Reading the works of early Feuerbach incites a cozy feeling in a Hegel-connoisseur: it’s that instant recognition that you are talking with a person who really knows and understands his Hegel – a very rare experience when reading books on Hegel. The occasion of Feuerbach’s article I am now reading is the book Anti-Hegel by Carl Friedrich Bachmann, a former student and a later critic of Hegel’s. Feuerbach is not intrinsically against the idea of criticising Hegel – or indeed any philosophy – as long as the criticism is intrinsic to the kernel of that philosophy, just like, Feuerbach thinks, Plato was able to criticise Parmenides and Spinoza Descartes. What such intrinsic criticism achieves, according to Feuerbach, is to reveal the limitations of the criticised philosophy.
Bachmann’s criticism, Feuerbach insists, is not intrinsic in this sense, but based on mere misunderstandings. Such a negative criticism does not turn against the limitations, but the very philosophical core, replacing it with one’s own ideas. Thus, Feuerbach gives an example, Bachmann confuses the Hegelian notion of identity as unity between two seemingly different things with mere sameness involving no difference, so that when Hegel is e.g. speaking of the identity of logic and metaphysics, meaning that our knowledge is intrinsically connected with the world around it, Bachmann sees nothing but mere confusion of two separate disciplines.
The main target of Bachmann’s criticism, according to Feuerbach, is Hegel’s notion of idea, which Bachmann regards as meaning nothing but a universal concept or genus, although Hegel’s own examples of idea are topics like life, knowledge and will – organic and mental processes. Armed with his own reading, Bachmann goes on to insist that Hegel is inconsistent in saying that nature in its idea is divine, but still does not correspond to its concept. What Hegel means, Feuerbach explains, is simply that nature is a mere determined modification of this divine idea – an organic outgrowth, one might say – and as such a modification not the most perfect form in which this divine idea appears.
More generally, Feuerbach explains, every determined idea – say, that of family – comes with its own criteria for the perfection of its exemplifications, making it hence understandable how there can be e.g. bad families, which still are in a sense families. Adding another example, Feuerbach notes that we do not deny that the essence of humanity lies in reason, just because there happen to exist stupid people. Thus, unlike Bachmann insists, we need not first empirically study what all concrete families are like, in order to describe the idea of a family, but instead, the idea of family is something we use to evaluate individual families – of course, this idea is also embodied in concrete examples, but not in bad, but in good families. Despite the idea being embodied, Feuerbach adds, this sensuous embodiment is not really of interest in comparison with the idea: for instance, when looking at a true work of art, the most important thing in it is the idea of art shining through in this painting, statue or whatever.
In addition to the notion of idea, Bachmann criticises Hegel’s notion that the history of philosophy would form a development, where the latest specimen contained all its predecessors: instead, Bachmann insists, history of philosophy has been just a random appearance of opinions contradicting one another. Feuerbach notes that Bachmann has simply misunderstood the manner in which the earlier philosophies are contained in the later ones, because integration into a more intricate system requires modification of the details of the original. Taking as an example Kant, whom Bachmann considered as evidence for his own position, since Kant famously rejected all previous metaphysics, Feuerbach argues that you can instead find traces of several predecessors in Kant’s philosophy, including skepticism of David Hume and apriorism of Leibniz. Indeed, Feuerbach sees Bachmann’s misunderstanding as a further proof that the latter cannot remove himself from the realm of mere sensuousness, where e.g. water of Thales clearly differs from air of Anaximenes.
Bachmann uses the familiar phenomena of sleeping, diseases affecting our capacity to think etc. as a proof that what Hegel called spirit is actually of material nature. Feuerbach notes that Bachmann’s examples reveal more the difference between individual human beings, who do have their material side, and the spirit as the universally on-going process of thinking, which individual human beings struggle to come in contact with. True, human beings sleep without being conscious or thinking, Feuerbach admits, but never do they all sleep at the same time. Furthermore, he adds, what awakens consciousness in us is the stimulus provided by our fellow human beings, connecting us to the on-going flow of spirit or humanity. In the best cases, we as individuals are guided by this spirit or one of its ideas, such as the idea of art and beauty are guiding true artists.
Connected to this idea of humans being guided by ideas is Hegel’s (according to Feuerbach) metaphoric statement that his own Logic as the construction of such ideas or categories describes the thinking of God before creation of the concrete world. Bachmann makes fun of this notion by identifying God with various categories of Hegelian Logic. Feuerbach insists that Bachmann is simply confused: Hegel noted that only some categories could be predicated of God and he never drew the ridiculous conclusion that the physical copy of his Logic is the very God. Instead, Feuerbach notes, Hegel’s Logic is a mere reconstruction of divine self-consciousness for the sake of individual human beings.
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keskiviikko 10. joulukuuta 2025
maanantai 28. heinäkuuta 2025
Carl Friedrich Göschel: Of the proof for the immortality of the human soul (1835)
Last time we saw Göschel, he was busy explaining his own take of the intricacies of the whole Hegelian system. In the work we are now dealing with, Von den Beweisen für die Unsterblichkeit der menschlichen Seele, he grapples with a special question of how to prove the immortality of human soul. His fundamental line of defence is again his reading of Hegelianism, which he mostly calls speculative philosophy, but he does point in this work to many other philosophers, using even thinkers like Spinoza and Kant to find arguments for his own understanding of what to expect after death.
Göschel is clearly very fond of analogies, and one of the two most important ones presented in this book is that between the three traditional proofs for God’s existence – a division going ultimately back to Kant, but viewed as being reimagined by Hegel – and what Göschel takes as three fundamental proofs for the immortality of human soul (fundamental in the sense that all other proofs should be mere variations or combinations of these three proofs). Göschel knows his Hegelese and adds at once that these three proofs are not enough, because they are part of pre-Kantian dogmatic philosophy that failed to ask the important question of how thinking could be applied to being.
To bridge this gap, Göschel introduces the second important analogy in the work. He lifts a threefold schema of the ideal development of individual human beings from Hegel’s philosophy of subjective spirit and rereads it as a development of spirit in a more traditional sense (of course, Hegelian habit of using words like soul and spirit with religious connotations made this repurposing easy). The difference is that while Hegelian philosophy of subjective spirit ends merely with the human being becoming part of a society of other human beings, Göschel’s new reading turns the development to more theological fields.
Göschel notes that even before humans wondered about proving the immortality of the soul, they were immediately convinced of the fact that the soul would go on continuing its life indefinitely. This immediate certainty, as it were, forms for him in a sense fourth proof of immortality, just like similarly the existence of God has been justified by humans at large agreeing about this being immediately certain. What awakens the need to prove that this inborn conviction is certain, Göschel states, is the fact of death that appears to contradict the immediate conviction.
The first real proof, corresponding to the cosmological proof of God’s existence, Göschel says, is what he calls theoretical or metaphysical proof. In effect, this is proof familiar at least from the Wolffian tradition: the soul is simple, thus, it cannot be destroyed through division like a composite, material thing. Göschel gives this proof a new twist by relating it to the immediate phase in Hegelian philosophy of spirit, named appropriately soul.
Hegel understood by soul a human being in a state where they had not yet grasped the idea of themselves as distinct from the world around them (or to which they had regressed through suggestion or mental illness). Göschel takes the word to describe more the result of the development of Hegelian soul, namely, a distinct individual. Furthermore, he gives it a new twist by understanding the soul as an individual necessarily related to what he calls an internal body. This internal body should be simple – kind of what Leibnizian monad was supposed to be – and separable from the external body, capable of surviving without it. Thus, Göschel states, just like the cosmological proof of God’s existence deduces from the current existence of world that requires something to sustain it the existence of an entity that will sustain it, similarly theoretical or metaphysical proof of the immortality of soul deduces from the current existence of the soul as a simple monad or atom its continuing into the future.
Survival of such a soul-atom is not enough, Göschel thinks, because just like even Wolffians noted, mere continued existence of such an atom does not guarantee that our memories and thoughts continue to exist in separation from the body. Even worse, there’s the possibility envisioned even by Leibniz that an omnipotent God could come and annihilate even the seemingly indestructible monad, just because they wanted to. Thus, Göschel states, staying in this standpoint of abstract individuality we would be locked to a most frightful dualism, where soul would be separated from everything else, including its external body, and would live in a constant fear of the absolute other or God and in pain for being separated from them.
This awareness of oneself as distinct from everything else and awareness of something else beyond oneself marks already, Göschel states, a transition to the next phase of the journey of soul, which he calls, following Hegel, consciousness. Here Göschel and Hegel have pretty much the same understanding of the term, except while for Hegel the other of which the consciousness is aware of means the external world in general and other humans in particular, for Göschel, the important other is always God.
For Göschel, the move to consciousness is also a move from the mere existence of the soul to its essence. He appropriates a Hegelian pun that the essence (Wesen) of something refers to what has happened to this something in the past (gewesen). In the case of consciousness, this involves the soul recollecting or internalising (another Hegelian pun on the word Erinnerung) this essence, which in Göschel's opinion means the consciousness becoming aware of the determination or destiny set to it by God at the time of creation.
Göschel connects this idea of the past determination of human consciousness with an analogy with the teleological proof of God’s existence, which hinges on the notion of finding the world to be geared toward some purposes. He links this proof to what he calls the practical proof of the immortality of the human soul: in essence, this is the proof Kant used in Critique of practical reason. In other words, consciousness is determined for some infinite goal that it cannot realise in a finite time, thus, because this goal is determined by God, they must guarantee the continued existence of consciousness.
The immortality in the practical proof appears to be based on the capacity of the human consciousness to approach its destiny, which due to the finity of humans seems hopeless to achieve. Here Göschel states that God has the power to change this human condition and will do it some day for everyone, leading us to the final stage of our development or spirit. While for Hegel this stage meant simply a time when a human being does not anymore feel alienation from the world around them, for Göschel the term takes more obvious religious connotations.
In Göschel's eyes, the phase of spirit means a return to the original conviction that a human soul will continue its existence indefinitely, but now this conviction can be put in a form of proof. While the ultimate experiential realisation of this conviction must wait for the time of our death, Göschel insists, we can already state this proof that he calls logical or ontological. In effect the proof is simply a variation of the Cartesian cogito: I think of my continued existence, but while I am thinking it, I must continue to exist. Göschel’s ontological proof of immortality appears to have a clear flaw: what about the time when we are not thinking? This flaw makes it as suspect as its analogue, the more famous ontological proof of God's existence, where the inevitability of thinking the most perfect being or God as existent should make us admit their existence.
Göschel is clearly very fond of analogies, and one of the two most important ones presented in this book is that between the three traditional proofs for God’s existence – a division going ultimately back to Kant, but viewed as being reimagined by Hegel – and what Göschel takes as three fundamental proofs for the immortality of human soul (fundamental in the sense that all other proofs should be mere variations or combinations of these three proofs). Göschel knows his Hegelese and adds at once that these three proofs are not enough, because they are part of pre-Kantian dogmatic philosophy that failed to ask the important question of how thinking could be applied to being.
To bridge this gap, Göschel introduces the second important analogy in the work. He lifts a threefold schema of the ideal development of individual human beings from Hegel’s philosophy of subjective spirit and rereads it as a development of spirit in a more traditional sense (of course, Hegelian habit of using words like soul and spirit with religious connotations made this repurposing easy). The difference is that while Hegelian philosophy of subjective spirit ends merely with the human being becoming part of a society of other human beings, Göschel’s new reading turns the development to more theological fields.
Göschel notes that even before humans wondered about proving the immortality of the soul, they were immediately convinced of the fact that the soul would go on continuing its life indefinitely. This immediate certainty, as it were, forms for him in a sense fourth proof of immortality, just like similarly the existence of God has been justified by humans at large agreeing about this being immediately certain. What awakens the need to prove that this inborn conviction is certain, Göschel states, is the fact of death that appears to contradict the immediate conviction.
The first real proof, corresponding to the cosmological proof of God’s existence, Göschel says, is what he calls theoretical or metaphysical proof. In effect, this is proof familiar at least from the Wolffian tradition: the soul is simple, thus, it cannot be destroyed through division like a composite, material thing. Göschel gives this proof a new twist by relating it to the immediate phase in Hegelian philosophy of spirit, named appropriately soul.
Hegel understood by soul a human being in a state where they had not yet grasped the idea of themselves as distinct from the world around them (or to which they had regressed through suggestion or mental illness). Göschel takes the word to describe more the result of the development of Hegelian soul, namely, a distinct individual. Furthermore, he gives it a new twist by understanding the soul as an individual necessarily related to what he calls an internal body. This internal body should be simple – kind of what Leibnizian monad was supposed to be – and separable from the external body, capable of surviving without it. Thus, Göschel states, just like the cosmological proof of God’s existence deduces from the current existence of world that requires something to sustain it the existence of an entity that will sustain it, similarly theoretical or metaphysical proof of the immortality of soul deduces from the current existence of the soul as a simple monad or atom its continuing into the future.
Survival of such a soul-atom is not enough, Göschel thinks, because just like even Wolffians noted, mere continued existence of such an atom does not guarantee that our memories and thoughts continue to exist in separation from the body. Even worse, there’s the possibility envisioned even by Leibniz that an omnipotent God could come and annihilate even the seemingly indestructible monad, just because they wanted to. Thus, Göschel states, staying in this standpoint of abstract individuality we would be locked to a most frightful dualism, where soul would be separated from everything else, including its external body, and would live in a constant fear of the absolute other or God and in pain for being separated from them.
This awareness of oneself as distinct from everything else and awareness of something else beyond oneself marks already, Göschel states, a transition to the next phase of the journey of soul, which he calls, following Hegel, consciousness. Here Göschel and Hegel have pretty much the same understanding of the term, except while for Hegel the other of which the consciousness is aware of means the external world in general and other humans in particular, for Göschel, the important other is always God.
For Göschel, the move to consciousness is also a move from the mere existence of the soul to its essence. He appropriates a Hegelian pun that the essence (Wesen) of something refers to what has happened to this something in the past (gewesen). In the case of consciousness, this involves the soul recollecting or internalising (another Hegelian pun on the word Erinnerung) this essence, which in Göschel's opinion means the consciousness becoming aware of the determination or destiny set to it by God at the time of creation.
Göschel connects this idea of the past determination of human consciousness with an analogy with the teleological proof of God’s existence, which hinges on the notion of finding the world to be geared toward some purposes. He links this proof to what he calls the practical proof of the immortality of the human soul: in essence, this is the proof Kant used in Critique of practical reason. In other words, consciousness is determined for some infinite goal that it cannot realise in a finite time, thus, because this goal is determined by God, they must guarantee the continued existence of consciousness.
The immortality in the practical proof appears to be based on the capacity of the human consciousness to approach its destiny, which due to the finity of humans seems hopeless to achieve. Here Göschel states that God has the power to change this human condition and will do it some day for everyone, leading us to the final stage of our development or spirit. While for Hegel this stage meant simply a time when a human being does not anymore feel alienation from the world around them, for Göschel the term takes more obvious religious connotations.
In Göschel's eyes, the phase of spirit means a return to the original conviction that a human soul will continue its existence indefinitely, but now this conviction can be put in a form of proof. While the ultimate experiential realisation of this conviction must wait for the time of our death, Göschel insists, we can already state this proof that he calls logical or ontological. In effect the proof is simply a variation of the Cartesian cogito: I think of my continued existence, but while I am thinking it, I must continue to exist. Göschel’s ontological proof of immortality appears to have a clear flaw: what about the time when we are not thinking? This flaw makes it as suspect as its analogue, the more famous ontological proof of God's existence, where the inevitability of thinking the most perfect being or God as existent should make us admit their existence.
What Göschel offers as a foundation of both ontological arguments is his rather metaphysical reading of Hegelian idea of thinking forming a unity with being, thinking being in a dominant role in this relation. He describes this unity as personality, not referring to a character of a conscious being, but to the concept of personhood in trinity: God is a unity in seeming multiplicity. In effect, Göschel insists that divine thinking has the capacity to penetrate anything that seemingly differs from it, both within itself (the different persons) and without itself (the creation). This penetrating thinking is going on all the time – or more likely, it is eternal in the sense of timeless. When a human spirit truly experiences the truth of both ontological proofs, it takes part in this divine thinking.
Göschel’s reading of Hegel seems to come close to pantheism, where the human spirit is like a droplet of water assimilated in the wide ocean of divinity. Yet, Göschel rejects this outcome with the Hegelian phrase that the earlier moments of development are retained in the later stages. While with Hegel it is quite natural to read such statements as saying merely that the history of human society is always played out through individuals, Göschel endorses a stronger interpretation that every individual human soul is retained by the divine thinking – not just in the Spinozan sense that these individuals are eternally thought by God, but as full individual soul-atoms with their own consciousness.
By being in community with God, Göschel continues, the individual human souls gain the divine ability to penetrate anything. This means that even the external world is not anymore a mystery to humans, but something they can freely manipulate by their will. This final stage of the development of the human soul Göschel calls resurrection, where the soul is not anymore an atom distinct from its external body, but reconstitutes this body as being now alive in a spiritual union with the soul.
Göschel’s reading of Hegel seems to come close to pantheism, where the human spirit is like a droplet of water assimilated in the wide ocean of divinity. Yet, Göschel rejects this outcome with the Hegelian phrase that the earlier moments of development are retained in the later stages. While with Hegel it is quite natural to read such statements as saying merely that the history of human society is always played out through individuals, Göschel endorses a stronger interpretation that every individual human soul is retained by the divine thinking – not just in the Spinozan sense that these individuals are eternally thought by God, but as full individual soul-atoms with their own consciousness.
By being in community with God, Göschel continues, the individual human souls gain the divine ability to penetrate anything. This means that even the external world is not anymore a mystery to humans, but something they can freely manipulate by their will. This final stage of the development of the human soul Göschel calls resurrection, where the soul is not anymore an atom distinct from its external body, but reconstitutes this body as being now alive in a spiritual union with the soul.
perjantai 14. helmikuuta 2025
Gustave Fechner: Booklet on life after death (1836)
Fechner’s Das Büchlein vom Leben nach dem Tode is again a book with a more serious tone, and indeed, it bears some similarities with Fechner’s account of living planets as a higher form of existence. While that book contained rather wild speculations, here Fechner admits that what he is discussing - life after death, or as Fechner calls it, the third period of human life after the first in womb and the second between birth and death - is a matter of belief, not of proof. What Fechner is attempting in the booklet is to explain how life after death could be possible.
Fechner begins by noting that in a quite mundane manner we can said to live beyond death in other human beings. A person influences other persons, and this influence, whether it be beneficial or harmful, lives on. Indeed, Fechner notes, with so-called great people this influence can be seen to last considerably long. Even with ordinary people, their influence lasts quite long, if we think that the people they influenced influence again further people.
This radius of influence of a person, Fechner suggests, is what ancient cultures thought of when they talked about spirits both beneficent and maleficent affecting us - it is the spirit of our ancestors affecting us. If some set of radii of influence gets hold of the whole culture of a particular time, it is often called a spirit of the time.
Fechner compares these radii of influence with waves of sound and light, which go through same spaces and still retain their individuality. In terms of more modern physics we might say that Fechner suggests that after the death of a material body certain energy remains. This energy, Fechner seems to say, still retains the individual consciousness, although they all share the same body, namely, the whole Earth, which, as we know from Fechner’s previous work, is a living organism, moving ever closer to a source of its perfection or Sun.
In effect, all these strands of soul energy form in Fechner’s book an intertwined network - what could be called a world soul. In a rather pantheistic fashion, Fechner suggests that there are a lot of these networks, combining to a kind of supernetwork, which or the source of which he calls by the traditional name God. Adding to this vision the idea that life in this world is just preparation and symbol for this life as part of this tree of spiritual energy, Fechner appears to bring new life to the idea that we all live in God.
Fechner begins by noting that in a quite mundane manner we can said to live beyond death in other human beings. A person influences other persons, and this influence, whether it be beneficial or harmful, lives on. Indeed, Fechner notes, with so-called great people this influence can be seen to last considerably long. Even with ordinary people, their influence lasts quite long, if we think that the people they influenced influence again further people.
This radius of influence of a person, Fechner suggests, is what ancient cultures thought of when they talked about spirits both beneficent and maleficent affecting us - it is the spirit of our ancestors affecting us. If some set of radii of influence gets hold of the whole culture of a particular time, it is often called a spirit of the time.
Fechner compares these radii of influence with waves of sound and light, which go through same spaces and still retain their individuality. In terms of more modern physics we might say that Fechner suggests that after the death of a material body certain energy remains. This energy, Fechner seems to say, still retains the individual consciousness, although they all share the same body, namely, the whole Earth, which, as we know from Fechner’s previous work, is a living organism, moving ever closer to a source of its perfection or Sun.
In effect, all these strands of soul energy form in Fechner’s book an intertwined network - what could be called a world soul. In a rather pantheistic fashion, Fechner suggests that there are a lot of these networks, combining to a kind of supernetwork, which or the source of which he calls by the traditional name God. Adding to this vision the idea that life in this world is just preparation and symbol for this life as part of this tree of spiritual energy, Fechner appears to bring new life to the idea that we all live in God.
Gustave Fechner: Comparative anatomy of angels (1825)
Remembering Fechner’s rather jesting tone in some of his works, one might think that his Vergleichende Anatomie der Engel would be of similar sort: after all, what 19th century philosopher would seriously speak about angels? And yet, Fechner does appear to be earnest with his ideas. Of course, Fechner uses a rather peculiar notion of angel. In effect, he supposes that humanity is not the highest form of life, but is followed in the hierarchy of life by a higher type of life form, which Fechner calls by the traditional name angel.
What then are these angels like? Fechner starts by noting that their shape must be closer to perfection than of ordinary life forms, that is, sphere, which is mathematically most even shape. In addition to this Platonic sounding justification, Fechner also tries a more biological argument - human skull is rounder than animal skull, just like humans are more perfect than animals. Indeed, he notes, the noblest part of all humans are the eyes, which are considered to be the mirror of the soul. Eyes, on the other hand, are almost round. Angels then, Fechner continues, are just eyes - they are round balls of nerve, sensitive to light.
As a further proof of the shape of angels, Fechner suggests as a principle that the lowest and the highest stages in the hierarchy of life are in many ways similar - the higher forms of life are more organised than the lower ones, but the more the progress of life forms continues in the hierarchy, the more integrated into the whole the new developments become, thus moving again toward greater simplicity. Hence, Fechner notes, the simplest, single-celled organisms are also round, and while the first higher rungs of the hierarchy of life add more organs to this basic shape, in the end all these new organs unite again into a shape of a ball.
In an extremely imaginative fashion, Fechner also suggests that different rungs in the hierarchy of existence correspond to different senses, which they use as their primary mode of communication. Mere lumps of matter interact only with properties we feel when touching objects, but chemical objects already interact in similar manner as food does, when tasted. Plants release odours and animals and humans have their voices and languages. For the angels is then left the sense of sight, and Fechner in fact suggests that they communicate by colours. They are in their natural form transparent - again, just like one-celled organisms - but they can assume any colour, if they want to say something.
In a further incredulous leap of thought Fechner suggests that these round, coloured balls are simply planets. He does say that not all planets have attained this status and some of them are just icy lumps of matter. Indeed, Fechner insists, the closer a planet is to the Sun, the higher is its state of awareness. Fechner even imagines that between Mercury and the Sun there are a number of planets, which we just do not see, because of the brightness of the Sun. Furthermore, he notes, these huge creatures must have senses we mere humans do not. In other words, these living planets must have an ability to be aware of the comings and goings in the whole universe through the effects of gravitation.
It is hard to take this all seriously and Fechner’s leaps of logic hardly form a coherent argument. One could perhaps accept the idea that the biosphere of Earth at least forms something analogous to an organism, yet, an analogy goes only so far, and it would need quite a bit more to prove that Earth is a large eye. Even so, Fechner’s book is interesting as a symbol of a simpler age in which everything seemed alive and Sun especially was not just a very hot furnace burning everything close to it, but could itself sustain life.
What then are these angels like? Fechner starts by noting that their shape must be closer to perfection than of ordinary life forms, that is, sphere, which is mathematically most even shape. In addition to this Platonic sounding justification, Fechner also tries a more biological argument - human skull is rounder than animal skull, just like humans are more perfect than animals. Indeed, he notes, the noblest part of all humans are the eyes, which are considered to be the mirror of the soul. Eyes, on the other hand, are almost round. Angels then, Fechner continues, are just eyes - they are round balls of nerve, sensitive to light.
As a further proof of the shape of angels, Fechner suggests as a principle that the lowest and the highest stages in the hierarchy of life are in many ways similar - the higher forms of life are more organised than the lower ones, but the more the progress of life forms continues in the hierarchy, the more integrated into the whole the new developments become, thus moving again toward greater simplicity. Hence, Fechner notes, the simplest, single-celled organisms are also round, and while the first higher rungs of the hierarchy of life add more organs to this basic shape, in the end all these new organs unite again into a shape of a ball.
In an extremely imaginative fashion, Fechner also suggests that different rungs in the hierarchy of existence correspond to different senses, which they use as their primary mode of communication. Mere lumps of matter interact only with properties we feel when touching objects, but chemical objects already interact in similar manner as food does, when tasted. Plants release odours and animals and humans have their voices and languages. For the angels is then left the sense of sight, and Fechner in fact suggests that they communicate by colours. They are in their natural form transparent - again, just like one-celled organisms - but they can assume any colour, if they want to say something.
In a further incredulous leap of thought Fechner suggests that these round, coloured balls are simply planets. He does say that not all planets have attained this status and some of them are just icy lumps of matter. Indeed, Fechner insists, the closer a planet is to the Sun, the higher is its state of awareness. Fechner even imagines that between Mercury and the Sun there are a number of planets, which we just do not see, because of the brightness of the Sun. Furthermore, he notes, these huge creatures must have senses we mere humans do not. In other words, these living planets must have an ability to be aware of the comings and goings in the whole universe through the effects of gravitation.
It is hard to take this all seriously and Fechner’s leaps of logic hardly form a coherent argument. One could perhaps accept the idea that the biosphere of Earth at least forms something analogous to an organism, yet, an analogy goes only so far, and it would need quite a bit more to prove that Earth is a large eye. Even so, Fechner’s book is interesting as a symbol of a simpler age in which everything seemed alive and Sun especially was not just a very hot furnace burning everything close to it, but could itself sustain life.
torstai 25. huhtikuuta 2019
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Opus Maximum
Coleridge’s unpublished Logic was actually just a part of larger project, which he called at different times either Opus Maximum or Magnum Opus. Logic, together with an account of history of philosophy, was meant to be a preliminary study leading to the central problematic of the grand work - a proof of mainline Christanity and especially the notion of trinity. This central part exists only in several large fragments, but these are enough to indicate what Coleridge's train of thought was.
We miss the opening chapters of Opus Maximum and enter the stage in medias res, with Coleridge considering the question what differentiates morality from other sciences. He notes that statements of morality have quite a peculiar flair. If morality tells me that I ought to do something, it does not mean that this action would be absolutely necessary - morality is no mathematics. Yet, the moral “ought” is also something completely different from hypothetical necessity of physical sciences.
Coleridge is clearly following the lead of Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason and it is thus no wonder that he invokes as a primary assumption underlying morality the notion of will. Coleridge’s idea appears to be that this will is somehow responsible of its actions and moral statements then indicate, what actions fulfill this responsibility and what actions actively break it.
What is this will then? Coleridge notes as its primary characteristic a capacity to begin causal series. Yet, he remarks, this is no true explanation in the usual sense of the word. Ordinarily, things are explained, Coleridge says, when they have been connected to some previous item that has caused it. In case of will we can never really do that, since this very ability to begin things anew is something completely inexplicable. In other words, the notion of will is an idea, that is, something that definitely underlies our experiences and so must be in our reach, but as a final link of explanation admits no further explanation.
Coleridge is at once opposed to the idea that all morality could be reduced to mere prudential love of oneself. Firstly, he notes in a Kantian manner that this “self” is nothing more than mere formal binding of a bundle of experiences and thus incapable of being loved, or then it means our true self that is beyond all experience and thus beyond mundane love. Indeed, he continues, what is loved in this self-love is usually the earthly representative of our self or body. That is, self-love is just love of bodily pleasures or other benefits, which eventually can be used for a more pleasurable bodily life. But when we are told that we ought to do something, we are not told to do it because of future pleasure.
Coleridge avoids the Kantian disparagement of moral emotions by restricting the notion of pleasure to bodily pleasures. He states that already the satisfaction felt when we use our cognitive abilities is far different from bodily pleasures, and even further removed is the feeling of bliss generated by morality and religion. Thus, there is no demand that moral actions should be done grudgingly.
Maxims of morality, Coleridge notes, seem like commands from another, higher self - what Kant would call our noumenal self - and consciousness of these commands we call conscience. Now, Coleridge continues, even becoming conscious of these commands demands something - we must act in certain manner so that we would not be blind to demands of conscience. In other words, he concludes, conscience is possible only if we actively admit that we are answerable to a superior form of our self and so have faith in something beyond sensible reality.
Coleridge goes even further and says that not just morality or ethics, but every kind of consciousness is dependent on such faith and conscience. We may perhaps detect influence of Fichte here. Coleridge notes that what he has called conscience is in a primary sense self-consciousness - consciousness of our true self as a source of norms for action. Furthermore, whatever we are conscious of - that is, more than just aware of, in the way mere animals are - we have immediately related to our self. To conclude, for Coleridge, the whole human experience is underlined by a consciousness of what we must do in the world we experience.
Coleridge’s next move has also Fichtean tones. He notes that in order to relate any object of experience to ourselves as a moral subject, we need the notion of an object that is also a moral subject, although different from ourselves - every I needs You. When we look at a certain viewpoint, we can not differentiate between the two persons, Coleridge insists, and then we are speaking at the level of reason, that is, at the level of what is necessary according to all subjects. It is only when we move on to the level of will that we can differentiate between persons, and even then our conscience tells us that the other persons are equal to our own self and should be treated as such.
Morality, Coleridge argues, can then be regarded as a demand to subjugate the level of will - differentiation of persons - to the level of reason - equalisation of persons. Furthermore, he notes, our idea of God is just an idea of an entity, in which these two standpoints coincide absolutely - absolute will, which is unified with universal reason. In other words, Coleridge's suggestion is that morality demands that we gain conscience, which is just our communion with the divine level.
Coleridge’s next question is how we humans come to have a link to God. He at once notices that this cannot happen through any ordinary sort of proof. Much like Jacobi before him, Coleridge suggests that such proofs risk the confusion of divine and mundane levels, which leads to pantheistic explanations. Instead, he remarks, faith in God is something we learn even from our mother’s milk. During the first period of our life we humans do not have the capacity to separate ourselves completely from our mothers, and indeed, we are aware of our full dependence of her. When we then see our mother praying to a Superior Being, we gain an inkling of a universal parent taking care of all persons.
One might think that this genetic explanation of our notion of God is an argument against this notion - people from different cultures and people with no previous education would have no idea of God’s existence. Coleridge tries to show that even the Lockean notion of tabula rasa analysis of human experience points towards a notion of God. Coleridge’s argument begins by noting that Lockean philosophers analyse the experienced things by the characteristics these things are perceived to have. He then remarks that these characteristics differ from one perceiver to another - a plant poisonous to one observer might be harmless to another. Hence, he concludes, these characteristics are not so much passive properties, but active powers that can appear in different manners in different surroundings. The source of such activities, Coleridge insists, must ultimately be a self-causating activity or will.
Having thus based all consciousness and experience on the existence of responsible will and the existence of that will on absolute will, Coleridge next wants to show that this absolute will is no deistic impersonal God. Indeed, in order to be not just reason, but also will, God must be a person, that is, an I compared to You or to another person. From another viewpoint Coleridge notes that God is supposed to be a pure creating activity and therefore must have some result, if nothing else, then this second person.
This necessary result of divine activity, Coleridge says, is nothing more than the so-called second person of trinity - Word or Logos, which could be said to conceptualise the original power of self-creation by creating distinctions within it. In addition to being differentiated into two persons, Father and Son, these two persons also recognise their identity in an act of mutual love, which is represented by Spirit or the third person of trinity. In a sense, then, God must create to itself a community of persons just to exist as a person.
At this point Coleridge notes the peculiarity of religion as a sort of synthesis of philosophy or science dealing with necessities and of history dealing with contingencies. While the trinitarian nature of divinity belongs in Coleridge’s eyes to the necessary portion of religion - God must be a self-created community of persons - the existence of evil does not. Only the possibility of evil is necessary, but its actual existence is not.
In fact, evil offers a true conundrum for Coleridge, because its existence should be explained. It cannot be explained through any activity of God, who cannot be a source of imperfection. The only possibility that Coleridge can fathom is then that evil is similarly self-caused as God himself. The difference is that while God exists necessarily, evil does not. Evil, that is, a will not abiding with God’s absolute will, has just willed itself to existence. Of course, temporal notions are here only a metaphor. In a less figurative sense, evil just is something that need not be, but still is, and since it exists, it retains itself, as long as nothing is done about it.
What is particularly important for Coleridge is to show that evil is not a necessary outcome of the energy of divinity, unlike in Plotinian philosophy, where evil has a mere shadow of an existence, necessarily projected by the ultimate reality. Closely connected with this attempt is Coleridge’s project of showing that certain key tenets of the Bible can be justified philosophically, which would bolster the status of Christianity against Neoplatonism and its modern appearance in Schellingian philosophy.
At this particular stage, Coleridge’s work becomes even more fragmentary, but certain key moments can be discerned. Coleridge evidently tries to show that the biblical story of Genesis can be rationally reconstructed by incorporating what he considered to be the most developed account of natural world - the Schellingian philosophy of nature - but leaving out its seeming pantheism, which denigrates the idea of personal God.
The starting point of Coleridge’s account seems to be the fact of evil - that is, of a will which at the same time stubbornly upholds its own particularity against the truly absolute will of God and tries to place itself in the place of absolute will, remaking all of existence in its own shape. This muddle of contradictory tendencies of particularisation and universalisation in the original evil will Coleridge calls chaos - it is the primordial puddle of contradictory forces, which by itself cannot do anything.
Just like God recognised itself in the other personality and thus loved it, Coleridge continues, God’s love extends also to the primordial chaos, despite its imperfection. This divine love or “breath of God” gives chaos a more stable existence and makes it a potential material for further shapes of existence - chaos becomes aether. In the same act, the differentiating person in trinity or Logos shapes a portion of this aether into a carrier of active energy or light. Thus, Coleridge weds the Biblical tale of God saying “let there be light” with the Schellingian idea that physical world is built out of opposition of active light and passive matter.
Next in Coleridge’s account is the multiplication of these basic opposites into various forms of opposition: separation of unit from true unity in centrifugal force opposed to a search of true unity in centripetal force, mutual repulsion of material units opposed to their coherence as a unified material object and volatile expansion or diffusion of matter opposed to its contraction into a tighter unity. This is followed by construction of air as mediating between mere vacuum and visible matter, and move to concerns of chemistry. We need not go into details, but merely state the obvious parallel of Coleridge's account with Schellingian ideas.
We miss the opening chapters of Opus Maximum and enter the stage in medias res, with Coleridge considering the question what differentiates morality from other sciences. He notes that statements of morality have quite a peculiar flair. If morality tells me that I ought to do something, it does not mean that this action would be absolutely necessary - morality is no mathematics. Yet, the moral “ought” is also something completely different from hypothetical necessity of physical sciences.
Coleridge is clearly following the lead of Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason and it is thus no wonder that he invokes as a primary assumption underlying morality the notion of will. Coleridge’s idea appears to be that this will is somehow responsible of its actions and moral statements then indicate, what actions fulfill this responsibility and what actions actively break it.
What is this will then? Coleridge notes as its primary characteristic a capacity to begin causal series. Yet, he remarks, this is no true explanation in the usual sense of the word. Ordinarily, things are explained, Coleridge says, when they have been connected to some previous item that has caused it. In case of will we can never really do that, since this very ability to begin things anew is something completely inexplicable. In other words, the notion of will is an idea, that is, something that definitely underlies our experiences and so must be in our reach, but as a final link of explanation admits no further explanation.
Coleridge is at once opposed to the idea that all morality could be reduced to mere prudential love of oneself. Firstly, he notes in a Kantian manner that this “self” is nothing more than mere formal binding of a bundle of experiences and thus incapable of being loved, or then it means our true self that is beyond all experience and thus beyond mundane love. Indeed, he continues, what is loved in this self-love is usually the earthly representative of our self or body. That is, self-love is just love of bodily pleasures or other benefits, which eventually can be used for a more pleasurable bodily life. But when we are told that we ought to do something, we are not told to do it because of future pleasure.
Coleridge avoids the Kantian disparagement of moral emotions by restricting the notion of pleasure to bodily pleasures. He states that already the satisfaction felt when we use our cognitive abilities is far different from bodily pleasures, and even further removed is the feeling of bliss generated by morality and religion. Thus, there is no demand that moral actions should be done grudgingly.
Maxims of morality, Coleridge notes, seem like commands from another, higher self - what Kant would call our noumenal self - and consciousness of these commands we call conscience. Now, Coleridge continues, even becoming conscious of these commands demands something - we must act in certain manner so that we would not be blind to demands of conscience. In other words, he concludes, conscience is possible only if we actively admit that we are answerable to a superior form of our self and so have faith in something beyond sensible reality.
Coleridge goes even further and says that not just morality or ethics, but every kind of consciousness is dependent on such faith and conscience. We may perhaps detect influence of Fichte here. Coleridge notes that what he has called conscience is in a primary sense self-consciousness - consciousness of our true self as a source of norms for action. Furthermore, whatever we are conscious of - that is, more than just aware of, in the way mere animals are - we have immediately related to our self. To conclude, for Coleridge, the whole human experience is underlined by a consciousness of what we must do in the world we experience.
Coleridge’s next move has also Fichtean tones. He notes that in order to relate any object of experience to ourselves as a moral subject, we need the notion of an object that is also a moral subject, although different from ourselves - every I needs You. When we look at a certain viewpoint, we can not differentiate between the two persons, Coleridge insists, and then we are speaking at the level of reason, that is, at the level of what is necessary according to all subjects. It is only when we move on to the level of will that we can differentiate between persons, and even then our conscience tells us that the other persons are equal to our own self and should be treated as such.
Morality, Coleridge argues, can then be regarded as a demand to subjugate the level of will - differentiation of persons - to the level of reason - equalisation of persons. Furthermore, he notes, our idea of God is just an idea of an entity, in which these two standpoints coincide absolutely - absolute will, which is unified with universal reason. In other words, Coleridge's suggestion is that morality demands that we gain conscience, which is just our communion with the divine level.
Coleridge’s next question is how we humans come to have a link to God. He at once notices that this cannot happen through any ordinary sort of proof. Much like Jacobi before him, Coleridge suggests that such proofs risk the confusion of divine and mundane levels, which leads to pantheistic explanations. Instead, he remarks, faith in God is something we learn even from our mother’s milk. During the first period of our life we humans do not have the capacity to separate ourselves completely from our mothers, and indeed, we are aware of our full dependence of her. When we then see our mother praying to a Superior Being, we gain an inkling of a universal parent taking care of all persons.
One might think that this genetic explanation of our notion of God is an argument against this notion - people from different cultures and people with no previous education would have no idea of God’s existence. Coleridge tries to show that even the Lockean notion of tabula rasa analysis of human experience points towards a notion of God. Coleridge’s argument begins by noting that Lockean philosophers analyse the experienced things by the characteristics these things are perceived to have. He then remarks that these characteristics differ from one perceiver to another - a plant poisonous to one observer might be harmless to another. Hence, he concludes, these characteristics are not so much passive properties, but active powers that can appear in different manners in different surroundings. The source of such activities, Coleridge insists, must ultimately be a self-causating activity or will.
Having thus based all consciousness and experience on the existence of responsible will and the existence of that will on absolute will, Coleridge next wants to show that this absolute will is no deistic impersonal God. Indeed, in order to be not just reason, but also will, God must be a person, that is, an I compared to You or to another person. From another viewpoint Coleridge notes that God is supposed to be a pure creating activity and therefore must have some result, if nothing else, then this second person.
This necessary result of divine activity, Coleridge says, is nothing more than the so-called second person of trinity - Word or Logos, which could be said to conceptualise the original power of self-creation by creating distinctions within it. In addition to being differentiated into two persons, Father and Son, these two persons also recognise their identity in an act of mutual love, which is represented by Spirit or the third person of trinity. In a sense, then, God must create to itself a community of persons just to exist as a person.
At this point Coleridge notes the peculiarity of religion as a sort of synthesis of philosophy or science dealing with necessities and of history dealing with contingencies. While the trinitarian nature of divinity belongs in Coleridge’s eyes to the necessary portion of religion - God must be a self-created community of persons - the existence of evil does not. Only the possibility of evil is necessary, but its actual existence is not.
In fact, evil offers a true conundrum for Coleridge, because its existence should be explained. It cannot be explained through any activity of God, who cannot be a source of imperfection. The only possibility that Coleridge can fathom is then that evil is similarly self-caused as God himself. The difference is that while God exists necessarily, evil does not. Evil, that is, a will not abiding with God’s absolute will, has just willed itself to existence. Of course, temporal notions are here only a metaphor. In a less figurative sense, evil just is something that need not be, but still is, and since it exists, it retains itself, as long as nothing is done about it.
What is particularly important for Coleridge is to show that evil is not a necessary outcome of the energy of divinity, unlike in Plotinian philosophy, where evil has a mere shadow of an existence, necessarily projected by the ultimate reality. Closely connected with this attempt is Coleridge’s project of showing that certain key tenets of the Bible can be justified philosophically, which would bolster the status of Christianity against Neoplatonism and its modern appearance in Schellingian philosophy.
At this particular stage, Coleridge’s work becomes even more fragmentary, but certain key moments can be discerned. Coleridge evidently tries to show that the biblical story of Genesis can be rationally reconstructed by incorporating what he considered to be the most developed account of natural world - the Schellingian philosophy of nature - but leaving out its seeming pantheism, which denigrates the idea of personal God.
The starting point of Coleridge’s account seems to be the fact of evil - that is, of a will which at the same time stubbornly upholds its own particularity against the truly absolute will of God and tries to place itself in the place of absolute will, remaking all of existence in its own shape. This muddle of contradictory tendencies of particularisation and universalisation in the original evil will Coleridge calls chaos - it is the primordial puddle of contradictory forces, which by itself cannot do anything.
Just like God recognised itself in the other personality and thus loved it, Coleridge continues, God’s love extends also to the primordial chaos, despite its imperfection. This divine love or “breath of God” gives chaos a more stable existence and makes it a potential material for further shapes of existence - chaos becomes aether. In the same act, the differentiating person in trinity or Logos shapes a portion of this aether into a carrier of active energy or light. Thus, Coleridge weds the Biblical tale of God saying “let there be light” with the Schellingian idea that physical world is built out of opposition of active light and passive matter.
Next in Coleridge’s account is the multiplication of these basic opposites into various forms of opposition: separation of unit from true unity in centrifugal force opposed to a search of true unity in centripetal force, mutual repulsion of material units opposed to their coherence as a unified material object and volatile expansion or diffusion of matter opposed to its contraction into a tighter unity. This is followed by construction of air as mediating between mere vacuum and visible matter, and move to concerns of chemistry. We need not go into details, but merely state the obvious parallel of Coleridge's account with Schellingian ideas.
Opus Maximum ends as abruptly as it began, with no indication how Coleridge would have finished the work. Still, we have seen enough to recognise which parts of the work would have been more fruitful. It is especially the idea of ethical underpinning of human consciousness and the notion of necessity of community for personality that hold most interest to a modern reader. On the other hand, his attempt to synthesise Genesis with German philosophy of nature seems like a peculiar and ultimately futile project.
torstai 25. lokakuuta 2018
Friedrich Eduard Beneke: New foundation for metaphysics (1822)
Beneke’s Neue Grundlegung zur Metaphysik is a programmatic declaration of the possibility of metaphysics. Beneke does not give a definite explanation of metaphysics, but he evidently contrasts it with a mere study of human consciousness - metaphysics, in comparison, deals with being and not mere thinking.
Problem of justifying the possibility metaphysics means then for Beneke a problem for showing that we can think of something we know to exist. Beneke’s not that original solution is to note that when we think of our very activities of thinking, we necessarily think of something that exists, because self-evidently our own activities of thinking must exist, whenever we happen to think them.
Beneke’s aim in pointing out this rather clear-looking fact is to argue against a position he calls strong idealism.This strong idealism is apparently supposed to endorse the notion that we can never connect thinking with being, but are always closed within the circle of mere representations of being. It is not at first clear why Beneke would call such a position idealism, but he is at least thinking about Kant’s notion of inner sense, which he explicitly denies.
It might be that Beneke and Kant are speaking of two different things. When talking about inner sense, Kant wants to emphasise that we cannot know even ourselves from a perspective reaching over our experience and that we therefore cannot know e.g. whether we are immortal and immaterial entities or material objects. Beneke accepts this, but insists that we still can know something about our mental life, namely, its existence as such, and even more, what this mental life feels to us. Of course, Kant might object that none of this is enough for knowledge, but we might well ask whether Kant just has a too tight definition of knowledge.
Although Beneke speaks against idealism, he is also willing to speak against a crude sort of realism that would state that we have as immediate connection with other things as with ourselves. Beneke still admits, against what he calls weak idealism, that we can know the existence of other things, although only mediately. The link between our immediate knowledge of ourselves and mediate knowledge of other things is, according to Beneke, our knowledge of our own bodies - we know our bodies just as we know our mental life, but our bodies are also causally connected to other bodies (Beneke deals here briefly with the Humean problem of how we recognise causality, and like in his earlier work, he insists that we can through an indefinite number of repeats become more and more certain of the existence of such a causal connection).
Although the lens of the body allows us to recognise the existence of other things, Beneke says, it also restricts our knowledge to a certain perspective. In other words, Beneke is of the opinion that we know other things more completely, if they happen to resemble ourselves. Even things quite removed from us, such as mere material objects with no life or consciousness, can be known only through the lens of our own bodily feelings - for instance, we can understand the physical movement of objects through our own experiences of moving through space.
Problem of justifying the possibility metaphysics means then for Beneke a problem for showing that we can think of something we know to exist. Beneke’s not that original solution is to note that when we think of our very activities of thinking, we necessarily think of something that exists, because self-evidently our own activities of thinking must exist, whenever we happen to think them.
Beneke’s aim in pointing out this rather clear-looking fact is to argue against a position he calls strong idealism.This strong idealism is apparently supposed to endorse the notion that we can never connect thinking with being, but are always closed within the circle of mere representations of being. It is not at first clear why Beneke would call such a position idealism, but he is at least thinking about Kant’s notion of inner sense, which he explicitly denies.
It might be that Beneke and Kant are speaking of two different things. When talking about inner sense, Kant wants to emphasise that we cannot know even ourselves from a perspective reaching over our experience and that we therefore cannot know e.g. whether we are immortal and immaterial entities or material objects. Beneke accepts this, but insists that we still can know something about our mental life, namely, its existence as such, and even more, what this mental life feels to us. Of course, Kant might object that none of this is enough for knowledge, but we might well ask whether Kant just has a too tight definition of knowledge.
Although Beneke speaks against idealism, he is also willing to speak against a crude sort of realism that would state that we have as immediate connection with other things as with ourselves. Beneke still admits, against what he calls weak idealism, that we can know the existence of other things, although only mediately. The link between our immediate knowledge of ourselves and mediate knowledge of other things is, according to Beneke, our knowledge of our own bodies - we know our bodies just as we know our mental life, but our bodies are also causally connected to other bodies (Beneke deals here briefly with the Humean problem of how we recognise causality, and like in his earlier work, he insists that we can through an indefinite number of repeats become more and more certain of the existence of such a causal connection).
Although the lens of the body allows us to recognise the existence of other things, Beneke says, it also restricts our knowledge to a certain perspective. In other words, Beneke is of the opinion that we know other things more completely, if they happen to resemble ourselves. Even things quite removed from us, such as mere material objects with no life or consciousness, can be known only through the lens of our own bodily feelings - for instance, we can understand the physical movement of objects through our own experiences of moving through space.
keskiviikko 28. maaliskuuta 2018
Arthur Schopenhauer: World as Will and Representation 1 - Will behind the phenomena
While the first section of Schopenhauer’s book was nominally Kantian, but in reality something else, the second section is a clear move beyond limits set by Kant. One of the most central thesis in Kant’s philosophy is that we do not have any access to things as they are in themselves. Schopenhauer flatly denies this and states that we indeed have such an access. If we were mere disembodied subjects, such an access wouldn’t exist, but we are not. In fact, we are very much embodied persons. Now, we can regard our bodies from an external viewpoint, as a mere object. Still, we also have access to what our bodies are, not as objects, but as things in themselves - through our will. For instance, we feel an urge to do something, and at once we can see this urge fulfilled in the movement of out body.
Superficially taken, Schopenhauer’s attempt to go beyond Kant’s limits for cognition resembles Fichte’s philosophy in the sense that both philosophers base their attempts on a practically understood self-consciousness. Yet, there are clear differences. While Schopenhauer’s justification is quite crude and seemingly based on nothing more than mere self-feeling, Fichte’s assumption is based on an interesting transcendental deduction: whole experience would not be possible without being set up by a practically understood self-consciousness.
Now, Schopenhauer distinguishes his primal will in itself from all motives seemingly guiding our actions. Such motives are mere phenomenal circumstances, which at most explain why we act at this moment and in this situation as we do. Primal will, on the other hand, is equal to action itself and is, according to Schopenhauer, ultimately explicable, because all explanations occur on the level of representations. In fact, no phenomenal restrictions apply to the primal will. Thus, on the level of will, Schopenhauer concludes, there are no separate individuals, but each and everyone of us is as well a representation of the primal will.
In fact, Schopenhauer goes even further and insists that animals, plants and even bare material objects are all just embodiment of will. At first sight, saying that e.g. gravity is a form of will is just replacing one difficult word (force) with another (will). Yet, it contains at least one description of such a force - it is somehow similar to the urge that we feel in our actions. While forces as such are just closed from us, will we know intimately well, and it is just a matter of extending this familiarity to, first, motiveless urges of animals and plants, and finally, to strivings of all material objects.
Although Schopenhauer then in a sense upholds an ontological monism - all is will - he does not endorse any monistic explanations in the level of science. On the contrary, science works at the level of appearance or representation, so there is no guarantee, he says, that e.g. organic phenomena could be reduced to chemical terms. In fact, Schopenhauer appears to suggest that no reduction of any kind can happen between different sciences. And indeed, if any type of reduction is to be effected, this should happen to a direction completely opposite from the usual attempts of reduction. In other words, inorganic phenomena, like gravity and magnetism, should be understood through an analogy to our own volitional efforts. In fact, Schopenhauer suggests that phenomena could be arranged in a hierarchy according to the level of resemblance they have with human volition. Such levels would then show different levels in the process of becoming apparent of the primordial will - mere material phenomena would show their origin in will least clearly, while human volition would show it most clearly.
We have already remarked about the resemblance of Schopenhauer’s notion of will with Fichte’s practical self-consciousness. Even clearer affinities Schopenhauer’s theory has with the romantic notion of phenomenal world as an appearance of forces of life. Like romantics, Schopenhauer notes that individuality is mere delusion, that everything originates from a unified source and that this source is embodied in a hierarchy of levels, where humanity holds the highest place. Even Schopenhauer’s insistence that at the level of phenomena different embodiments of primordial will strive against one another is not unlike e.g. Hegelian insistence that basic forces contradict one another and even cancel themselves in some circumstances. Furthermore, Schopenhauer’s statement that will can never completely fulfill its strivings, but is always driven to do more and more, is quite on line at least with the ideas of some romantics - although others imagined that at some level (perhaps with humans) such a primal need could be balanced by harmonious reason.
Superficially taken, Schopenhauer’s attempt to go beyond Kant’s limits for cognition resembles Fichte’s philosophy in the sense that both philosophers base their attempts on a practically understood self-consciousness. Yet, there are clear differences. While Schopenhauer’s justification is quite crude and seemingly based on nothing more than mere self-feeling, Fichte’s assumption is based on an interesting transcendental deduction: whole experience would not be possible without being set up by a practically understood self-consciousness.
Now, Schopenhauer distinguishes his primal will in itself from all motives seemingly guiding our actions. Such motives are mere phenomenal circumstances, which at most explain why we act at this moment and in this situation as we do. Primal will, on the other hand, is equal to action itself and is, according to Schopenhauer, ultimately explicable, because all explanations occur on the level of representations. In fact, no phenomenal restrictions apply to the primal will. Thus, on the level of will, Schopenhauer concludes, there are no separate individuals, but each and everyone of us is as well a representation of the primal will.
In fact, Schopenhauer goes even further and insists that animals, plants and even bare material objects are all just embodiment of will. At first sight, saying that e.g. gravity is a form of will is just replacing one difficult word (force) with another (will). Yet, it contains at least one description of such a force - it is somehow similar to the urge that we feel in our actions. While forces as such are just closed from us, will we know intimately well, and it is just a matter of extending this familiarity to, first, motiveless urges of animals and plants, and finally, to strivings of all material objects.
Although Schopenhauer then in a sense upholds an ontological monism - all is will - he does not endorse any monistic explanations in the level of science. On the contrary, science works at the level of appearance or representation, so there is no guarantee, he says, that e.g. organic phenomena could be reduced to chemical terms. In fact, Schopenhauer appears to suggest that no reduction of any kind can happen between different sciences. And indeed, if any type of reduction is to be effected, this should happen to a direction completely opposite from the usual attempts of reduction. In other words, inorganic phenomena, like gravity and magnetism, should be understood through an analogy to our own volitional efforts. In fact, Schopenhauer suggests that phenomena could be arranged in a hierarchy according to the level of resemblance they have with human volition. Such levels would then show different levels in the process of becoming apparent of the primordial will - mere material phenomena would show their origin in will least clearly, while human volition would show it most clearly.
We have already remarked about the resemblance of Schopenhauer’s notion of will with Fichte’s practical self-consciousness. Even clearer affinities Schopenhauer’s theory has with the romantic notion of phenomenal world as an appearance of forces of life. Like romantics, Schopenhauer notes that individuality is mere delusion, that everything originates from a unified source and that this source is embodied in a hierarchy of levels, where humanity holds the highest place. Even Schopenhauer’s insistence that at the level of phenomena different embodiments of primordial will strive against one another is not unlike e.g. Hegelian insistence that basic forces contradict one another and even cancel themselves in some circumstances. Furthermore, Schopenhauer’s statement that will can never completely fulfill its strivings, but is always driven to do more and more, is quite on line at least with the ideas of some romantics - although others imagined that at some level (perhaps with humans) such a primal need could be balanced by harmonious reason.
torstai 22. maaliskuuta 2018
Arthur Schopenhauer: World as Will and Representation 1 (1819)
Although in the preface of the first edition of his main work, Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Schopenhauer is quite insistent that no one should read his work, before reading first Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and his own work on the principle of sufficient reason, when I first read the work, I understood it quite well without these aids and even by beginning from the second, supplementary book published later. This is mostly a testament to Schopenhauer’s skills as a writer. Compared to some of his contemporaries, Schopenhauer’s prose is even dull in its simplicity.
The first edition of the work divides into five sections, two dealing with world as representation and two with world as will, while the fifth is a detailed criticism of Kant’s philosophy. I shall follow Schopenhauer’s division in this regard and divide my account of the book into five consecutive posts.
Although I shall thus consider Schopenhauer’s relation to Kant in more detail in a later post, we can already note that in the first section of his book, Schopenhauer offers a quite simplified and even caricaturised version of Kantianism. Schopenhauer’s basis for his form of Kantianism is the conceptual pair of subject and object. Subject is that which is conscious of an object and neither can exist without the other, Schopenhauer says - there could be no consciousness without nothing to be conscious of, but also nothing to be conscious of without any consciousness. While object is spatio-temporal, subject is not. Still, space and time can also be seen as forms of being conscious of, in the sense that subject sees everything spatially and temporally. Same goes for causality - object follows causal laws and subject regards everything as following causal laws. Thus, without any subject, there would be no object, no space, no time and no causality. This quite straightforward idealism Schopenhauer takes as the essence of Kant’s philosophy - and essentially also as the kernel of Berkeley’s philosophy. All of this would quite confuse most Kantians, who would be quick to distinguish between Kant and Berkeley.
We have already seen Schopenhauer develop the basic structure of this first part in his book on the principle of sufficient reason, and what he adds in this work is mostly just the subjective correlates for the objective elements. We have already seen that Schopenhauer follows Kant in regarding space and time as forms of cognition - following Kant, he calls them objects of pure sensibility. Space and time alone would allow no change - space as such is not processual, while time as such has nothing abiding that could change. It is only their combination that makes it possible to experience something as changing, Schopenhauer says. This combination of the two happens through what Schopenhauer, again following Kant, calls understanding. But unlike with Kant, Schopenhauerian understanding does nothing else, but implicitly regards everything in space and time as causal. Causality binds space and time together through the notion of matter, which is just an abiding substrate for all causal changes. Schopenhauer takes this notion of understanding in a quite robust manner: there literally is a module in our brain that combines our individual perceptions into neat causal chains.
Even more adamantly than Kant does Schopenhauer insist that causality cannot be applied outside experience. In fact, Schopenhauer insists that objects do not causally affect subject. Neither does subject create objects, but both appear on the playing field at the same time.
Beyond sensibility and understanding Schopenhauer places reason, which for him, more clearly than for Kant, is a common name for our conceptual abilities. Indeed, it is our conceptual ability reason is all about, since it is the only essentially human cognitive faculty. Schopenhauer thinks that reason by itself cannot really do anything, but is always dependent on the content given by sensibility and understanding, because concepts are just abstract generalisations from perceptions. Still, for practical purposes moving to this level of abstractions is of necessity - for instance, we couldn’t communicate things to others, if we couldn’t use concepts for them. Even so, Schopenhauer emphasises the use of perceptual and intuitive examples even in case of scientific study, which is the place where conceptual side of cognition is at most in play - the certainty of even mathematical principles is essentially based on perceptions and intuitions. The most remarkable thing about this account is how unremarkable it is - even Wolffians could have accepted everything Schopenhauer had to say about reason.
Indeed, in a sense Schopenhauerian notion of reason is closer to Wolffian than Kantian philosophy. When it comes to the practical use of reason, Schopenhauer denies that reason could have any absolute moral principles, which would be based on nothing external. Thus, the only way reason could be used in action would be as a faculty for guiding us to as happy life as possible. Hence, the most perfect system of practical reason for Schopenhauer is Stoicism, which aims at human happiness and notes that it can be achieved only through perfect self-control.
The first edition of the work divides into five sections, two dealing with world as representation and two with world as will, while the fifth is a detailed criticism of Kant’s philosophy. I shall follow Schopenhauer’s division in this regard and divide my account of the book into five consecutive posts.
Although I shall thus consider Schopenhauer’s relation to Kant in more detail in a later post, we can already note that in the first section of his book, Schopenhauer offers a quite simplified and even caricaturised version of Kantianism. Schopenhauer’s basis for his form of Kantianism is the conceptual pair of subject and object. Subject is that which is conscious of an object and neither can exist without the other, Schopenhauer says - there could be no consciousness without nothing to be conscious of, but also nothing to be conscious of without any consciousness. While object is spatio-temporal, subject is not. Still, space and time can also be seen as forms of being conscious of, in the sense that subject sees everything spatially and temporally. Same goes for causality - object follows causal laws and subject regards everything as following causal laws. Thus, without any subject, there would be no object, no space, no time and no causality. This quite straightforward idealism Schopenhauer takes as the essence of Kant’s philosophy - and essentially also as the kernel of Berkeley’s philosophy. All of this would quite confuse most Kantians, who would be quick to distinguish between Kant and Berkeley.
We have already seen Schopenhauer develop the basic structure of this first part in his book on the principle of sufficient reason, and what he adds in this work is mostly just the subjective correlates for the objective elements. We have already seen that Schopenhauer follows Kant in regarding space and time as forms of cognition - following Kant, he calls them objects of pure sensibility. Space and time alone would allow no change - space as such is not processual, while time as such has nothing abiding that could change. It is only their combination that makes it possible to experience something as changing, Schopenhauer says. This combination of the two happens through what Schopenhauer, again following Kant, calls understanding. But unlike with Kant, Schopenhauerian understanding does nothing else, but implicitly regards everything in space and time as causal. Causality binds space and time together through the notion of matter, which is just an abiding substrate for all causal changes. Schopenhauer takes this notion of understanding in a quite robust manner: there literally is a module in our brain that combines our individual perceptions into neat causal chains.
Even more adamantly than Kant does Schopenhauer insist that causality cannot be applied outside experience. In fact, Schopenhauer insists that objects do not causally affect subject. Neither does subject create objects, but both appear on the playing field at the same time.
Beyond sensibility and understanding Schopenhauer places reason, which for him, more clearly than for Kant, is a common name for our conceptual abilities. Indeed, it is our conceptual ability reason is all about, since it is the only essentially human cognitive faculty. Schopenhauer thinks that reason by itself cannot really do anything, but is always dependent on the content given by sensibility and understanding, because concepts are just abstract generalisations from perceptions. Still, for practical purposes moving to this level of abstractions is of necessity - for instance, we couldn’t communicate things to others, if we couldn’t use concepts for them. Even so, Schopenhauer emphasises the use of perceptual and intuitive examples even in case of scientific study, which is the place where conceptual side of cognition is at most in play - the certainty of even mathematical principles is essentially based on perceptions and intuitions. The most remarkable thing about this account is how unremarkable it is - even Wolffians could have accepted everything Schopenhauer had to say about reason.
Indeed, in a sense Schopenhauerian notion of reason is closer to Wolffian than Kantian philosophy. When it comes to the practical use of reason, Schopenhauer denies that reason could have any absolute moral principles, which would be based on nothing external. Thus, the only way reason could be used in action would be as a faculty for guiding us to as happy life as possible. Hence, the most perfect system of practical reason for Schopenhauer is Stoicism, which aims at human happiness and notes that it can be achieved only through perfect self-control.
torstai 28. syyskuuta 2017
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Biographia litteraria (1817)
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| (1772-1834) |
Coleridge is best known for his evocative poetry, such as Kubla Khan, but he had his hand also in introducing continental and especially German philosophy into Great Britain. Coleridge’s role was, firstly, quite straightforward as he was the first translator of some works of Schelling in English. Yet, he was more than just a passive translator of German thought. Coleridge was actively engaging with the thoughts of post-Kantian philosophy and preparing a book on the topic. Still, he never managed to prepare a finished philosophical work.
Closest to what we have of philosophy in his published works is Coleridge’s Biographia Litteraria. The title suggests that the book would be a biography, and Coleridge does recount some tales e.g. of his journeys on the continent. Yet, the true import of the book lies in an aesthetical question what forms a proper work of poetry.
Incitement for Coleridge’s question lies in theory of poetics by another poet, William Wordsworth. What especially irked Coleridge in Wordsworth’s ideas was latter’s insistence that poetic language differed in no manner from language of good prose, which in no manner differed from language of ordinary people. Coleridge himself notes that while some lines in poems could be part of a prose text, especially if changes in word order, made due to metre and rhyming, would be cancelled, there are some lines which have an inherently poetic nature. Furthermore, this poetic nature is something completely different from crude speech used by rustic people. Coleridge even reprimands Wordsworth for including in his poems dramatic parts, in which ordinary people speak in their own words - if they truly speak in their own words, it is not poetic, if it is poetic, it is not faithful to the language of ordinary people.
Coleridge’s position is quite traditional - one would think he would be even more horrified of a modern poetry - and it is quite difficult to fathom what is this essential ingredient making a text poetic. Coleridge first states the common element in poems and fictional prose texts: they are both meant to cause pleasure, not to convey truth, like philosophical treatises. Thus, Plato’s dialogues are not poems, although they do have a certain poetic flair.
The external signs of poetry, such as rhyming and metre, are not completely external to the idea of poetry in Coleridge’s eyes. The purpose of them is to hold our attention throughout the whole poem and weave all the details described into a coherent whole. It is indeed this attention to wholes or totalities that is the distinguishing mark of poetry for Coleridge - a poem must form an organic system, in which all details, including such seemingly minute things as the tone of the words, must serve the grand purpose of the poem.
Coleridge connects at once this idea of poems as organic wholes to his notion of imagination. Unfortunately, Coleridge doesn’t actually explain what he means by imagination - an anonymous proofreader was of the opinion that Coleridge’s account of imagination was far above the understanding of an ordinary reader, so it was removed from the final published work. We do hear that imagination is different from fancy, which is a mere mechanical association of ideas. Instead, it appears to be closely connected with the basic forces responsible for the generation of human experience. Here Coleridge’s Schellingian tendencies appear most vividly, for Schelling too connected artistic imagination with the primal forces behind human experiences.
Coleridge paints himself as not just an imitator of Schelling. Instead, he just happened to have similar influences as Schelling did, which inevitably led both to similar conclusions. Coleridge mentions explicitly such names as Plato, Plotinus, Giordano Bruno and Jacob Boehme, all of whom were important also to Schelling - and all of whom had tendencies toward mysticism and pointed philosophy towards a search for something ineffable and beyond human experience. Kant was also important for Coleridge, as showing the limits of ordinary reasoning and as hinting about vistas beyond ordinary human experience. Fichte is also appreciated, as pointing out that truth behind everything lies in activity and not in mechanistic matter, but Coleridge disparages him for ignoring nature as an organic totality - all very reminiscent of Schelling.
It is then no wonder that Coleridge has in metaphysics a strikingly Schellingian attitude. We must look at things from both the viewpoint of the object or nature and the viewpoint of subject or intelligence. When we look at nature, Coleridge says, we inevitably come to laws, which are no mere matter, but intellectual things. As laws are supposed to reveal the deep structure of nature, we end up seeing that nature itself is basically intellectual. Of course, this conclusion presupposes that we accept laws as pre-existing patterns of nature’s movements and not just as our subjective generalisations from natural events.
Starting from the viewpoint of the subject, we have the immediate certainty of our own existence. We also appear to be certain of the existence of quite a number of things, which we assume to be completely independent of ourselves. Yet, as we have no gateway to things outside us, these seemingly external things appear to vanish into mere dreams. Coleridge’s wish is to uphold the every-day realism - these things we see are truly real. Paradoxically, his strategy is to hold that they are in a sense ideal. In other words, their existence is connected organically to my own existence, which means that I can be equally certain of their existence as I am of my own existence.
Coleridge’s justification of his position follows also Schellingian routes. He assumes that it is meaningful to speak about truth - something we might well concede to him, since otherwise we might as well stop caring about philosophy. Now, truth - or more likely, true thoughts - are not something self-sufficient, but dependent on the existence of things (if I know a table, the table must first exist). Then again, a series of truths, if it is to be completely reliable, must be based on something self-evident, which is certain to be true by itself. This self-evident truth must then also be based on something existent, which, Coleridge argues, must then be something, which doesn’t require the existence of anything else (notice how closely we are threading through very traditional theological notions).
What is this object of true knowledge? Firstly, it should be the source of all existence, because it shouldn’t be dependent on anything else. Secondly, it shouldn’t be a mere object or an ordinary thing, because such things would always require a further explanation - it would be something beyond ordinary experience. This means, primarily, that the object of ultimate knowledge must actually be also the subject of this ultimate knowledge. In other words, if we ever could approach this state of final knowledge, we would literally turn into God. The closest we can humanly approximate this state is in our self-consciousness, which is at least certain to ourselves, even if it is not absolutely certain. Secondarily, since this primary object of knowledge cannot be a mere passive thing, it should be an activity, that is, it is a process creating itself as its own object. This act of self-creation is then a part of all self-consciousness and it is apparently this power, which the power of poetic imagination should resemble.
This subjective side of Coleridge’s - or Schelling’s philosophy - is equally suspect as the objective side and for quite similar reasons. Why should we assume that the absolute ground of our self-consciousness resembles us and deserves the name of self-consciousness? How do we know that there is such an ultimate ground of knowledge and not just passing, contextually accepted foundations?
I will not decide the issue of the believability of Coleridgean metaphysics here. Instead, I shall end with his attempt to show how the empiricist school of philosophy can also be reconciled with this metaphysical picture. On a superficial level, the two positions appear to be contradictory - one bases knowledge on the divine self-knowledge, the other on immediate sensations. Yet, Coleridge solves this problem simply by stating that the empiricist describes correctly the generation of knowledge - we simply have no starting point for knowledge seeking but our sensations. Still, we can never said to have found an absolute foundation for even our sensations, before we have experienced ourselves the divine self-knowledge, which is ontologically at the basis of even sensations.
The external signs of poetry, such as rhyming and metre, are not completely external to the idea of poetry in Coleridge’s eyes. The purpose of them is to hold our attention throughout the whole poem and weave all the details described into a coherent whole. It is indeed this attention to wholes or totalities that is the distinguishing mark of poetry for Coleridge - a poem must form an organic system, in which all details, including such seemingly minute things as the tone of the words, must serve the grand purpose of the poem.
Coleridge connects at once this idea of poems as organic wholes to his notion of imagination. Unfortunately, Coleridge doesn’t actually explain what he means by imagination - an anonymous proofreader was of the opinion that Coleridge’s account of imagination was far above the understanding of an ordinary reader, so it was removed from the final published work. We do hear that imagination is different from fancy, which is a mere mechanical association of ideas. Instead, it appears to be closely connected with the basic forces responsible for the generation of human experience. Here Coleridge’s Schellingian tendencies appear most vividly, for Schelling too connected artistic imagination with the primal forces behind human experiences.
Coleridge paints himself as not just an imitator of Schelling. Instead, he just happened to have similar influences as Schelling did, which inevitably led both to similar conclusions. Coleridge mentions explicitly such names as Plato, Plotinus, Giordano Bruno and Jacob Boehme, all of whom were important also to Schelling - and all of whom had tendencies toward mysticism and pointed philosophy towards a search for something ineffable and beyond human experience. Kant was also important for Coleridge, as showing the limits of ordinary reasoning and as hinting about vistas beyond ordinary human experience. Fichte is also appreciated, as pointing out that truth behind everything lies in activity and not in mechanistic matter, but Coleridge disparages him for ignoring nature as an organic totality - all very reminiscent of Schelling.
It is then no wonder that Coleridge has in metaphysics a strikingly Schellingian attitude. We must look at things from both the viewpoint of the object or nature and the viewpoint of subject or intelligence. When we look at nature, Coleridge says, we inevitably come to laws, which are no mere matter, but intellectual things. As laws are supposed to reveal the deep structure of nature, we end up seeing that nature itself is basically intellectual. Of course, this conclusion presupposes that we accept laws as pre-existing patterns of nature’s movements and not just as our subjective generalisations from natural events.
Starting from the viewpoint of the subject, we have the immediate certainty of our own existence. We also appear to be certain of the existence of quite a number of things, which we assume to be completely independent of ourselves. Yet, as we have no gateway to things outside us, these seemingly external things appear to vanish into mere dreams. Coleridge’s wish is to uphold the every-day realism - these things we see are truly real. Paradoxically, his strategy is to hold that they are in a sense ideal. In other words, their existence is connected organically to my own existence, which means that I can be equally certain of their existence as I am of my own existence.
Coleridge’s justification of his position follows also Schellingian routes. He assumes that it is meaningful to speak about truth - something we might well concede to him, since otherwise we might as well stop caring about philosophy. Now, truth - or more likely, true thoughts - are not something self-sufficient, but dependent on the existence of things (if I know a table, the table must first exist). Then again, a series of truths, if it is to be completely reliable, must be based on something self-evident, which is certain to be true by itself. This self-evident truth must then also be based on something existent, which, Coleridge argues, must then be something, which doesn’t require the existence of anything else (notice how closely we are threading through very traditional theological notions).
What is this object of true knowledge? Firstly, it should be the source of all existence, because it shouldn’t be dependent on anything else. Secondly, it shouldn’t be a mere object or an ordinary thing, because such things would always require a further explanation - it would be something beyond ordinary experience. This means, primarily, that the object of ultimate knowledge must actually be also the subject of this ultimate knowledge. In other words, if we ever could approach this state of final knowledge, we would literally turn into God. The closest we can humanly approximate this state is in our self-consciousness, which is at least certain to ourselves, even if it is not absolutely certain. Secondarily, since this primary object of knowledge cannot be a mere passive thing, it should be an activity, that is, it is a process creating itself as its own object. This act of self-creation is then a part of all self-consciousness and it is apparently this power, which the power of poetic imagination should resemble.
This subjective side of Coleridge’s - or Schelling’s philosophy - is equally suspect as the objective side and for quite similar reasons. Why should we assume that the absolute ground of our self-consciousness resembles us and deserves the name of self-consciousness? How do we know that there is such an ultimate ground of knowledge and not just passing, contextually accepted foundations?
I will not decide the issue of the believability of Coleridgean metaphysics here. Instead, I shall end with his attempt to show how the empiricist school of philosophy can also be reconciled with this metaphysical picture. On a superficial level, the two positions appear to be contradictory - one bases knowledge on the divine self-knowledge, the other on immediate sensations. Yet, Coleridge solves this problem simply by stating that the empiricist describes correctly the generation of knowledge - we simply have no starting point for knowledge seeking but our sensations. Still, we can never said to have found an absolute foundation for even our sensations, before we have experienced ourselves the divine self-knowledge, which is ontologically at the basis of even sensations.
keskiviikko 26. heinäkuuta 2017
Arthur Schopenhauer: Of the fourfold root of the law of sufficient reason
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| 1788 - 1860 |
With Arthur Schopenhauer I faced an important decision on my blogs. Without a shadow of a doubt, Schopenhauer's philosophy belongs to post-Kantian period known as German idealism. Despite his vitriolic rhetorics against them, Schopenhauer has much more in common with German idealists than he cared to admit. World of experience as a mere phenomenon, will or activity as the true reality behind it, art as a pathway to understanding world of experience and partially even the ultimate reality – all of these primary foundations of Schopenhauer's philosophy are themes discussed by some German idealists. Even Schopenhauer's interest in Indian philosophy was nothing unusual for the age.
Despite all the similarities, I simply had to include Schopenhauer as the part of this blog, detailing the development of modern philosophy, because of one crucial element in his philosophy, namely, his pessimism. It is debatable how original even that sentiment was – although the public image of the classic German systems was one of progress, they still showed an inkling of the angst and suffering involved in the human condition. Still, pessimism as expressed by the figure of Schopenhauer was an important instigator for much German philosophy of the late 19th century and beyond, because it forcefully raised the question of the meaning of life to public discussion.
Schopenhauer's first serious philosophical work, Über die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde, contains already in nuce many of the important elements of his later work on world as both representation and will. Yet, it seemingly considers a very specific question: the famous proposition, supposedly invented by Leibniz, that all things must have a reason. Even in this work Schopenhauer shows his talent of ridiculing the ideas of his predecessors, often even for no reason. Schopenhauer's main task is to note that while the principle of sufficient reason is correct, it should also be divided into several subprinciples, because the principle as such is quite too abstract to help anyone. This supposed innovation is not that original, because even many pre-Kantian philosophers had criticised Leibniz and his supposed lackey, Christian Wolff, for not noticing that the principle of sufficient reason was actually just an abstraction out of many different principles. Remarkably, even Wolff himself had said that reasons came in many different forms – Schopenhauer himself knows this, but insinuates that Wolff had just managed to make a muddle in his attempt to classify different kinds of reasons.
Even if Schopenhauer was quite willing to make fun of Wolff and companions, he was also happy to just steal their terminology, whenever needed. Thus, Schopenhauer borrows from Wolff the notion of ratio essendi – reason for the existence of something – but changes the meaning of the term, because he is not satisfied with what Wolff meant by it. For Wolff, the actual existence of things is eventually based on God's free decision, while the possible existence of a thing – what something is or would be, if it existed – depends on its essence, which is supposedly a kind of kernel of thing's properties.
As we shall see, Schopenhauer doesn't believe that anything truly new would ever be generated, but he does appear to accept that things in the world around us do have a sort of abstract essence. Yet, unlike with Wolff, this essence is not a conglomeration of basic forces, but instead, the sum of all spatiotemporal properties of a thing. Here Schopenhauer shows his enthusiasm for Kant's idea of space and time as forms of sensation. Primary one of these two appears to be time, where a series of temporal points determines the next one in a very simple manner: if we have four temporal points, they will be followed by a fifth. Schopenhauer is here following the supposedly Kantian idea that arithmetic is somehow determined by time. Just like with time, spatial elements determine one another. The difference is, firstly, that the three-dimensionality of space allows more complex relations, and secondly, that these determining relations are often reciprocal – any two angles of a triangle determine the third angle.
One might ask why Schopenhauer didn't distinguish the temporal and spatial grounding relations, which are clearly dissimilar. His classification seems even more arbitrary, when we look at the next species of grounding relation. When we do not regard merely space or time, but their filled combination – world of experience – we find, Schopenhauer insists, that all spatio-temporal events require a cause that temporally precedes them. This sort of ground or reason Schopenhauer calls, again following Wolff, ratio fiendi, that is, a reason for a change. Note that it is only a reason for change Schopenhauer is here talking about, and since every change presupposes something that remains same, he is confident to draw the conclusion that we can assume the existence of something (matter) that remains same throughout all changes. Since all changes require a previous cause, the series of causes goes on to infinite past, Schopenhauer insists. One might wonder how Schopenhauer argues for these statements, but in a sense, he does not – these truths are just self-evidently true, because they characterise the world we experience, which is just a world as we experience it and not as it is in itself.
Although Schopenhauer then seems to take all kinds of causes as belonging to one class, he does distinguish causes in the living world as different from all the rest of the causes. While a mere cause determines necessarily what its effect will be, a cause acting on, say, a plant, will be a mere stimulus for the plant's own life processes. Even more distinct are such causes in the animal world, which do not merely start a reflex, but make the animal motivated to act in some manner. Peculiarly, while Schopenhauer does not want to make stimuli into a distinct group of grounds or reasons, he does make motives into an independent class. His justification is that we humans experience motives in a different manner from other causes – when we want or desire something, we are conscious of ourselves as an active agent wanting or desiring something. One might ask Schopenhauer if we do not also have a peculiar experience of stimuli causing reflexes. For instance, when the doctor hits our knee, we feel our leg moving and this feeling clearly differs from us seeing a rock fall – yet, we also feel the movement as not being instigated by ourselves or as involuntary.
Whatever the potential faults in Schopenhauer's classification are, we have dealt now with three of his four types of sufficient reason. While these three types concern three different kinds of objects – abstract spatio-temporal figures, concrete physical objects and ourselves as acting agents – the fourth type is more about representations of objects. This is in Schopenhauer's eyes the peculiarly human type of reason, and indeed, concerns our ability of reasoning. To put it shortly, this type is about the question what we can hold as true. The short answer is, of course, that we should have a reason for this. These reasons could be other truths, but here an infinite regress is not possible, Schopenhauer says. Instead, there must be a link to objects of our experiences or at least to the general formal properties characteristing the whole experience.
torstai 8. tammikuuta 2015
Samuel Johnson: Elementa philosophica: containing chiefly, Noetica, or things relating to the mind or understanding: and Ethica, or things relating to the moral behavior (1752)
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| Samuel Johnson (1696 -1772) |
What is more interesting is Johnson's connection with bishop Berkeley. It should be best to point out first that Samuel Johnson I am speaking of is not the Samuel Johnson who wrote the first dictionary of English and famously argued against Berkeley by kicking a stone – that man lived in London. This Johnson was in fact quite appreciative of Berkeley's philosophy and had even met the reverend, when Berkeley was visiting Rhode Island.
While Berkeley's most famous philosophical works are quite focused on few central topics – e.g. that existence can be defined through capacities of being perceived and perceiving, that matter as neither perceptible nor perceiving does not exist and God causing our perceptions directly – in Johnson's book these topics are barely mentioned. The first part, Noetics, focuses on questions that in continental Europe were addressed in books on logic: how does human mind work and how it is to be properly educated and used. Berkeley's theses work as a sort of ontological underpinning of this methodological framework – a novel attempt, at least.
Johnson's take on Berkeley's philosophy seems rather peculiar. He appears to think that the essential message of esse est percipi is that everything we see is as it is – there is no reality behind perceptions, which can then be directly identified with things themselves. So, we do know that there are horses, because we definitely see them running about. This is, of course, what Berkeley himself professed – he thought he was upholding the common sense against sceptical attacks inherent in Locke's philosophy.
More peculiar is that Johnson at once assumes many ontological notions Berkeley had suggested were quite unnecessary and meant really nothing. Thus, while Berkeley thought there was no reason to speak of any substance or substrate behind perceived properties, Johnson notes there is a perfectly valid sense of substance – certain combinations of simple perceptions just are substances. Furthermore, Johnson also find a use for the concept of matter, which Berkeley had discarded as leading to skepticism – material things just are those that are defined by being perceived. All of this is a symptom of Johnson taking universalisation and abstraction far more seriously – an understandable view in a study leading all the way to scientific generalities.
After the Berkeleyan underpinnings Johnson's Noetics seems a rather traditional work – once he gets to the level of concepts, he can just follow in the footsteps of traditional syllogistics. He also presents a rather traditional metaphysical account of world – being perceived (being acted upon) and perceiving (acting) define two kinds of beings, material things and spirits. Clearly spirits as the more active component are somehow more robust and more essential. Behind all the material things and spirits lies the perfect spirit or God.
Johnson's Ethics feels even more traditional. The aim of the second part is to secure human happiness, which is one purpose of God and which results not through excessive pleasure, but through moderation. Indeed, Johnson can point out to a result from Noetics that spirits are somehow more important than material things, which are nothing more than mere perceptions – one cannot find true happiness with mere passive perceptions, but it must be found in spiritual matters.
So much for Samuel Johnson, I'll now return to Condillac.
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