Miss Buddha (95 page)

However, he then went on to argue that this
attempt to learn from experience is not at all rational, thus
calling into question the reliability of our memories, our
reasoning processes, and our ability to learn from past experiences
or to make even the smallest predictions about the future—for
example, that the sun will rise tomorrow.

Anybody who drinks too deeply from the
chalice of Hume will spend a long time trying to rediscover his
feet.

Kant

German philosopher Immanuel
Kant (1724-1804) actually appreciated Hume’s skepticism, and in
response to it, in 1781, he published the
Critique of Pure Reason
, widely
considered the greatest single work in modern philosophy, wherein
he made a thorough and systematic analysis of the conditions for
knowledge.

As an example of genuine knowledge, he cited
Newton’s contributions to the laws of physics. In the case of
Newtonian physics, Kant argued, reason seemed to have done an
effective job of comprehending and categorizing the data supplied
by the senses, and based on them to have succeeded in postulating
universal and necessary laws of nature, such as the law of
gravitation and the laws of motion.

Kant explained how such knowledge could in
fact be possible, and so provided a complete reply to Hume’s
skepticism and also answered many of the problems that had plagued
Western philosophers since the time of Descartes.

Kant set out by making a fresh analysis of
the elements of knowledge, asking for the first time an extremely
basic question: “How is our experience possible in the first
place?”

Kant concluded that certain categories of
knowledge, such as space, time, substance, and causality—all of
which he maintained are essential to our thinking and to our
experience of phenomena in the world—should be viewed as
transcendental. Therefore, he concluded, all objects of knowledge
must conform to the human mind’s essential ways of perceiving and
understanding—ways that involve the transcendental categories—if
they are to be knowable at all.

Kant, not particularly modest by leaning,
proclaimed that his newly developed hypothesis about knowledge and
reality was as significant for the future of philosophy as the
hypothesis of Copernicus—that the planets orbit the Sun—had been
for science.

He then, however, went on to claim that
things-in-themselves—that is, things as they exist outside human
experience—are unknowable, and so managed to limit human knowledge
to the “phenomenal world” of experience. Metaphysical beliefs about
the soul, the cosmos, and God (the “noumenal world” transcending
human experience), Kant held, are matters of faith, and can never
be perceived or proven.

Some maintain (a view not shared by yours
truly) that Kant’s musings constituted a high point of the
Enlightenment.

19
^th
Century
Philosophy

Kant was, in fact, so
revered that the 19
^th
–century philosopher generally
developed his views with reference to his understanding of
Kant.

In Germany, Kant’s
influence led subsequent philosophers to explore idealism and
ethical voluntarism, a philosophical tradition that places a strong
emphasis on human will. While philosophers before Kant had explored
the
objects
of
knowledge, those who followed him on the path of idealism turned to
the
subject
of
knowledge—what some have since referred to as the ego, or the I,
the mind, and human consciousness.

First came Johann Gottlieb Fichte
(1762-1814), who transformed Kant’s critical idealism into absolute
idealism by eliminating Kant’s “things-in-themselves” (external
reality) and by making the self, or the ego, the ultimate
reality.

Fichte held that the world is, in fact,
created by an absolute ego, which is conscious first of itself and
only later of non-self, or the otherness of the world.

The human will, he maintained, a partial
manifestation of self, gives human beings freedom to act.

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling
(1775-1854) stepped even closer to absolute idealism by construing
objects or things as the works of the imagination and Nature as an
all-embracing being, spiritual in character.

Schelling thus went on to became the leading
philosopher of the Romantic movement, which in contrast to the
Enlightenment placed its faith in feeling and the creative
imagination rather than in reason.

This romantic view of the divinity of nature
influenced the American transcendentalist movement, led by poet and
essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, and pursued by others like David
Henry Thoreau.

Hegel

Some view Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) as the most powerful philosophical mind
of the 19
^th
-century, and for good reason.

His system of a nearly absolute idealism,
although influenced greatly by Kant and Schelling, was based on his
own conception of logic and his own philosophical method.

In fact, and contrary to the skeptics, Hegel
believed that absolute truth, or reality, exists and that the human
mind can know it—a very positive view indeed.

This is so, he maintained, because “whatever
is real is rational.” He conceived the subject matter of philosophy
to be what reality as a whole actually consisted of, a reality he
named Absolute Spirit, Cosmic Reason.

The world of human experience, whether
subjective or objective, is but a manifestation of Absolute
Spirit.

Philosophy’s task, according to Hegel, is to
trace and chart the path of Absolute Spirit from its original
abstract, undifferentiated being into more and more concrete
reality.

Hegel believed that this charting occurs by
a dialectical process—that is, a process whereby conflicting ideas
resolve—consisting of a series of triads. Each triad involves: (a)
an initial state (or thesis), which might be an idea or a movement;
(b) its opposite state (or antithesis); and (c) a higher state, or
synthesis, combining elements from the two opposites into a new and
superior arrangement. The new synthesis then becomes the thesis of
the next triad in an unending progress toward the ideal.

Unfortunately, Hegel then went on to argue
that this dialectical logic should be applied to the advancement of
all knowledge, including science and history, where his views were
to provide a foundation for the political and social philosophy
later developed by Karl Marx.

According to Hegel, human history
demonstrates the dialectical development of Absolute Spirit as can
be observed in the conflicts and wars, the rise and fall of
civilizations. In fact, he maintained that political states are
real entities, discrete identities, the manifestation of Spirit in
the world, and individual participants of history. In every epoch a
particular state is the bearer or agent of spiritual advance, and
it thereby gathers to itself power.

Because the dialectic means opposition and
conflict, war must be expected, and it has value as evidence of the
health of a state.

Hegel’s philosophy did stimulate interest in
history by representing it as a deeper penetration into reality
than the natural sciences provide.

His conception of the
national state as the highest social embodiment of the Absolute
Spirit was for some time—and in many quarters still is—believed to
be the main source of 20
^th
-century totalitarianism,
although Hegel himself, despite his concept of the national state
as identity, advocated a large measure of individual
freedom.

He was embraced, and to some degree
perverted, by those who held personal power as the highest goal of
mankind.

Schopenhauer

Hegel’s successors,
however, rejected Hegel’s stated faith in reason and progress.
Arthur Schopenhauer, for one, in
The World
as Will and Idea
(1819) argued that
existence is fundamentally irrational and simply an expression of
blind, meaningless force—a force he equated with the human will to
live and reproduce. But will, he held, entails continuous striving
and inevitably results in disappointment and suffering.

Given this bleak assessment, Schopenhauer
offered two avenues of escape from irrational (though some would
call it rational) will: through the contemplation of art, which
enables one to endure the tragedy of life, and through the
renunciation of will and of the striving for happiness.

It is significant to note that Schopenhauer
was one of the first Western philosophers to be influenced by
Indian philosophy, then beginning to appear in European
translations. The influence of Buddhist thought, for example,
appears in his sense that the world is suffering which can be
overcome only through renunciation.

Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) continued
the revolt against reason initiated by the romantic movement, but
he rather scornfully repudiated what he felt was Schopenhauer’s
resigned attitude. Instead, Nietzsche advocated the values of
vitality and strength, and the supremacy of a purely egoistic
existence.

He also scorned the Christian and democratic
ideas of the equal worth of human beings, maintaining that it was
up to the aristocrat to refuse to subordinate himself to a state or
cause, thereby achieving self-realization and greatness.

For Nietzsche, the power to be strong was
the greatest value in life. However, although Nietzsche did indeed
valued geniuses over dictators, according to many subsequent
critics, his beliefs helped bolster the ideas of the National
Socialists (Nazis) who gained control of Germany in the 1930s.

Kierkegaard

Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard
(1813-1855) developed his own, subtle philosophy of life, a
philosophy that was not appreciated—if even comprehended—until a
century after it was formed.

His was a philosophy of a literary,
religious, and self-revealing (rather than systematic) character
and his views stressed the importance of experiences that the
intellectual mind judges as unwanted or absurd, including the
experiences of angst and “fear and trembling” (which was to become
the title of one of his books).

Such experiences, he held, lead first to
despair and eventually to religious revelation and faith.
Kierkegaard expressed this process by the religious person
commanded by God to sacrifice his own most cherished treasures, as
was Abraham when ordered to sacrifice his son Isaac in the Old
Testament.

Although Abraham does not understand this
quite absurd, if Godly, request, he decides to obey in an act of
blind commitment. And it is such terrible experiences, Kierkegaard
claimed, that teaches us that our relationship to God is absolute
(though some would say blind) and all else relative.

What is most significant in a person’s life,
Kierkegaard concluded, are the decisions born of such ethical
crises.

Bentham and Mill, Utilitarians

Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832)
and John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), who were both economists as well
as philosophers, were to dominate English philosophy in the
19
^th
century.

Bentham’s contribution was the ethical
principle of utilitarianism—in essence: what is useful is good—and
Mill then carried it further and refined the doctrine.

Just as Kant had argued a rational principle
of moral law superior to individual desire—by which people’s
conduct ought to be governed—the utilitarians argued an ethical
principle superior to the self-interest of the individual.

They based this principle on the assumption
that, first of all, we all desire happiness; secondly, that we have
to find that happiness in society, and, as a consequence, we all
have a vested interest in society’s general happiness.

This led to the position that whatever
produces the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people
is most useful for all.

Mill, in elaborating and refining this
principle, partly abandoned the greatest good idea and instead
maintained that one should consider the quality, or type, of
pleasure as well as the quantity.

Karl Marx and Marxism

Karl Marx, and his collaborator Friedrich
Engels accepted the basic form of Hegel’s dialectic of history, but
then made crucial modifications to it.

For them history was not a matter of
Absolute Spirit developing, but a development of the material
conditions governing humanity’s economic existence. In their
view—which became known as historical materialism—the history of
society is a history of class struggle in which the ruling class
uses religion and other traditions and institutions, as well as its
economic power, to, basically, suppress and dominate the working
classes—which, if history is to be believed, is not too far off the
mark.

Human culture, according to Marx, is
dependent on economic (material) conditions and serves economic
ends. Religion, he concluded, is “the opiate of the masses” that
serves the political end of suppressing mass revolution.

Marx’s theory of revolution, history,
economics, and politics—claiming to have proved that the long
history of oppression would end only when the masses rise up and
usher in a revolution that will create a classless utopian
society—laid the philosophical groundwork for Communism, and
motivated the Russian Revolutions of 1917, the Communist victory in
China in 1949, and the Cuban Revolution of 1959.

Pragmatism

Toward the end of the
19
^th
century, pragmatism continued what the empiricist had begun by
basing knowledge on experience. As a result, pragmatism became the
most vital American school of thought of its time.