A Short History of Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Wittgenstein

by Roger Scruton

  The concept of the Lebenswelt enabled Husserl to revive a project of post-Kantian idealism: the project of distinguishing the human realm (the realm of meaning) from the realm of nature (the realm of science and explanation). Inspired by Kant’s division between understanding and practical reason, the romantic theologian F.D.E.Schleiermacher (1768-1834) had argued that the interpretation of human actions can never be accomplished by the methods employed in the natural sciences. The human act must be understood as the act of a free being, motivated by reason, and understood through dialogue. The same is true of texts, which can be interpreted only through an imaginative dialogue with their author. ‘Hermeneutics’—the art of interpretation—involves the search for reasons rather than causes, and the attempt to understand a text as an expression of rational activity—the very activity that is manifest in me.

  A later Kantian philosopher, Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), extended Schleiermacher’s hermeneutical method to the entire human world. Our attitude to other people, he argued, is fundamentally distinct from and even opposed to the scientific attitude. We seek to understand their actions not by explaining them in terms of external causes, but ‘from within’, by an act of rational self-projection that Dilthey calls Verstehen. In understanding human life and action I must find the agent’s reasons for what he does. This means conceptualising the world as he does, seeing the connections and unities that he sees. For example, I understand your fear of speaking in a certain place, once I conceptualise it as you do, as somewhere ‘sacred’.

  Our every-day ways of conceptualising the world do not, as a rule, follow the direction required by scientific explanation. Rather, Dilthey suggests, they represent the world as ‘ready for action’. I see the world under the aspect of my own freedom, and describe and respond to it accordingly. This before me is not a member of the species Homo sapiens but a person, who looks at me and smiles; that beside her is not a piece of bent organic tissue but a chair on which I may sit; this on the wall is not a collection of tinted chemicals but a picture, in which the face of a saint appears; and so on. In short, we are not merely in dialogue with each other; we are in dialogue with the world itself, moulding the natural order through concepts, so as to align it with our aims. Our categories do not explain the world, so much as endow it with meaning.

  Husserl took this idea a stage further, by suggesting that the pre-scientific vision of the world expresses not merely our identity as rational beings, but our life. The world appears to us in the guise of a ‘lived environment’: a place in which we situate ourselves as acting and suffering organisms. We understand objects as ‘friendly’ or ‘hostile’, ‘comfortable’ or ‘uncomfortable’, ‘useful’ or ‘useless’, and in a thousand ways divide the world according to our interests. Our classifications form no part of the enterprise of scientific explanation, and have an authority that no science could remove. The new task of phenomenology is to awaken us to the Lebenswelt, and to vindicate those ‘we’-thoughts in which the meaning of objects is created and made public.

  Dilthey was the first to attempt a systematic distinction between the Geisteswissenschaften (humanities) and the natural sciences, suggesting that the first are really extended and transhistorical exercises in Verstehen. Husserl recognised, however, that these ‘human sciences’ had entered a condition of crisis during our century, precisely because natural science had presumptiously invaded their territory, and so prompted people to throw away, as useless remnants of a vanished world-view, the concepts through which the Lebenswelt is understood and organised. The crisis is not only intellectual; it is also moral, indeed, a crisis of civilisation itself. For the Lebenswelt falls apart when not sustained by reflection. The result is a loss of meaning, a moral vacuum, into which we are led whenever we surrender to the false gods of science.

  No philosopher in our time has been more acutely aware of this moral vacuum than Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), a pupil of Husserl’s, who can fairly claim to be the most important thinker, and the darkest, of the existentialist school. Husserl had delivered, during his middle years, two series of lectures, later published as The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness, in which he claimed to rediscover, on the level of phenomenological analysis, the age-old metaphysical problem of time. Inspired by this and other later Husserlian writings, Heidegger composed his Being and Time (1927), which is the most complex of the many works inspired, directly or indirectly, by Kant’s theory of time as the ‘form of inner sense’.

  It is impossible to summarise Heidegger’s work, which no one has claimed to understand completely. In the next chapter I shall give reasons for thinking that it may be unintelligible, from the very nature of the phenomenological ‘method’ which it employs. Its language, like that of the later Husserl, is metaphorical and contorted to the point almost of incomprehensibility; the reader has the impression that never before have so many words been invented and tormented in the attempt to express the inexpressible.

  Heidegger claims that his method is phenomenological, and that its essence is captured in the slogan, ‘To the things themselves!’ Philosophy is the study of phenomena, where ‘phenomena’ is taken in its original Greek sense as referring to whatever ‘shows itself’. Phenomena are not mere appearances, but those things which show themselves to consciousness. Hence the priority of phenomenology over any physical or psychological science. Phenomenology is also the fundamental form of ‘ontology’—the study of what is. Despite its Cartesian beginnings, phenomenology in the work of Heidegger breaks loose from epistemology and launches itself, with a daring unprecedented since Hegel, onto the sea of speculation, with only one question as its guide. This question is that of ‘the meaning of being’, a question which, we are invited to suppose, was the subject-matter of all those ancient philosophies, Socratic and pre-Socratic, which the Cartesian method submerged.

  Being (Sein) must be distinguished from Dasein. Dasein is the kind of being that characterises human self-consciousness. It is the ‘thing which understands being’. It would be convenient if we could give the term ‘Dasein’ its normal translation of ‘existence’. Unfortunately, Heidegger, who can certainly be thought to multiply terms to the limit of possibility, whether or not beyond necessity, has forestalled us. He introduces a third term, Existenz, which denotes ‘that kind of Being towards which Dasein can comport itself in one way or another, and always does comport itself somehow’. Dasein, by contrast, has its being ‘for its own’. Dasein is what Sartre later described as être four-soi, and what Hegel had already described as being-for-self (Fürsichsein).

  As we shall see, both Heidegger and Sartre owe far more to Hegel than their vocabulary. All these are more or less pompous ways of distinguishing things from persons. What then is the argument, or, failing that, the thesis, of Being and Time? I am not sure, but perhaps the following represents a part of it. First, while Heidegger rejects the use of such terms as ‘subject’ and ‘object’, preferring technicalities of his own, he is clearly concerned with the modern problem of self-knowledge. What is self-knowledge, what is its object and what does it yield by way of insight into the objective world? He begins, therefore, from the firstperson case, saying that ‘the assertion that it is I who in each case Dasein is, is ontically obvious’. But ontical obviousness is one thing, content another. We must answer the ‘problem of being’. This poses itself initially as the question: ‘Who (what) am I?’ As Kant showed in the Paralogisms, no amount of study of the immediate knowledge characteristic of the first person will answer this question. Heidegger notices and applauds the result, but does not, as he perhaps should, feel threatened by it. Now, we can know from phenomenological analysis that the essence of Dasein lies in its existence: it at least has existence, and it has existence essentially. This ontological argument for the existence of the subject should not be taken too seriously. For if we know nothing else about this Dasein than that it exists, we have hardly advanced even so far as the first Cartesian question.

  Heidegger
precedes his theory of being (which is in fact a theory of self-consciousness) with a fascinating, but maddeningly abstract, description of the world of phenomena. Since all being is being in the world, then the essence of the world as phenomenon must be explored if being is to be understood. We learn that the world contains things, but that thinghood must be construed not in its modern, scientific sense, but in its ancient meaning—the meaning of the Greek term pragmata. Objects are ‘to be used’, or ‘ready to hand’. Hence we can understand them as ‘signs’; that is, we interpret them as bearing an immediate relation to ourselves. (Here we again encounter the influence of Dilthey.) The world first comes into consciousness as a sign, as logos. It is that which ‘bears a meaning for us’. This explains Dasein’s ‘fascination with the world’. Seemingly independent objects can be constantly appropriated for Dasein’s own uses, made into expressions, and assigned a meaning. This is the ‘abolition of distance’ (Entfernen) between objects and ourselves. We are led to understand that this abolition of distance also provides the first ‘phenomenon’ of space—it is this which leads to my sense of having spatial position in my world.

  But this peaceful union of Dasein and its world is broken, as ever, by the appearance of the Other. (Or, the Zeitgeist having become more paranoid since Hegel’s day, by the intrusion of ‘them’.) In relation to this existence of others my own existence is put in question. I become aware of what Heidegger calls my ‘thrown-ness’ (Geworfenheit), which is the lack of any reason for my existence in the world; the fact that I am simply there. It is this which appears in the phenomenon of fear, and which precipitates that great turning away from the world which others have called alienation, but which Heidegger prefers to call ‘the Fall’. Dasein ‘falls’, not into sin or Hell, but into ‘inauthenticity’. Confronted with the absolute enigma of my own being I flee from myself. I lose myself in anxiety, and in order to escape that anxiety I try to cease to be myself and instead become one of ‘them’. I become an object, part of that world which first shattered my composure by showing my arbitrariness, and which now tempts me to deny myself, by melting into the impersonal ‘they’ of role, form and ‘idle talk’.

  However, this inauthenticity brings with it a sense of the absurd. This is the sense that objects are without meaning. They had a meaning for Dasein, but have no meaning for the consciousness which identifies itself only impersonally, as a part of ‘them’. This sense of absurdity translates itself into anxiety, and in anxiety the first answer to the question of being is formed. ‘Who am I?—answer: myself.’ Whatever else I am, I am that. Anxiety, as Heidegger puts it, ‘individualises’. Precisely because it has no object, because its intentionality is universal, undifferentiated, without focus, it can only be grasped as mine. In the experience of anxiety I am cut off from them, and thrown back into my individuality, my existence, as the ultimate fact.

  This sense of individuality has, as its principal manifestation (one might almost say ‘moment’), the exercise of a peculiar mental capacity which Heidegger calls ‘care’ (Sorge). The attitude of the anxious self to the world is one of care: apprehension for itself and for others, and the attempt to understand the world as an object of knowledge and activity. This care brings with it the separation of subject and object, and the idea of objective truth. As Heidegger puts it, care ‘uncovers the world’, and so finds what is objective in relation to itself. (At this point Heidegger recognises that he is touching on the old Kantian problem of the presuppositions of self-knowledge, but rejects the idea that we need to prove the existence of an objective world. Apparently, what is presupposed needs no proof, only an ‘uncovering’.)

  The ‘caring’ self has a new kind of being—a wholeness which Heidegger also describes as a being-towards-death. For anxiety brings with it the apprehension of finiteness and vulnerability; and ‘care’ is simply understanding the world as the locus of finite and vulnerable existence. In being-towards-death I recognise my predicament as a creature conditioned by time, and see that only in time is my redemption possible, so that care becomes the ‘call of conscience’. I have to make myself responsible for my acts and my existence: this is the single answer that I have to undifferentiated anxiety, and it is my first glimpse of authenticity. I am more fully myself in recognising the call of something that is both integral to me, and yet which also points beyond me. I have been summoned out of the lostness of ‘they’ and called upon to announce myself in resolution. (The archetype of this way of thinking can be found in Hegel’s Logic, in a passage entitled ‘Barrier and Ought’.)

  But resolution requires what Heidegger calls an ‘anticipatory resoluteness’. I must see the future in a certain way—as at least partially closed to me—if I am to have this attitude. I can decide to do something only in so far as I do not regard the question whether or not I shall do it as already settled. The future must therefore have a special status for me. It must be the object of different attitudes from those that I direct towards the present and past. It follows that I can only become authentic if I realise that my being is in time, not just in the sense that all things are in time, but in the deeper sense that time must form and determine all my outlook on the world, separating the future, which is the object of resoluteness, from the past, which is the object of guilt and responsibility. It can do that, Heidegger says, only if I see my freedom and my temporality as one and the same thing. This is ‘being free for death’. The final answer to the riddle of existence is this: I am a being who is extended in time, and whose redemption lies in that freedom which time alone provides, the freedom to make of my life what I choose it to be, and thereby to change from thrown-ness to resolution. In that change lies the realisation, and acceptance, of mortality.

  There is a certain poetry in Heidegger’s vision, and moments of true philosophical insight. But how much of it is really philosophy, and how much an embroidered description of a private spiritual journey? Such questions take us into the heart of philosophical method. One thing is clear, which is that Heidegger’s conclusions, where intelligible, are clearly intended as universal truths, not merely about the human condition, but about the world as such. Their status is synthetic and a priori; they could be neither proved nor disproved by any form of science. It is tempting sometimes to interpret them in a scientific or pseudo-scientific way, as gestures towards a psychology of self-consciousness. But that interpretation can hardly account for the generality and abstractness of what is put forward, besides suggesting (what is clearly false) that these theories could be measured against empirical evidence and so refuted or confirmed. On the other hand, Heidegger does not give any arguments for the truth of what he says. Most of Being and Time consists of compounded assertions, with hardly a ‘thus’, ‘therefore’, ‘possibly’, or ‘it might follow that’, to indicate the relations which are supposed to hold between them. The crucial thesis that idealism does not need a refutation, since its falsehood is given in Dasein’s quest for selfknowledge, is supported, not by argument, but by etymology, and the etymology of a Greek word to boot. (This Greek word being aletheia, which etymologically means ‘uncovering’, but literally means ‘truth’.) Even if the whole of Heidegger’s philosophy is both meaningful and true, therefore, we have yet to be given a reason to accept it. Looked at critically, Heidegger’s ideas seem like spectral visions in the realm of thought; vast, intangible shadows cast by language. Perhaps, if there were no distinction in grammar between Sein and Dasein, no abstract nouns of the kind exemplified by ‘Geworfenheit’, these shadows would dissolve, and nothing come to replace them. This sort of philosophy shows, in Wittgenstein’s words, ‘the bewitchment of the intelligence by means of language’.

  This lack of argument persists in the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre (19051980), the French pupil of Husserl and of Heidegger who has done the most to propagate existentialism as a moral and metaphysical doctrine peculiarly suited to the demands of the modern conscience. But it is to some extent compensated for by literary graces, and by an art of pe
rsuasion that has made Sartre into one of the most influential writers of our time. In plays, novels and essays he has repeatedly expressed, modified and resurrected the existentialist vision; transforming it from abstract theory to imaginative experience. In his philosophical works the same imaginative methods persist. Faced with the question, ‘Is this philosophy or is it psychology?’ he would no doubt answer, ‘Neither and both’. I shall try to present a philosophy which I believe to be Sartre’s. Those parts that might seem to be psychological in nature are so evidently derived from Hegel, that it will need no apology to discuss them as though they were integral to the philosophical history of our time.

  Sartre’s early work on The Psychology of the Imagination (1940) (The Imaginary, as its title should have been translated), shows the influence of Husserl very strongly, and, while the English title (and French subtitle) suggest a reluctance to accept that phenomenology and psychology are distinct, the content makes it clear that Sartre is able to argue persuasively for conclusions about the nature of the human mind which are by any standards philosophical. These conclusions reappear, transmuted from their phenomenological form, in Sartre’s famous lecture L’Existentialisme est un humanisme. This was delivered in 1945, after war-time experiences which had so transformed every aspect of Sartre’s intelligence that it is usual to ignore the (in my view) more original and more important work which preceded them. I shall follow the usual practice, and regard this lecture, together with the vast and rambling reflections of Being and Nothingness (1943) as containing the fundamentals of Sartre’s existentialism.