In such an irrational world, however, there exists a morality which is necessarily ascetic and nullifying. In a pessimistic morality there is no glorification of life, but nullification and destruction of the will to live. Indeed, if the root of all evils is the will to live, there is no other escape, no other remedy than to suppress this will. The steps which make possible the suppression of the instinct to life are three: aesthetics, ethics, ascetics. Schopenhauer is inspired by Neo-Platonism in this regard.
Aesthetics is the activity of man, absorbed in contemplation of the idea of beauty, untroubled by any desire and, consequently, by any evil. Wrapped up in aesthetic contemplation, he is not longer a slave of the will. But aesthetics is not sufficient, for the joy which it gives is possible only for intellectuals, and even in such persons it is of short duration. Hence it is necessary to ascend to the second grade, ethics.
Ethics makes man able to acknowledge that in addition to himself there are other men endowed with an essence like his own. Hence he is forced by ethics to suppress his egoism which, because of the desire for life, is the root of every evil. The fundamental characteristic of ethics is compassion. Man is immoral when he increases the misery of another or when he remains indifferent to another's suffering. On the contrary, he is moral when he feels the distress of those who are his fellow men, and tries to mitigate their pain. Thus he feels that he is one with all men, as in truth he is, by reason of the unity of the Universal Will from which everyone proceeds. But even ethics does not succeed in completely eradicating the insidious source of all evils, and hence it is necessary to ascend still further, to the third grade, ascetics.
Asceticism consists in the constant action of nullifying the will itself. Art suspends will; ethics mortifies it; ascetics nullifies it. Only the great penitents and saints have reached this stage. Schopenhauer, by a complete misunderstanding of spiritual life, believed the penitents and saints of the Church to be absolutely indifferent and detached from all that surrounds them, mentally dead to all things, while materially they continue to live.
The moral teaching of Schopenhauer, culminating in his asceticism, the nullifier of life, is completely opposed to Hegel's morality, which glorifies life. Both, however, are atheistic on account of the immanentist prejudice which vitiates them.
Saturday, January 10, 2009
Applications of His Doctrine to Man
Pessimism
If reality is the blind will to live, and the world is the objectivation of such a blind will, life is painful misery. Schopenhauer makes a broad and acute analysis of all the various branches of existence, only to conclude that life is essentially pain and that it is a mistake to persevere in the will to live. According to him, everywhere in the world everything is desire, because all -- everywhere -- is will. To desire signifies suffering distress on account of the lack of what is desired. If the desire is not satisfied, the distress remains and increases; if it is satisfied, satiety and annoyance follow, and this in turn causes new desires and new distresses.
The will finds thousands of pretexts for perpetuating this unsatisfied hunger of the will to live. These pretexts only perpetuate the misery of life.
- One such pretext and deceit is love. The will of the species masks itself under the pleasures of love with the purpose of perpetuating the desire for life in others. In so doing, it satisfies its own will to live.
- Another pretext and deceit is egoism, which impels us to increase the pains of others in the hope of gaining some advantage in our own miserable life.
- Still another deceit and illusion is progress which, in actuating itself, only makes more acute the sense of distress.
The Sacred Writer, in Schopenhauer's interpretation, says that increasing knowledge is only to increase distress. (Ref. Ecclesiastes 1:14, 18: I have seen all things that are done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a chase after wind...For in much wisdom there is sorrow and he who stores up knowledge stores up grief.)
The whole world is miserable because of the universal blind will to live. Man can avoid his share of misery by suppressing the will to live.
Schopenhauer's philosophy is the antithesis of that of Hegel. In Hegel, reality and rationality coincide. Struggle and injustice are nullified and are justified in the higher synthesis; and, finally, progress and history entirely justify evil in its extreme manifestations of war and national calamities. In Schopenhauer, on the contrary, reality is blind and therefore essentially irrational and evil. Love, progress, history do not justify and annul misery; they are deceits and illusions behind which the blind, unconscious will masks itself, for this will is never satisfied with living and suffering. The systems of Hegel and Schopenhauer represent different atheistic conceptions of the world and of life.
The World as Will and Idea
Schopenhauer's unhappy relations with his mother finally terminated in open hostility, and he moved to Dresden. By this time the central and simple idea of his philosophy had taken hold in his mind. The principal source of this idea was his own experience and moods, but the expression of it owed much to the philosophies of Plato and Immanuel Kant and the mystical literature of India. He foresaw that his reflections would eventually lift him above the absurd stresses and conflicts of his life, and he thought that ultimately his writings would usher in a new era not only in philosophy but also in human history. Whereas former philosophies had been parceled into schools and special problems, his own, as he envisaged it, would be a single, simple fabric. The simplest expression of this potent idea is probably the very title of the book he wrote at Dresden, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Idea). The world is necessarily present to a subject that perceives it; thus the world is "idea" or "representation." Yet the world is not created or constructed by the subject or the mind; its own nature is will, or blind striving. "My body and my will are one," and in the final analysis one person's will is indistinguishable from every other form of willing.
The book was printed by a reluctant publisher in 1818 and failed to gain a public. Nevertheless, with two books to his credit, Schopenhauer was given a lectureship in philosophy at the University of Berlin. At that time G. W. F. Hegel was the center of attention, and Schopenhauer decided to compete with him by lecturing at the same hour. But he addressed an empty room, and shortly his academic career was over.
Biography
The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), whose pessimistic philosophy was widely known in the late 19th century in Europe and the United States, held that ultimate reality wasnothing but senseless striving or will, having no divine origin and no historical end.
Arthur Schopenhauer was born in Danzig on Feb. 22, 1788. His father, a successful Dutch businessman, had a taste for urbane living, travel, and bourgeois culture, while his mother aspired to the more exotic culture of writers and nonconformists. When Schopenhauer was 5, Danzig, formerly a free mercantile city, was annexed by Poland. As a consequence, his family moved to Hamburg, Germany, in search of a more congenial setting for his father's business. In 1797 Schopenhauer was sent to stay with a family in France, returning to Hamburg after 2 years to enter a private school. Later he became interested in literature, earning the disapproval of his father, who nonetheless gave him the choice of pursuing serious literary studies or traveling with the family for 2 years. Schopenhauer chose to travel.
His voyages over, Schopenhauer took a job as a clerk in a Hamburg merchant's office. That year, 1805, his father died, apparently a suicide. The mercantile world held only drudgery for young Schopenhauer, whose ambitions and desires were both unfocused and frustrated. Feeling constrained by a promise to his father, Schopenhauer remained at work until 1807, when he joyfully resigned in order to study Greek and Latin in a school at Gotha. Having enraged an unsympathetic instructor, he transferred to a school in Weimar, where his mother had already established herself as mistress of a literary salon frequented by Goethe and other notables. But Schopenhauer had earlier quarreled with his mother, whom he thought too free with her ideas and her favors. He therefore resided with his mentor, the philologist Franz Passow, who paid his tuition. Schopenhauer's studies went well, and in 1809, on acquiring a handsome legacy, he enrolled at the University of Göttingen. He studied mostly the sciences and medicine but eventually turned to philosophy.
Art as Will and Representation
When we've come this far, we ask ourselves the following question: what is art then? What is the metaphysical essence of art? Drawing ideas directly from Schopenhauer, Nietzsche introduces what would come to be one of the world's most famous metaphors about the interpretation of art. But to understand this metaphor, we must first become acquainted with the Schopenhauerian philosophy of the Will. According to Schopenhauer, our world consists out of two basic elements: the Will and the representation. The Will is an objective force, which we commonly are only able to perceive via representations. Think of the Will as the instinct of a tiger. You cannot see, hear nor feel it, but you know it's real, because it's what drives and motivates the tiger to attack its prey and kill it. The representation of that Will could be said to be the tiger as we know it, with fur, claws and bloody teeth.
Art, similar to our senses in that it's a medium through which we perceive the world, is divided into different art forms: primarily, music and poetry. Music, Schopenhauer claims, is the only art form that is able to fully express the objective Will. We understand this in the form of what many often call "absolute music," a term that means the music isn't trying to depict an inner visual scenery or "soundscape" as some call it, but is completely abstract in its essence. An example of this is the Fifth Symphony by Beethoven. When we listen to it, there is no clear visual agenda or program behind it, only a total expression of Beethoven's emotions, passions and experiences. The Fifth Symphony could therefore be said to capture aspects of the objective Will of Beethoven. Thus, concludes Schopenhauer, music is a unique art form in that it is able to express a complete objectification of the Will.
This is the basic metaphysical discussion that Nietzsche uses to develop his theory about the essence of art. Music is the expression of the objective Will that Schopenhauer talks about, but what about poetry? We mentioned earlier how this Will is commonly perceived by us in the form of representation. Poetry, Nietzsche says, is a different art form from music, because it cannot express the objective Will, only the representation of it. For example, when we read a poem, we translate the sentences into visual experiences. We cannot experience a poem the same way we experience a symphony, because the former relies completely on our inner visualization, while the latter is perceived by our senses in a more direct and abstract form. Herein lies the difference.
Music lets us gain direct access to the Will, while poetry requires an extra level of medium, namely the representation. If we could explain this in visual terms, it would look something like this:
Music => Will => Perceiver
Poetry => Will => Representation => Perceiver
The difference between the poetic and musical art form is thus a metaphysical one: music has the ability to capture the Will itself because it speaks directly to our senses, while poetry is dependant on us imagining the Will, re-creating it visually. To shed some more light on this difference, Nietzsche mentions the German poet Friedrich Schiller, who explains the creation process behind his poetry. First he finds an inner musical rhythm and then he writes down a visualized expression of that music. In other words, poetry is not just a visualization of an experience, but carries an inner musical melody underneath it. When reading a poem, we follow the inner rhythm of each verse; hence one could say we're actually reading music!
But even if poetry has some obvious musical aspects to it, it is still dependant upon the visualization process, which is why it cannot express an objectification of the Will like music can. Some people will here note that not all music is "absolute music," that is, certain music actually depict something strongly visually, often in the form of different themes of programs. This is true and Nietzsche deals with this by taking Beethoven's sixth as an example. This symphony was composed with a clear program for each piece and thus can be said to not be completely abstract in its nature.
So is also the case with what we commonly refer to as "program music," but the point to make here is that music doesn't rely on this visualization process. We can for instance visualize certain parts in Beethoven's "absolute" fifth, and thereby add the extra level of medium found within poetry - the interpretation of the Will - but it is a level of medium that we as perceivers add to the experience, not a medium inherent to the nature of music itself. Music can therefore contain visual or programmatic elements, but does not necessarily have to. This conclusion leads Nietzsche to uphold music as the highest form of art - the only art form that is possible of penetrating deepest into the core of our organic existence.
Crime and Punishment
Nietzsche studies the psychological phenomenon behind bad conscience and traces it back to the time in history when man lost contact with his natural instincts to hunt and conquer. When this primitive lifestyle suddenly became morally demonized, man turned against himself and thus invented bad conscience. Nietzsche also examines the origins of crime and punishment, linking it to the time when people started to form social relations based upon promise and trust. An example is a master lending out money to his worker: the only guarantee the master has that he will ever see his money again is based upon human trust.
Of course, not all of these promises were kept and eventually the master had to invent a counter-promise: if the worker cannot keep his promise, the master has a right to inflict harm upon him - and so the notion of punishment was created. Nietzsche remains critical to all of these moral systems that he sees as phenomenons originating from pre-moral situations. He raises a series of thought-worthy questions: can the master really be paid back on a broken promise by means of punishment? Can the loss of one individual be equally measured to that of another?
Again we see a pattern emerge: once we establish moral laws that don't coincide with our natural human behaviour, we suddenly feel bad about being ourselves. The slave believes this is his way out of being oppressed by his master, but as Nietzsche reveals, all of humanity suffers from the inversion of the master morality, the hierarchical laws of nature.
The three Judeo-Christian belief systems (Judaism, Islam, Christianity) made enormous victories worldwide, conquering culture after culture. To Nietzsche, this was a disease of monumental proportions. He saw a group of slaves fooling their masters into obeying a God that proclaimed a moral system not in accordance with natural laws. Reality is built upon natural selection, which says that only he who is most fit in accordance with his natural environment will survive. The wave of Christian revolution across Europe could therefore not last forever. Nietzsche knew this and believed that he lived in an age that could come to put a stop to the religion of slave revolt.
The Psychology of Slave Morality
The effects of the new wave of slave morality become apparent in the psychological mechanisms behind its Christian followers. Nietzsche explains the evident conflict that now appears between the new moral system and natural reality. Christianity glorifies everything that is being weak and under-confident, but this only affirms the position of the slave. In order to feel superior over their previous masters, the slaves now have to find a way of achieving power, passively. They invent the notion of pity.
Nietzsche examines pity and pitiful thinking from a psychological perspective: the individual, who is weak, naturally cannot beat his master - unless he invents the theory that the master actually is the weak party. The slave therefore claims to pity his master, because he's not devoted to the value system of slave morality, which says that only meek people with meek impulses are rewarded. Thus he creates the illusion of being in a superior position to his master, while at the same time feeling good about it. And the only way for the master to be loyal to the God of the slaves that supposedly enforces this system is to accept his inferiority and join hands with the slaves in equality.
How could the masters give in to all of this? Nietzsche has several explanations to why things escalated as they did. The flaws and inherent weaknesses of the human individual are vulnerable to psychological manipulation. For instance, when we do something that we inherently think is wrong, such as killing a person, we feel bad about it. It is our human conscience that is speaking, informing us of a conflict between our actions and our moral viewpoints. This means that what we commonly refer to as having a "bad conscience," really is a moral perception of an event and not something objective or absolute. In other words: if you establish a new moral perception of what is "right" and "wrong," you can actually manipulate people around you into feeling bad about things defined as morally incorrect.
Religion
Nietzsche's relation to religion was problematic. His belief in the complete and uncompromising individuality that previously had been defended by German romanticists such as Heinrich von Kleist led him to viciously attack the inherent dogmatic qualities of religious practice and formation. At the same time he drew notable influence from Germanic mythology and spiritual values, in which he saw a radical contrast to modern Judeo-Christian beliefs. In his famous work Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche writes:
The noble man honours in himself the powerful one, him also who has power over himself, who knows how to speak and how to keep silence, who takes pleasure in subjecting himself to severity and hardness, and has reverence for all that is severe and hard. "Wotan placed a hard heart in my breast," says an old Scandinavian Saga: it is thus rightly expressed from the soul of a proud Viking. (Beyond Good and Evil, Chapter IX, §260)
But most importantly, religion symbolized to Nietzsche the creation of static, moral laws, upholding virtues that seemed to draw away from life and demonize it, instead of celebrating it with joy and passion. He systematically examined the inherent psychological motives behind the creation of morality and concluded that it seemed to be a way for people to establish a parallel world in which the uncomfortable sides to reality, such as death, pain, inequality, and struggle, were banned and declared morally "wrong." This led Nietzsche on a warrior's path, in turn condemning those who tried to condemn life, to end with the controversial news to the modern world: "God is dead!"
The Death of God
"Whither is God?" he cried. "I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I! All of us are his murderers! But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? And backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we not hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition?—Gods, too, decompose! God is dead! (The Gay Science, Book III, §125)
This is the frank but controversial message that the madman in The Gay Science brings to his fellow citizens of the modern world. God is dead because we have killed him. How? To understand this, one must sink into the very core of Christianity, like Nietzsche did. According to Christian belief, the earthly life is a horrible place filled with death, pain, inequality and natural instincts. All of this goes against the moral ethics of God, who promises his followers a safe place in Heaven. But in order to reach this Heaven, we must live our lives according to the laws and ethics of that world here on earth, and this is where the problem lies.
A rightful Christian lives his life according to the moral laws of Heaven, otherwise he's not allowed through the pearly gates and thus is condemned to Hell for all of eternity. This means that Christianity demonizes the earthly life and its natural laws, in favour of a world reduced of all unpleasant things inherent to this reality. What Nietzsche and many people like him in the modern age did was to slowly begin to openly criticize the very foundation of the Christian faith. Was there really a God? Did a Heaven really exist, and if so, was it something worth striving for?
But the very thing that led to the decline of Christianity in the West was the new scientific optimism of the Enlightment. During this time, man's capacity to human reason and objective truth was upheld, and religious faith came under attack for supporting a dead cause. Science and technological development would lead humanity into a better age of material wealth and prosperity. For Nietzsche, this age marked the point when God was "killed." We searched for the truth and came to find that there is no God. "Great," one might say, "we found that God isn't real and just some made up hocus-pocus fantasy for superstitious ignorants. Time for truth to reign!"
This is what many people during this time thought. They felt immediately relieved by knowing they no longer had to care for a God that didn't exist. But as Nietzsche noted, truth isn't always what we seek. When a truth we previously thought to be real is suddenly proven to be false, we instantly need something new to replace the missing truth with. He asked himself: if we don't believe in gods anymore, what are we to believe in? People were slowly beginning to ask themselves the same question, without coming to any conclusion. Suddenly a fate worse than ever had come true: man had abandoned his belief in the eternal gods, but without returning to something else. As Heaven had turned out to be a religious dream and the earthly life still represented what was ethically and morally demonized, man had nowhere to go. Alone, shattered by the despair of being caught in a world of horror, he was doomed to live in a void of emptiness.
The Tragic Myth
In The Birth of Tragedy from 1872, Nietzsche studied the Ancient Greek culture, specifically the Greek Tragedy. He posed the question of why the Greeks developed such an art form. Why did a people whose cultural life otherwise seemed so life-affirming and bright suddenly begin writing complex dramas where the lonely individual took the wrong step in life, abruptly finding themselves at the mercy of the gods?
For Nietzsche, who is already beginning to reveal the foundation of his philosophy, there is a truth about life to be found in tragedy. True art, he says, must reflect life and thus be amoral, because life in its very core is not moral, but rather, organic. And as organic life has no moral guidance but only primal natural laws, through which it both creates and destroys lesser life such as human beings and animals, it must be regarded as "anti-life" to morally condemn natural things such as death, pain or tragedy. Herein lies the foundation to what Nietzsche sees as brilliant in the Greek tragic myth: it celebrates life unconditionally and captures its essence of existence without flinching or defending itself with ethical principles. It's a clear expression of life itself.
But for Nietzsche, this conclusion is only the platform. For tragedies to be made, man must invent myths. The Greek religious life was filled with hundreds upon hundreds of gods, goddesses and mystic tales from which the Greeks drew inspiration for their art. This realization becomes the central idea that Nietzsche wants to make about art: without a strong and rich life of myths and magic tales, the culture slowly decays from within due to lack of nourishment.
Art is not created from moral or rational principles, but from the depth of the soul of a people. The myth is the expression of that unique soul, but as soon we try to "objectify" or rationally explain its relevance, we slowly kill our cultural life and replace it with a clinic, materialist worldview. This worldview is the modern one, where we have literally killed the belief in religion, passion, magic and myth, because we no longer understand their function. We search for "objective" answers to the myth itself and unsurprisingly we find none, because the truth about life, according to Nietzsche, does not lie in the myth itself, but in its metaphorical expression of life. We cannot discover Zeus up on Mount Olympus, nor will we ever find the Cyclops that almost killed Odysseus, because these are simply metaphors to communicate something about our existence that cannot be adequately explained otherwise.
Nietzsche sees a corrolation between myth and perception of reality. We cannot gain direct access to any objective truth, the "thing in itself"; instead, we interpret it through subjective symbolism, just like we perceive life through the metaphor in art. In his groundbreaking work called On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, he writes:
The various languages placed side by side show that with words it is never a question of truth, never a question of adequate expression; otherwise, there would not be so many languages. The "thing in itself" (which is precisely what the pure truth, apart from any of its consequences, would be) is likewise something quite incomprehensible to the creator of language and something not in the least worth striving for. This creator only designates the relations of things to men, and for expressing these relations he lays hold of the boldest metaphors.
This conclusion is the beginning to an aesthetic manifesto, upholding the subjective experience as more worthwhile than the search for objective truth - a truth that Nietzsche says we cannot possibly gain access to anyway. The only way for us to live in harmony is to accept the limitations of our human conditions and find truth in the metaphor of art. As he famously proclaims in The Birth of Tragedy: "the existence of the world is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon."
Biography
German philosopher and artist who deconstructed morality and celebrated the Romantic myth as an expression of life.
"Nihilism stands at the door: whence comes this uncanniest of all guests?" In 1901, this question appeared in the first chapter of a posthumously published philosophical work called The Will To Power. The author of the book was Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, a German philosopher and artist, renowned for his fiery outbursts on Christianity, moral conventions and contemporary modern society. Alienated from the outside world and in deep mental breakdown, Nietzsche left the world with an astounding legacy that would continue to question and criticize established norms and principles long after his death. Who was he, this lonely man who hid his face behind a giant moustache, writing mystical aphorisms that declared the death of God?
Introduction
Friedrich Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844, in a small German town called Röcken bei Lützen, located southwest of Leipzig. His father died when he was only four years old, which left him in the hands of his mother, Franziska, his paternal grandmother, Erdmuthe, his father's two sisters, Auguste and Rosalie, and his younger sister, Therese Elisabeth Alexandra. From the beginning, Nietzsche's life was already taking a decisive form. Early on he became acquainted with the music of Richard Wagner, whose charismatic art and personality attracted his attention. This eventually led to a close friendship between the two, who both shared a passion and enthusiasm for the philosophical works of Arthur Schopenhauer.
Being a successful student in philology and somewhat of an academic star, thanks to his essays on Aristotle, Theognis and Simonides, Nietzsche was suddenly called in to enter the military service at age 23. During this time he was struck by a serious chest injury, which forced him to immediately suspend his military training. Five years later, Nietzsche released his first book, entitled The Birth of Tragedy (1872), which examined the Greek culture and the metaphysics behind art, drawing a heavy inspiration from Schopenhauer and also Wagner, whose work he praised immensely.
Nietzsche continued visiting Wagner regularly at his home in Bayreuth, until Human, All-Too-Human (1878) was published. This work marked the end of their ten-year friendship, in which Wagner came under attack as the thinly-disguised "artist." At around this time, Nietzsche's life changed completely. He became the Nietzsche we commonly think of today: the lonely wanderer who had given up his German citizenship, travelling around Europe with no stable home of residence. In 1882 he visited Rome, where he met the Russian woman named Lou Salomé. Nietzsche fell in love with her and requested her hand in marriage, but she declined. Their friendship was never to be the same again, and one can imagine that Nietzsche was never to fully recover from this, either.
The following years became a particularly productive period for Nietzsche, with the publication of works such as The Gay Science (1882), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-85), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), Twilight of the Idols (1888), and The Antichrist (1888). Shortly after The Antichrist was published, Nietzsche suddenly fell into a mental breakdown, often described as a scene where he witnessed a horse being whipped, clung his arms around the animal's neck, and then collapsed. For a long time his madness was believed to have been the result of a syphilitic infection, but recent studies have showed that the culprit was actually brain cancer, which Nietzsche appears to have inherited from his father.
Nietzsche spent his last days on an estate known as the "Villa Silberblick," rented by his sister Elisabeth, who had married a German anti-Semite named Bernhard Förster. On August 25, 1900, Friedrich Nietzsche passed away in what is presumed to have been pneumonia in combination with a stroke. His body was placed in the family gravesite together with his mother and sister, by the church in Röcken bei Lützen. Villa Silberblick became the "Nietzsche Archives," containing his personal manuscripts, but to the rest of the world, Nietzsche was already archived in the history of mankind as the man who changed the face of German philosophy forever.
Monday, January 5, 2009
Significance and influence
In psychology, James's work is of course dated, but it is dated as is Galileo's in physics or Charles Darwin's in biology because it is the originative matrix of the great variety of new developments that are the current vogue. In philosophy, his positive work is still prophetic. The world he argued for was soon reflected in the new physics, as diversely interpreted, with its resonances from Charles Peirce, particularly by Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, and the Danish quantum physicist Niels Bohr—a world of events connected with one another by kinds of next-to-next relations, a world various, manifold, changeful, originating in chance, perpetuated by habits (that the scientist calls laws), and transformed by breaks, spontaneities, and freedoms. In human nature, James believed, these visible traits of the world are equally manifest. The real specific event is the individual, whose intervention in history gives it in each case a new and unexpected turn. But in history, as in nature, the continuous flux of change and chance transforms every being, invalidates every law, and alters every ideal.
James lived his philosophy. It entered into the texture and rhythms of his rich and vivid literary style. It determined his attitude toward scientifically unaccepted therapies, such as Christian Science or mind cure, and repugnant ideals, such as militarism. It made him an anti-imperialist, a defender of the small, the variant, the unprecedented, the weak, wherever and whenever they appeared. His philosophy is too viable and subtle, too hedged, experiential, and tentative to have become the dogma of a school. It has functioned rather to implant the germs of new thought in others than to serve as a standard old system for others to repeat.
Interest in religion
The Principles completed, James seems to have lost interest in the subject. Creator of the first U.S. demonstrational psychological laboratory, he disliked laboratory work and did not feel himself fitted for it. He liked best the adventure of free observation and reflection. Compared with the problems of philosophy and religion, psychology seemed to him “a nasty little subject” that he was glad to have done with. His studies, which were now of the nature and existence of God, the immortality of the soul, free will and determinism, the values of life, were empirical, not dialectical; James went directly to religious experience for the nature of God, to psychical research for survival after death, to fields of belief and action for free will and determinism. He was searching out these things, not arguing foregone conclusions. Having begun to teach ethics and religion in the late 1880s, his collaboration with the psychical researchers dated even earlier. Survival after death he ultimately concluded to be unproved; but the existence of divinity he held to be established by the record of the religious experience, viewing it as a plurality of saving powers, “a more of the same quality” as oneself, with which, in a crisis, one's personality can make saving contact. Freedom he found to be a certain looseness in the conjunction of things, so that what the future will be is not made inevitable by past history and present form; freedom, or chance, corresponds to Darwin's “spontaneous variations.” These views were set forth in the period between 1893 and 1903 in various essays and lectures, afterward collected into works, of which the most notable is The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897). During this decade, which may be correctly described as James's religious period, all of his studies were concerned with one aspect or another of the religious question.
His natural interest in religion was reinforced by the practical stimulus of an invitation to give the Gifford Lectures on natural religion at the University of Edinburgh. He was not able to deliver them until 1901–02, and their preparation focussed his labours for a number of years. His disability, involving his heart, was caused by prolonged effort and exposure during a vacation in the Adirondacks in 1898. A trip to Europe, which was to have taken up a sabbatical year away from university duties, turned into two years of invalidism. The Gifford Lectures were prepared during this distressful period. Published as The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), they had an even greater acclaim as a book than as articles. Cautious and tentative though it was, the rich concreteness of the material and the final summary of the evidence—that the varieties of religious experience point to the existence of specific and various reservoirs of consciousness-like energies with which we can make specific contact in times of trouble—touched something fundamental in the minds of religionists and at least provided them with apologetic material not in conflict with science and scientific method. The book was the culmination of James's interest in the psychology of religion.
Interest in Psychology
In 1872 James was appointed instructor in physiology at Harvard College, in which capacity he served until 1876. But he could not be diverted from his ruling passion, and the step from teaching physiology to teaching psychology—not the traditional “mental science” but physiological psychology—was as inevitable as it was revolutionary. It meant a challenge to the vested interests of the mind, mainly theological, that were entrenched in the colleges and universities of the United States; and it meant a definite break with what Santayana called “the genteel tradition.” Psychology ceased to be mental philosophy and became a laboratory science. Philosophy ceased to be an exercise in the grammar of assent and became an adventure in methodological invention and metaphysical discovery.
With his marriage in 1878, to Alice H. Gibbens of Cambridge, Mass., a new life began for James. The old neurasthenia practically disappeared. He went at his tasks with a zest and an energy of which his earlier record had given no hint. It was as if some deeper level of his being had been tapped: his life as an originative thinker began in earnest. He contracted to produce a textbook of psychology by 1880. But the work grew under his hand, and when it finally appeared in 1890, as The Principles of Psychology, it was not a textbook but a monumental work in two great volumes, from which the textbook was condensed two years later.
The Principles, which was recognized at once as both definitive and innovating in its field, established the functional point of view in psychology. It assimilated mental science to the biological disciplines and treated thinking and knowledge as instruments in the struggle to live. At one and the same time it made the fullest use of principles of psychophysics (the study of the effect of physical processes upon the mental processes of an organism) and defended, without embracing, free will.
Biography (1842 - 1910)
(born Jan. 11, 1842, New York, N.Y., U.S.—died Aug. 26, 1910, Chocorua, N.H.) American philosopher and psychologist, a leader of the philosophical movement of Pragmatism and of the psychological movement of functionalism. Early life and education
James was the eldest son of Henry James, an idiosyncratic and voluble man whose philosophical interests attracted him to the theology of Emanuel Swedenborg. One of William's brothers was the novelist Henry James. The elder Henry James held an “antipathy to all ecclesiasticisms which he expressed with abounding scorn and irony throughout all his later years.” Both his physical and his spiritual life were marked by restlessness and wanderings, largely in Europe, that affected the training of his children at school and their education at home. Building upon the works of Swedenborg, which had been proffered as a revelation from God for a new age of truth and reason in religion, the elder James had constructed a system of his own that seems to have served him as a vision of spiritual life. This philosophy provided the permanent intellectual atmosphere of William's home life, to some degree compensating for the undisciplined irregularity of his schooling, which ranged from New York to Boulogne, Fr., and to Geneva and back. The habits acquired in dealing with his father's views at dinner and at tea carried over into the extraordinarily sympathetic yet critical manner that William displayed in dealing with anybody's views on any occasion.
When James was 18 years of age he tried his hand at studying art, under the tutelage of William M. Hunt, an American painter of religious subjects. But he soon tired of it and the following year entered the Lawrence Scientific School of Harvard University. From courses in chemistry, anatomy, and similar subjects there, he went to the study of medicine in the Harvard Medical School; but he interrupted this study in order to accompany the eminent naturalist Louis Agassiz, in the capacity of assistant, on an expedition to the Amazon. There James's health failed, and his duties irked him. He returned to the medical school for a term and then during 1867–68 went to Germany for courses with the physicist and physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz, who formulated the law of the conservation of energy; with Rudolf Virchow, a pathologist; with Claude Bernard, the foremost experimentalist of 19th-century medicine; and with others. At the same time he read widely in the psychology and philosophy then current, especially the writings of Charles Renouvier, a Kantian Idealist and relativist.
The acquaintance with Renouvier was a focal point in James's personal and intellectual history. He seems from adolescence to have been a delicate boy, always ailing, and at this period of his stay in Germany he suffered a breakdown, with thoughts of suicide. When he returned home in November 1868, after 18 months in Germany, he was still ill. Though he took the degree of M.D. at the Harvard Medical School in June 1869, he was unable to begin practice. Between that date and 1872 he lived in a state of semi-invalidism in his father's house, doing nothing but reading and writing an occasional review. Early in this period he experienced a sort of phobic panic, which persisted until the end of April 1870. It was relieved, according to his own statement, by the reading of Renouvier on free will and the decision that “my first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.” The decision carried with it the abandonment of all determinisms—both the scientific kind that his training had established for him and that seems to have had some relation to his neurosis and the theological, metaphysical kind that he later opposed in the notion of “the block universe.” His revolutionary discoveries in psychology and philosophy, his views concerning the methods of science, the qualities of men, and the nature of reality all seem to have received a definite propulsion from this resolution of his poignant personal problem.
Intuition and Critique of intellect
Critique of intellect
Given that absolute reality is a duration or flow one is most attuned to, this flow not in one's thought (which halts or stops this irreducible flux) but in actions in which one participates in and so move along with this flow. All theoretical knowing, therefore, is founded on a more primordial or original practical attitude of the knower to what is known. The mistake of metaphysics is to assume that universals or essences actually exist in the real things; rather all rational analysis is a kind of “objectifying” the absolute reality of duration into “segments” or static objects to be known. By adding up a number of segments or perspectives as “propositions” about the object we represent to ourselves an image of the thing that is known. In this way, one builds up or constructs a unity out of the parts which one has gathered or perceived. This knowledge can be very useful in practical affairs but it should not be confused with the ultimate reality itself, as if one were really knowing the things in themselves. Rather this unity of parts belongs to the symbol as opposed to the ultimate reality which has no parts. This capacity of intellectual knowing Bergson attributes to analysis. In analyzing, one dissects or breaks up into parts, only in order to later construct or unify that knowledge of the object under analysis. This tendency to analyze is a result of conceptual reason which always thinks in this way, that is, by objectifying. In doing this, time as the ultimate reality is conceived of in the form of space. But for Bergson time eludes all spatial representation and so there must be a more original way of accessing this ultimate reality.
Intuition
Since in all rational knowledge, one understands through concepts, which “freeze” the ultimate reality of duration into static representations, there must be a way to penetrate this ultimate reality in order to “know” it. Bergson calls this means of access “intuition.” Intuition is opposed to intellect and is used as a philosophical method by which one enters into a reality in order to experience it immediately in its original manner. For Bergson, intuition is deeper than intellect and so is able to penetrate the reality and so experience it even if it can’t know it, strictly speaking, through rational analysis.
Although not rational analysis itself, intuition is still a kind of reflection rather than some kind of instinct, feeling, or sensible perception. The disclosure of duration occurs, therefore, through an introspection of self whereby one sees through memory the flux of time, which passes through all one's various experiences, knowledge, associations, and so forth. But given this limitation of intuition, Bergson is forced into metaphorical imagery to evoke this more original experience of time. Moreover, he holds that one can “think” in duration by reflecting upon this ultimate flow from within this very flow itself, which is what metaphorical language is able to achieve because its imagery is more basic to the original flux than is the "imagery" of conceptual representation. Furthermore, because such “knowledge” is based on this original metaphysical experience, Bergson refers to his philosophy as the “true empiricism.” Therefore, he encourages his readers to penetrate for themselves the hidden depths by which the original dynamism of duration can be experienced. Likewise, the freedom, which is inherent in duration, can also be experienced within this metaphysical intuition; thus, one encounters the élan vital which eludes the mechanical necessity of brute force and so opens the space for creative possibility.
Bergson's Ideas
His Idea:
- There are two methods of intellectual inquiry: intuition and analysis.
- Analysis understands reality in terms of stability, predictability, and spatial location; intuition, on the other hand, experiences growth, novelty, and temporal duration.
- True donation is experienced only in the human person, and that duration is preserved in memory.
- Memory, while being informed by sense impressions, is not absolutely dependent upon the matter of the brain.
- Freedom is the personal event of self-creation.
- An inexhaustible, vital impulse orients all of creation to greater perfection and as such lies at the core of evolution.
- Mysticism, as ultimate transcendence, experiences the unity of all things and expresses itself in a call to universal love; this is the insight of dynamic religion and morality.
- Closed societies with their concern for social order and cohesion produce religions of authority, ritual, and hierarchy, as well as a morality focused on law.
Relationship with James and Pragmatism
Bergson came to London in 1908 and visited William James, the Harvard philosopher who was Bergson's senior by seventeen years, and who was instrumental in calling the attention of the Anglo-American public to the work of the French professor. James's impression of Bergson is given in his Letters under date of October 4, 1908.
As early as 1880 James had contributed an article in French to the periodical La Critique philosophique, of Renouvier and Pillon, entitled Le Sentiment de l'Effort. Of these articles the first two were quoted by Bergson in his 1889 work, Time and Free Will. In the following years 1890-91 appeared the two volumes of James's monumental work, The Principles of Psychology, in which he refers to a pathological phenomenon observed by Bergson. Some writers, taking merely these dates into consideration and overlooking the fact that James's investigations had been proceeding since 1870 (registered from time to time by various articles which culminated in "The Principles"), have mistakenly dated Bergson's ideas as earlier than James's.
It has been suggested that Bergson owes the root ideas of his first book to the 1884 article by James, "On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology," which he neither refers to nor quotes. Bergson replied to this insinuation by denying that he had any knowledge of the article by James when he wrote Les données immédiates de la conscience. Although James was slightly ahead in the development and enunciation of his ideas, he confessed that he was baffled by many of Bergson's notions. James certainly neglected many of the deeper metaphysical aspects of Bergson's thought, which did not harmonize with his own, and are even in direct contradiction. In addition to this, Bergson can hardly be considered a pragmatist.
Nevertheless, William James hailed Bergson as an ally. Early in the century (1903) he wrote: "I have been re-reading Bergson's books, and nothing that I have read since years has so excited and stimulated my thoughts. The most noteworthy tributes paid by him to Bergson were those made in the Hibbert Lectures (A Pluralistic Universe), which James gave at Manchester College, Oxford, shortly after meeting Bergson in London. He remarks on the encouragement he has received from Bergson's thought, and refers to the confidence he has in being "able to lean on Bergson's authority."
The influence of Bergson had led him "to renounce the intellectualist method and the current notion that logic is an adequate measure of what can or cannot be."
These remarks, which appeared in James' book A Pluralistic Universe in 1909, impelled many English and American readers to an investigation of Bergson's philosophy for themselves. In the following year the translation was completed and still greater interest in Bergson and his work was the result. By a coincidence, in that same year (1911), Bergson penned a preface of sixteen pages entitled Truth and Reality for the French translation of James's book, "Pragmatism".
In April (5th to 11th) Bergson attended the Fourth International Congress of Philosophy held at Bologna, in Italy, where he gave an address on "Philosophical Intuition".
Criticisms
From his first publications, Bergson's philosophy attracted strong criticism. Among those who explicitly criticized Bergson (either in published articles or letters) were Bertrand Russell, George Santayana, G. Peirce took strong exception to being aligned with Bergson. In response to a letter comparing his work with that of Bergson he wrote, "a man who seeks to further science can hardly commit a greater sin than to use the terms of his science without anxious care to use them with strict accuracy; it is not very gratifying to my feelings to be classed along with a Bergson who seems to be doing his prettiest to muddle all distinctions." Some critics have taken exception to the notion that Proust took anything of great significance from Bergson's philosophy. As one critic remarks: "As much as he was influenced by Bergson’s ideas, Proust appears to have found the diametrically opposed 'metaphysic'...equally attractive....[Proust’s] attempt, expressed in the delaying syntax of his long sentences, to immobilize and protract the instant by subdividing it infinitely, by spreading and, so to speak, spatializing it, bespeaks the mathematical, atomic, Eleatic materialism..., precisely that 'mechanical' materialism against which Bergson argued." Even William James's students resisted the assimilation of his work to that of Bergson's. As Jean Wahl described the "ultimate disagreement" between James and Bergson: "for James, the consideration of action is necessary for the definition of truth, according to Bergson, action...must be kept from our mind if we want to see the truth." Gide even went so far as to say that future historians will over-estimate Bergson's influence on art and philosophy just because he was the self-appointed spokesman for "the spirit of the age."
Bergson's "duration" is subjective. As early as the 1890s, Santayana attacked Bergson's view of the New and the indeterminate: "the possibility of a new and unaccountable fact appearing at any time," he writes, "does not practically affect the method of investigation;...the only thing given up is the hope that these hypotheses may ever be adequate to the reality and cover the process of nature without leaving a remainder. According to Santayana and Russell, Bergson projected false claims onto the aspirations of scientific method, which Bergson needed to make in order to justify his prior moral commitment to freedom. Russell takes particular exception to Bergson's understanding of number in chapter two of "Time and Free-will." According to Russell, Bergson uses an outmoded spatial metaphor ("extended images") to describe the nature of mathematics as well as logic in general. "Bergson only succeeds in making his theory of number possible by confusing a particular collection with the number of its terms, and this again with number in general," writes Russell
Life and Thought
Henri Bergson was born in Paris on October 18, 1859 and lived a life of an intellectual from a young age. As a young man, he attended the École Normale Supérieure and the University of Paris. After graduating, he was a teacher in several secondary schools until 1898. In that year, Bergson was offered a position as a professor at the École Normale Supérieure. He was later appointed to the prestigious position as the chair of philosophy at the Collège de France. By 1914, Bergson was honored by being elected to the French Academy. By 1921, Bergson resigned from the Collège de France and focused his time and energy on international affairs, politics, moral problems, and religion. He was so involved in political and moral issues that in his later years, he only published one book The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. He was awarded the the Nobel Prize in literature in 1927.
Bergson's doctoral dissertation, Time and Free Will was published in 1889 and caught the interest of many noted philosophers. Bergson believed in freedom of the mind and on a state of thought known as “duration.” Bergson described duration as a conscious state that cannot be measured. Some of his other books include Matter and Memory, Laughter, and Creative Evolution. All of these works address the mind and its functions and were very influential on writers, artists, philosophers, intellectuals and poets through the entire 20th century.
Henri Bergson’s work emphasized the importance of intuition in the function of thought. Although he is often associated with the school of philosophy known as intuitionalist, his work did not address intuition alone. It did, however, celebrate the vital action of human creativity as it emerged in the course of life.
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