A Short History of Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Wittgenstein Read online

  This analytical or critical philosophy, manifested at its most magisterial in the writings of Kant, has also dominated Anglo-American philosophy during this century, in the special form of ‘conceptual’ or ‘linguistic’ analysis. But the history of the subject suggests that, in questions of philosophy, analysis, in whatever high respect it may be held, always creates a desire for synthesis and speculation. However narrow a particular philosophy may look at first sight, however much it may seem to be mere verbal play or logic-chopping, it will in all probability lead by persuasive steps to conclusions, the metaphysical implications of which are as far-reaching as those of any of the grand speculative systems.

  I have said that it is an essential feature of philosophical thought that it should have truth as its aim. But, faced with the bewildering variety of the conclusions, the contradictions of the methods, and the darkness of the premises of philosophers, the lay reader might well feel that this aim is either unfulfillable, or at best a pious hope rather than a serious intention. Surely, the reader will say, if there is such a thing as philosophical enquiry, which aims at and generates truth, then there ought to be philosophical progress, received premises, established conclusions; in short there ought to be the kind of steady obsolescence of successive systems that we observe in natural science, as new results are established and old ones overthrown. And yet we find no such thing; the works of Plato and Aristotle are studied as seriously now as they ever were, and it is as much the business of a modern philosopher, as it was the business of their philosophical contemporaries, to be familiar with their arguments. A scientist, by contrast, while he may have an interest in the history of his subject, can often ignore it with impunity, and usually does so. A modern physicist who had never heard of Archimedes may yet have a complete knowledge of the accepted conclusions of his subject.

  It would be an answer to this scepticism to argue that there is progress in philosophy, but that the subject is peculiarly difficult. It lies at the limit of human understanding; therefore its progress is slow. It would also be an answer to argue that the nature of the subject is such that each attempt is a new beginning, which can take nothing for granted, and only rarely reach conclusions that have not been already stated in some other form, clothed in the language of some other system. It is useful here to contrast philosophy with science on the one hand, and literature on the other. As I have suggested, a scientist may with impunity ignore all but the recent history of his subject and be none the less expert for that. Conversely, someone with only a very inadequate grasp of physics (of the system of physics which is currently accepted as true) may nevertheless prove to be a competent historian of the subject, able to explore and expound the intellectual presuppositions and historical significance of many a dead hypothesis, and many an outmoded form of thought. (Thus we find that science and the history of science are beginning to be separable academic disciplines, with little or no overlap in questions or results.)

  When we turn to literature, however, we find a completely different state of affairs. First, it is implausible to suggest that there is an innate tendency of literature to progress—since there is nothing towards which it is progressing. Science, which moves towards truth, builds always on what has been established, and has an inalienable right to overthrow and demolish the most ingenious, satisfying and beautiful of its established systems, as Copernicus and Galileo overthrew the Ptolemaic and Aristotelian cosmology. It follows that someone who had never heard of Ptolemy or even of Aristotle might still be the greatest living cosmologist. Literature, by contrast, has its high points and its low points, but no semblance of a necessary progression from one to the other. The perspective across this landscape will change with time: what had appeared towering will in time be diminished, and (more rarely) what now appears insignificant will from a distance appear great. But there is no progress beyond Homer or Shakespeare, no necessary expectation that a person, however talented, who has stuffed his brain with all the literature produced before him must therefore be in a position to do as well or better, or even in a position to understand what he has read.

  Associated with this evident lack of a determinate direction are two important features of literary scholarship: first, it is impossible to engage in literary history without a full understanding of literature, and secondly, we cannot assume that a full understanding of literature will come from the study of contemporary works alone. History and criticism here penetrate and depend on each other; in science they are independent.

  Philosophy seems to occupy some intermediate place between science and literature. On the one hand, it is possible to approach it in a completely unhistorical spirit, as Wittgenstein did, ignoring the achievements of previous philosophers and presenting philosophical problems in terms that bear no self-confessed relation to the tradition of the subject. Much contemporary philosophy is in this way unhistorical, and often none the worse for it. Philosophers have succeeded in isolating a series of questions to which they address themselves in a manner that increasingly concerns itself with what has been most recently thought, and with the intention of improving on that recent thought. The image is generated of ‘established results’, and of a movement which, because it is progressive, can afford to be unhistorical. But with the help of a little ingenuity, it is usually possible to discover, concealed in the writings of some historical philosopher, not only the most recent received opinion, but also some astonishing replica of the arguments used to support it. The discovery that the latest results have been anticipated by Aristotle, for example, has occurred many times during the history of philosophy, and always in such a way as to lead to the recognition of new arguments, new difficulties, and new objections surrounding the position adopted, whether that position be the scholastic theology of Aquinas, the romantic metaphysics of Hegel, or the dry analysis of the contemporary linguistic school.

  Moreover, it is an undoubted fact that to approach the works of historical philosophers without the acquisition of some independent philosophical competence leads to misunderstanding. A purely ‘historical’ approach as much misrepresents the philosophy of Descartes or Leibniz as it misrepresents the plays of Shakespeare or the poetry of Dante. To understand the thought of these philosophers is to wrestle with the problems to which they addressed themselves, problems which are usually still as much the subject of philosophical enquiry as they ever were. It seems to be almost a precondition of entering the thought of traditional philosophers that one does not regard the issues which they discussed as ‘closed’, or their results as superseded. To the extent that one does so regard them, to that extent has one removed them from any central place in the history of the subject. (Just as a poet drops from the corpus of our literature to the extent that his concerns seem merely personal to him.) Pursuing this thought, one comes very soon to the conclusion that two philosophers may arrive at similar results, but present those results so differently as to deserve equal place in philosophical history. This is the case with William of Ockham and Hume, with Hegel and Sartre. We will come across this phenomenon repeatedly in what follows.

  We are now in a position to make a preliminary distinction of the greatest importance, the distinction between the history of philosophy and the ‘history of ideas’. An idea may have a complex and interesting history, even when it is obvious to every philosopher that it has no persuasive power. (Consider the idea that there is more than one God.) Likewise an idea may have serious philosophical content, but owe its influence not to its truth but to the desire to believe it. (Consider the idea of redemption.) To be part of the history of philosophy an idea must be of intrinsic philosophical significance, capable of awakening the spirit of enquiry in a contemporary person, and representing itself as something that might be arguable and even true. To be part of the history of ideas an idea need only have an historical influence in human affairs. The history of philosophy must consider an idea in relation to the arguments that support it, and is distracted by too great an attention to its more
vulgar manifestations, or to its origins in conceptions that have no philosophical worth. It is surely right for the historian of philosophy to study Kant’s ethics, and to ignore Luther’s Bondage of the Will, even though, from the historical point of view, the former would have been impossible had the latter not been written. In conceding such points, we concede also that the best method in philosophical history may be at variance with the practice of the historian of ideas. It may be necessary for the philosopher to lift an idea from the context in which it was conceived, to rephrase it in direct and accessible language, simply in order to estimate its truth. The history of philosophy then becomes a philosophical, and not an historical, discipline.

  If the historian of philosophy studies influences, therefore, they will be the influences that derive not from the emotional or practical appeal but from the cogency of ideas. Hence the influence of Hume and Kant will be of the greatest philosophical significance, while the influence of Voltaire and Diderot will be relatively slight. To the historian of ideas, these four thinkers each belong to the single great movement called the ‘Enlightenment’, and in human affairs, where what matters is not cogency but motivating force, their influence is tangled inextricably.

  It may happen that an historian of ideas and an historian of philosophy study the same system of thoughts; but it will be with conflicting interests, demanding different intellectual expertise. The historical influence of Rousseau’s Social Contract was enormous. To study that influence one requires no better philosophical understanding of the document than belonged to those through whom the influence was most deeply felt—men and women of letters, enlightened sovereigns, popular agitators. The question of its philosophical interest, however, is an independent one, and, in order to approach the document from the philosophical view one must understand and set forth its conclusions with the best intention of determining their truth. To be able to do this one will need capacities of a different kind from those of the people most strongly influenced by the doctrine. One may indeed come to the conclusion (not in this case but certainly in the case of Tom Paine’s Rights of Man) that a philosophical work of immense historical importance has no significant place in the history of philosophy.

  In what follows the reader must bear in mind this distinction between the history of philosophy and the history of ideas, and recognise that the history that I am outlining is as much created by as it has created the current state of philosophical understanding. My method, however, will be, not to expound the arguments of philosophers in full, but to outline the main conclusions, their philosophical significance, and the kinds of consideration that led their authors to espouse them.

  2 - THE RISE OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY

  The tradition which has marked out Descartes as the founder of ‘modern’ philosophy should not lead us to erect an impassable barrier between the thought of the seventeenth century and all that had preceded it and made it possible. The method of philosophy changed radically as a result of Descartes’ arguments. But much of its content remained the same. It should not therefore be regarded as surprising if some modern philosophical idea can be shown to have been anticipated by the thinkers of the Middle Ages, in their manifold attempts either to reconcile religion and philosophy or else to divide them.

  The spirit of Plato, and that of his pupil and critic Aristotle, have haunted philosophy throughout its history, and it is to them that almost all medieval controversies in the subject can ultimately be traced. They each bequeathed to the world arguments and conceptions of superlative intellectual and dramatic power, and it is not surprising that, wherever they were read, their influence was felt. Each of the important Mediterranean religions—Judaism, Christianity and Islam—attempted either to assimilate their doctrines or to present some alternative that would be equally persuasive and equally compatible with our intuitive sense of the nature of the world and of our place within it.

  From Plato and the neo-Platonic tradition the medievals inherited a cosmology which both justified the belief in a supersensible reality, and at the same time presented an elevated picture of our ability to gain access to it. Plato had argued that the truth of the world is not revealed to ordinary sense-perception, but to reason alone; that truths of reason are necessary, eternal and (as we would now say) a priori; that through the cultivation of reason man can come to understand himself, God and the world as these things are in themselves, freed from the shadowy overcast of experience. The neo-Platonists developed the cosmology of Plato’s Timaeus into a theory of creation, according to which the entire world emanates from the intellectual light of God’s self-contemplation. Reason, being the part of man which participates in the intellectual light, knows things not as they seem but as they are. This theory— initially metaphysical—seemed to imply a corresponding ‘natural philosophy’ (a natural philosophy which had both Platonic and Aristotelian variants). According to this natural philosophy the earth and earthly things reside at the centre of the turning spheres, each representing successive orders of intellection, and each subordinate to the ultimate sphere of immutability, where God resides in the company of the blessed. Reason is the aspiration towards that ultimate sphere, and man’s mortality is the occasion of his ascent towards it. This ascent is conditional upon his turning away from preoccupation with the ephemeral and the sensory towards the contemplation of eternal truth. This ‘natural philosophy’, persuasively expounded by Boethius (c. 480524 AD) in his Consolation of Philosophy (one of the most popular works of philosophy ever to have been written), influenced his predecessor St Augustine (354-430 AD)—who nevertheless retained a sceptical stance towards much of Plato’s metaphysics—and reappears in one or another variant, described, upheld and celebrated in countless works of medieval and early Renaissance literature, from popular lyrics to such masterpieces of high art as Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, Dante’s Divine Comedy and Spenser’s Faerie Queene.

  The consoling vision of neo-Platonic physics was accompanied, however, by no prescription against metaphysical uncertainty. At every point in the neo-Platonic system problems of seemingly insuperable difficulty were presented to the enquiring mind. What, for example, is this ‘reason’ upon which our knowledge of ultimate truth depends, and what are the laws of its operation? In what sense does it generate eternal, as opposed to transient, insights, and how do we learn to distinguish between the two? What is the nature of God, and how do we know of his existence? What are the laws which govern the movement and generation of sublunary things, and how is the Platonic hypothesis—that man’s residence among them is temporary, and that the end of his being lies elsewhere—compatible with his subjection to those laws? At every point the neo-Platonic cosmology raises problems of a philosophical kind. These problems seem not to be amenable to scientific resolution. On the contrary, they are posed precisely by the suggestion that sensory perception, which is the principal vehicle of scientific thought, leads us not to truth but to systematic (if sometimes persuasive) illusion.

  As the theories of Aristotle began to become known among European thinkers—filtered through the writings of Arab philosophers and theologians who had gained them, as it were, by right of conquest— they were avidly studied as the source of new answers to these metaphysical queries. Some of the Aristotelian arguments were familiar to the early Christians. In particular, these arguments had been used in giving philosophical formulation to the doctrine of the Trinity. It was thanks to the philosophers of Alexandria, in particular to Clement (c. 150-215) and Origen (c. 185-254), both of whom had seen the inadequacies inherent in the neo-Platonism of their day, that all the resources of Greek philosophy were used together in the attempt to achieve a coherent statement of Christian dogma. And with the victory over Arianism, and the consequent acceptance of the doctrine of the Trinity, one of the most important of all Aristotelian concepts, the concept of substance, took a central place in the formulation of the credo of the Christian Church. Thus already, by the time that the Council of Nicaea (325) declared the Son
to be consubstantial with the Father, a dependence of theology upon Aristotelian metaphysics had arisen. Boethius, in his writing on the Trinity and his surviving translations of Aristotle, did much to reinforce this dependence. But it was only later, at the end of the ‘dark ages’, that the full content of Aristotelian metaphysics began to enter into the philosophical speculations upon which the Christian world-view sought to found itself; and by then the Aristotelian theories had been systematised and adapted by such thinkers as Al-Farabi (875950), Avicenna (890-1037) and Averroes (c. 1125 to c. 1198), all of them Moslems, and Moses Maimonides (1135-1204), a Jew well versed in the philosophical speculations by which the doctrines of the Koran were currently supported. Aristotelian doctrine therefore entered the arena of theology already bearing the stamp of a monotheism which had found it congenial.

  The final conversion of Christian theologians to Aristotelian ways of thinking occurred during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and led, with the founding of universities at such important centres as Paris and Padua, to the rise of that philosophical movement now known as ‘scholasticism’. The greatest luminary of this movement was St Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), whose Summa Theologica purported to give a complete description of the relation between man and God, relying only on philosophical reasoning, and without recourse to mystical assertion or unsupported faith. His master at every point was Aristotle, and the subsequent synthesis of Christian doctrine and Aristotelian metaphysics—known after its creator as Thomism—has remained to this day the most persuasive of the foundations offered for Christian theology.