A Short History of Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Wittgenstein, Second Edition

by Unknown Author

  The premise of Sartre’s philosophy is expressed in surprisingly mediaeval terms, as the proposition that ‘existence precedes essence’. There is no human nature, since there is no God to have a conception of it. Essences, as intellectual constructions, vanish with the mind that would conceive them. For us, therefore, our existence—which is to say, that unconceptualised individuality which was celebrated (but not described) by Kierkegaard—is the premise of all enquiry. This existence is determined by no universal idea, and has no prefigured destiny such as might be contained in a vision of human nature. Man must make his own essence, and even his existence is, in a sense, an achievement. He exists fully only when he is what he purposes to be. (Here, as elsewhere, Sartre’s philosophy echoes that of Heidegger.)

  The premise of philosophy is still, therefore, the premise of Descartes, the ‘cogito’; but it is the cogito transformed by Husserlian phenomenology. All consciousness is intentional—it posits an object in which it sees itself as in a mirror. Object and subject arise together and are conceived in radically different ways. Because they are so familiar to us, these ways defy description in the language of common sense. Hence the need for technicalities in order to describe the fundamental difference between the knower and the known (the ‘pour-soi’ and the ‘en-soi’, as Sartre calls them).

  In setting itself up as subject in relation to a possibly unknowable object, the self creates (or posits) a separation in its world, a kind of crevasse which no amount of experience can fill. This crevasse is called ‘néant’, or nothingness, which ‘lies coiled in the heart of being, like a worm’. That characteristic phrase is part of an evocative description designed to persuade us that the separation of primeval being into subject and object generates a third thing (or rather no-thing). It is this third thing that enters the world of self-consciousness in persecutory disguises.

  A.J.Ayer accused Sartre of a logical mistake in introducing ‘nothingness’ as though it were an entity: the logical mistake of the king in Through the Looking Glass who takes ‘Nobody’ as a proper name. But perhaps such criticism, tempting though it is, misses the phenomenological point of Sartre’s coinage. Sartre is attempting to describe what is given to consciousness in the very act of conceiving itself as related to an objective world, and he perforce must strain language in order to express an experience which is so immediate as to precede every attempt at description.

  The experience of nothingness is always with us and hence is elusive, as the ego is elusive. To persuade us of its actuality, Sartre provides various vivid examples, expectation and its disappointment being prominent among them. When I enter a cafe in search of Pierre, and he is not there, he is no more not there because of my expectation than he is not there when I had not thought of him. Yet my experience is changed by my expectation. The cafe reflects back to me, in all its particulars, the absence of Pierre. Pierre’s absence becomes a pervasive quality of the consciousness through which these particulars are perceived. The cafe presents a kind of narrative of Pierre’s non-existence, which could not be read in any locality where I had not expected him. This idea is certainly fanciful, but it is also typical of Sartrean phenomenology, being at once observant and uncanny. Like Socrates, Sartre attempts to introduce ‘aporia’, or intellectual anguish, as a prelude to the introduction of a metaphysical idea which will console the bewildered intelligence.

  Only self-consciousness can bring néant or nothingness into the world: for the merely sentient being the fracture between subject and object has not opened. But with the sense of nothingness comes anguish. The question arises, ‘How shall I fill this void—between myself and the world?’, or, to put it in a way which, for Sartre, seems to be equivalent: ‘How shall I make myself part of the world?’ This is the phenomenological meaning of the question ‘What shall I do?’ It is the present sense of the future, and of the individual’s responsibility for that future. Anguish is the proof of freedom. There can be nothing more certain to a person than that he is free, since nothing is more certain than the existential choice which compels the recognition of futurity, and of our responsibility towards it.

  What is the outcome of anguish? Initially it manifests itself, Sartre says, as the sense that objects are not properly distinct from each other. They are undifferentiated, passive, awaiting agency. Our sense of the gap between subject and object translates itself into a feeling of nausea at the dissolution of things. The world becomes slime. In reaction I may run away from the future, hide myself in some predetermined role, contorting myself to fit a costume that is already made for me, so leaping across the chasm that divides me from objects only in order to become an object myself. This happens when I adopt a morality, a religion, a social role that has been devised by others and which has significance for me only in so far as I am objectified in it. The result is what Sartre calls ‘bad faith’, indistinguishable I think from Heidegger’s inauthenticity, and once again owing what content we can ascribe to it to the ‘alienation’ of nineteenth-century Hegelian thought.

  This false simulation of the in-itself by the for-itself (of the object by the subject) is to be contrasted with the authentic individual gesture. This, the reader will not be surprised to learn, cannot be described in its generality, but can only be seen in its individuality, in the free act whereby the individual creates both himself and his world together, by casting the one into the other. Don’t ask how this is done. Its end point is what matters, and this Sartre describes as ‘commitment’. But commitment to what?

  Sartre here introduces his well-known defence of ethical subjectivism, arguing that any adoption of a system of values which is represented as ‘objective’ constitutes an attempt to transfer my freedom into the world of objects, and so to lose it. The desire for an objective moral order is an exhibition of bad faith, and a loss of the freedom without which no moral order of any kind would be conceivable. In what sense Sartre is able to recommend the authenticity which consists in the purely selfmade morality is unclear. He does recommend it, but, by his own argument, his recommendation can have no objective force. He is therefore more apt to use the language of ‘must’ than of ‘ought’:

  I emerge alone and in dread in the face of the unique and first project which constitutes my being; all the barriers, all the railings, collapse, annihilated by the consciousness of my liberty; I have not, nor can I have, recourse to any value against the fact that it is I who maintain values in being; nothing can assure me against myself; cut off from the world and my essence by the nothing that I am, I have to realise the meaning of the world and of my essence: I decide it, alone, unjustifiable, and without excuse.

  In such a way Sartre tries to preserve Kant’s ethic of moral ‘autonomy’, while divesting it of the commitment to a moral law.

  So far, as I said, there is not much to distinguish Sartre’s philosophy from Heidegger’s, except for a greater ease and clarity of expression, and a taste for vivid examples. But Sartre picks up another part of the Hegelian legacy. He gives his own version of the master and slave argument, this time under the guise of an examination of love. He attempts to show that all love, and indeed all human relation, is founded in contradiction. He introduces the notion of ‘being-for-others’ in order to describe the peculiar position in which a self-conscious being can find himself, of being at once a free subject in his own eyes, and a determined object in the eyes of others. (Compare Kant’s distinction between the transcendental and the empirical self.) When another selfconscious being looks at me, I know that he searches in me not just for the object, but also for the subject. The gaze of a self-conscious creature has a peculiar capacity to penetrate, to create a demand. This is the demand that I, as free subjectivity, reveal myself in the world.

  Taking his cue from ‘the life and death struggle’ of the Phenomenology of Spirit (see p. 169), Sartre now proceeds to describe all human relations in terms of struggle. If I love a woman then this is never simply a matter of lusting to gratify myself on her body: if it were just tha
t, then any object, even a simulacrum of a human body, would do just as well. What I want is her: that is, the individual who is only real in her freedom, and who is falsified by every attempt to represent her as an object. As Sartre puts it: love wants the freedom of another, in order to make that freedom its own. But of course, the peculiarity of freedom is that it cannot be borrowed, shared or stolen. It is mine and mine alone. The lover, who wants to possess the body of another only as, and only in so far as, the other possesses it himself, is tied by a contradiction. His desire will fulfil itself only by frustrating itself, leaving him with the freedom of the other yet further removed. In the act of love, the other becomes his body, and so loses in the eyes of the lover the subjectivity which defines him. The most evident case of this, Sartre suggests, is sadomasochism, of which he gives a detailed and fascinating analysis.

  Sartre’s cheerless account of human affection perhaps contains some of his most lasting contributions to thought. Philosophically it is not original, owing what strength it has to the deeper discussions of Hegel. ‘Love’, wrote Hegel, ‘is the most tremendous contradiction; the understanding cannot resolve it’ (Philosophy of Right, addition to paragraph 158). But contradictions worried Hegel less than they worry others: they were there to be transcended, through the dialectical movement which belongs, not to understanding, but to reason, whether in its pure or in its practical form. Sartre’s account stops short of any such metaphysical solution. Nevertheless, it remains in some ways more acute, and more terrifyingly persuasive, than the Hegelian arguments which it borrows. It is in this area—that of the observation of the human world—that latter-day phenomenology has been most influential. Sartre’s studies of love, of ‘the gaze’, of hesitation, guilt and anguish, have been matched by other contributions of equal eloquence and power. Perhaps the most important among these have been those of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) in The Phenomenology of Perception (1945) and Signs (1960). The result has been a mass of phenomenological lore. I call it lore, not out of disrespect, but because of the impossibility of ascertaining its intellectual status. The results of phenomenology can seem both true to experience and yet irritatingly paradoxical, both in their style and in their philosophical presuppositions. Some reasons for this air of paradox will emerge in the chapter which follows.

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  W.M.Kneale, in A.J.Aver et al., The Revolution in Philosophy, New York, 1956, p. 26.

  19 - WITTGENSTEIN

  Our discussion has brought us, by various routes, to that point in philosophical history from which, for a long time, many philosophers have dated its commencement. The discovery of the new logic precipitated ‘analytical’ philosophy, bringing about, first logical atomism, then logical positivism and finally linguistic analysis, the practitioners of which have often paid scant heed to the arguments and aims of their predecessors. A single figure contributed decisively to the formation of each of these schools, and the same figure sowed in each of them the seeds of its destruction.

  The rise of 'analytical' philosophy

  Much has been written in recent years about the life and philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951). It is now widely thought that he is the most important philosopher of our century. It is hard, nevertheless, to fit his thought into the history of the subject, partly because of its later iconoclasm, partly because, like Frege, he began from reflections which, in the light of that history, may seem parochial and even without philosophical relevance. As a prelude, therefore, it is necessary to say something about the state of English philosophy at the time when Wittgenstein first took an interest in it. This interest presaged the prolonged influence of Viennese ideas on Anglo-American thought. We must return a little in time, to the ideas of Russell and Moore.

  Bertrand Arthur, third Earl Russell (1872-1970) has been mentioned so far in connection with the new logic, which he transformed into a powerful tool of philosophical analysis. No less important historically was his friend G.E.Moore (1873-1958), the writer of an important treatise on ethics, Principia Ethica (1903), and the relentless foe of all forms of metaphysical speculation that seemed to be the enemies of common sense. Together, Moore and Russell devoted themselves to the demolition of the arguments of British idealism, as these were represented by Bradley (at Oxford) and J.M.McTaggart (1866-1925) at their own university of Cambridge. Russell, in his early work on the foundations of geometry, acknowledges the influence of Bradley’s Logic. But this did not prevent him from discerning, in Bradley’s famous proof of the makeshift character of both objects and qualities (see p. 233), a confusion between the ‘is’ of predication and the ‘is’ of identity, or from accusing Bradley and McTaggart of sleight of hand in almost all their proofs for the inadequacy of our common sense conceptions of space, time and matter. Moore joined in the battle, adding not so much arguments as peculiarly dramatic assertions. How is it possible, he asked, for my belief that I have two hands to be less certain than the validity of all the philosophical arguments which have been adduced to disprove it? The combination of Russell’s mercurial logic, and Moore’s robust refusal to think further than his nose, or hands, proved extremely destructive, and it became fashionable to describe idealist metaphysics not as false, but as meaningless. Other philosophers—notably Hume—had said similar things. But now more than ever it seemed possible to prove the point, by developing a theory of the structure of language that would show precisely what could and what could not be said. And it was supposed that among the things that could not be said, metaphysics was the most easily recognisable.

  The first such theory was logical atomism, adumbrated by Russell, and more or less completely expressed in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921). This work, more succinct even than Leibniz’s Monadology, claimed to give the final answers to the questions of philosophy. It was inspired in part by Russell’s famous theory of descriptions, published in 1905, in an article that F.P.Ramsey (19031930) described as ‘a paradigm of philosophy’. This theory will therefore serve as a fitting introduction to Wittgenstein’s work.

  The theory of descriptions

  It is strange, but nevertheless true, that one of the most important publications in modern philosophy should have had, as its ostensible purpose, the explanation of the meaning of the word ‘the’. What is the difference, Russell asks, between the sentence ‘a golden mountain exists’ and the sentence ‘the golden mountain exists’? The first expression is explained by the new logic as follows: the predicate ‘golden mountain’ is instantiated, or, more formally, there exists an x such that x is a golden mountain. This proposition is clearly false. But what about the second proposition? Here the word ‘the’ seems to change the predicate ‘golden mountain’ into what Russell would call a denoting phrase (and what Frege had called a name). This is a strange effect of grammar. It has a yet stranger logical consequence, namely, that the sentence seems to refer to something—the golden mountain. But how is that possible, if no golden mountain exists? Here, Russell argued, we have a paradigm case of a grammatical form which conceals the logical form of a sentence. Taking his cue from his own and Frege’s implicit definition of number, he offers an implicit definition of the word ‘the’. We cannot say explicitly what the term ‘the’ denotes, but we can show how to eliminate it from all the sentences in which it occurs.

  Consider the sentence, ‘the King of France is bald’. For this to be true, there must be a king of France, and he must be bald. Moreover, to capture the distinctive sense of the word ‘the’ we have to add that there is only one king of France. The conditions which make the sentence true give us its meaning; hence we can say that ‘the King of France is bald’ is equivalent to the conjunction of three propositions: ‘there exists a king of France; everything which is a king of France is bald; and there is only one king of France.’ (More formally—there exists an x such that: x is a king of France and x is bald, and, for all y, if y is a king of France, y is identical to x.) It follows from this analysis that, if there is no king of France,
then the original sentence is false. The phrase ‘the King of France’, which seemed to be a denoting phrase or name, is in fact no such thing, but rather a predicate attached to a concealed existential claim. The King of France is, as Russell put it, a logical fiction. (There is a historical antecedent for this kind of philosophical theory in Bentham’s theory of fictions.)

  Philosophically, Russell directed his arguments against certain phenomenologists (notably Alexius Meinong (1853-1920)) who had wanted to conclude that, if we can think of something, such as the golden mountain, then that thing must, in some sense, exist. (If you don’t like the word ‘exist’, then another—‘subsist’—is offered to allay your logical susceptibilities.) Russell did not fully grasp that Meinong and his associates were not so much engaged in exploring the logic of denotation, as in examining the ‘intentional object’ of thought. Be that as it may, however, Russell’s argument lent itself to instant generalisation, and in this generalised form provided a basis for the philosophy of the Tractatus.

  Logical atomism and the Tractatus

  According to the Tractatus, everything that can be thought can also be said. The limits of language are, therefore, the limits of thought, so that a complete philosophy of the ‘sayable’ will be a complete theory of what Kant had called ‘the understanding’. All metaphysical problems arise because of the attempt to say what cannot be said. A proper analysis of the structure of the terms used in that attempt will show this to be so, and thus either solve or dissolve the problems.