Miss Buddha (96 page)

To the pragmatists, ideas only demonstrate
their value insofar as they enrich human experience. All other
ideas are more or less worthless, speculative fluff.

The founder of this movement, and who gave
the movement its name, was Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914). Two
other philosophers also made significant contributions: the
psychologist and religious thinker William James
(1842-1910)—brother of famed author Henry James—and John Dewey
(1859-1952), an educator, and a psychologist as well.

Peirce formulated a very pragmatic theory of
knowledge and advocated a “laboratory philosophy” whereby
researchers should only investigate and clarify knowledge that is
gained either through everyday experience or through scientific
inquiry.

By restricting the realm of meaningful
questions to those that concern experience, Peirce hoped to
introduce scientific logic into metaphysics.

He also advanced a theory of truth as
agreement, and defined such truth as that which an ideal community
of researchers could agree upon. Now, one could object that there
is no such thing as an “ideal community of researchers” hence no
chance of truth according to Pierce.

As for traditional philosophy, Peirce
maintained that many such concepts have no practical use and thus
are meaningless.

Whereas Peirce sought to isolate the exact
meaning of terms and ideas and so sought to make metaphysics a
precise and pragmatic discipline, James and Dewey applied the
principles of pragmatism to develop a more comprehensive
philosophy.

Like Peirce, James held that the meaning of
ideas lies in their practical consequences. If an idea has no
practical uses, then it is meaningless.

Accordingly, James focused on the power of
true ideas to offer individuals, rather than scientific
researchers, practical guidance in handling problems that arise in
everyday experience. Truth, according to James, resides in those
experiences that enable common people to successfully navigate the
challenges and demands of the world.

Dewey, on the other hand, focused more on
the cooperative process in which human beings, as intelligent and
social beings (when and where that happens to be the case), create
and revise ideas about the world.

One such process, according to Dewey, was
scientific inquiry. Another was active participation in just and
democratic social and political communities. Based on his
postulates and on his research, Dewey concluded that there are only
two sure guides for intelligent behavior: science and
democracy.

20
^th
Century
Philosophy

A potpourri of methods,
interests, and styles of argumentation marked
20
^th
-century philosophy and was to prove both fruitful and
destructive.

This diversity, and the divisions that arose
as a result of it, proved fruitful in that new topics arose and new
ways developed for discussing these topics philosophically. It
proved destructive, however, as philosophers ceased to address the
man on the street, or even the enthusiastic amateur, and instead
began to write for a narrow audience of the likeminded, and not
only ignored the common man as inconsequential but often also
derided philosophical styles different from their own.

In the decades following World War II
(1939-1945), a significant division arose between what was now
termed the “continental” philosophers, who worked on the European
continent, and philosophers in the United States, the United
Kingdom, and Australia.

Deconstruction and other postmodern theories
followed existentialism and phenomenology on the continent, whereas
the Americans, Britons, and Australians worked in the analytic
tradition.

Toward the end of the century this conflict
eased as interest shifted from earlier disputes, and more
philosophers now began exploring common roots instead of conflicts
between the postmodern and the traditional.

Phenomenology

It was the German philosopher Edmund Husserl
(1859-1938) who founded the movement that was to be known as
phenomenology. Husserl’s view was that the philosopher’s mission
was to describe and analyze phenomena as they occur, whether such
phenomena are objective or subjective, emphasizing careful
observation and interpretation of our conscious perceptions of
things.

First, he held, we must pay more attention
to what we are conscious of. We must perceive far more carefully
and intensely than we do in everyday life. We must, in a word, be
more mindful about our surroundings.

Secondly, we must then reflect upon these
observations and interpret them without preconceptions. Husserl
maintained that the only way to solve philosophical problems was
through a logical analysis of the data emerging from such a
“phenomenological study” of the contents of the mind.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger
further developed phenomenology and its emphasis on pure
description. For them, however—Plato smiling in the wings—all
perceptual experience references something beyond and independent
of our perception of it.

Existentialism

Heidegger also had a significant hand in
existentialism. The existentialist, by definition, focuses on the
personal: on individual existence, subjectivity, and choice.

Its two central doctrines hold that there is
no such thing as a fixed human essence structuring our lives and,
further, that our choices are always and only determined by free
will.

According to existentialism, we determine or
create our individual selves by the choices we make in life. This,
of course, implies that human beings have enormous freedom. In
fact, existentialists asserted human free will is so powerful that
it overwhelms many individuals, who then “flee freedom” by falsely
assuming religion, science, or other external factors as shackles
to limit that freedom—a flight, also, from responsibility.

Apart from Heidegger, prominent
existentialist thinkers include Simone de Beauvoir and her
companion Jean-Paul Sartre, philosopher, novelist, and
playwright.

Analytic Philosophy

By the end of the First
World War, another flavor of philosophy rose to prominence in the
United Kingdom: The Analytic. This movement shifted its
investigative focus from philosophy’s traditional questions of life
and truth and what existence is about to those of
language
, which the
movement claimed was now philosophy’s proper purview.

Most analytic philosophers asserted that a
significant number of issues prominent in the history of philosophy
are, in fact, unimportant or even meaningless because they arose
when philosophers misunderstood or misused language.

Analytic philosophy, then, is squarely based
upon the assumption that a careful analysis of language and its use
in describing philosophical concepts can clear up these problems
and confusions.

Naturally, if we hold widely divergent
definitions of various key concepts, and then perhaps widely
divergent definitions of the words constituting the original
definitions, yes, then communication will suffer serious
difficulties, and disagreements and arguments will surely
ensue.

One can question, however, to what degree
earlier philosophers simply cross-defined each other, or whether
the Analytical Movement was simply putting linguistic blinders on
because they could not face the more (and bleeding) realistic
issues at hand.

Be that as it may, the two founding fathers
of Analytic Philosophy were British philosopher and mathematician
Bertrand Russell and Austrian-born British philosopher Ludwig
Wittgenstein.

Russell, quite naturally and strongly
influenced by the precision of his first love, mathematics, wished
to construct a logical language so precise that it would, beyond
discussion or argument, reflect the nature of the world.

He reasoned that what he called the “surface
grammar” of everyday language in the streets masks a true, and
infinitely more precise, “logical grammar,” a thorough knowledge of
which is a prerequisite to understanding the true (philosophical
and logical) meaning of statements.

Russell and many of his colleagues and
followers went so far as to assert that any complex statement can
be reduced to simple components; should such a statement’s internal
logic not permit such distillation and reduction, then it must be
meaningless—quite an assumption, if I may say so.

Russell’s view was to be central to the
founding of the so-called Vienna Circle, a group of analytic
philosophers active from about 1920 to 1950, led by Rudolf Carnap
and Moritz Schlick.

The members of the Vienna Circle were all
scientists or mathematicians as well as philosophers, and their
musings and speculations originated the movement known as Logical
Positivism. They speculated that the clarification of meaning is
philosophy’s job one, and that all meaningful statements are either
scientifically (or experientially) verifiable statements about the
world or else logical tautologies (self-evident propositions).

According to the Vienna Circle, the
discovery of new facts belonged to science and science alone, and
metaphysics—the subsequent construction of comprehensive truths
about reality—was nothing but pretentious pseudo-science.

Wittgenstein, who studied
with Russell at Cambridge, was perhaps the most important of the
analytic philosophers, eclipsing even his famous colleague. Like
Russell, he distrusted ordinary, day-to-day language. In his
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
(published in 1921) Wittgenstein declared that
“philosophy aims at the logical clarification of
thoughts.”

Indeed, philosophy’s function, he believed,
was to monitor the use of language by reducing complex statements
to their elementary components and by rebuffing all attempts to
misuse words in creating the illusion of philosophical
depth—something he though fraudulent.

“What can be said at all can be said
clearly,” he said, “and what we cannot talk about [clearly] we must
consign to silence.”

The
Tractatus
did make important
contributions not only to the philosophy of language and logic, but
also to the philosophy of mathematics.

Granted, the account of language in
Wittgenstein’s later work was much richer and more sophisticated
than that in the Tractatus, but Wittgenstein never abandoned his
radical early views on the nature of philosophy as outlined in the
Tractatus.

The Constructivists vs. the
Descriptivists

As the Analytic Movement
took hold and grew, different ideas emerged about how best to
proceed with philosophical analysis. A group called
constructivists
, inspired
by Russell, the early writings of Wittgenstein, and the logical
positivists, argued that the solutions to philosophical problems
lie in using tools of logic to create more precise technical
vocabularies.

Again, all down to language.

Two leading representatives of this movement
were the American philosophers Nelson Goodman and W. V. Quine.
Quine saw language and logic as themselves embodying theories about
reality, rather than consisting of theory-neutral tools of
analysis.

By contrast, the
Descriptivists
(formed
and roused primarily by the British philosophers G. E. Moore,
Gilbert Ryle, and John Austin) maintained that philosophical
analysis should focus on the careful study of the everyday usage of
crucial terms, since that would more closely approached agreed upon
truth (among people in general).

Although the more radical
formulations of analytic philosophy from the first half of the
20
^th
century are no longer heeded by the philosophical community,
analytic philosophy actually continues to flourish.

In fact, many later philosophers adopted
ideas, methods, or values from this movement, including the
Americans Donald Davidson, Hilary Putnam, and Saul Kripke.
Additionally, Analytic Philosophy has widely influenced the
training and practices of philosophers today.

This has brought both good and ill in its
wake. On the one hand, its tenets have led to a renewed commitment
to clarity, concision, incisiveness, and to new depth in
philosophical thinking and writing.

On the other hand, it has also brought many
philosophers to such difficult and obscure technical language (in
direct opposition to the tenets of the school, one would be
forgiven for thinking) that their ideas are accessible to only a
small community of specialists—a pattern that usually spells doom
for the school so afflicted.

Postmodern Philosophy

Despite the Analytics call for simplified
language and terminology, the opposite seems to be the order of the
day in many postmodern philosophical texts, although the
difficulties and convolutions in this case are more often than not
intentional and reflect specific postmodern claims about the nature
of language and meaning—that there is no meaning and that truth (if
there were such a thing) cannot be communicated.

The literal meaning
of
postmodernism
is “after modernism,” and in many ways postmodernism is a
thinly veiled, if not outright attack on the modernist claims about
the existence of such philosophical goals as truth and
value.

In disputing past assumptions,
postmodernists, in their rather apathetic approach, point to
inadequacy of language as a mode of communication.

Leading this band of obstructionists (in my
view) are French philosophers Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault,
and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.