Consistently with his contextualism, Dewey stressed the social circumstances in which different moral theories arose. His Ethics begins, not with a review of rival moral theories, but with a survey of anthropology and a brief history of the moral problems and practices of the ancient Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans. By locating moral theories in their social contexts, Dewey exposed their limitations. Theories that make sense in certain contexts may not make sense in others. For example, Dewey argued that the failure of ancient Greek teleological theories to grasp the independence of the right from the good arose from the fact that the good for individual citizens of Greek city-states was inextricably wrapped up with participation in civic life and promotion of the good of the city-state as a whole.
Dewey also stressed the ways abstract philosophical doctrines are socially embodied, frequently so as to rationalize and reinforce stultifying and unjust social arrangements. For example, the sharp dichotomy between purely instrumental and intrinsic goods both reflects and reinforces an organization of work life that reduces it to drudgery. Since work is of merely instrumental value, so the thinking goes, there is no point in trying to make it interesting to those who do it. The dichotomy also rationalizes oppressive class divisions. Insofar as the good life is conceived in terms of devotion to or enjoyment of purely intrinsic, noninstrumental goods (such as intellectual contemplation and the appreciation of beauty), it is a life that can be led only by a leisured class, whose members do not have to spend their time earning a living. This class depends upon a working class whose function is to provide them with the leisure they need to pursue the good life. Dewey's critique of traditional ways of distinguishing means from ends is thus simultaneously a critique of class hierarchy.
Dewey argued that the primary problems for ethics in the modern world concerned the ways society ought to be organized, rather than personal decisions of the individual . Thus, in contrast with his voluminous political commentaries, Dewey published very little on personal “applied ethics.” The rapid social changes that were taking place in his lifetime required new institutions, as traditional customs and laws proved themselves unable to cope with such issues as mass immigration, class conflict, the Great Depression, the demands of women for greater independence, and the threats to democracy posed by fascism and communism. As a progressive liberal, Dewey advocated numerous social reforms such as promoting the education, employment, and enfranchisement of women, social insurance, the progressive income tax, and laws protecting the rights of workers to organize labor unions. However, he stressed the importance of improving methods of moral inquiry over advocating particular moral conclusions, given that the latter are always subject to revision in light of new evidence.
Thus, the main focus of Dewey's social ethics concerns the institutional arrangements that influence the capacity of people to conduct moral inquiry intelligently. Two social domains are critical for promoting this capacity: schools, and civil society. Both needed to be reconstructed so as to promote experimental intelligence and wider sympathies. Dewey wrote numerous works on education, and established the famous Laboratory School at the University of Chicago to implement and test his educational theories. He was also a leading advocate of the comprehensive high school, as opposed to separate vocational and college prepatory schools. This was to promote the social integration of different economic classes, a prerequisite to enlarging their mutual understanding and sympathies. Civil society, too, needed to be reconstructed along more democratic lines. This involved not just expanding the franchise, but improving the means of communication among citizens and between citizens and experts, so that public opinion could be better informed by the experiences and problems of citizens from different walks of life, and by scientific discoveries (PP). Dewey regarded democracy as the social embodiment of experimental intelligence informed by sympathy and respect for the other members of society . Unlike dictatorial and oligarchic societies, democratic ones institutionalize feedback mechanisms (free speech) for informing officeholders of the consequences for all of the policies they adopt, and for sanctioning them (periodic elections) if they do not respond accordingly.
Dewey's moral epistemology thus leads naturally to his political philosophy. The reconstruction of moral theory is accomplished by replacing fixed moral rules and ends with an experimental method that treats norms for valuing as hypotheses to be tested in practice, in light of their widest consequences for everyone. To implement this method requires institutions that facilitate three things: (1) habits of critical, experimental inquiry; (2) widespread communication of the consequences of instituting norms, and (3) extensive sympathy, so that the consequences of norms for everyone are treated seriously in appraising them and imagining and adopting alternatives. The main institutions needed to facilitate these things are progressive schools and a democratic civil society. Experimentalism in ethics leads to a democratic political philosophy.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Social Ethics
Dewey's Moral Philosophy
John Dewey (1859-1952) lived from the Civil War to the Cold War, a period of extraordinary social, economic, demographic, political and technological change. During his lifetime the United States changed from a rural to an urban society, from an agricultural to an industrial economy, from a regional to a world power. It emancipated its slaves, but subjected them to white supremacy. It absorbed millions of immigrants from Europe and Asia, but faced wrenching conflicts between capital and labor as they were integrated into the urban industrial economy. It granted women the vote, but resisted their full integration into educational and economic institutions. As the face-to-face communal life of small villages and towns waned, it confronted the need to create new forms of community life capable of sustaining democracy on urban and national scales. Dewey believed that neither traditional moral norms nor traditional philosophical ethics were up to the task of coping with the problems raised by these dramatic transformations. Traditional morality was adapted to conditions that no longer existed. Hidebound and unreflective, it was incapable of changing so as to effectively address the problems raised by new circumstances. Traditional philosophical ethics sought to discover and justify fixed moral goals and principles by dogmatic methods. Its preoccupation with reducing the diverse sources of moral insight to a single fixed principle subordinated practical service to ordinary people to the futile search for certainty, stability, and simplicity. In practice, both traditional morality and philosophical ethics served the interests of elites at the expense of most people. To address the problems raised by social change, moral practice needed to be thoroughly reconstructed, so that it contained within itself the disposition to respond intelligently to new circumstances. Dewey saw his reconstruction of philosophical ethics as a means to effect this practical reconstruction.
Dewey's ethics replaces the goal of identifying an ultimate end or supreme principle that can serve as a criterion of ethical evaluation with the goal of identifying a method for improving our value judgments. Dewey argued that ethical inquiry is of a piece with empirical inquiry more generally. It is the use of reflective intelligence to revise one's judgments in light of the consequences of acting on them. Value judgments are tools for enabling the satisfactory redirection of conduct when habit no longer suffices to direct it. As tools, they can be evaluated instrumentally, in terms of their success in guiding conduct. We test our value judgments by putting them into practice and seeing whether the results are satisfactory — whether they solve the problems they were designed to solve, whether we find their consequences acceptable, whether they enable successful responses to novel problems, whether living in accordance with alternative value judgments yields more satisfactory results. We achieve moral progress and maturity to the extent that we adopt habits of reflectively revising our value judgments in response to the widest consequences for everyone of living them out. This pragmatic approach requires that we locate the conditions of warrant for our value judgments in human conduct itself, not in any a priori fixed reference point outside of conduct, such as in God's commands, Platonic Forms, pure reason, or “nature,” considered as giving humans a fixed telos. To do so requires that we understand different types of value judgments in functional terms, as forms of conduct that play distinctive roles in the life of reflective, social beings. Dewey thereby offers a naturalistic metaethic of value judgments, grounded in developmental and social psychology.
Philosophical Thought 2
Dewey's writings on education, notably his The School and Society (1899) and The Child and the Curriculum (1902), presented and defended what were to remain the chief underlying tenets of the philosophy of education he originated. These tenets were that the educational process must begin with and build upon the interests of the child; that it must provide opportunity for the interplay of thinking and doing in the child's classroom experience; that the teacher should be a guide and coworker with the pupils, rather than a taskmaster assigning a fixed set of lessons and recitations; and that the school's goal is the growth of the child in all aspects of its being.
Among the results of Dewey's administrative efforts were the establishment of an independent department of pedagogy and of the University of Chicago's Laboratory Schools, in which the educational theories and practices suggested by psychology and philosophy could be tested. The Laboratory Schools, the original unit of which began operation in 1896, attracted wide attention and enhanced the reputation of the University of Chicago as a foremost centre of progressive educational thought. Dewey headed the Laboratory Schools from 1903 to 1904.
Dewey's ideas and proposals strongly affected educational theory and practice in the United States. Aspects of his views were seized upon by the “progressive movement” in education, which stressed the student-centred rather than the subject-centred school, education through activity rather than through formal learning, and laboratory, workshop, or occupational education rather than the mastery of traditional subjects. But though Dewey's own faith in progressive education never wavered, he came to realize that the zeal of his followers introduced a number of excesses and defects into progressive education. Indeed, in Experience and Education (1938) he sharply criticized educators who sought merely to interest or amuse students, disregarded organized subject matter in favour of mere activity on the part of students, and were content with mere vocational training.
During the last two decades of Dewey's life, his philosophy of education was the target of numerous and widespread attacks. Progressive educational practices were blamed for the failure of some American school systems to train pupils adequately in the liberal arts and for their neglect of such basic subjects as mathematics and science. Furthermore, critics blamed Dewey and his progressive ideas for what the former viewed as an insufficient emphasis on discipline in the schools.
Philosophical Thought
Dewey left Michigan in 1894 to become professor of philosophy and chairman of the department of philosophy, psychology, and pedagogy at the University of Chicago. Dewey's achievements there brought him national fame. The increasing dominance of evolutionary biology and psychology in his thinking led him to abandon the Hegelian theory of ideas, which views them as somehow mirroring the rational order of the universe, and to accept instead an instrumentalist theory of knowledge, which conceives of ideas as tools or instruments in the solution of problems encountered in the environment. These same disciplines contributed somewhat later to his rejection of the Hegelian notion of an Absolute Mind manifesting itself as a rationally structured, material universe and as realizing its goals through a dialectic of ideas. Dewey found more acceptable a theory of reality holding that nature, as encountered in scientific and ordinary experience, is the ultimate reality and that man is a product of nature who finds his meaning and goals in life here and now.
Since these doctrines, which were to remain at the centre of all of Dewey's future philosophizing, also furnished the framework in which Dewey's colleagues in the department carried on their research, a distinct school of philosophy was in operation. This was recognized by William James in 1903, when a collection of essays written by Dewey and seven of his associates in the department, Studies in Logical Theory, appeared. James hailed the book enthusiastically and declared that with its publication a new school of philosophy, the Chicago school, had made its appearance.
Dewey's philosophical orientation has been labeled a form of pragmatism, though Dewey himself seemed to favour the term “instrumentalism,” or “experimentalism.” William James's The Principles of Psychology early stimulated Dewey's rethinking of logic and ethics by directing his attention to the practical function of ideas and concepts, but Dewey and the Chicago school of pragmatists went farther than James had gone in that they conceived of ideas as instruments for transforming the uneasiness connected with the experience of having a problem into the satisfaction of some resolution or clarification of it.
Dewey's preferred mode of inquiry was scientific investigation; he thought the experimental methods of modern science provided the most promising approach to social and ethical as well as scientific problems. He rejected the idea of a fixed and immutable moral law derivable from consideration of the essential nature of man, since such a traditional philosophical method denied the potential application and promise of newer empirical and scientific methods.
Dewey developed from these views a philosophical ground for democracy and liberalism. He conceived of democracy not as a mere form of government, but rather as a mode of association which provides the members of a society with the opportunity for maximum experimentation and personal growth. The ideal society, for Dewey, was one that provided the conditions for ever enlarging the experience of all its members.
Dewey's contributions to psychology were also noteworthy. Many of the articles he wrote at that time are now accepted as classics in psychological literature and assure him a secure place in the history of psychology. Most significant is the essay “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology,” which is generally taken to mark the beginnings of functional psychology—i.e., one that focuses on the total organism in its endeavours to adjust to the environment.
Educational theory and practice. Dewey's work in philosophy and psychology was largely centred in his major interest, educational reform. In formulating educational criteria and aims, he drew heavily on the insights into learning offered by contemporary psychology as applied to children. He viewed thought and learning as a process of inquiry starting from doubt or uncertainty and spurred by the desire to resolve practical frictions or relieve strain and tension. Education must therefore begin with experience, which has as its aim growth and the achievement of maturity.
Biography
John Dewey was born Oct. 20, 1859, Burlington, Vt., U.S.—died June 1, 1952, New York, N.Y. American philosopher and educator who was one of the founders of the philosophical school of pragmatism, a pioneer in functional psychology, and a leader of the progressive movement in education in the United States.
Early life
The son of a grocer in Vermont, Dewey attended the public schools of Burlington and there entered the University of Vermont. After graduating from the university in 1879, Dewey taught high school for three years. In the fall of 1882 he entered Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, for advanced study in philosophy. There he came under the influence of George Sylvester Morris, who was a leading exponent of Neo-Hegelianism, a revival of the thought of the early-19th-century German philosopher Hegel. Dewey found in this philosophy, with its emphasis on the spiritual and organic nature of the universe, what he had been vaguely groping for, and he eagerly embraced it.
After being awarded the Ph.D. degree by Johns Hopkins University in 1884, Dewey, in the fall of that year, went to the University of Michigan, where, at the urging of Morris, he had been appointed an instructor in philosophy and psychology. With the exception of the academic year 1888–89, when he served as professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota, Dewey spent the next 10 years at Michigan. During this time his philosophical endeavours were devoted mainly to an intensive study of Hegel and the British Neo-Hegelians and to the new experimental physiological psychology then being advanced in the United States by G. Stanley Hall and William James.
Dewey's interest in education began during his years at Michigan. His readings and observations revealed that most schools were proceeding along lines set by early traditions and were failing to adjust to the latest findings of child psychology and to the needs of a changing democratic social order. The search for a philosophy of education that would remedy these defects became a major concern for Dewey and added a new dimension to his thinking.
Marx's Labor Theory Of Value
One of the commonly debated topics of Marxism is the concept of 'the law of value'. Marx developed many different theories and various aspects of those theories are controversial. This paper will focus, however, only on the most basic of his theories, namely that of 'the labor theory of value'. This theory took several alternative forms over the course of Marx's different volumes of publications. It was very often in the center of criticism, but because of the short length of this paper not much can be said about the critics of Marx's theory.
Marx's central theme is the importance of the 'commodity production'. Marx defines a commodity as anything which possesses both use and exchange value, and price as its monetary expression. Marx tried to say that trees, unmined metals, or barren land were not commodities but were merely gifts of nature. An exchange value had to come into play for something to be considered a commodity.
The most easily recognized aspect of commodity production is the use of labor. For a commodity to be produced a certain amount of labor must be involved in the production process. Marx put labor at such an important position that unless labor was used commodity had no value. By doing this he made it clear how important everyone's labor contribution is to the economy. " If he could establish the fact that human labor-and labor alone-was value creating, it could be made to follow that only those who worked were entitled to share in the resulting output."(Balinky,60). Marx believed that if he could maintain the importance of labor then his plan would succeed.
This is why Marx considered labor as the essential part of any production process. The value of a product is directly related to the amount of labor that is needed to produce that product. The more productive the labor is the more value it adds to the commodity. Marx believed that if two products needed the same amount of labor to produce them, then they contained the same value. " Commodities... that can be produced in the same labour time...have the same values, and that, on the other hand, differences in value find their measure in the quantitative difference in the labour time required for the production of commodities" (Kuhne,70). Labor is directly related to the price of the commodity. Some of Marx's ideas about the value were changed in his later writings.
One would probably ask how could Marx account for the importance of capital. He knew that critics would jump at the opportunity to discredit his theory by claiming that he downplayed other vital inputs to production. Marx claimed that machinery and other means of production had needed labor for their production. "He began with the simple proposition that a commodity is produced by utilization of some combination of labor and physical instruments, i.e., machinery, tools, equipment, etc. He referred to this combination as the means of production necessary to the creation of any commodity".(Balinky, 61). Marx distinguished between two different types of capital, variable and constant. Variable capital was the capital used to pay for the wages of labor. This was the only type of capital Marx considered relevant for creation of value. According to his reasoning constant capital needed labor before it could produce anything. Machines without the necessary labor to run them could not contribute to value in Marx's theory. They would sit there unused and useless. So although he downplayed its importance of the capital, Marx attempted to explain why he did so.
Marx needed a unit of measurement to consistently and accurately measure the value of labor. He came up with the most simple explanation: the time. He would use hours, days and weeks as the "pure and simple" way to measure the amount of labor that was used to produce a commodity. However, a specialized labor in producing a product was worth more than a 'simple' unskilled labor. Marx did not really explain how he came to this conclusion, he left it to the faith of his follower to believe in his theory.
Marx knew that there were many questions about his labor theory of value. He made two revisions to it after his original exposition. In his first model, exchange values were relative to the quantities of labor needed to produce commodities in question. This assumed that every firm in that industry had the same 'composition of capital', i.e. the same capital-labor ratio. In his revision of the labor-value theory "he was forced to admit that even in the long run--for technical as well as value reasons--the organic composition of capital did vary significantly from one industry or sphere of production to another" (Balinky, 82). The effect of this was different rates of profit in different industries. This fact was not acknowledged in the original model. In his third model he changed his stance about a link between supply and demand. This shows that Marx did see faults in his original theory and tried to fix some of its problems.
The labor theory of value's main premise is that the common way to measure value of commodities is through the amount of labor used. Marx acknowledged value for only something that used labor and could be exchanged. The idea of commodity production was a very central and important part of his theory. He emphasized the importance of value that comes from these commodities and how all these can be measured by the common element of labor.
The Communist Manifesto
Throughout the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx talks about how the "spectre of Communism" is spreading across Europe and the World. Yet, on the whole, he never really discusses much what Communism is as much as he derides Capitalism and the many faults that he has with other Socialist systems. It would have been more appropriate for his work to be called "Anti-Capitalist and Other Socialism Ideas Manifesto." Marx does not, however, go into much detail about how Communists would run the economy. Due to the many misconceptions of what the Communist Manifesto is about, the following is a short summary and critique of this important piece of literature that had influenced many in this world.
The introduction of the manifesto starts off with the popular quote "A spectre is haunting Europe-the spectre of Communism."(p.54) This provides much imagery to the reader and draws his or her into the body of work. Marx tries to make a clear understanding of what Communism is and how people would go about creating Communism. In a way, it was a platform for what Communism was to Marx. The organization Marx was in, the Second Congress of the Communist League, wanted him to write this manifesto so that it could be spread around. It was a way of promoting Communism, thus spreading throughout Europe much like the introduction wanted it to be thought of as.
Marx then goes into the first part of the body of his manifesto, which is the section entitled "Bourgeois and Proletarians." In this part, he goes into how society started communal but then became more unequal as time went on. Systems such as Feudalism, Mercantilism, and finally Capitalism benefited from the use of exploitation. He first introduces the idea that economic concerns of a nation drive history, and that the struggle between the rich bourgeoisie and the hard working proletariat would eventually lead to Communism. He goes on and on how the bourgeois have always got what they wanted. Marx does site positives that were done by this group, but he certainly seemed more reflective on the negatives committed by the bourgeois. Marx states the bourgeoisie "has agglomerated population, centralized means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands." (Marx, p.59) He then describes the proletarians, or the labor class, and how they were formed, how they have suffered, and how they must overcome their struggles. Marx declares that this "`dangerous class,' the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution." (Marx, p.65) A revolution where the proletariats take over and dethrone the bourgeoisie.
The second section entitled "Proletarians and Communists" distinguishes how these two groups are one and the same. Marx first goes into detail about what Communists believe in, tries to show similarities between the two, and recommends that Communism be the best choice instead of the other forms of socialism. This is implied when Marx states "The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all the other proletarian parties: formation of the prletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat." (Marx, p.67) He tries to give concrete details of what Communism is, such as his idea that "in Communist society, the present dominates the past." (Marx, p.69) This section, however is still doing a lot of bashing on the bourgeoisie. For example, Marx wrote that in "bourgeois society, capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality." (Marx, p.69) He goes on and on about capital, bourgeois and communism. However, he really does not state any concrete ideas on how communists would run the economy.
"Socialist and Communist Literature" is the heading for the third section, and it is itself divided into many smaller sections. Reactionary Socialism has a)feudal socialism, b)petty bourgeois socialism, and c)German, or "True" Socialism as subsections. Conservative, or Bourgeois, Socialism and Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism do not have any subsections under them. Here, Marx goes into great detail trying to explain very briefly what each of these earlier, popular theories of socialism are all about, as well as his opinion on each of them. He states "Since the development of class antagonism keeps even pace with the development of industry, the economic situation, as they find it, does not as yet offer to them the material conditions, for the emancipation of the proletariat. They therefore search after a new social science, after new social laws, that are to create these conditions." (Marx, p.83) However, Communism does not need to do this and justifies itself by the movement of the proletariat. Once again, however, Marx does not offer any differing economic theories from these other Socialist ideologies. He still does not give a sample of Communist economic theory either.
Finally, Marx's last section of his Communist Manifesto is entitled "Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various Existing Opposition Parties" where he goes on giving the view of the Second Congress of the Coummunist League for which he was asked to write the manifesto for. He reiterates that "the Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement." (Marx, p.85) Yet again, no economic theory for Communism is stated. Thus, the Communist Manifesto is a very brief political rather than economic summary of what Communism is about. If one wishes to find capitalist bashing, other socialist ideas rebuked, and an opinion of bourgeoisie and proletariat life, the Communist Manifesto has all of this. But if one wants to find concise, specific information on what Communist ideologies and economic theories propose, the Communist manifesto will be too general.
Karl Marx's Economic Theories
For Karl Marx, the basic determining factor of human history is economics. According to him, humans — even from their earliest beginnings — are not motivated by grand ideas but instead by material concerns, like the need to eat and survive. This is the basic premise of a materialist view of history. At the beginning, people worked together in unity and it wasn’t so bad.
But eventually, humans developed agriculture and the concept of private property. These two facts created a division of labor and a separation of classes based upon power and wealth. This, in turn, created the social conflict which drives society.
All of this is made worse by capitalism which only increases the disparity between the wealthy classes and the labor classes. Confrontation between them is unavoidable because those classes are driven by historical forces beyond anyone’s control. Capitalism also creates one new misery: exploitation of surplus value.
For Marx, an ideal economic system would involve exchanges of equal value for equal value, where value is determined simply by the amount of work put into whatever is being produced. Capitalism interrupts this ideal by introducing a profit motive — a desire to produce an uneven exchange of lesser value for greater value. Profit is ultimately derived from the surplus value produced by workers in factories.
A laborer might produce enough value to feed his family in two hours of work, but he keeps at the job for a full day — in Marx’s time, that might be 12 or 14 hours. Those extra hours represent the surplus value produced by the worker. The owner of the factory did nothing to earn this, but exploits it nevertheless and keeps the difference as profit.
In this context, Communism thus has two goals: First it is supposed to explain these realities to people unaware of them; second it is supposed to call people in the labor classes to prepare for the confrontation and revolution. This emphasis on action rather than mere philosophical musings is a crucial point in Marx’s program. As he wrote in his famous Theses on Feuerbach : “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”
Society
Economics, then, are what constitute the base of all of human life and history — generating division of labor, class struggle, and all the social institutions which are supposed to maintain the status quo. Those social institutions are a superstructure built upon the base of economics, totally dependent upon material and economic realities but nothing else. All of the institutions which are prominent in our daily lives — marriage, church, government, arts, etc. — can only be truly understood when examined in relation to economic forces.
Marx had a special word for all of the work that goes into developing those institutions: ideology. The people working in those systems — developing art, theology, philosophy, etc. — imagine that their ideas come from a desire to achieve truth or beauty, but that is not ultimately true.
In reality, they are expressions of class interest and class conflict. They are reflections of an underlying need to maintain the status quo and preserve current economic realities. This isn’t surprising — those in power have always wished to justify and maintain that power.
Why Does Religion Exist?: Karl Marx's Analysis of Religion
According to Karl Marx, religion is like other social institutions in that it is dependent upon the material and economic realities in a given society. It has no independent history; instead it is the creature of productive forces. As Marx wrote, “The religious world is but the reflex of the real world.”
According to Marx, religion can only be understood in relation to other social systems and the economic structures of society. In fact, religion is only dependent upon economics, nothing else — so much so that the actual religious doctrines are almost irrelevant. This is a functionalist interpretation of religion: understanding religion is dependent upon what social purpose religion itself serves, not the content of its beliefs.
Marx’s opinion is that religion is an illusion that provides reasons and excuses to keep society functioning just as it is. Much as capitalism takes our productive labor and alienates us from its value, religion takes our highest ideals and aspirations and alienates us from them, projecting them onto an alien and unknowable being called a god.
Marx has three reasons for disliking religion. First, it is irrational — religion is a delusion and a worship of appearances that avoids recognizing underlying reality. Second, religion negates all that is dignified in a human being by rendering them servile and more amenable to accepting the status quo. In the preface to his doctoral dissertation, Marx adopted as his motto the words of the Greek hero Prometheus who defied the gods to bring fire to humanity: “I hate all gods,” with addition that they “do not recognize man’s self-consciousness as the highest divinity.”
Third, religion is hypocritical. Although it might profess valuable principles, it sides with the oppressors. Jesus advocated helping the poor, but the Christian church merged with the oppressive Roman state, taking part in the enslavement of people for centuries. In the Middle Ages the Catholic Church preached about heaven, but acquired as much property and power as possible.
Martin Luther preached the ability of each individual to interpret the Bible, but sided with aristocratic rulers and against peasants who fought against economic and social oppression. According to Marx, this new form of Christianity, Protestantism, was a production of new economic forces as early capitalism developed. New economic realities required a new religious superstructure by which it could be justified and defended.
Marx’s most famous statement about religion comes from a critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law:
Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusion about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions.
This is often misunderstood, perhaps because the full passage is rarely used: the boldface in the above is my own, showing what is usually quoted. The italics are in the original. In some ways, the quote is presented dishonestly because saying “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature...” leaves out that it is also the “heart of a heartless world.” This is more a critique of society that has become heartless and is even a partial validation of religion that it tries to become its heart. In spite of his obvious dislike of and anger towards religion, Marx did not make religion the primary enemy of workers and communists. Had Marx regarded religion as a more serious enemy, he would have devoted more time to it.
Marx is saying that religion is meant to create illusory fantasies for the poor. Economic realities prevent them from finding true happiness in this life, so religion tells them this is OK because they will find true happiness in the next life. Marx is not entirely without sympathy: people are in distress and religion does provide solace, just as people who are physically injured receive relief from opiate-based drugs.
The problem is that opiates fail to fix a physical injury — you only forget your pain and suffering. This can be fine, but only if you are also trying to solve the underlying causes of the pain. Similarly, religion does not fix the underlying causes of people’s pain and suffering — instead, it helps them forget why they are suffering and causes them to look forward to an imaginary future when the pain will cease instead of working to change circumstances now. Even worse, this “drug” is being administered by the oppressors who are responsible for the pain and suffering.
Life dan Work
The German philosopher Karl Marx (1818-1883) was one of the most influential political writers in history. Indeed, in the last half of the twentieth century, almost half the people in the world lived in countries governed by principles based on Marx's work.
To understand the scope and importance of Marx, we must look to his childhood and to the political situation of his time. Marx grew up in a learned family that prized education. In fact, he came from a long line of rabbis on both sides of the family. In 1835, at the age of 17, Marx went to the University of Bonn to study law. However, Marx's father felt his son should go to a more serious school so, a year later, Marx was sent to the University of Berlin where he studied for four years.
Even as a young man, Marx had a thoughtful, philosophical bent. When he was 17 years old, he wrote a letter to his father, in which he pondered the choices that a young person must make when choosing a profession:
"...But the chief guide which must direct us in the choice of a profession is the welfare of mankind and our own perfection. It should not be thought that these two interests could be in conflict, that one would have to destroy the other; on the contrary, Man's nature is so constituted that he can attain his own perfection only by working for the perfection, for the good, of his fellow men. If he works only for himself, he may perhaps become a famous man of learning, a great sage, an excellent poet, but he can never be a perfect, truly great man."
I have quoted from this letter at such length to show you that Marx was much more than a political philosopher. As he grew older, he developed into a highly educated economist, a historian, a social scientist and, eventually, a revolutionary.
In October 1842, not long after finishing his formal education, Marx began to edit a 4-month old liberal newspaper, "Rheinische Zeitung", in the Prussian city of Cologne. (At the time, Prussia was an independent kingdom, the largest and most important of the Germanic states.)
Up to now, Marx had looked at the study of the law only as an academic pursuit. However, "Rheinische Zeitung" was an outlet for the region's middle class and intellectuals, people who were strongly opposed to Prussian authoritarianism. As editor, Marx was obliged -- for the first time in his life -- to confront legal and political issues from a practical viewpoint. This led him to turn his attention to economics and, within a short time, he began to develop a progressive, anti- authoritarian philosophy.
In November of 1842, Marx met Friedrich Engels, a German writer who was visiting the newspaper on his way to England. Marx and Engels began to collaborate, the start of a fruitful and stimulating partnership that was to last the rest of their lives. Under Marx's guidance and Engels' influence, the newspaper became more and more radical. In March 1843, Marx was forced to resign and, two weeks later, the Prussian government closed down the paper.
Marx then traveled to Paris, where he became involved with working-class, socialist groups. At the end of 1844, he was expelled from Paris, and he and Engels went to Brussels, where they stayed for three years. During this interval, Marx devoted himself to an intensive study of history, developing a materialistic conception of the field. In doing so, he took a very important philosophical step.
At the time, European metaphysics was dominated by Hegel's philosophy of idealism, based on two ideas. First, that reality is a creation of the mind; second, that history can be explained as an eternal struggle between opposing spiritual forces, a concept known as the Hegelian dialectic.
For Marx, reality was material, not spiritual. He rejected Hegel's interpretation of history in favor of a more practical doctrine, which came to be known as Dialectical Materialism. According to Marx, all progress takes place because of a "struggle of opposites", a naturally occurring process that cannot be influenced by individuals. People make social decisions solely in response to their economic needs and, thus, over time, the characteristics of a society are determined by its economic structure. Within a particular culture, classes arise based on people's relationships to the means of production. (For example, there are owners, managers, workers, and so on.)
These ideas served as the basis of a complex political doctrine that came to be called Marxism. Briefly, Marxism holds that the history of society is best-understood as "the history of class struggle". In the same way that the old feudal nobility was replaced by the bourgeoisie (that is, the capitalist class), the bourgeoisie itself will, one day, be replaced by the proletariat (the working class). In a capitalist system, the bourgeoisie is able to flourish because it extracts surplus profit from the products produced by the proletariat. However, capitalism has inherent contradictions, fatal weaknesses that, over time, become more and more severe. Eventually, the proletariat will become so impoverished that they will revolt and take control of the means of production, resulting in a completely classless society. Once this happens, the oppressive, coercive capitalist state will be replaced by a society based on rational economic cooperation.
While living in Brussels, Marx and Engels joined a newly formed organization of German emigre workers. The organization was based in London and called the Communist League. At the end of 1847, Marx and Engels traveled to London for a Communist League conference, where they were commissioned to write a "succinct declaration" of the organization's principles.
The result, published in 1848, was "The Communist Manifesto", arguably the single most influential political statement in history. Within the Communist Manifesto, Marx applied the concepts of dialectical materialism, asserting that social reform -- "the triumph of the working class" -- was not only desirable, but inevitable.
In May 1849, Marx was once again exiled. This time he moved to London, where he would live for the rest of his life. During this time, Marx did a great deal of writing and political organizing.
In the 1850s, he studied political economics and wrote weekly articles as a foreign correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune. In 1857, he produced an 800-page manuscript called "The Grundrisse" (Outlines), which was not published until 1941.
In the 1860s, he wrote three large volumes, "Theories of Surplus Value", in which he discussed theories of political economics. And in 1864, he and Engels helped found the International Workingmen's Association.
From 1867 to 1894, Marx created his greatest work, a three- volume treatise called "Das Kapital" ("Capital"), in which he used Dialectical Materialism to analyze and explain economic and social history. The first volume was published in 1876, and Marx worked on the other two for the rest of his life.
On March 14, 1883, Marx died. At his funeral, he was eulogized by Engels: "Fighting was his element. And he fought with a passion, a tenacity and a success such as few could rival... Though he may have had many opponents, he had hardly one personal enemy. His name will endure through the ages, and so also will his work." After Marx's death, Engels edited and published the second and third volumes of "Das Kapital".
Although it is true that many of Marx's predictions about the course of the revolutionary movement were wrong (at least, so far), there is no gainsaying that he was a true genius who left a firm, enduring mark on the world in which he lived. Even today, there are many who believe, as Engels did, that, "just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history." As Marx himself wrote in a letter (to Engels in 1868):
"It is absolutely impossible to transcend the laws of nature. What can change in historically different circumstances is only the form in which these laws expose themselves."
Friday, December 26, 2008
Hegel: Influence
At the time of Hegel’s death, he was the most prominent philosopher in Germany. His views were widely taught, and his students were highly regarded. His followers soon divided into right-wing and left-wing Hegelians. Theologically and politically the right-wing Hegelians offered a conservative interpretation of his work. They emphasized the compatibility between Hegel’s philosophy and Christianity. Politically, they were orthodox. The left-wing Hegelians eventually moved to an atheistic position. In politics, many of them became revolutionaries. This historically important left-wing group included Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer (1809–92), Friedrich Engels, and Karl Marx. Engels and Marx were particularly influenced by Hegel’s idea that history moves dialectically, but they replaced Hegel’s philosophical idealism with materialism.
Hegel’s metaphysical idealism had a strong impact on 19th-century and early 20th-century British philosophy, notably that of Francis Herbert Bradley, and on such American philosophers as Josiah Royce, and on Italian philosophy through Benedetto Croce. Hegel also influenced EXISTENTIALISM, through the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. PHENOMENOLOGY, has been influenced by Hegel’s ideas on consciousness. The extensive and diverse impact of Hegel’s ideas on subsequent philosophy is evidence of the remarkable range and the extraordinary depth of his thought.
Self-Knowledge of the Absolute, Philosophy of History, Ethics and Politics
Self-Knowledge of the Absolute
The goal of the dialectical cosmic process can be most clearly understood at the level of reason. As finite reason progresses in understanding, the Absolute progresses toward full self-knowledge. Indeed, the Absolute comes to know itself through the human mind’s increased understanding of reality, or the Absolute. Hegel analyzed this human progression in understanding in terms of three levels: art, religion, and philosophy. Art grasps the Absolute in material forms, interpreting the rational through the sensible forms of beauty. Art is conceptually superseded by religion, which grasps the Absolute by means of images and symbols. The highest religion for Hegel is Christianity, for in Christianity the truth that the Absolute manifests itself in the finite is symbolically reflected in the incarnation. Philosophy, however, is conceptually supreme, because it grasps the Absolute rationally. Once this has been achieved, the Absolute has arrived at full self-consciousness, and the cosmic drama reaches its end and goal. Only at this point did Hegel identify the Absolute with God. “God is God,” Hegel argued, “only in so far as he knows himself.”
Philosophy of History
In the process of analyzing the nature of Absolute Spirit, Hegel made significant contributions in a variety of philosophical fields, including the philosophy of history and social ethics. With respect to history, his two key explanatory categories are reason and freedom. “The only Thought,” maintained Hegel, “which Philosophy brings. . . to the contemplation of History, is the simple conception of Reason; that Reason is the Sovereign of the world, that the history of the world, therefore, presents us with a rational process.” As a rational process, history is a record of the development of human freedom, for human history is a progression from less freedom to greater freedom.
Ethics and Politics
Hegel’s social and political views emerge most clearly in his discussion of morality (Moralität) and social ethics (Sittlichkeit). At the level of morality, right and wrong is a matter of individual conscience. One must, however, move beyond this to the level of social ethics, for duty, according to Hegel, is not essentially the product of individual judgment. Individuals are complete only in the midst of social relationships; thus, the only context in which duty can truly exist is a social one. Hegel considered membership in the state one of the individual’s highest duties. Ideally, the state is the manifestation of the general will, which is the highest expression of the ethical spirit. Obedience to this general will is the act of a free and rational individual. Hegel emerges as a conservative, but he should not be interpreted as sanctioning totalitarianism, for he also argued that the abridgment of freedom by any actual state is morally unacceptable.
Philosophical Aims-Dialectic
Philosophical Aims
Hegel’s aim was to set forth a philosophical system so comprehensive that it would encompass the ideas of his predecessors and create a conceptual framework in terms of which both the past and future could be philosophically understood. Such an aim would require nothing short of a full account of reality itself. Thus, Hegel conceived the subject matter of philosophy to be reality as a whole. This reality, or the total developmental process of everything that is, he referred to as the ABSOLUTE, (q.v.), or Absolute Spirit. According to Hegel, the task of philosophy is to chart the development of Absolute Spirit. This involves (1) making clear the internal rational structure of the Absolute; (2) demonstrating the manner in which the Absolute manifests itself in nature and human history; and (3) explicating the teleological nature of the Absolute, that is, showing the end or purpose toward which the Absolute is directed.
Dialectic
Concerning the rational structure of the Absolute, Hegel, following the ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides, argued that “what is rational is real and what is real is rational.” This must be understood in terms of Hegel’s further claim that the Absolute must ultimately be regarded as pure Thought, or Spirit, or Mind, in the process of self-development (see IDEALISM,). The logic that governs this developmental process is DIALECTIC, (q.v.). The dialectical method involves the notion that movement, or process, or progress, is the result of the conflict of opposites. Traditionally, this dimension of Hegel’s thought has been analyzed in terms of the categories of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Although Hegel tended to avoid these terms, they are helpful in understanding his concept of the dialectic. The thesis, then, might be an idea or a historical movement. Such an idea or movement contains within itself incompleteness that gives rise to opposition, or an antithesis, a conflicting idea or movement. As a result of the conflict a third point of view arises, a synthesis, which overcomes the conflict by reconciling at a higher level the truth contained in both the thesis and antithesis. This synthesis becomes a new thesis that generates another antithesis, giving rise to a new synthesis, and in such a fashion the process of intellectual or historical development is continually generated. Hegel thought that Absolute Spirit itself (which is to say, the sum total of reality) develops in this dialectical fashion toward an ultimate end or goal.
For Hegel, therefore, reality is understood as the Absolute unfolding dialectically in a process of self-development. As the Absolute undergoes this development, it manifests itself both in nature and in human history. Nature is Absolute Thought or Being objectifying itself in material form. Finite minds and human history are the process of the Absolute manifesting itself in that which is most kin to itself, namely, spirit or consciousness. In The Phenomenology of Mind Hegel traced the stages of this manifestation from the simplest level of consciousness, through self-consciousness, to the advent of reason.
Biography
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich HEGEL (1770–1831), German idealist philosopher, who became one of the most influential thinkers of the 19th century. Hegel was born in Stuttgart on Aug. 27, 1770, the son of a revenue officer with the civil service. He was brought up in an atmosphere of Protestant PIETISM, (q.v.) and became thoroughly acquainted with the Greek and Roman classics while studying at the Stuttgart gymnasium (preparatory school). Encouraged by his father to become a clergyman, Hegel entered the seminary at the University of Tübingen in 1788. There he developed friendships with the poet Friedrich Hölderlin and the philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling. Having completed a course of study in philosophy and theology and having decided not to enter the ministry, Hegel became (1793) a private tutor in Berne, Switzerland. In 1797 he assumed a similar position in Frankfurt. Two years later his father died, leaving a financial legacy that was sufficient to free him from tutoring.
In 1801 Hegel went to the University of Jena, where he studied, wrote, and eventually became a lecturer. At Jena he completed The Phenomenology of Mind (1807; trans. 1910), one of his most important works. He remained at Jena until October 1806, when the city was taken by the French and he was forced to flee. Having exhausted the legacy left him by his father, Hegel became editor of the Bamberger Zeitung in Bavaria. He disliked journalism, however, and moved to Nuremberg, where he served for eight years as headmaster of a gymnasium.
During the Nuremberg years Hegel met and married Marie von Tucher (1791?–1855). Three children were born to the Hegels, a daughter, who died soon after birth, and two sons, Karl (1813–1901) and Immanuel (1814–91). Before his marriage, Hegel had fathered an illegitimate son, Ludwig (1807–31), who eventually came to live with the Hegels. While at Nuremberg, Hegel published over a period of several years The Science of Logic (1812, 1813, 1816; trans. 1929). In 1816 Hegel accepted a professorship in philosophy at the University of Heidelberg. Soon after, he published in summary form a systematic statement of his entire philosophy entitled Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline (1817; trans. 1959). In 1818 Hegel was invited to teach at the University of Berlin, where he was to remain. He died in Berlin on Nov. 14, 1831, during a cholera epidemic.
The last full-length work published by Hegel was The Philosophy of Right (1821; trans. 1896), although several sets of his lecture notes, supplemented by students’ notes, were published after his death. Published lectures include The Philosophy of Fine Art (1835–38; trans. 1920), Lectures on the History of Philosophy (1833–36; trans. 1892–96), Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (1832; trans. 1895), and Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1837; trans. 1858).
Strongly influenced by Greek ideas, Hegel also read the works of the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, the French writer Jean Jacques Rousseau, and the German philosophers Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Schelling. Although he often disagreed with these philosophers, their influence is evident in his writings.
Space and Time
Many metaphysicians have argued that neither time nor space can be ultimately real. Philosophers conceived of God as existing from everlasting to everlasting and as present in all parts of the universe. God was not so much in space and time as the source of space and time. Whatever falls within space and time is thereby limited, for one space excludes another and no two times can be simultaneous. God, however, is by definition an infinite being and so must exist timelessly and apart from space.
Reference has already been made to the way in which Kant argued for an intimate connection between time and space and human sensibility: that human beings experience things as being temporally and spatially situated is to be connected with the nature of their minds, and particularly with their sensory equipment. Kant was entirely correct to describe space and time as "intuitions," by which he meant that they are peculiar sorts of particulars; he was right again to insist on the centrality in sensing of the notions of here and now, which can be indicated but not reduced to conceptual terms. It is highly doubtful, however, whether he had sufficient grounds for claiming a priori insight into the nature of space and still more that of time; his case for thinking that space and time are "pure" intuitions was palpably inadequate. The lesson to draw from his careful discussion of this subject might well be not that there must be a form of reality lying beyond space and time but rather that nothing can be real that does not conform to spatial and temporal requirements. Space and time are bound up with particularity, and only what is particular can be real.
It was only in a weak sense that Immanuel Kant denied the reality of time and space. Other philosophers have certainly been bolder, though generally on the basis of a less solid grasp than Kant possessed of what it is to experience temporally and spatially. Thus, Bradley argued against the view that space and time are "principles of individuation" by alleging that no specification of spatial or temporal position, whether in terms of here and now or by the use of spatial coordinates or dating systems, could achieve uniqueness. Any descriptions such as "at 12 o'clock precisely on January 4, 1962" or "just 75 yards due north of this spot" might apply to infinitely many times or places in the universe, for there was nothing to prevent there being infinitely many temporal and spatial orders. Bradley forgot that the whole meaning of a spatial or temporal description is not exhausted when attention is given to the connotations of the terms used; what has to be considered is the words as used in their context, which is that of a person who can indicate his position in space and time because of the fact that he is himself situated in space and time. One cannot express uniqueness in words as such, but he can use words to express uniqueness. Bradley's suggestion that it is possible to conceive of many temporal and spatial orders is by no means free from controversy. In general, men think of all events as happening before, simultaneously with, or after the moment that is called "now," all spatial positions as relating in some way or other to the point that is called "here." In circumstances where this cannot be done, as with events or places in a dream, men dismiss them as quite unreal. That there might be events or places with no relation to their own now and here is something they often refuse to take seriously, though there are theories in modern science that suggest that they are wrong to do so.
It was pointed out earlier that to say that something is unreal in a metaphysical context is often to say that it is unintelligible, and it is not surprising to find that arguments about the unreality of space and time have often turned on conceptual considerations. Thus, it is alleged that there is an incoherency in the notion of space because it claims to be a whole that is logically prior to its parts, and nevertheless turns out in practice to be merely an indefinitely extensible aggregate. Everything that occupies space falls within a wider spatial context; the thought of space as such is, as Kant saw, involved in any spatial description. Yet space as such is something that constantly eludes man's grasp; space, as man knows it, is just one spatial situation after another.
The difficulties found in the notion of time turn on the combination in it of the idea that time is continuous and the idea that it is made up of discrete parts. Henri Bergson, a French philosopher who was concerned with the notions of duration and movement, said that time was experienced as continuous; it was only the "spatialized" time measured by clocks that was taken to have separable parts (minutes, hours, weeks, and so on), and this "public" time was merely conventional. This, however, seems altogether too easy a solution of the problem, for privately experienced time also goes by (one stretch of it follows another), and the thesis that public time is merely conventional is at best highly controversial. It must be allowed that time is commonly thought of as at once flowing and, as it were, subject to arrest. Whether this is, in fact, openly inconsistent may be doubted, but it is on points like this that the metaphysical case in question rests.
Few British or American philosophers discuss these questions now, largely because they have been persuaded by Moore that any attack on such central notions in men's thought as these must be mistaken in principle. As a result, little attention is given to a question that deserves investigation; namely, what is to take the place of space and time in metaphysical thought. Idealist writers constantly said that space and time qualified appearances, and that nothing that did so could fail to be taken up in the higher experience that was experience of reality. But how is this supposed to be done? Time is perhaps cancelled and yet preserved in the idea of eternity, space in the thought of something that is at once omnipresent yet not in any particular place. But what is there that is positive about these notions? The eternal, it is sometimes said, is not to be identified with what lasts through all time; it is, strictly, outside time altogether. But what does it mean to say this? When it is said, for example, that numbers or truths are eternal, the proper inference is that they have nothing to do with time; to inquire when they came into or will go out of existence is to ask a question that is ill posed. When God, however, is said to be eternal, the impression is often given that he has temporal characteristics, although in some higher form. What this higher form is deserves careful consideration, the result of which might be that it is not the conception of time that is incoherent but the conception of God.
Metaphysics and Epistemology
Kant's most widely read and most influential book is Critique of Pure Reason [1] (1781), which proceeds from a remarkably simple thought experiment. He said, try to imagine something that exists in no time and has no extent in space. The human mind cannot produce such an idea—time and space are fundamental forms of perception that exist as innate structures of the mind. Nothing can be perceived except through these forms, and the limits of physics are the limits of the fundamental structure of the mind. On Kant's view, therefore, there are something like innate ideas—a priori knowledge of some things (space and time)—since the mind must possess these categories in order to be able to understand the buzzing mass of raw, uninterpreted sensory experience which presents itself to our consciousness. Secondly, it removes the actual world (which Kant called the noumenal world, or noumena) from the arena of human perception—since everything we perceive is filtered through the forms of space and time we can never really "know" the real world.
Kant termed his critical philosophy "transcendental idealism While the exact interpretation of this phrase is contentious, one way to start to understand it is through Kant's comparison in the second preface to the "Critique of Pure Reason" of his critical philosophy to Copernicus' revolution in astronomy. Kant writes: "Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects. But all attempts to extend our knowledge of objects by establishing something in regard to them a priori, by means of concepts, have, on this assumption, ended in failure. We must therefore make trial whether we may not have more success in the tasks of metaphysics, if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge" [Bxvi]. Just as Copernicus revolutionized astronomy by changing the point of view, Kant's critical philosophy asks what the a priori conditions for our knowledge of objects in the world might be. Transcendental idealism describes this method of seeking the conditions of the possibility of our knowledge of the world.
Kant's "transcendental idealism" should be distinguished from idealistic systems such as Berkeley's. While Kant claimed that phenomena depend upon the conditions of sensibility, space and time, this thesis is not equivalent to mind-dependence in the sense of Berkeley's idealism. For Berkeley, something is an object only if it can be perceived. For Kant, on the other hand, perception does not provide the criterion for the existence of objects. Rather, the conditions of sensibility - space and time - provide the "epistemic conditions", to borrow a phrase from Henry Allison, required for us to know objects in the phenomenal world.
Kant had wanted to discuss metaphysical systems but discovered "the scandal of philosophy"—you cannot decide what the proper terms for a metaphysical system are until you have defined the field, and you cannot define the field until you have defined the limit of the field of physics first. 'Physics' in this sense means, roughly, the discussion of the perceptible world.
Biography
Immanuel Kant was born in Königsberg, East Prussia in 1724 and died in 1804. He attended the Collegium Fridiricianum at the age of eight, a Latin school that taught primarily classicism. After over eight years of study there, he went into the University Of Königsberg, where he spent his academic career focusing on philosophy, mathematics and physics. The death of his father had a strong effect on Kant, he left the university and earned a living as a private tutor. However, in 1755 he accepted the help of a friend and resumed study, receiving his doctorate in 1756.
He taught at the university and remained there for 15 years, beginning his lectures on the sciences and mathematics, though over time he covered most branches of philosophy. In spite of his growing reputation as an original thinker, he did not gain tenure at the university until 1770, receiving his professorship of logic and metaphysics. He continued writing and lecturing at Königsberg for the next 27 years, drawing many students there due to his rationalist and hence, unorthodox approach to religious texts. This led to political pressure from the government of Prussia, and in 1792, he was barred from teaching or writing on religious subjects by the king, Fredrich William II. Kant dutifully obeyed the injunction until the death of the king five years later, returning to the writing and lecturing of his ideas. The year following his retirement, he published a summary of his views on religion. He died in 1804.
Kant devised a model, an individual epistemology, by examining the basis of human knowledge and its limits. He brought together the ideas of rationalism, influential thinkers such as Leibniz and Wolff, with empiricism as proposed by David Hume. Kant's critical philosophy is presented in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781); the idea of critique is to establish and investigate the legitimate limits of human knowledge. Knowledge of sensible objects must form itself in advance to the structures of the human mind's ability to reason, and therefore all objects conform themselves a priori in such a relation -legitimate knowledge of objects is limited to how they appear for us.
Kant's logic creates a division and complex interplay of judgments- a priori and a posteriori judgments and analytic or synthetic judgments. A judgment is analytic if the subject of its proposition is contained within its predicate, i.e. "Sound theories are theories". To state the reverse would be a logical absurdity. The judgment is considered analytic because the truth of the proposition lies in the validity of the concept itself. All analytic judgments are a priori and thus, as is the case for all a priori judgments, they are independent of experience. However, judgments about empirical knowledge can only be made upon experience, are synthetic, a posteriori, and can be reversed without such a contradiction, i.e. "The theory is sound".
Here unfolds three classes of judgments: a) analytic a priori, b) synthetic a posteriori, and c) synthetic a priori. The particular concern for Kant is the synthetic a priori, for the sciences and mathematics are as such, existing independent of experience and yet as syntheses of previous judgments (knowledge). The question as to the origins of judgments becomes necessary. Metaphysics describes a science concerned with this inquiry, a solution to unsolvable problems set by pure reason itself, namely the concepts of God, freedom and immortality.
Kant developed a system of ethics in Metaphysics of Ethics (1797), in which he places reason as the fundamental authority for morality. Any action born of a mere expediency or servitude to law, politic or custom could be considered as moral, a sense of duty must arise solely as prescribed by reason. Reason dictates two imperatives: the hypothetical and the categorical. In the case of the former, a course of action to accomplish a specific task is presented, and in the latter a course of action that presents itself as appropriate, and necessary. The categorical is the basis for the ethical. This structure defends a fundamental freedom of the individual; that each one be responsible for their own ability, through reason, to obey consciously the laws of the universe.
Kantian philosophy was to have an enormous impact on modern philosophy as well as the fine arts and literature. Hegel was to develop the dialectical method based on elements within the Critique of Pure Reason, which in turn functioned as an underlying structure in Marx's philosophy.
Exile and Apologetics, 1762-1778
Forced to flee from France, Rousseau sought refuge at Yverdon in the territory of Bern. Expelled by the Bernese authorities, he found asylum in Môtiers, a village in the Prussian principality of Neuchâtel. Here in 1763 he renounced his Genevan citizenship. The publication of his Lettres écrites de la montagne (1764), in which he defended L'Émile and criticized "established" reformed churches, aroused the wrath of the Neuchâtel clergy. His house was stoned, and Rousseau fled to the isle of St. Pierre in the Lake of Biel, but he was again expelled by the Bernese. Finally, through the good offices of the British philosopher David Hume, he settled at Wotton, Derbyshire, England, in 1766. Hume managed to obtain from George III a yearly pension for Rousseau. But Rousseau, falsely believing Hume to be in league with his Parisian and Genevan enemies, not only refused the pension but also openly broke with the philosopher. Henceforth, Rousseau's sense of persecution became ever more intense, even at times hysterical.
Rousseau returned to France in June 1767 under the protection of the Prince de Conti. Wandering from place to place, he at last settled in 1770 in Paris. There he made a living, as he often had in the past, by copying music. By December 1770 the Confessions, upon which he had been working since 1766, was completed, and he gave readings from this work at various private homes. Madame d'Épinay, fearing an unflattering picture of herself and her friends, intervened; the readings were forbidden by the police. Disturbed by the reaction to his readings and determined to justify himself before the world, Rousseau wrote Dialogues ou Rousseau, Juge de Jean-Jacques (1772-1776). Fearful lest the manuscript fall into the hands of his enemies, he attempted to place it on the high altar of Notre Dame. Thwarted in this attempt, he left a copy with the philosopher Étienne Condillac and, not wholly trusting him, with an English acquaintance, Brooke Boothby. Finally, in 1778 Rousseau entrusted copies of both the Confessions and the Dialogues to his friend Paul Moultou. His last work, Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, begun in 1776 and unfinished at his death, records how Rousseau, an outcast from society, recaptured "serenity, tranquility, peace, even happiness."
In May 1778 Rousseau accepted Marquis de Giradin's hospitality at Ermenonville near Paris. There, with Thére‧se at his bedside, he died on July 2, 1778, probably from uremia. From birth he had suffered from a bladder deformation. From 1748 onward his condition had grown worse. His adoption of the Armenian mode of dress was due to the embarrassment caused by this affliction, and it is not unlikely that much of his suspicious irritability can be traced to the same malady. Rousseau was buried on the île des Peupliers at Ermenonville. In October 1794 his remains were transferred to the Panthéon in Paris. Thére‧se, surviving him by 22 years, died in 1801 at the age of 80.
L'Émile and Du contrat social
L'EL'Émile ou de l'éducation remains one of the world's greatest speculative treatises on education. However, Rousseau wrote to a correspondent who tried to follow L'Émile literally, "so much the worse for you!" The work was intended as illustrative of an educational program rather than prescriptive of every practical detail of a proper education. Its overarching spirit is best sensed in opposition to John Locke's essay on education. Locke taught that man should be educated to the station for which he is intended. There should be one education for a prince, another for a physician, and still another for a farmer. Rousseau advocated one education for all. Man should be educated to be a man, not to be a doctor, lawyer, or priest. Nor is a child merely a little man; he is, rather, a developing creature, with passions and powers that vary according to his stage of development. What must be avoided at all costs is the master-slave mode of instruction, with the pupil as either master or slave, for the medium of instruction is far more influential than any doctrine taught through that medium. Hence, an education resting merely on a play of wills - as when the child learns only to please the instructor or when the teacher "teaches" by threatening the pupil with a future misfortune - produces creatures fit to be only masters or slaves, not free men. Only free men can realize a "natural social order," wherein men can live happily.
A few of the striking doctrines set forth in L'Émile are: the importance of training the body before the mind, learning first through "things" and later through words, teaching first only that for which a child feels a need so as to impress upon him that thought is a tool whereby he can effectively manage things, motivating a child by catering to his ruling passion of greed, refraining from moral instruction until the awakening of the sexual urge, and raising the child outside the doctrines of any church until late adolescence and then instructing him in the religion of conscience. Although Rousseau's principles have never been fully put into practice, his influence on educational reformers has been tremendous.
L'Émile's companion master work, Du contrat social, attempted to spell out the social relation that a properly educated man - a free man - bears to other free men. This treatise is a difficult and subtle work of a penetrating intellect fired by a great passion for humanity. The liberating fervor of the work, however, is easily caught in the key notions of popular sovereignty and general will. Government is not to be confused with sovereignty of the people or with the social order that is created by the social contract. The government is an intermediary set up between the people as law followers and the people as law creators, the sovereignty. Furthermore, the government is an instrument created by the citizens through their collective action expressed in the general will. The purpose of this instrument is to serve the people by seeing to it that laws expressive of the general will of the citizens are in fact executed. In short, the government is the servant of the people, not their master. And further, the sovereignty of the people - the general will of the people - is to be found not merely in the will of the majority or in the will of all but rather in the will as enlightened by right judgment.
As with L'Émile, Du contrat socialis a work best understood as elaborating the principles of the social order rather than schematizing the mechanism for those general principles. Rousseau's political writings more concerned with immediate application include his Considérations sur le gouvernement de la Pologne (1772) and his incomplete Projet de constitution pour la Corse, published posthumously in 1862.
Other writings from Rousseau's middle period include the Encyclopédie article Économie politique (1755); Lettre sur la Providence (1756), a reply to Voltaire's poem on the Lisbon earthquake; Lettre a‧ d'Alembert sur les spectacles (1758); Essai sur l'origine des langues (1761); and four autobiographical Lettres a‧ Malesherbes (1762).
Biography
The Swiss-born philosopher, author, political theorist, and composer Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) ranks as one of the greatest figures of the French Enlightenment.
Both Jean Jacques Rousseau the man and his writings constitute a problem for anyone who wants to grasp his thought and to understand his life. He claimed that his work presented a coherent outlook; yet many critics have found only contradictions and passionate outbursts of rhetoric. One interpreter has called Rousseau "an irresponsible writer with a fatal gift for epigram." In the eyes of others Rousseau was not a "serious thinker" but only a mere feeler who occasionally had a great thought. Still others have found Rousseau a mere juggler of words and definitions. Even those who turn to him as an innovating genius have been at odds concerning what he advocated. Rousseau has been variously applauded or denounced as the founder of the romantic movement in literature, as the intellectual father of the French Revolution, as a passionate defender of individual freedom and private property, as a socialist, as a collectivist totalitarian, as a superb critic of the social order, and as a silly and pernicious utopian. Some few critics notably Gustave Lanson and E. H. Wright - have taken Rousseau at his word and believe that he attempted to answer only one question: how can civilized man recapture the benefits of "natural man" and yet neither return to the state of nature nor renounce the advantages of the social state?
For Rousseau's biographers the man himself has been as puzzling as his work - a severe moralist who lived a dangerously "relaxed" life, a misanthrope who loved humanity, a cosmopolitan who prided himself on being a "citizen of Geneva," a writer for the stage who condemned the theater, and a man who became famous by writing essays that denounced culture. In addition to these anomalies, his biographers have had to consider his confessed sexual "peculiarities" - his lifelong habit of masturbation, his exhibitionism, his youthful pleasure in being beaten, his 33-year liaison with a virtual illiterate, and his numerous affairs - and, characteristic of his later years, his persecution suspicions that reached neurotic intensity.
Three major periods characterize Rousseau's life. The first (1712-1750) culminated in the succe‧s de scandale of his Discours sur les sciences et les arts. The second (1750-1762) saw the publication of his closely related major works: La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), L'Émile (1762), and Du contrat social (1762). The last period (1762-1778) found Rousseau an outcast, hounded from country to country, his books condemned and burned, and a personnage, respected and with influential friends. The Confessions, Dialogues, and Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire date from this period.
Saturday, December 20, 2008
Political Thought
David Hume held several posts in his life, but never achieved high office in the academic world or elsewhere. He did, though, achieve the ‘literary fame’ which was his sole expressed ambition: his work was widely admired and discussed in Scotland, France, England, and beyond, and his reputation, though viciously attacked by eminent Victorians such as Carlyle, has been maintained on a high level ever since.
This reputation is not primarily as a political theorist, but in the fields of epistemology and ethics, where his Enquiry concerning Human Understanding and A Treatise of Human Nature respectively have given him an undisputed eminent place in the history of philosophy. His position in the history of political thought is not generally considered to be so large. There is no work comparable to Hobbes's Leviathan, Rousseau's Social Contract, or even Locke's Two Treatises on Civil Government; it is a consequence of his approach to politics that there could not be. Hume's conventionally ‘political’ works consist of something between a dozen and two dozen essays, depending on what one means by politics. Yet Hume is, in many respects, a deeply political writer. His epistemology cannot be ignored by anyone seeking to explain politics, his consideration of the nature of morality, including convention, justice, and property, is an important political theory in all but conventional categorization and these are complemented by his overtly political essays and his History of England in six volumes.
Hume wrote forcefully, in elegant, common language: no British philosopher is further removed than Hume from the Germanic habit of inventing terms and creating concepts. Yet Hume's clarity is often said to be deceptively, even deceitfully, misleading: the contradictions and ambiguities of Hume's writings as a whole are legion and he can make an apparently simple concept, like ‘the association of ideas’, which he is often accused of overusing, into a puzzle as unclear as anything in Kant or Hegel. Take, for example, four famous Humean arguments:
(1) ‘Hume's fork’: the insistence, most clearly in the Enquiry, that true statements come in two forms, ‘relations of ideas’ (especially mathematics) and ‘matters of fact’. Books full of claims which fall into neither category should be ‘consigned to the flames’. This argument suggests Hume as an intellectual ancestor of the logical positivists.
(2) Atheism: the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, consistently with much of Hume's epistemological writings, appear to favour rejection of all the established arguments in favour of religion including the ontological argument, the necessity of a Creator, and so on.
(3) Causation: Hume argued that causes did not have a separate existence, that the idea of causation must be reduced to the ‘constant conjunction’ of what we imagine to be causes and their effects.
(4) The gap between facts and values: or, in Hume's terms, the impossibility of inferring an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’.
Yet all of these arguments, put so forcefully by Hume in famous passages, are contradicted or mitigated elsewhere in his writings and have been interpreted in widely different ways. The ‘relations of ideas’ category is expanded far beyond the bounds allowed by the logical positivists and Hume insists on the untenability of complete scepticism. Not only is there private correspondence which seems to establish Hume as a religious believer, but the Dialogues contain convincing arguments in favour of an anthropomorphic analogy for any principle of order in the universe and for the necessity of religion reinforcing morality.
The argument from ‘constant conjunction’ can be cited as both a scepticism about science and as a redefining basic principle for Newtonian physics and thus modern science. Some critics have argued that Hume, far from instigating a rigid distinction between fact and value, collapsed such a distinction and convincingly portrayed certain kinds of morality as natural and compelling because of their naturalness.
Similar contradictions threaten the clarity of his political writings. In his essay, ‘Of the Original Contract’, he sustains, with great force and elegance, a contempt for the plausibility and usefulness of any idea of government being based on the kind of contract posited by Hobbes, Locke, or Rousseau. Government is founded on ‘usurpation or conquest’; it must be supported because of its beneficial consequences and it would not last five minutes if subjected to the test of having to fulfil a valid contract. But in many other passages, including the essay Of the Origin of Government, he seems much more sympathetic to a contractual account. In That Politics may be reduced to a Science he argues against the possibility of general prescriptions of how government should be organized while in Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth he appears to offer us just such a general prescription, a devolved, elected, republic, based on a property franchise with a separation of powers.
The accusation must be considered that Hume was inconsistent and negative. Contesting such considerations must start with Hume's beliefs and prejudices about English history. His History ends with the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1689: ‘we, in this island, have ever since enjoyed if not the best system of government, at least the most entire system of liberty, that ever was known among mankind.’ Nothing could be stronger or more consistent in Hume's view of the world than the contrast between his abhorrence for the doctrinaire, vicious milieu of the seventeenth century, with its religious persecutions, civil wars, and political crises, and his gratitude for finding himself alive in the eighteenth century. His own age, as he portrayed it in his essays on economics and the arts, was an unprecedented period of peace, stability, prosperity, and freedom of expression. His disgust at the excesses of the seventeenth century is well shown in his version of the Popish Plot period of 1678-9 with its show trials (as we should now call them) and its hypocrisies, in which both sides, supporters of Parliament and monarch, were equally objectionable in his view.
How did the happy condition of the eighteenth century arise? On what principle was it based? How was it to be maintained? These were essential questions for Hume and he had subtle and important answers to them. The settlement of British political problems had not come about because the right side won, still less because the correct doctrine prevailed. Of William of Orange, the principal beneficiary of the Glorious Revolution, he says, ‘though his virtue, it is confessed, be not the purest, which we meet with in history, it will be difficult to find any person, whose actions and conduct have contributed more eminently to the general interests of society and of mankind’. Thus he supports the same side as John Locke, but regards Locke as taking the right side, not just for the wrong reason, but for the wrong sort of reason. Acceptance of the Glorious Revolution and the subsequent Hanoverian Settlement starts with its good effects. One reason these effects are good is that they give a preponderant victory to the Whigs, but not a total victory: the monarchy remains, with Hume's support, allowing a government which is ‘mixed’ in its principles and institutions and therefore moderate in its nature. Above all, political life is no longer a contest over abstract or religious truth; Hume had as much contempt for divine right as for contract theory, and as much again for the popular political dogmas they generated: the Tory doctrine of passive obedience and Whig doctrine of the right of resistance. Whatever the subtleties of Hume's religious position, he was consistently opposed to religion in its seventeenth-century form, which claimed philosophical truth and moral substance. By contrast, he saw ‘ancient religion’ as a benign package of myths, morals, and allegiances which required no dogma.
Hume's philosophical arguments and historical judgements can be synthesized as follows: the purpose of government is the well-being of the people, but you cannot bring government into being or destroy governments in relation to that purpose, because to do so would not be beneficial. Governments arise by contingency; they are worthy of obedience not because of any rigorous principle, but because their maintenance allows the freedom and stability which is conducive to the general well-being. Human institutions are founded not on abstract principles, but on conventions; justice and property are necessary conventions in conditions of scarcity. Some conventions have a natural basis, not in that they can be derived naturally from reason, but in the sense that they flow from the sympathy which exists naturally in all of us and links us together. The question for political theorists is not, ‘In what circumstances can we justify acceptance of and obedience to government?’, but ‘How can we understand the nature of the bonds which form a society and give us the habit of being governed without resorting to the kind of theological and moral dogmas which are intellectually unacceptable and practically dangerous?’ Most elements of this body of theory are shared with Hume's contemporaries: the relativism and passion for moderate government is shared with Montesquieu; the ultimately sensual purpose is shared with the utilitarians, though without a linear concept of well-being or the apparent rigour of Bentham; the belief in a society based on convention, which grows in conditions of stability, is shared with Burke. Yet the whole constitutes one of the most subtle and important of modern political philosophies.
Theory of Ideas
Hume accepts the Cartesian doctrine of the distinct idea - conceivability subject only to the principle of contradiction - as both the unit of reasoning and the criterion of truth. But the doctrine of the distinct idea means that every noncontradictory idea expresses an a priori logical possibility. And the speculative freedom of the imagination to conceive opposites without contradiction makes it impossible to demonstrate any matter of fact or existence. This argument leads to a distinction between relations of ideas (demonstrations which are true a priori) and matters of fact (the opposite of which is distinctly conceivable). And this distinction excludes from the domain of rational determination every factual event, future contingent proposition, and causal relation. For Hume, since truth is posterior to fact, the ideas of reason only express what the mind thinks about reality.
Distinct ideas, or imaginative concepts, are pure antinomies apart from experience as every factual proposition is equally valid a priori. But Hume does acknowledge that such propositions are not equally meaningful either to thought or action. On the level of ideas, Hume offers a conceptual correlative to the exemption of sensation as a form of cognition by his recognition that the meaning of ideas is more important than their truth. What separates meaningful propositions from mere concepts is the subjective impression of belief.
Belief, or the vivacity with which the mind conceives certain ideas and associations, results from the reciprocal relationship between experience and imagination. The cumulative experience of the past and present - for example, the relational factors of constancy, conjunction, and resemblance - gives a bias to the imagination. But it is man's imaginative anticipations of the future that give meaning to his experience. Neither the relational elements of experience nor the propensive function of the imagination, from the viewpoint of the criterion of truth, possesses the slightest rational justification. Hence the interplay between the criterion of truth and the logic of the imagination explains both Hume's skepticism and his conception of sensation and intellection.
The most celebrated example of this argument is Hume's analysis of the causal relation. Every statement which points beyond what is immediately available to the senses and memory rests on an assumption and/or extension of the cause and effect relation. Let us examine two cases: I see lightning and hear thunder; I see a rabbit and then a fox. The question is why I am right in concluding that lightning causes thunder but wrong in believing that rabbits cause foxes. Experience, in both instances, reveals an A that is followed by B, and repeated experiences show that A is always followed by B. While the constant conjunction of A and B might eliminate the rabbit-fox hypothesis, it is of no help in explaining causality because there are all sorts of objects, such as tables and chairs, which are similarly conjoined but not supposed to be causally related. Thus experience reveals only that constant conjunction and priority are sufficient but not necessary conditions for establishing a causal connection. And it is necessity, understood as that which cannot be otherwise than it is, which makes a relation causal in the propositional form of "If A then B must appear and if no A then no B."
But if necessary connection explains causality, what explains necessity? Experience yields only a particular instance and tells us nothing about the past or the future. Nor is there any necessity discoverable in repeated experiences. That the sun will rise tomorrow because it has in the past is an assumption that the past necessarily causes the future which is, of course, the connection that is to be demonstrated. If experience cannot account for necessity, then reason fares no better. I can always imagine the opposite of any matter of fact without contradiction. If someone tells me that Caesar died of old age or that thunder is uncaused or that the sun will not rise tomorrow, I will not believe him, but there is nothing logically incorrect about such statements since for every probability "there exists an equal and opposite possibility." Thus there is no justifiable knowledge of causal connections in nature, although this is not a denial that there are real causes. Man's supposed knowledge results from repeated associations of A and B to the point where the imagination makes its customary transition from one object to its usual attendant, that is, "an object followed by another, and whose appearance always conveys the thought to that other."
Because of his skeptical attitude toward the truths of reason Hume attempted to ground his moral theory on the bedrock of feeling - "Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions." In this, Hume followed the "moral sense" school and, especially, the thought of Francis Hutcheson. The notion that virtue and vice are to be derived ultimately from impressions of approbation and blame or pleasure and pain shows that Hume anticipated Jeremy Bentham's utilitarianism, a debt which the latter acknowledged. Although Hume considered himself to be primarily a moralist, this doctrine is the least original part of his philosophical writings.
Posts
