore be accorded the highest place in man’s self-understanding. Indeed, it is through one art in particular, that of music, that we comprehend what is otherwise permanently hidden from us, namely, the objective presentation of the will itself (as opposed to its subjective presentation in me). In music I hear not my will or your will, but the will detached from all individual striving, from all objects of desire and fear, and rendered objective and intelligible. Melodies and modulations present us with a movement that is purely ideal, and through which we glimpse the ocean of eternity. That is why, even in the stormiest symphony of Beethoven, we hear only the resolution of contending forces and the achievement of sublime consolation. In music the will plays with itself, like the waves above the ocean’s calm.

  Schopenhauer’s many applications of his philosophy are worked out with imagination and panache, and in his essays he shows a remarkable ability to conjure from his system new, surprising, but always apt and penetrating observations of the human lot. His system was for daily use: not the abstract jargon of Fichte, but a weapon against the ‘unscrupulous optimism’ by which he saw himself surrounded. He enjoyed his pessimistic conclusions too much to convince the reader that he really believed in them; and his sardonic assaults on popular prejudice reveal a far greater attachment to life than to the renunciation that he officially favoured. He was certainly arrogant and overbearing in his manner, with a morose streak that led him always to keep a loaded pistol beside him when he slept. But his character was gregarious: he loved wine, women and song and lived the normal life of a selfish academic. He was bitterly distressed by the favourable reception accorded to Hegel. Yet his own philosophy too had far-ranging influence. Not only did Schopenhauer present the Kantian system in easily digestible form; he made it coincide with the prevailing mood of nineteenth-century Germany, which was one of baffled hope and romantic resignation. By his philosophy of will and renunciation he gave new forms of life (or at any rate new forms of death) to Christian culture. Without Schopenhauer there would have been neither Wagner nor Nietzsche as we know them, and it was Nietzsche’s final choice of will against renunciation that brought German romantic philosophy to an end.

  It might be thought that, having located the essence of reality in the will, and having conceived this will on the model of the thing-in-itself of Kant, Schopenhauer would have found himself with a ready answer to the problem of freedom. On the contrary, however. He recognised that men are praised and blamed only for their actions, and that these actions belong to the world of representation. Hence human action cannot be vindicated by the freedom (which is in any case no more than a universal waywardness) of the underlying and unknowable will. A person’s phenomenal character is the origin of all his acts, and is also determined in every particular. Hence there is freedom only in the qualified, commonsense form: a person can do things, and is not always constrained or obstructed in his immediate aims. The ‘transcendental’ su
bject of Schopenhauer’s philosophy therefore drops out of consideration even in the discussion of that problem which Kant had introduced it to solve. It is to be wondered whether or not any further philosophical reasoning can be found in favour of this thing which, while represented as the single ultimate reality, remains none the less (to borrow a phrase of Wittgenstein’s) a ‘something about which nothing can be said’.

  Schopenhauer was not the only one of Hegel’s opponents to rest his faith in the unsayable. S0ren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), in his attack on the prevailing Hegelian rationalism, sought to undermine the claim that ‘the real is the rational and the rational the real’, and so to reaffirm the value of that which, while real, lies beyond the reach of reason. But, lacking Schopenhauer’s gift of argument, and being indeed more literary than philosophical in his inclination, he did not set up any elaborate system of ideas whereby to postpone the recognition of his ultimate refuge. There is, in Kierkegaard, no attempt to address the traditional philosophical problems and present a partial answer to them, no attempt to explore the observable (if transient) world, in order to renounce it more confidently for the realm of the unknowable. On the contrary, the whole order of post-Kantian philosophical argument was dismissed, and while the result was a species of irrationalism which, by its very nature, defies philosophical defence, there is no doubt that, in retrospect, Kierkegaard must be seen as a significant thinker, if only because he grasped the fact that the philosophical systems of his day could not be established by argument, and therefore contained no authority that he was constrained by reason to accept.

  Kierkegaard wrote much. His style was humorous, vivacious and often highly poetical, although marred by the acute self-consciousness which led him also constantly to hide behind pseudonyms, and to write long and tedious polemics (often against himself). His principal interest was the vindication of the Christian faith, and he wrote always directly or indirectly towards this end, inventing in the process the name, if not the philosophy, of ‘existentialism’, for which achievement he is now chiefly known. His philosophy is a clear example of a reaction against idealism which is not also a form either of empiricism or scepticism. In the course of this reaction, it is once again the subject that is reaffirmed, as the ground of all philosophical thought. The first-person case comes to acquire just the same over-bearing significance that it had for Descartes and Hume. The main difference is that Kierkegaard’s interest lies not in the properties of the individual, nor in the knowledge of the world that might be derived from them, but in the sheer fact of individual existence, conceived independently of all our attempts to bring it under concepts.

  Kierkegaard’s first and principal target was Hegel. He attacked the idea of ‘universal’ spirit, and the associated Hegelian attempt to describe the nature and development of spirit in abstracto, without reference to the individual. It is in the individual, according to Kierkegaard, that the true essence of spirit—its essence as ‘subjectivity’—is revealed. He was particularly hostile to the Hegelian philosophy of history, which he rightly saw as inviting both the deification of history and the loss of the sense of individual responsibility towards events. This sense he sometimes describes as ‘subjectivity’, sometimes as ‘existential pathos’, and sometimes as ‘anxiety’; without it, all freedom, all ethical life, and all hope of religious salvation are cancelled.

  Many of the Young Hegelians—such as Bruno Bauer (1809-1882) and David Strauss (1808-1874)—were already in the process of developing a theology of history that, in paving the way for Marxist materialism, made possible the realisation of Kierkegaard’s fears concerning the transference of religious faith from God to the world. This transference Kierkegaard saw as irremediably evil. Yet for him it was the inevitable outcome of the renunciation of individual existence as the premise of philosophy. Kierkegaard criticised the Hegelian logic as a tissue of illusion, arguing in Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), his principal philosophical text, that the ‘introduction of movement into logic is a sheer confusion of logical science’. The ‘logical system’ of Hegel, in attempting to regiment the world and its history within the conceptions of a universal science (Wissenschaft), must inevitably be self-defeating. Logic, as the science of inference, cannot provide its own premises. These must therefore be obtained from some other source. Moreover, the Hegelian ‘universal subject’ is nothing but the absence of a subject. The only legitimate subject is concrete, individual and in some deep sense inaccessible to the laws of thought. Logic is timeless, empty of content, whereas the individual finds his essence in time, and enacts in time the drama which uniquely defines him. The movement that Hegel wished to see in logic lies in the individual alone.

  Kant once said that he had criticised the pretensions of reason in order to make room for faith. How seriously he meant this I do not know: the contrast between reason and faith belongs to medieval conceptions which are too far from Kant’s transcendental idealism to cast any obvious light on it. It is certainly true, however, that there is much affinity between Kierkegaard and those thinkers who had first presented the contrast as central to the Christian vision of the world. Indeed Kierkegaard’s philosophy can be seen as a peculiarly modern, as well as a peculiarly Protestant, exposition of the famous ‘credo quia absurdum’ of Tertullian.

  Kierkegaard’s philosophy begins and ends with the individual. This individual is, very crudely, the Cartesian subject; his predicament is described by Kierkegaard as one of ‘subjectivity’. In order to characterise it more completely, Kierkegaard thinks it is necessary to develop a philosophy of existence. But, as he argues, an existential system is impossible, since any system, in abstracting from the individuality of what it describes, must ignore that which is important, namely existence itself. Like almost every philosopher who has located his subject in the unsayable, Kierkegaard goes on to say a great deal about it. He seems to accept at one point (namely in the famous Either/Or (1843)) the Hegelian conception of the ‘moment of consciousness’. There he argues that the essence of the individual is temporal, but that this existence in time is conditioned by an ineradicable longing for the eternal. The ‘aesthetic’ way of life, which is that most evidently available to the romantic consciousness, unites the subject with what is temporary, and fixes his soul in the immediate. The aesthetic consciousness finds its paradigm of personal life in that which is most determined by the passage of time—the erotic. ‘The essential aesthetic principle’ is ‘that the moment is everything, and in so far again essentially nothing’. The ethical consciousness by contrast recognises the destiny of the individual outside time. From the ethical point of view, individual life is an aspiration towards eternity. It therefore foreswears allegiance to the temporal. For all that, it does not lose itself in the abstractions of logical thinking, even though these represent the world, in some sense, sub specie aeternitatis. To have recourse to abstraction is simply to abrogate existence. It is impossible to conceive existence without movement, and therefore impossible to convey its eternal reality. The ethical consciousness finds the subject suspended between time and eternity, rejecting the former, but unable to grasp the latter without losing his identity. What then can the subject do in order both to reach to eternity and at the same time to keep hold of- and indeed establish—his reality as an individual existence?

  It is here that Kierkegaard invokes his idea of faith. Reason, which produces only abstractions, negates our individual essence. This essence is subjectivity, and subjectivity exists only in the ‘leap of faith’, or ‘leap into the unknown’, whereby the individual casts in his lot with eternity in the only manner that will also guarantee his present being.

  Kierkegaard was a convinced Christian, despite his lifelong reaction against the mingled bleakness and hypocrisy of his native Protestant church. He therefore devoted much of his writing to the somewhat self-defeating task of showing that the Christian faith is precisely the one which best calls forth this existential leap. In his efforts to establish this he came up wi
th the doctrine that ‘truth is subjectivity’. The traditional conceptions of truth— either as correspondence with reality or as coherence with the system of true ideas—he regarded as equally empty, not because false, but because tautologous. Truth, like everything else, ceased to be empty only when related to the subject. And ‘for a subjective reflection the truth becomes a matter of appropriation, of inwardness, of subjectivity, and thought must probe more and more deeply into the subject and his subjectivity’.

  As a literary idea, and as an invitation to exalt the individual to a position of eminence that he had never achieved before, this is fairly comprehensible. But as a philosophical theory it has the obvious weakness that the distinction between appearance and reality disappears. For truth, the concept in terms of which that distinction has ultimately to be made, has been absorbed into the realm of appearance, resulting in the following obscure definition: truth is ‘an objective uncertainty held fast in an appropriation-process of the most passionate inwardness’, hence ‘the mode of apprehension of the truth is precisely the truth’. We could put this more simply by saying that there is, for Kierkegaard, no longer any distinction between subject and object. The leap into subjectivity and the leap of faith are ultimately one and the same, and while Kierkegaard supposes that the individual finds himself, at the end of this vertiginous process, emerging into the full reality of the ‘ethical life’, certain of his own eternity, and yet living in time with true ‘existential pathos’, it is difficult to see how he is supposed to achieve this. The best that he can do, in his state of subjectivity, is to believe that the world is larger than himself, perhaps with that ‘romantic irony’ which Hegel described so well in his Lectures on Aesthetics. But to believe is not to know, and irony is no substitute for conviction.