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MINISTRY OF PUBLIC HEALTH OF THE REPUBLIC OF KAZAKHSTAN

KARAGANDA STATE MEDICAL UNIVERSITY

N.F. Loman, I.A. Chesnokova

Lecture on Philosophy

(second part)

Educational manual

Karaganda 2011 УДК 1 ББК 87.3 Л 70 REVIEWERS:

A.Sch. Mirzabekova – professor on the department of Political science, d.ph.s., “Bolashak” university

O.K. Nikitina – head of department of history of Kazakhstan and social political disciplines, KSMU

S.A. Nikiforova – senior teacher on the department of history of Kazakhstan and social political disciplines, KSMU

Л 70 Loman N.F. Chesnokova I.A. Lecture on philosophy (second part). – Educational manual. –Karaganda. -2011. –160p.

ББК 87.3

Educational manual “Lecture on Philosophy” based on the authentic texts, where explicate views of the famous philosophers on the fundamental philosophical issues such as being, human being, society, government, history, dialectics, education, and epistemological questions. It also includes sections on Russian philosophy and Philosophy of XX century. Educational manual has glossary as a valuable source of philosophical terminology for better understanding, and test for self-control. This is the final part of educational manual which helps students, studying in English in KSMU, to acquire knowledge in philosophical field, develop ability and skills to reason and critical think. This manual is recommended to use on practical classes and for preparation an examination on Philosophy.

Discussed and approved on the meeting of the Methodological council of KSMU Protocol № 4 from 08.12.2010 Confirmed and recommended to publish by Scientific council of KSMU Protocol № 5 from 30.12.2010

Ó N.F. Loman, I.A.Chesnokova, 2011

2 Content

Introduction 5

1. Russian Philosophy 6 2. Western philosophy in XX century 21 3. Consciousness: philosophical and medical perspectives 50 4. Philosophy of being 55 5. Philosophic anthropology 61 6. Social philosophy 64 7. Philosophy of culture 70 8. Philosophy of love 77 9. Philosophy of religion 85 10. Philosophy of history 93 11. Philosophy of politics 100 12. Philosophy of education 113 13. Problems of dialectic theory 118 14. Epistemology 125 15. Philosophy of global problem 132 16. Fundamental questions of philosophy 134 Reference 141

Glossary 142

Test 155

3 ABBREVIATIONS

AD –anno Domini, years after the birth of Christ

b. -born

BC –before Christ

c. –century

cf. –compare with

DNA –deoxyribonucleic acid

e.g. –example

etc. –etcetera

i.e. –id est (that is)

no. –number

p. –page

Tim. –Timothy

USSR – Union of Soviet Socialist republic

viz. –videlicet

vol. -volume

4 INTRODUCTION

Human ideas have always focused on issues of our world, its essence and phenomenon; human being and its environment; knowledge and education; social justice and political concerns. In this educational manual you hear from the west experts who analyze philosophical views of thinkers interested in problem of being and humankind; in searching the best government and social justice; interested in understanding of consciousness, love; examined ability of mind to know this world; coexistence of different civilizations and world threat today. For the ending the section on history of Philosophy it also includes theme on Russian philosophy where reader can know philosophical views of the greatest Russian thinkers as Dostoevskyi, Tolstoi, Soloviev and etc. Pragmatism, the analytic tradition, and the phenomenological tradition, structuralism and poststructuralism is the last and essential part of this section to know the philosophical issues of last century.

The foundation of this educational manual is the authentic text of American authors like Donald Palmer, James Mannion, Robert Audi and also philosopher of former Soviet Union like Spirkin. With help of their books English speaking students have good opportunity to know philosophical argument on different areas and learn how build it for their needs. This educational manual provides knowledge in philosophical field; develop ability and skills to reason and critical think.

Compiling of this educational manual was supported in part by the Junior Faculty Development Program, which is funded by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) of the United States Department of State, under authority of the Fulbright –Hays Act of 1961 as amended and administered by American Councils for International Education: ACTR/ACCELS. The opinions expressed herein are the author’s own and do not necessarily express the view of either ECA or American Councils.

Educational manual meet the requirements of the high school and can be recommended to use on practical classes and for preparation an examination on Philosophy.

5 1. RUSSIAN PHILOSOPHY

Russian thought is best approached without fixed preconceptions about the nature and proper boundaries of philosophy. Conditions of extreme political oppression and economic backwardness are not conducive to the flowering of philosophy as a purely theoretical discipline; academic philosophy was hence a latecomer on the Russian scene, and those (such as the Neo-Kantians of the end of the nineteenth century) who devoted themselves to questions of ontology and epistemology were widely condemned for their failure to address the country’s pressing social problems. Since Peter the Great’s project of Westernization, Russian philosophy has been primarily the creation of writers and critics who derived their ideals and values from European sources and focused on ethics, social theory and the philosophy of history, in the belief that (as Marx put it in his ‘Thesis on Feuerbach’) philosophers had hitherto merely interpreted the world: the task was now to change it. This passionate social commitment generated much doctrinaire fanaticism, but it also inspired the iconoclastic tendency made philosophically respectable by Nietzsche: the revaluation of values from an ironic outsider’s perspective. The principal contribution of Russian thinkers to world culture has so far consisted not in systems, but in experiments in the theory and practice of human emancipation. Some of these led to the Russian Revolution, while others furnished remarkably accurate predictions of the nature of utopia in power. Like Dostoevskii’s character Shigalëv who, starting from the ideal of absolute freedom, arrived by a strict logical progression at the necessity of absolute despotism, Russian philosophers have specialized in thinking through (and sometimes acting out) the practical implications of the most seductive visions of liberty that Europe has produced over the last 200 hundred years. What Berdiaev called the ‘Russian Idea’ – the eschatological quest that is the most distinctive feature of Russian philosophy – can be explained in terms of Russian history. The Mongol yoke from the twelfth to the fourteenth century cut Russia off from Byzantium (from which it had received Christianity) and from Europe: it had no part in the ferment of the Renaissance. Its rise as a unified state under the Moscow Tsardom followed closely on the fall of the Orthodox Byzantine Empire, and the emerging sense of Russian national identity incorporated a messianic element in the form of the monk Philotheus’ theory of Moscow as the ‘Third Rome’, successor to Rome and Constantinople as guardian of Christ’s truth in its purity (Medieval philosophy). ‘There will not be a fourth’, ran the prophecy: the Russian Empire would last until the end of the world. Russian thought remained dominated by the Greek patristic tradition until the eighteenth century, when the Kievan thinker Skovoroda (sometimes described as Russia’s first philosopher) developed a religious vision based on a synthesis of ancient and patristic thought. He had no following; by the mid- century Russia’s intellectual centre was St Petersburg, where Catherine the Great, building on the achievements of her predecessor Peter, sought to promote a Western secular culture among the educated elite with the aid of French

6 Enlightenment ideas. But representatives of the ‘Russian Enlightenment’ were severely punished when they dared to cite the philosophes’ concepts of rationality and justice in criticism of the political status quo. The persecution of advanced ideas (which served to strengthen the nascent intelligentsia’s self- image as the cultural and moral leaders of their society) reached its height under Nicolas I (1825–55), when philosophy departments were closed in the universities, and thought went underground. Western ideas were the subject of intense debate in small informal circles of students, writers and critics, the most famous of which in Moscow and St Petersburg furnished the philosophical education of such intellectual leaders as the future socialists Herzen and Bakunin, the novelist and liberal Ivan Turgenev, the literary critic Belinskii (from whose ‘social criticism’ Soviet Socialist Realism claimed descent), and the future Slavophile religious philosophers Kireevskii and Khomiakov (Slavophilism). As a critic has noted: ‘In the West there is theology and there is philosophy; Russian thought, however, is a third concept’; one which (in the tsarist intellectual underground as in its Soviet successor) embraced novelists, poets, critics, religious and political thinkers – all bound together by their commitment to the goals of freedom and justice. In the 1830s these beleaguered individuals encountered German Idealism: an event of decisive significance for the future development of Russian thought. The teleological structures of idealist thought provided Russian intellectuals with a redemptive interpretation of their conflicts and struggles as a necessary stage in the dialectical movement of history towards a transcendent state of harmony. Idealism (notably in its Hegelian form left its mark on the vocabulary of subsequent Russian philosophy, but its principal legacy was the belief, shared by the vast majority of Russian thinkers, that an ‘integral worldview’, a coherent and unified vision of the historical process and its goal, was the essential framework both for personal moral development and social theorizing. The question of history’s goal became a matter for intense debate among the intelligentsia with the publication in 1836 of Chaadaev’s ‘Philosophical Letter’, which posed Russia’s relationship to the West as a central philosophical problem, maintaining that Russia’s historical separation from the culture of Western Christianity precluded its participation in the movement of history towards the establishment of a universal Christian society. Les letter philosophiques outline a religious philosophy of history, according to which Christianity is the sourse of universal historical development and the the western church is embodiment of humanity unity. Chadaev (1794 - 1856) belived that divine reason acts throught the church, that the church was guiding humanity to the Kingdom of god, and that the Kingdom of God had already been partly established in the West. Unfortunatly, Russia had derived its Christianity from «misarable, despite Byzantium»; its «religious separatism» had thus closed the country off from universal historical development. «Isoleted in the world,» Chaadaev wrote in his first letter, «we [Russians] had given nothing to the worl, we have tought nothing to the world; we have not added a single idea to the

7 mass of the human ideas; we have contributed nothing to the progree of the human spirit. And we have have disfigured everything we have touched of that progress.» For this views the Russian government declared Chaadaev insane. His response was Apology of a Madman (1837), in which he claim Chaadaev’s version of the march of progress was much indebted to French Catholic conservatism, while the nationalist riposte to his ideas drew heavily on the Romantics’ critique of the Age of Reason and Schelling’s organic conception of nationhood. Chadaev's ideas spurred the formation of the two grpoups of thinkers who whould soon view themselves as Slavophiles and Westernizers. The main Slavophile thinkers were Ivan Kireevskii, Aleksei Khomiakov, Konstantin Aksakov and etc. The Slavophiles held that Western culture was in a state of terminal moral and social decline, suffering from an excess of rationalism, which had led to social atomization and the fragmentation of the individual psyche. These divisions could be healed only by religious faith in its purest form, Russian Orthodoxy, whose spirit of organic ‘togetherness’, uncontaminated by Western rationalism, they presented as a model for Russian society and a beacon for mankind. They thereby laid the foundations of a distinctively Russian tradition of cultural and religious messianism which includes Dostoevskii’s political writings, the Pan-Slavist and Eurasian movements, and the apocalyptic vision of Berdiaev, whose philosophy was highly popular among the Soviet underground. As a group, they retained Chaadaev's not recognize that these righs must be firmly guaranteed by law. Aksakov declared: «Guarantees are unnecessary. They are an evil!» With his appoach, albeit an extreme one, «juridical standards are completely repudiated,» Horujy 'external truth,' is sharpened to the point of legal nihilism.» The examples of that Russian humanism was not necessarily liberal in its applications. Libiralism requirew not only a humanist focus on the person and human dignity, but also recognition of the value of law. By this measure and others, neither the Slavaphiles nor Herzen were liberals. Khomiakov called for a return to traditional Orthodoxy. As Robert Bird mentions in the Introduction to On Spiritual Unity, “The question of Russia and Europe became a transcription of the question of Orthodoxy and Western Christianity.” Khomiakov compares Western European Christianity as “the grain of sand [that] draws no new life from the heap into which it is cast by chance,” stating that “the brick laids in the wall in no way changes or improves as a result of the place allotted it by the bricklayer’s bevel.” Khomiakov insists on the doctrine of sobornost, or “organic togetherness.” Sobornost, as explained by Riasanovsky, is an integration of love, freedom, and truth which was the very fundamental nature of Orthodoxy. Furthering the separation between Slavophiles and Westernizers, Khomiakov states that “the Slav cannot be fully a Slav without Orthodoxy.” Satisfying a need for a more complete ideology beyond religion, Kireevsky expounded on this religious foundation by embracing Russian culture and general society. He states that “literature, music or foreign affairs ... as it were, [are] a fundamental part of our very being, insofar as it affects every

8 circumstance and every moment of our lives.” Kireevsky focuses on the cultural aspect of Slavophilism. In a letter to Count Komarovsky entitled “On the Nature of European Culture and on Its Relationship to Russian Culture,” he identifies a general sentiment that Russia is the living embodiment of the universal ideal of unity. This is due to the purity of its Orthodox culture, blaming the West’s deteriorating culture on the character of Western civilization, values, and society. Symmetrically, Russia’s cultural superiority is directly attributed to the character of the Russian people. The major ideas of Slavophilism, as penned by Khomiakov and Kireevsky, conclude that due to Russia’s pure Orthodox values and traditions, Russian life is superior to that of the West. The very character of the Western Europeans is despicable and contains a vile artificiality. Western Christianity does not incorporate the loving and inclusive traditions as the Orthodox Church and the true nation-loving Slav cannot adopt Catholicism and Western European Christianity without betraying his own culture and people. These beliefs were universal amongst Slavophiles. The Russian Westernizers were seen as isolating themselves from everything that was distinctively Russian. As Slavophilism evolved, the answer to Russia’s future depended in a return to the “native principles, in overcoming the Western disease.” Once cured, the mission of the Slavophiles would transcend into a purely evangelical goal of delivering Russian culture to the deteriorating West. Though many intellectuals supported the Westernization of Russia since the reign of Peter the Great, the term “Westernizer” had not been coined until the Slavophiles wanted to shed a poor light on the individuals, portraying them as being anti-Russian. In the 1840s, the cohesive group of Westernizers appeared as a loose union of varying Western ideals that banded together in their opposition to Slavophilism. Among the Westernizers were individuals such as Vissarion Belinsky (1811-1848) and Alexander Herzen (1812-1870). Due to such varying ideologies that fell within the Westernism group, there was not a specific identifiable theme or mission. Instead, each individual had his own beliefs and theories and just happened to be lumped together since each did not adopt the Slavophile ideology. In addition, Riasanovsky indicates that the Westernizers changed positions quickly. Some trends in the Westernizers’ philosophies did appear. Among these, was a general disregard for religious overtones and most were agnostic and even atheistic. Most importantly, the Westernizers believed that Russia was not unique to the world and that, in order to prosper, the nation must embrace the historically Western path, which served as the role model to modernization. However, Belinsky warns that Russia should not merely imitate what the European countries have done. “Likewise, we shall not forget our own worth. We shall know how to take pride in our nationality... but we shall know how to be proud without vainglory which blinds one to one’s own defects...” Herzen

9 (1812 - 1870) echoes this need for Western influence in a successful and flourishing Russia. Secular and Westernist thinkers tended to be scarcely less messianic in their response to Chaadaev’s pessimism. The first philosophers of Russian liberalism interpreted their country’s past and future development in the light of Hegel’s doctrine of the necessary movement of all human societies towards the incarnation of Reason in the modern constitutional state, while the Russian radical tradition was shaped successively by the eschatological visions of the French utopian socialists, the Young Hegelians and Karl Marx. Herzen defined the distinctive characteristic of Russian radical thought as the ‘implacable spirit of negation’ with which, unrestrained by the European’s deference to the past, it applied itself to the task of freeing mankind from the transcendent authorities invented by religion and philosophy; and the radical populist tradition that he founded argued that the ‘privilege of backwardness’, by permitting Russia to learn both from the achievements and the mistakes of the West, had placed it in the vanguard of mankind’s movement towards liberty. Russian literature also played an essencial role in preserving and deeping the Russian humanist tradition in the second half of the 19 centure. From the perspective of the future develoment of Russian philosophy, Dostoevskii was the most important figure. Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) never completely committed himself to a specific ideological set. Already at the age of seventeen, he had commited himself to solving what he called «the mystery of the man», and he devoted his life's work to the task. For him the mystery was not only that human being combine in themselves both human and divine elements, but that the realization of the divine depends on the humen freedom. The human realization of the divine involeves tortuous inner struggle, since the human elementes is inclined toward the physical world while called towards the spiritual. For Dostoevskii's Grand Inquisitor, the burden of this struggle is so great that to impose it on human beings is inhumane. For Dostoevskii, not to impose it is inhumane, since without freedom (especially freedom of conscience) humanity cannot realize its highest, divine potential. Dostoevskii thought freedom the ground of the genuine faith. He belived that faith must come from within each person, on «the evidence of things not seen» (Hebrews I I:I), not externally through the Grand Inquisitor's instruments of «miracle, mystery, and authority». But freedom entails the possibility (and abundant historical reality) of moral evil, the ultimate justifiction of which is beyond hman understanding. Dostoevskii's anguish over the problem of evil led to his messianic vision of a universal Christian brotherhood united by Russia, the one «God -bearing» nation. In The Idiot, the main character Prince Myshkin is arriving to St. Petersburg from a Swiss sanitarium where he has been seeking treatment for an illness similar to epilepsy. The title is derived from the portrayal of Myshkin as an awkward idiot. He is unable to articulate himself, somewhat uneducated, and appears simple and innocent. Despite his idiotic tendancies, Myshkin is an

10 honest, albeit overly generous, young man whose goodness consistently brings him trouble. Through a series of troubling events, it is concluded that the only place fit for Myshkin is the sanitarium from which he recently left. Dostoyevsky paints a portrait of a world filled with materialism, power hungry individuals, and overall corruption. His main character Myshkin represents all that is good and innocent and proceeds to prove that such righteousness cannot survive in this seemingly apocalyptic world. This portrayal of a society obsessed with money, power, and material is an accurate painting of what many Slavophiles considered to be Western Europe. This is what Kireevsky was referring to in “On the Nature of European Culture.” “There (in the West) one finds the precariousness of individual autonomy, here the strength of family and social ties. There we see ostentatious luxury and artificial life, here the simplicity of vital needs and the courage of moral fortitude.” The argument could be held that Myshkin himself is Russia, as the symbol of goodness cannot fit in the Western world of “ostentatious luxury and artificial life.” Myshkin repeatedly exhibits the sobornost philosophy. “Myshkin is the first of Dostoyevsky’s characters fully to understand the notion that each is responsible for all; for this reason he is so ready to say he is to blame, and to forgive all who wrong him...” This idea of a innate unity of intuitiveness for one’s fellow brother is the driving force behind sobornost and Slavophilism. Myshkin continues to show love and compassion to fellow characters, seeking for a harmonious understanding and a resolution to the chaos that is consistently created. Utopianism aside (and sometimes not), the genius with which Dostoevskii explored the inscrutable «mystery of man» had deep impact on Russian philosophy of the Silver Age, especially through his close friend Vladimir Solov'ev, but also through Sergei Bulgakov, Nikolai Berdiaev, and Dmitrii Merezhkovskii. Lev Tolstoi also contributed powerfully to Russian anti-positivism. His major novels, War and Peace, Anna Karenina and Resurrection, all valued the gloal of individual inner self –perfection over the objective of the political reform. In his philosophical tract, On Life (1888), Tolstoi made the case that every human being should cultivate «rational consciousness,» a principle of personal economy ordering the passions or «appetites». In the same track, he attacked positivists under the lable of modern –day «Scribes», for ruling out any questions about life beyond thouse pertaining to the «animal existence» of human being. In his defense of the religious anarchism, The Kingdome of God is Within You (1893), Tolstoi elaborated a three –stage theory of history asserting that human being have moved from an initial period of «divine consciousness» characterized by faith in «the source of eternal, undying life -God.» This theory of history was a deliberate repudiation of August Comte's positivism scheme, which imagined historical progress as a move away from «primitive» religious and metaphysical consciousness.

11 Russian religious philosophers tended to see themselves as prophets, pointing the way to the regeneration of human societies through the spiritual transformation of individuals. Vladimir Solov'ev (1853-1900) would be Russian's religious philosopher. Randall Poole focuses on the central concept of Solov'ev philosophy. Godmanhood (bogochelovechestvo), also tranlated as «divine humanity» or the «humanity of God». Godmanhood refers to humanity's divine potential and vocation, the ideal of our divine self –realization in and union with God. Human beings, created in the image of God, are called to realize the divine likeness through positively working for the Kingdom of God, for universal transformation in the «unity of all» (vseedinstvo) in which all will be one in God. Since Godmanhood depends on autonomous human activity and self- development, it is, as Nikolai Berdiaev remarked, humanistic in its very conception. In 1891, Solov'ev delivered a lecture, «On the Reason for the Collapse of the Medieval Worldview». He condemned as «monstrous» the medieval doctrine that the only path to salvation is faith in church dogma, and as «cheap» the idea of «salvation through dead faith and works of piety –works and and not works.» True salvation requires, rather, the hard work of self –and social transformation, of assimilating to God's likeness and achieving deification. He believed that his country’s mission was to bring into being the Kingdom of God on Earth in the form of a liberal theocracy, which would integrate knowledge and social practice and unite the human race under the spiritual rule of the Pope and the secular rule of the Russian tsar. His metaphysics of ‘All-Unity’ was a dominant force in the revival of religious and idealist philosophy in Russia in the early twentieth century, inspiring an entire generation of thinkers who sought to reinterpret Christian dogma in ways that emphasized the links of spiritual culture and religious faith with institutional and social reform, and progress in all other aspects of human endeavour. Not the least fateful development of the «positive», collectivist direction of freedom and perfectibility in Russian humanism was Russian Marxism. Among them were leading Russian émigré philosophers after 1917, such as Semën Frank, Bulgakov (who sought to create a new culture in which Orthodox Christianity would infuse every area of Russian life), Berdiaev (who was strongly influenced by the messianic motifs in Solov’ëv), and Hessen, who offered a Neo-Kantian and Westernist interpretation of the notion of ‘All-Unity’. A number of émigré philosophers (notably Il'in and Vysheslavesev) interpreted Bolshevism as the expression of a spiritual crisis in modern industrialized cultures. Many blamed the Russian Revolution on infection from a culturally bankrupt West which (echoing the Slavophiles, Dostoevskii and Leont'ev) they presented as corrupted by rationalism, positivism, atheism and self-centred individualism (although few have gone as far as the fiercely polemical Losev who, up until his death in the Soviet Union in 1988, maintained that electric light expressed the spiritual emptiness of ‘Americanism and machine- production’). Most maintained a historiosophical optimism throughout the

12 catastrophes of the first half of the twentieth century, which Berdiaev saw as a precondition for messianic regeneration, while Hessen believed that religious and cultural values would emerge triumphant from the carnage in a dialectical Aufhebung. Nikolai Berdyaev (1874-1948), a religious philosopher. Berdyaev said the messianism of two European nations—Russia and Germany—had an impact on their neighbors. The two, however, were not similar. German messianism was pagan in character, marked by a glorification of race, nature, and the fighting spirit, completely contradicting the spiritual message of Judaism and Christianity. Russian messianism, by contrast, was deeply rooted in Jewish and Christian thought. “The Russian messianic conception,” Berdyaev said, “always exalted Russia as a country that would help to solve the problems of humanity and would accept a place in the service of humanity.” Berdyaev regarded communism as the total negation of morality, not as an economic system. He believed in the reality and significance of spirit. In his first important book Meaning of the Creative Act, he begins by asserting, 'The human spirit is in prison. Prison is what I call this world, the given world of necessity.' Thus early on he establishes his dualistic type of thinking, an aspect of his thought that has precluded his acceptance by academic philosophers devoted to the science of cognition. However, Berdyaev's dualism is really not between spirit and matter, it is between good and evil, which distances him still further from modern philosophy. Matter for him is degraded spirit, putting it in the category of evil. Spirit is always regarded by him as primary being that must be valued, developed and allowed full range of its creative possibilities. The primacy of spirit leads naturally to other facets of his philosophy. The subjective world is what Berdyaev is concerned with, the object world being a degraded form of spirit. He states his position clearly in Solitude and Society (the literal translation of the Russian title is Myself and the Object World). Here he states, 'It is important to grasp first of all, that the objective world is a degraded and spellbound world — a world of phenomena rather than one of existences. Object processes abstract and disrupt existence. They substitute society for community, general principles for communion and the empire of Caesar for the Kingdom of God.' Berdyaev's important concept of 'freedom' is closely bound to his spiritual orientation. Freedom is the sine qua non for creative spiritual energy to express itself. He asserts in The Realm of Spirit and the Realm of Caesar, 'Freedom presupposes the existence of a spiritual element, not determined by either nature or society. Freedom is the spiritual element in man. If a man is a being completely determined by nature and society, there can be no freedom.' In the first chapter of The Meaning of the Creative Act can be found his challenge to the modern, scientific worldview, «The scientific — not science — is bondage of the spirit to the lower spheres of being, the constant and ubiquitous

13 consciousness of the power of necessity, of dependence on things of this world.» He explains the scientific causality principle as 'man's reaction for self- preservation; man, lost in the dark forest of the world's life.» From this nucleus of metaphysical concepts, Berdyaev developed a remarkable set of writings on topics such as time, history, personality, Russia, nationalism, communism, the cosmos and God. He considered himself to be a Christian, an identity that he did not assume until well into adulthood. However, his Christianity was of a sort that did not fit any of the established churches. He said he preferred the Russian Orthodox Church to the other major Christian denominations because he felt there was more latitude there for his own views on the need for freedom and creativity in religious life. Still, he was usually regarded with suspicion by the Orthodox clerical establishment, especially during its period of communist domination. Materialism Destroys the Eternal Spirit. Civilization is by its nature "bourgeois" in the deepest spiritual sense of the word. "Bourgeois" is synonymous precisely with the civilized kingdom of this world and the civilized will to organized power and enjoyment of life. The spirit of civilization is that of the middle classes, it is attached and clings to corrupt and transitory things, and it fears eternity. To be a bourgeois is therefore to be a slave of matter and an enemy of eternity. The perfected European and American civilizations gave rise to the industrial-capitalist system, which represents not only a mighty economic development but the spiritual phenomenon of the annihilation of spirituality. The Technological Society. The triumphant advent of the machine opened a new era in which life loses its organic character and natural rhythm; man is separated from nature by an artificial environment of machines, by the very instruments of his intended domination of nature. As a reaction against his mediaeval ascetic ideal, man puts aside both resignation and contemplation, and attempts to dominate nature, organize life and increase its productive forces. This, however, does not help to bring him into closer communion with the inner life and soul of nature. On the contrary, by mastering it technically and organizing its forces man becomes further removed from it. Organization proves to be the death of the organism. Life becomes increasingly a matter of technique. The machine sets its stamp upon the human spirit and all its manifestations. Thus civilization has neither a natural nor a spiritual, but a mechanical foundation. It represents par excellence the triumph of technique over both the spirit and organism. The machine and technique are the product of the mental development and discoveries of culture; but they sap its organic foundations and kill its spirit. Culture, having lost its soul, becomes civilization. Spiritual matters are discounted; quantity displaces quality. The assertion of the will to "life," power, organization and earthly happiness, brings about mankind's spiritual decline; for the higher spiritual life is based upon asceticism and resignation. Such are the tragedy and fate of historical destinies. Civilization as opposed to culture, which is given up to the contemplation of eternity, tends to be futurist. Machinery and technique are chiefly responsible

14 for the speeding up of life and its exclusive aspiration towards the future. Organic life is slower, less impetuous, and more concerned with essentials, while civilized life is superficial and accidental; for it puts the means and instruments of life before the ends whose significance is lost. The consciousness of civilized men is concentrated exclusively upon the means and technique of life considered as the only reality, while its aims are regarded as illusory. Technique, organization and the productive processes are a reality while spiritual culture is unreal, a mere instrument of technique. The relation between end and means is reversed and perverted. This loss of any sense of purpose is the death of a culture. The only real way to culture lies through religious transformation. He believed that this primal drama and mystery of Christianity consist in the genesis of God in man and of man in God. This mystery, is, indeed, implicit in the foundations of Christianity. Historical destiny reveals more particularly the genesis of God in man. This constitutes the central fact of human and world destiny. But there exists a no less profound mystery, that of the genesis of man in God, accomplished in the inmost depths of the divine life. For if there is such a thing as a human longing for God and a response to it, then there also must be a divine longing for man the genesis of God in man; a longing for the love and the freely-loving and, in response to it, the genesis of man in God. A divine movement which brings about the genesis of God implies the reciprocal movement of man towards God, by which he is generated and revealed. This constitutes the primal mystery both of the spirit and of being, and at the same time of Christianity, which in its central fact, in the Person of Christ, the Son of God, unites two mysteries. In the Image of Christ is brought about the genesis of God in man and of man in God, and the perfection of both is manifest. Thus, for the first time, in response to God's movement and longing, a perfect man is revealed to Him. This mysterious process occurs in the interior depths of the divine reality itself; it is a sort of divine history which is reflected in the whole of the outer history of mankind. History is, indeed, not only the revelation of God, but also the reciprocal revelation of man in God. The whole complexity of the historical process can be explained by the inner interdependence of these two revelations. For history is not only the plan of the Divine revelation, it is also the reciprocal revelation of man himself; and that makes history such a terrible and complex tragedy. History would not be tragic if it were only the revelation of God and its gradual apprehension. Its drama and tragedy are not only determined in the divine life itself, but also by the fact that they are based upon the mystery of freedom, which is not only a divine, but also a human revelation--that longed for by God in the depths of the divine life. The origin of the world springs from the freedom willed by God in the beginning. Without His will or longing for freedom no world process would be possible. In its place there would be a static and pre-eminently perfect Kingdom of God as an essential and predetermined harmony. The world process, on the other hand, implies a terrible tragedy, and history a succession of

15 calamitous events in the centre of which stands the Crucifixion, the Cross on which the Son of God Himself was crucified, because God had desired freedom and because the primal drama and mystery of the world are those of the relations between God and His other self, which He loves and by which He desires to be loved. And only freedom endows this love with any significance. This freedom, which is absolutely irrational and inapprehensible to reason, offers a solution of the tragedy of world history. It fulfills not only God's revelation in man, but also man's in God. The Russian Cosmism is in fact a specific spiritual, philosophic-scientific orientation, demonstrating encyclopedic and self-relying, synthetic expression of Russian genius, not only in the domain of thinking and imagination but also in the domain of techniques and construction etc. The ideas about a wholly new man and about wholly new society, a totally new world, about possible moving to other planets, found there a fertile ground, there emerged maximalists who marked the development of Russia and, in a way, that of the world all through until the present time. Nikolai Fedorov (1828-1903), philosopher, theologian, scientist, ascetic, his works: Filosofiya Obshchago Dela: Stat’i; Sobranie Sochineniy, The Question of Brotherhood or Kinship, of the Reasons for the Unbrotherly; What Was Man Created For? The Philosophy of the Common Task: Selected Works. Due to his Christian perspective, Fedorov found the widespread lack of love among people appalling. He divided these non-loving relations into two kinds. One is alienation among people: “non-kindred relations of people among themselves.” The other is isolation of the living from the dead: “nature’s non- kindred relation to men.” “[O]ne should live not for oneself nor for others but with all and for all” (Filosofiya Obshchago Dela vol. I, 118, n. 5, as quoted in Zakydalsky, 55). Fedorov is referring to all people of all time (past, present, future). He is speaking of a project to unite humankind, the colonization (“spiritualization”) of the universe, the quest for the Kingdom of God, the creation of cosmos from chaos, the death of death, even resurrection of the dead. Human life, emphasized Fedorov, dies for two reasons. First is internal: due to the material organization of a human, his functionality is incapable of infinite self-renewal. To overcome this, psychophysiological regulation of human organisms is needed. The second reason is the spontaneous nature of the external environment, its destructive character that must be overcome with regulation of nature. Regulation of nature, “introducing will and reason into nature” includes, according to Fedorov, prevention of natural disasters, control of Earth's climate, fight against viruses and epidemics, mastery of solar power, space exploration and unlimited creative work there. Achieving immortality and revival of all people who ever lived are two inseparable goals, according to Fedorov. Immortality is impossible, both ethically and physically, without revival. We can’t concede that our ancestors, who gave us life and culture, are left to die, that our relatives and friends die. Achieving immortality for living individuals and future generations is only a 16 partial victory over death, only the first stage. The complete victory will be achieved only when everyone is returned to a transformed immortal life. Fedorov tried to plan specific actions for scientific research of the possibility of restoring life and making it infinite. His first project is connected with collecting and synthesizing decayed remains of dead based on "knowledge and control over all atoms and molecules of the world". This idea of Fedorov is related to the modern practice of cloning. The second method described by Fedorov is genetic-hereditary. The revival could be done successively in the ancestral line: sons and daughters restore their fathers and mothers, they in turn restore their parents and so on. This means restoring the ancestors using the hereditary information that they passed on to their children. Using this genetic method it is only possible to create a genetic twin of the dead person (the problem of identity in cloning). It is necessary to give back the revived person his old mind, his personality. Fedorov speculates about the idea of “radial images” that may contain the personalities of the people and survive after death. Nevertheless, Fedorov noted that even if a soul is destroyed after death, Man will learn to restore it whole by mastering the forces of decay and fragmentation. Fedorov believed, and passionately felt, that resignation in the face of death and separation of knowledge from action was false Christianity. He cautioned against being fooled into worshipping the blind forces of Satan. Rather, one should actively participate in changing what is into what ought to be. The division between the learned and the unlearned was, in Fedorov’s view, worse than the separation of the rich and the poor. The unlearned are more concerned with work than thought. The learned (philosophers and scientists) are less concerned with work than thought. The learned seem unaware that ideas “are not subjective, nor are they objective; they are projective.” Philosophers and scientists, because they have separated ideas from moral action, are simply slaves to the imperfect present order. It is a root dogma of the learned that paradise is not possible. The unlearned should demand that the learned (because only they have the necessary knowledge) become a temporary task force for the Kingdom of God. The learned, however, will attempt to persuade us that problems like crop failures, disease, and death are not general questions but matters for a narrow discipline, questions for only a very small (or nonexistent) minority of the learned. Separation of the learned from the masses turns them into a seemingly permanent class, producing non-lovers of humankind. The “transformation of the blind course of nature into one that is rational … is bound to appear to the learned as a disruption of order, although this order of theirs brings only disorder among men, striking them down with famine, plague, and death.” A citizen, a comrade, or a team-member can be replaced by another. However a person loved, one’s kin, is irreplaceable. Moreover, memory of one’s 17 dead kin is not the same as the real person. Pride in one’s forefathers is a vice, a form of egotism. On the other hand, love of one’s forefathers means sadness in their death, requiring the literal raising of the dead. Politics must be replaced by physics. The politics of egoism and altruism must be replaced by Christianity which “knows only all men.” Pride is a Tower of Babel that separates us from one another. Love is a “fusion as opposed to a confusion.” For Fedorov, “complete and universal salvation” is preferable to “incomplete or non-universal salvation in which some men — the sinners — are condemned to eternal torments and others — the righteous — to an eternal contemplation of these torments.” That is to say, Fedorov’s bold science project, “the common task,” is not the only possible route to salvation. “Salvation may also occur without the participation of men … if they do not unite in the common task”; “if we do not unite to accomplish our salvation, if we do not accept the Gospel message,” then a “purely transcendent resurrection will save only the elect; for the rest it will be an expression of God’s wrath,” “eternal punishment.” “I believe this literally.” “Christianity has not fully saved the world, because it has not been fully assimilated.” Christianity “is not simply a doctrine of redemption, but the very task of redemption.” Chizevski, Alexander (1857- 1964), world renowned scientist, a nominee for the Nobel prize, the founder of heliobiology, philosopher, artist, his works: Physical factors of the historic process; Astronomy, physiology and history; The Terrestrial Echo of Solar Storms. He stand for that "Life is a phenomenon. Its production is due to the influence of the dynamics of the cosmos on a passive subject. It lives due to dynamics, each oscillation of organic pulsation is coordinated with the cosmic heart in a grandiose whole of nebulas, stars, the sun and the planet." He analyzed sunspot records and proxies as well as battles, revolutions, riots and wars in Russia and 71 other countries for the period 500 BCE to 1922. He found that 80% of the most significant events occurred around sunspot maximum. This data was also reported and further analyzed by Raymond Wheeler and Edward R. Dewey in America, and Dewey reported various cycles in the battles index including 11 and 22 years, both related to sunspot activity. He noted that the Russian Revolution of 1917 occurred during a sunspot activity peak and as a result spent long years in Soviet prisons (Gulag) because his theory challenged the communist belief system. He considered that solar activity triggered existing grievances and complaints rather than causing them. F.A. Florenski (1882-1937), philosopher, theologian, mathematician, physicist... an encyclopedic brain, representing in a specific way the originality of Russian thought and spirit in general. As a priest wearing his garb, he participated as an expert in the state projects, writer of more than hundred and twenty articles in the first edition of the great Soviet Technical Encyclopedia. This thinker, called ”Russian Leonardo da Vinci” or ”Russian Pascal”, creative in various fields, did not escape the tragic fate of the Russian elite intelligentsia after the revolution - he died in a concentration camp after long sufferings. 18 The creative genius of the ”Russian Cosmists” moved from the vague images and visions, across the more or less developed theoretical systems, all the way until the final act which led to the great changes. The novelty in the creation of these thinkers, who tried their hands both in theory and practice, consists first of all in their thinking style, in their striving for the integrality of the conception of world as a whole, in which the phenomena of most different kind possess some common foundations and regularities. The Significance and Impact of Russian Thought: 12 theses by Mikhail Epstein: 1. In the modern epoch, Russia was the first non-Western nation to challenge Eurocentric historical models and cultural canons, such as rationalism, legalism, individualism, and offer an alternative model of civilization (the dispute between Slavophiles and Westernizers). Contemporary multiculturalism goes back to the Russian intellectual search for non-European national identity. 2. The Russian synthesis of philosophy and religion, the phenomenon of "religious philosophy," is unique in the history of thought. Revelation and rationalization, faith and reason were approached as complementary aspects of "integral knowledge." The concept of integrity, or totality, is the seminal Russian contribution to the theory of knowledge. This principle also extends to the ontological dimension, as the axiomatic unity of knowledge and being. 3. Russian philosophy is unique in its devotion to the goals of practical transformation of life and society. Intelligentsia is a characteristically Russian phenomenon: in European philosophy, this term refers to a speculative and contemplative capacity of mind, while in Russia it became the name of a powerful social stratum whose specific task was the implementation of general ideas in reality. Intelligentsia attempts to live and act in accordance with philosophical ideas and impose them on society as a whole. 4. Russian philosophy produced large-scale projects of comprehensive transformation of the world, including such ideas, proclaimed by Solovyov and Fedorov, as "Godmanhood," "total-unity," eschatological transfiguration and the end of history, the restoration of Christian unity, the victory over blind forces of nature, infinite cosmic expansion and the resurrection of dead. Russian philosophy introduced new universal dimensions and criteria into world thought, though the immediate outcome of these projects could have no practical value and even entailed a danger of totalitarianism. 5. Russian philosophy elaborated, with attention to the smallest details, the utopian project of Marxist thought, systematized it as "dialectical and historical materialism," and convincingly demonstrated both the advantages and perils of its practical applications. What remained a speculative, if influential, theory in the Western social sciences, was tested in the practice of Russian

19 communism and proved its unfitness for the improvement of human society: such is the crucial negative lesson of Soviet Marxism. 6. In the USSR, philosophy for the first time in human history became the guiding principle of all economical, political, and cultural activities. The philosophy of dialectical and historical materialism played the role that in traditional societies belongs to mythology and religion. The Soviet ideocratic State was a unique experience in conceptualizing and philosophizing the entirety of reality, as a laboratory for the testing of general concepts. The cherished union of State and philosophy that since Plato's "The Republic" inspired major Western thinkers, including Thomas More and Hegel, was implemented` in Russia - and proved to be the most tyrannical force in history. 7. During the Soviet epoch, philosophy was the most dangerous occupation in Russia, and the overwhelming majority of first-rate thinkers, such as Berdyaev, Shestov, Florensky, Bakhtin, Losev, were persecuted, exterminated, or silenced (exile, death sentence, labor camp, ban on publications, etc.). This persecution testified, as never before in history, to the vitality and validity of philosophical thought for the cause of spiritual liberation. The readiness of a thinker to sacrifice his life and freedom for the sake of his convictions gave a deeper meaning to the very profession of the philosopher. 8. Since Russian thought suffered most severely from totalitarian temptations, it also elaborated philosophical strategy of resistance to totalitarianism. Such trends and schools, as existentialism, dialogism, culturology, Christian liberalism and ecumenism, structuralism, and conceptualism, arose in opposition to Soviet totalitarianism and demonstrated the variety of intellectual methods challenging State ideocracy. Such concepts as "self-constructing personality," "ethics of creativity" (Berdyaev), "dialogue," "carnival," "polyphony" (Bakhtin), "semiosphere," "typology of cultures"(Lotman) "national image of the world"(Gachev) "national repentance and self-limitation" (Solzhenitsyn), provide a wide range of strategies for anti- totalitarian and anti-utopian thinking. 9. In the beginning of the 20th century, Russian thought, inspired by Dostoevsky, was the first to embrace existentialism as a coherent set of new philosophical ideas. Russian philosophy laid a foundation for the criticism of rationalism, objectification, and "essentialism" - the metaphysics of general laws which was indifferent to individuality. Rozanov, Berdyaev and Shestov anticipated major changes in European thought; they expressed existentialist views twenty or thirty years before existentialism became a leading movement in Western philosophy. 10. Russian culturology and structuralism are important contributions to the philosophy of culture and sign systems. In Russia, these schools emphasize the integrity and interrelatedness of all cultural activities and languages and the necessity of dialogue among various cultures. As distinct from American multi-

20 culturalism which stresses plurality and self-identity of cultures, Russian thought is more inclined to a trans-cultural approach: each culture can achieve its identity only in the eyes of another culture. 11. Russian conceptualism is an innovative contribution to post-modernist and post-structuralism thought. By demonstrating the relativity and self- referentiality of all sign-systems, conceptualism criticizes the basic notion of 'reality" as projected by ideological schemes. Conceptualism marks the breakthrough of Russian thought into the post-ideological and post-utopian dimension, the demystification of all authoritative and objectivistic discourses, including those of Marxism and structuralism. 12. Philosophical thought of the post-Stalin epoch, including such movements as structuralism, personalism, culturology, and religious philosophy, has anticipated and stimulated to a large degree the current Russian transition from totalitarianism to democracy. Demystification of ideology, the freedom of personality, the plurality of cultural languages and the interaction of different cultures and religions - these are some of philosophical premises of the contemporary democratic transition.

2. WESTERN PHILOSOPHY IN XX CENTURY

Pragmatism. The logician and semiologist Charles Peirce (1839-1914) invented the term pragmatism and meant it to be the name of a method whose primary goal was the clarification of thought. Perhaps pragmatism was conceived in Peirce's mind when he read the definition of "belief" offered by the psychologist Alexander Bain. Belief is "that upon which a man is prepared to act," said Bain. Fierce agreed and decided that it followed from this definition that beliefs produce habits and that the way to distinguish between beliefs is to compare the habits they produce. Beliefs, then, are rules for action, and they get their meaning from the action for which they are rules. With this definition, Peirce had bypassed the privacy and secrecy of the Cartesian mind and had provided a direct access to mental processes (because a person's belief could be establishes by observing that person's actions). In its inventor's hands, pragmatism was a form of radical empiricism, and some of Peirce's claims are reminiscent of Berkeley's. For example, what Berkeley said about ideas ("our idea of anything is our idea of its sensible effects") is not unlike what Peirce said about belief. James. James saw it as a philosophy capable of resolving metaphysical and religious dilemmas. Furthermore, he saw it as both a theory of meaning and a theory of truth, Let us first look at James's pragmatic theory of meaning. In Pragmatism, he wrote:

Is the world one or many?—fated or free?—material or spiritual? — here are notions either of which may or may not hold good of the world; and disputes 21 over such notions are unending. The pragmatic method in such cases is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences. What difference would it practically make to anyone if this notion rather than that notion were true? If no practical difference whatever can he traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle.

James concluded from this thought process the following principle: "There can be no difference anywhere that doesn't make a difference elsewhere?" To clarify James's point, we will take three sentences, each quite different from the others, and test them for pragmatic meaning: A. Steel is harder than flesh. B. There is a Bengal tiger loose outside. C. God exists. From a pragmatic point of view, the meanings of sentences A and B are unproblematic. We know exactly what it would be like to believe them, as opposed to believing their opposites. If we believed an alternative to A, it is clear that in many cases we would behave very differently than we do behave now. And what we believe about B will also have an immediate Impact on our behavior. What about sentence C? Here we see what James himself would admit to be the subjective feature of his theory of meaning. If certain people believed that God existed, they would conceive of the world very differently than they would conceive of it if they believed God did not exist. However, there are other people whose conceptions of the world would be practically Identical (i.e., identical in practice) whether they believed that God did or did not exist. For these people, the propositions "God exists" and "God does not exist" would mean (practically) the same thing. For certain other people who find themselves somewhere between these two extremes, the proposition "God exists" means something like, "On Sunday, I put on nice clothes and go to church," because, for them, engaging in this activity is the only practical outcome of their belief (and a belief is just a rule for action, as Peirce had said). So much for the pragmatic theory of meaning. Now for the pragmatic theory of truth. James had this to say about truth: "ideas (which themselves are but parts of our experience) become true just insofar as they help us to get into satisfactory relation with other parts of our experience,….truth in our ideas means their power to 'work.'" James also said (perhaps less felicitously) that the issue was that of the "cash value" of ideas. It is interesting to compare the pragmatic theory of truth with the other two theories of truth that have competed with each other throughout the history of Western philosophy: the correspondence theory and the coherence theory. The correspondence theory has been the dominant one and has been especially favored by empiricists. It says simply that a proposition is true if it corresponds with the facts. The sentence "The cat is on the mat" is true if and only if the cat is in fact on the mat. The main attractions of this theory are its simplicity and Its appeal to common sense. The main weaknesses are (1) the difficulties in

22 explaining how linguistic entities (words, sentences) can correspond to things that are nothing like language, (2) the difficulty in stating exactly what It Is that sentences are supposed to correspond to (facts'? What is a "fact" if not that which a true sentence asserts?), and (3) a particular awkwardness In its application to mathematics (what Is it to which the proposition "5 + 2 = 7" corresponds?). The coherence theory of truth asserts that a proposition Is true if it coheres with all the Other propositions taken to be true. This theory has been preferred by rationalists. Its greatest strength is that it makes sense out of idea of mathematical truth ("5 + 2 = 7" is true because it is entailed by "7 = 7," and by "1 + 6 = 7," and by "21/3 = 2X3 + 1," etc.). Its greatest weakness is its vicious circularity. Proposition A is true by virtue of its coherence with propositions B, C, and D. Proposition B is true by virtue of its coherence with propositions A, C and D. Proposition C is true by virtue of its coherence with A, B, and D, and so forth. (Think of the belief system of a paranoid. All his beliefs cohere perfectly with one another. Everything that happens to him is evidence that everybody is out to get him.) Now, the pragmatist says that the test of correspondence and the test of coherence are not competing theories, but simply different tools to be applied to beliefs to see if those beliefs "work." Sometimes one test is a satisfactory tool, sometimes the other, but neither is the sole criterion of truth. James's most extended account of truth is this: True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot. . . . The truth of an Idea is not a stagnant property Inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. If we return to our three model sentences, we see that A certainly works. Believing that steel is harder than flesh definitely puts us in a much more satisfactory relation to the rest of our experience than does believing the opposite. For most of us, B usually does not work. Under typical conditions, believing that there is a Bengal tiger loose outside the room we now occupy would put us in a paranoid relation with the rest of our experience. Of course, sometimes believing it to be true would work. (Namely, we are tempted to say, when there really is a tiger outside.) What about the third example? Obviously, the truth or falsity of the claim that God exists cannot even come up for those people for whom there is no practical difference whether they believe it or not. But for those people for whom the distinction is meaningful, the pragmatic test of truth is available. Unlike for the propositions in sentences A and B, there is no direct pragmatic test of the proposition "God exists." In fact, the empirical evidence, according to James, is equally indecisive for or against God's existence. About- this and similar cases, James said, "Our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on Intellectual grounds? (In asserting this, James sounded very much like Kant.) James went on to say that for many

23 people, the belief in God does work, though he was prepared to admit that for a few it does not work. Rather, a belief in God puts some people in a state of paranoic fear vis-à-vis the rest of their experiences. So, for the first group , the proposition "God exists" is true, and for the second group, it is false. It was this subjective side of James's theory of truth that displeased many philosophers, including Peirce. This feature of pragmatism was somewhat ameliorated by the work of John Dewey. First, one last point about James: the allusion earlier to the similarity between him and Kant was not gratuitous. Both Kant and James tried to justify on practical grounds our right to hold certain moral and religious values that cannot be justified on purely Intellectual grounds. Furthermore, just as Kant had seen himself as trying to mediate between the rationalists and the empiricists, so did James see himself as mediating between what he called the "tender-minded" and the "tough-minded" philosophers, see Table 1:

Table 1. The tender –minded and the tough –minded philosopher by James The Tender -Minded The Tought Minded Rationalistic («going by principles») Empiricist (going by «fact») Intellectualistic Sansationalistic Optimistic Materialistic Religious Pessimistic Free willist Fatalistic Monistic Pluralistic Dogmatical Skeptical

The trouble with these alternatives, said James, was that "you find an empirical philosophy that is not religious enough, and a religious philosophy that is not empirical enough." Obviously, James thought that his pragmatism offered a third, more satisfying, alternative. John Dewey. John Dewey (1659-1952) was perhaps the most Influential of the pragmatists Dewey found progress in the resolution of certain organic conflicts between Individuals and their social and natural environments. From Darwin, Dewey learned that consciousness, mind, and Intellect were not something different from nature, opposed to it and standing in splendid aloofness above it: rather, they were adaptations to nature, continuous with it, and like other appendages of plants, insects, and animals, functioned best when used to solve problems posed to them by the natural world. Dewey was more concerned with social psychology. His basic philosophical interests were in politics, education, and morality. According to Dewey, higher organisms develop as problem-solving mechanisms by learning routines that transcend purely instinctual responses. We cal these routines "habits." As the organism's environment becomes more ambiguous and the organism itself becomes more complex., its responses become more "mental"

24 intelligence evolves when habit fails to perform efficiently. Intelligence interrupts and delays a response to the environment when a problematic situation is recognized as problematic. Thought is, in fact, a "response to the doubtful as such" The function of reflective thought is to turn obscurity into clarity, 'ouch a transformation is called "knowledge." The move from ignorance to knowledge is the transition from "a perplexed, troubled. or confused situation at the beginning [to] a cleared-up, unified, resolved situation at the close." Ideas are plans for action. They are "designations of operations to be performed"; the are hypotheses, thinking is simply “deferred action”. Thoughts that do not pass into actions that rearrange experience are useless thoughts. (The same is true of philosophies.) There is [a] first-rate test of the value of any philosophy which is offered us: Poes it end in conclusions which, when they are referred hack to ordinary life-experiences and their predicaments, render them more significant, more luminous to ls, and make our dealing with them more fruitful?' Or does it terminate in rendering the things of ordinary experience more opaque than they were before and depriving them of having in "reality" even the significance that they seemed to have? Traditional epistemologists, whether rationalist or empiricist, have erred. They believed that what was to be known was some reality preexisting the act of knowing. For them, the mind is the mirror of reality, or what Dewey called "the spectator theory of knowledge." It sought to find certainty, either in universals (rationalism) or in sense data (empiricism). But universals and sense data are not the objects of knowledge; rather, they are the instruments of knowledge. One of the consequences of Dewey's revision is that philosophy must abandon what hitherto had been considered as "ultimate questions" about Being and Knowledge. Knowledge must be instrumental. Its function is to solve problems. Strictly speaking, then, the object of knowledge is constructed by the inquiring mind. Knowledge changes the world that existed prior to its being known, but not in the Kantian sense in which it distorts reality (the noumenal world); rather, knowledge changes the world in the sense that it imposes new traits on the world, for example, by clarifying that which was inherently unclear. The function of reflective thought is to transform a situation in which there is experienced obscurity, doubt, conflict, disturbances of some sort, into a situation that is clear, coherent, settled, harmonious. According to Dewey, the definition of the world as the totality of substances (things) was abandoned with the advent of modern science, which revealed not "objects" but relationships. In abandoning that definition, science also dissolved the distinction between knowing and doing. Galileo is credited by Dewey for initiating this revolution, a revolution that all but philosophers have accepted. Science allows us to escape from the tyranny of the past and allows us to exert some control over our natural and social environment. And yet, it is not only scientists who know. Poets, farmers, teachers, states-people, and dramatists know. Nevertheless, ultimately all must look to the scientists for a methodology.

25 In fact, science is just a sophisticated form of common sense. Science, or its strategies, should play the role in the contemporary world that the Church played in the medieval world. Scientific techniques must be applied to the development of both values and social reform. For Dewey, there is no dichotomy between scientific facts and values. Values are a certain kind of facts found in experience, facts such as beauty, splendor, and humor. But like the products of every other intervention into reality, they reveal themselves relative to the interests of the inquirer. But Dewey's "pragmatic instrumentalism" is not just a form of utilitarianism. The error of utilitarianism is to define value in terms of objects antecedently enjoyed; but for Dewey, just because something has been enjoyed does not make that thing worthy of enjoyment. Without the intervention of thought, enjoyments are not values. To call something valuable is to say that it fulfills certain conditions —namely, that it directs conduct well. There is a difference between the loved and the lovable, the blamed and the blamable, the admired and the admirable. What is needed is an active and cultivated appreciation of value. Its development is a supreme goal, whether the problem confronted is intellectual, aesthetic, or moral. The Analytic Tradition. Moore. George Edward Moore (1573-1955) had come to Cambridge to study classical literature, and part of his program involved taking philosophy classes. Moore would ask if that meant that the wall next to him was not nearer than the library building; Moore wanted to know if that meant that the class would not end at noon. Russell found Moore's "naive" questions to be very exciting. Moore came to be known as the "philosopher of common sense." Common sense became for him what sense data had been for the empiricists and what reason had been for the rationalists—namely, the foundation of certainty. In one of his most famous essays, "A Defence of Common 'dense" Moore listed a series of propositions that he claimed to know with certainty to be true, including these: A. There exists at present a living human body, which is my body. B. This body was much smaller when it was born than it is now. C. Ever since it was born it has been in contact with, or not far from, the surface of the earth. D. Ever since it was born it has been at various distances from a great number of physical objects. E. The earth had existed many years before my body was born. F. Many other human bodies had existed before my body was born, and many of them had already died before my birth. This list goes on and on. It is a rather boring list, but Moore knew full well that his list was tedious. The point is that, according to him, every one of these propositions has been denied by some philosopher, somewhere, sometime. The truth usually is boring, and we should get suspicious when we hear dramatic metaphysical theses that deny commonplace beliefs, such as the Hegelian claims: Time and space have no objective reality; the Individual is an

26 abstraction; mathematics is only a stage in the dialectic; the Absolute is expressed, but not revealed, In the world. Moore did not necessarily want to claim that these assertions were untrue, only that they were strange and that no obvious meaning could be attached to them. As Moore's student and friend John Maynard Keynes said, the question most frequently on Moore's lips was, “What exactly do you mean?” And, said Keynes, "If it appeared under cross- examination that you did not mean exactly anything, you lay under a strong suspicion of meaning nothing whatever'.' The Hegelian philosophers at Cambridge and Oxford In the 1830s and 1390s had spent a lot of time inventing new philosophical terminology in order to devise novel ways of talking, because they all seemed to agree that there was something defective about our ordinary discourse concerning the world. Moore was not a bit convinced that these new ways of speaking were really necessary. He wanted to know exactly what was wrong with ordinary language. Moore's commitment to our normal way of thinking and talking about the world is seen very clearly in this passage from "A Defence of Common Sense": I [assume] that there is some meaning which is the ordinary . . . meaning of such expressions as "The earth has existed for many years past." And this, I am afraid is an assumption which some philosophers are capable of disputing. They seem to think that the question "Do you believe that the earth has existed for many years past?" is not a plain question, such as should be met either by a plain "Yes" or "No," or by a plain "I can't make up my mind" but is the sort of question which can be properly met by: "It all depends on what you mean by 'the earth' and 'exists' and years": If you mean so and so, and so and so, and so and so, then I do; but if you mean so and so, and so and so, and so and so, or so and so, and so and so, and so and so, or so and so, and so and so, and so and so, then I don't, or at least I think it is extremely doubtful." It seems to me that such a view is as profoundly mistaken as any view can be. It is very clear that, with Moore, the aim of philosophy is not that of generating grandiose metaphysical schemes, nor is it even that of arriving at the truth (much less, the Truth); rather, its goal is the clarification of meaning. This goal puts Moore squarely in the camp of the analytic philosophy that Frege had pioneered—a kind of philosophy that, for better or for worse, was to dominate a great part of the twentieth century. Moore was the initiator of what might almost be called a movement: one that was antimetaphysical, concerned with detailed analysis, obsessed with the problem of meaning, and far removed from the social, political, and personal problems that afflicted people of his day. Furthermore, with his concern with precise language, Moore took the first step in tie direction that has since been called the "linguistic turn." We will se all these features again in Russell, in the logical positivists, aid in Wittgenstein. For ,all his virtues, Moore seems a bit too complacent to many philosophers today. His perhaps overly satisfied attitude toward the world can be easily detected in the following passage:

27 I do tot think that the world or the sciences would ever have suggested to me any philosophical problems. What has suggested philosophical problems to me is things which other philosophers have said about the world and the sciences. Russell. Moore's friend at Cambridge, Bertrand Russell (1672-1970), was born into a prominent noble family. Probably Russell's major contribution to way around because there was less risk of error in science than in philosophy. He was one of many analytical philosophers who assumed that "science is innocent unless proved guilty, while philosophy is guilty One constant in his thought was his view of philosophy as essentially analytical. In 1924 he wrote: Although . . . comprehensive construction is part of the business of philosophy, I do not believe it is the most important part. The most important part, to my mind, consists in criticizing and clarifying notions which are apt to be regarded as fundamental and accented uncritically. As instances I might mention: mind, matter, consciousness, knowledge, experience, causality, will, time. I believe all these notions to be inexact and approximate, essentially infected with vagueness, incapable of forming part of any exact science. Another constant in Russell's philosophy was his commitment to Ockham's razor, which, as we have seen, is a plea for theoretical simplicity, an injunction not to "multiply entities beyond necessity." Russell formulated it thus: "Wherever possible, substitute constructions out of known entities for inferences to unknown entities." He thought we should try to account for the world In terms of those features of it with which we have direct acquaintance and we should avoid the temptation of positing the existence of anything with which we cannot be acquainted, unless we are forced to do so by undeniable facts or by a compelling logical argument. Donald Palmer lets Russell's "Theory of Descriptions," which he took to be one of his major contributions to philosophy, represent his views: From Plato forward, philosophers had struggled with the logic of the concept of existence, and many of them, including Plato, were driven to create grandiose metaphysical schemes to accommodate the problems caused by that concept. Russell found most of these schemes to be too metaphysical (i.e., too much in violation of the strictures of Ockham's razor) or to be simply too paradoxical. Let us look at three such problems dealing with the question of existence. 1. I say, "The golden mountain does not exist." You ask, "What is it that does not exist?" I answer, "The golden mountain" by doing so, I seem to be attributing a kind of existence to the very thing whose existence just denied. The Platonists' solution to this problem was to say that terms like "the golden mountain" designate Ideals that exist in a realm of pure being, but not in the physical world. Clearly, such a view would be too metaphysical for Russell and would cry out for the application of Ockham's razor. 2. Consider the sentence "Scott is the author of Waverley." Logicians have held that if two terms denote the same object, these terms could be

28 Interchanged without changing the meaning or truth of the proposition being expressed by the sentence. (If A = B, then [A = B] = [B = A] = [A = A] = [B = B].) Now, the novel Waverley was published anonymously, and many people wanted to know who wrote it. Ring George IV was particularly interested to know because he wanted to find out who was maligning his ancestors. The king did not want to know whether the sentence "The author of Waverley is the author of Waverley" was true, nor if the sentence "Sir Walter Scott is Sir Walter Scott" was true. (Though a Platonic/ Leibnizian solution to the problem would be that, indeed, all sentences are versions of the proposition "Everything is everything," or A = A." But such a metaphysical "solution" could never satisfy a Bertrand Russell.) 3. Consider this sentence: "The present king of France is bald." This assertion seems false (because there is no such person), but according to the law of the excluded middle, the negation of any false proposition must be true, so it follows that there must be truth to the claim "The present king of France is not bald." Yet surely that sentence is false too. Must we once again accept some kind of metaphysical solution to the dilemma by consigning to an ideal realm of being the object designated by the term "the present king of France," along with the ideal characteristics "bald" and "hairy"? The Platonic logicians thought so. Russell thought not. (Russell said that the Hegelians would find the solution in a synthesis: "The present king of France wears a toupee") So here we have three different logical problems concerning the concept of being or existence. The goal of Russell's Theory of Descriptions was to unveil the true logical structure of propositions about existence in order to eliminate paradoxes and metaphysical obfuscations. Russell discovered a formula that he thought could perform this job: There is an entity C, such that the sentence «X» is «Y» is true if if and only if X=C. In this formula, C is an entity, Y is a characteristic written in the form of an adjective, and X is the subject to which the adjective is attributed. For example, the sentence "The golden mountain does not exist" is rendered by Russell as: "There's no entity C, such that the sentence 'X is golden and mountainous' is true if and only if X = C." In other words, the offending term, "the golden mountain" (offending because it seems to denote an entity, that is, name a thing) has been transformed Into a description (golden and mountainous), and the real assertion of the proposition is that there is no existing object that could be correctly characterized using that description. Notice that the notion of "existence" has been analyzed out of the term "the golden mountain" Concerning the second problem, the sentence "Scott is the author of Waverley" becomes "There is an entity C, such that 'X wrote Waverley' is true if and only if X = C; moreover, C Is Scott'.' So the characteristic "authorly" properly describes an existing entity (Scott) and does so in a way that is not merely tautological. Notice once again that the notion of existence has been analyzed out of the description "the author of Waverley."

29 Finally, the sentence "The present king of France is bald" means "There is an entity C, such that 'X is kingly, French, and bald' is true if and only if X = C." But there is no entity to which such a description correctly applies, so the sentence is false; and so is its negation because there is also no entity that is correctly described as being "kingly, French, and hairy." So we can assert that both sentences are false without violating the law of the excluded middle. In each of these three cases, Russell applied Ockham's razor and excised the concept of existence. Russell rather immodestly said of his solution, "This clears up two millennia of muddle-headedness about 'existence,' beginning with Plato's Theaetetus." Logical Positivism. The paradigmatic case of the view that philosophy job is that of logical analysis came from a group of European philosophers who are known as the logical positivists. Their movement grew out of some seminars In the philosophy of science offered at the University of Vienna In the early 1920s by Professor Moritz Schlick. The original group, which called itself the 'Vienna Circle," was composed mostly of scientists with a flair for philosophy and a desire to render philosophy respectable by making it scientific. Their technical Inspiration came primarily from the work of Ernst Mach, Jules Folncare, and Albert Einstein. The models for their Idea of logical analysis came from Principia Mathematics, by Russell and Whitehead, and from Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, recently published by Wittgenstein. Besides Schlick, other people associated with the movemnet were Otto Neurath, Hans Reichenbach, A.J. Ayer, and Rudolf Carnap. The Vienna Circle was the resurrection and updating of Hume's Fork. All putative propositions would be shown to be other analytic (tautologies whose negation leads to self-contradiction), synthetic (propositions whose confirmation depends on observation and experimentation), or nonsense. The positivists' conclusions were therefore like Hume's in many respects. For example, Carnap wrote, "In the domain of metaphysics, Including all philosophy c value and normative theory, logical analysis yields the negative result that the alleged statements in this domain are entirely meaningless fake a look at Camap's analysis of the function of language, scheme 1. We see that language has only two duties: expression and representation. Once psychology has been correctly established as an empirical science and metaphysics correctly recognized as an art form, philosophy is seen to be nothing but logic. According to Carnap, there is nothing wrong with the poetic function of metaphysics as long as it is identified and treated as such. Carnap wrote, The non-theoretical character of metaphysics would not be in itself a defect; all arts have this non-theoretical character without thereby losing their high value for personal as well as social life. The danger lies in the deceptive character of metaphysics; it gives the illusion of knowledge without actually giving any knowledge.

Expressive function Representative Function of language

30 of  language  Art Science (=the system of theoretical knowledge)  Emperical science Lyrical Verses, etc  1. (metaphysics) Physics, Biology, etc. 2. (psychology)  3. logic

Scheme 1. Analysis of the function of language by Carnap

Even some of Hume's skeptical musings were too metaphysical for the positivists. Hume had claimed that there was no good reason to believe that any event ever caused another event because there was no sense datum representing any cause, only sense data representing series of events. But for Schlick, Hume's search for an entity to correspond to the name "cause" was itself suspect. Schlick said, "The word cause, as used in everyday life, implies nothing but regularity of sequence because nothing else is used to verify the propositions In which it occurs... The criterion of causality is successful prediction. That is all we can say" Schlick's comments about causality reveal another feature of the positivistic view, namely, that (in the case of synthetic claims) the meaning of a proposition is its method of verification. Furthermore, the language of verification would have to be reduced to what were called "protocol sentences." Protocol sentences were to be assertions that expressed the raw verifiable facts with complete simplicity. These sentences would be "the absolutely indubitable starting points of all knowledge," according to Schlick. An example would be "Moritz Schlick perceived red or\ the 6th of May, 1954, at 5:05 P.M. in the room numbered 301 in the Philosophy Hall at the University of Vienna." The logical positivists, looking for incorrigibility as the foundation of science, decided that even protocol sentences were not certain enough because they did not designate the simplest facts, so they tried to reduce protocol sentences yet further to what they called "confirmation sentences," an example of which would be "Red here now" These sentences were more certain because they were less complex than protocol sentences; but the trouble with them turned out to be that the act of writing down the phrase "here now" produced a meaning not identical to the actual pointing that took place when the confirmation sentence was uttered. Not only that, but to name the experience as "red" seemed to transcend the perceptual event by categorizing it as a member of the class of red experiences, thereby referring to more than what was actually present in the experience. Ultimately, it was suggested that certainty could be found only in an act of pointing and grunting. By now it was beginning to become obvious that something had gone very wrong and that this part of the positivist program was hopeless. The logical positivists had tried to find the foundations of science, and instead they had

31 reverted to the cave dweller mentality. They fell to squabbling over this problem, and it was never resolved to anyone's satisfaction, including their own. We have seen Carnap's demonstration that metaphysics is only an expressive, not representative, form of language. The positivists performed a similar it was simply a disguised "commands in a misleading Carnap. So the sentence thing like this: Therefore, the so-called sentence "Stealing is immoral" is really only the expression of emotion and can be neither true nor false. It expresses what Ayer called a "pseudo-concept." Such were the moral consequences of the positivists' radical application of Hume's Fork. Needless to say, most philosophers were not very satisfied with this account of ethics. Furthermore, as has been indicated, logical positivism began to come undone over its failure to find the much-heralded incorrigibility in protocol sentences and confirmation sentences. (As one commentator put it, tie positivists set out to sea unfurling the sail of what they took to be a watertight "man-o-war" only to Find that it leaked badly. They began patching the leaks and discoverer that the patches leaked. By the time the ship sank they were patching patches on patches.) Logical positivism came to its final grief over another internal question: If all propositions are either analytic, synthetic, or nonsense, what is the status of the proposition "All propositions are either analytic, synthetic, or nonsense"? It too must be either analytic, synthetic, or nonsense. If it is analytic (Ayer's view), it is a mere tautology and tells us nothing about the world. Furthermore, in this case, we should be able to look up the word "proposition" In the dictionary and discover it to be defined in terms of analyticity and syntheticity. But it's not. If the proposition is synthetic (Carnap's view), then we should be able to verify it empirically. But verification isn't possible either. So it looks as though the key principle of positivism is neither analytic nor synthetic. Wittgenstein, whose Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus had been the main inspiration of positivism, took the heroic5tep of dairying that it was nonsense (though, as we will see, he thought some nonsense was better than other nonsense). Wittgenstein. The author of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the book that so inspired the logical positivists, was Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889- 1951). The Tractatus, which is set up as a series of seven propositions. Each proposition is followed by a sequence of numbered observations about each proposition, or observation about the observations, or observations about the observations about the observations. For instance, the first page begins is thus: 1. The world is all that is the case. 1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things. 1.11 The world is determined by the facts, and by their being all the facts. 1.12 For the totality of facts determines what is the case, and also whatever is not the case.

32 1.13 The facts in logical space are the world. 1.2 The world divides into facts. 1.21 Each item can be the case or not the case while everything else remains the same. 2. What is the case—a fact—is the existence of states of affairs.

Wittgenstein held the view that, because we can say true things about the world, the structure of language must somehow reflect the structure of the world. That is part of what he means in paragraph 1.1, "The world is the totality of facts, not of things." Now, what are the facts of which the world consists? They are, to use Russell's term, "atomic facts." They are the simplest facts that can be asserted and are the simple truths into which all other more complex truths can be analyzed. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein did not say exactly what these facts were, and it was these facts that the positivists were seeking with their attempts to construct protocol sentences and confirmation sentences. The positivists liked other features of the Tractatus as well. They particularly approved of the conception of philosophy that Wittgenstein put forth: Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical. Consequently we cannot give any answer to questions of this kind, but can only establish that they are nonsensical.(4.003) The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, I.e., the propositions of natural science—i.e., something that has nothing to do with philosophy— and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions . . . this method would be the only strictly correct one. (6.53) These paragraphs seem to express perfectly the hard-liner position of logical positivists. No surprise that the latter thought of Wittgenstein as one of their own. However, certain puzzling statements in the Tractatus created quite a bit of discomfort for the members of the Vienna Circle. For example, in the preface Wittgenstein wrote, "The whole sense of this book might be summed up in the following words: what can be said at all can be said clearly and what we cannot talk about we must consign to silence." Now, the positivists wanted to interpret Wittgenstein as saying here, "Metaphysicians, shut up!" But Wittgenstein himself seemed curiously attracted to what he called "the silence" and made further enigmatic allusions to it. In paragraph 6.54 he wrote, My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions and then he will see the world aright.

33 It was here that Wittgenstein was admitting that his own propositions were nonsense, but apparently a special kind of higher nonsense. What would higher nonsense be like? Wittgenstein continued:

How things are In the world is a matter of complete Indifference for what is higher. God does not reveal himself in the world. (6.432) It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists. (6.44) The solution to the enigma of life in space and time lies outside space and time. (6.4312)

Slowly and in horror the truth dawned on the Vienna Circle. Wittgenstein was a mystic! He was worse than the metaphysicians. For a while, Wittgenstein seemed satisfied with the Tractatus. It had answered all the philosophy questions that could be sensibly asked. As he had written: "When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the question be put into words. The riddle does not exist. If a question can be framed at all, it is possible to answer it" (6.5). After break Wittgenstein saw philosophy still as essentially the concern with meaning, and it was still very much language-oriented. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein had written, "The limits of my language are the limits of my world" (5.6). That view continued to hold in the Investigations, but language itself now seemed much less limited than it had been in the earlier book. Let us start our discussion of the investigations with a look at the problem of meaning. Throughout the history of philosophy, from Plato to the Tractatus, the key model of meaning was that of denotation that is, of naming. Even where philosophers like Frege, Russell, and the author of the Tractatus had distinguished between "reference" (denotation) and "sense" the former was given priority. According to Wittgenstein, the historical prioritizing of naming as the key feature of meaning had generated a certain kind of metaphysical picture that was pervasive in Western thought and that was in error. Plato thought that words had to be names of things that existed unchanging and eternally, and because there was no such thing in the observable world, he developed his theory of the other-worldly Forms. Aristotle thought words named something uncharging in the world, namely, substances. In the medieval period, the nominalists also thought of words as names but thought that they named nothing. Their conclusion therefore was like that of the last sentence of Eco's novel The Name of the Rose, namely, "we have only names" The empiricists held that words named sense data and that any word not doing so was suspect. The pragmatists thought that words named actions, and the positivists, Russell, and the early Wittgenstein thought they named atomic facts. The later Wittgenstein broke completely with this tradition, claiming that the meaning of a word is its use in the language" We wrote,

34 Think of the tools in a tool box: there is a hammer, pliers, a saw, a screwdriver, a rule, a glue pot, glue, nails and screws.—The functions of words are as diverse as the functions of these objects. (And in both cases there are similarities.) ... It is like looking into the cabin of a locomotive. We see handles all looking more or less alike. (Naturally, since they are supposed to be handled.) But one is the handle of a crank which can be moved continuously (it regulates the opening of a valve); another is the handle of a switch, which has only two effective positions, it is either off or on; a third is the handle of a brake-lever, the harder one pulls on it, the harder it brakes; a fourth, tie handle of a pump: it has an effect only so long as it is moved to and fro. (11,12) So language, like tools or like the gadgets in the cabin of a locomotive, can get jobs done, and its meaning is found in the work it accomplishes. Suppose two people are driving rapidly toward a certain destination, trying to arrive before sunset because the headlights are broken, and suppose the driver says, "Well, bad luck! The sun just went down." Now, what if tie passenger says, with a look of superiority, "We now know that the sun does not go down,' and that the illusion that it does is the result of the earth turning on its axis." Does what he said mean anything? No, because in that context, it gets no job done (even though in another context that same sentence would get a job done). In fact, there is something mad about inserting this scientific fact into the context described. There would also be something mad if the passenger, having found a hammer in the glove compartment, began hitting the driver with it and explained the action by saying "Hammers are for hitting." Yes, but not for hitting just any thing, any time, any place. And the same is the case with language. Still, a tool can serve a number of functions. In some contexts, a hammer can serve as a weapon or as a paperweight. How about language? Does it have only two uses, as the logical positivists suggested (an expressive function and a representative function)? Wittgenstein asked: But how many kinds of sentence are there? Say assertion, question, and command?—There are countless kinds: countless different kinds of use of what we call "symbols," "words," "sentences" And this multiplicity is not something fixed, given once for all; but new types of language, new language-games, as we may say, come into existence, and others become obsolete and get forgotten. (23) This comment brings up another feature of Wittgenstein's theory of meaning related to his claim that "the meaning is the use." He wrote, "The question 'What is a word really? is analogous to 'what is a piece in chess?'... Let us say that the meaning of a piece Is its role in the game" (108). Wittgenstein generalized his claim when he called any language a "language-game" Let's consider this point. All games are rule-governed. The meaning of a piece {or a chip, or card, or mitt) in the game is derived from its use according to the rules. What is a pawn? A pawn is a piece that moves one square forward, except on its first move, when it may move two squares. It may take the opponent's piece

35 laterally and is converted to a queen if it reaches the opposite side of the board. Similarly with words, phrases, and expressions— they are rule-governed, and their meaning is derived from the use to which they may be put according to the rules of the language game. There are lots of kinds of rules determining language use: grammatical rules, semantical rules, syntactical rules, and what could generally be called rules of context, 'dome of these rules are very rigid, some are very flexible, and some are negotiable. These variations are true in a comparison of different games (the rules of chess are more rigid than those of ring-around-the-rosy), or even in a comparison within a game (rules governing the pawn's moves are rigid, but those governing the pawn's size are flexible). E3ut even flexible rules are rules, and they cant be broken without certain consequences. When some of the rules of a given language game are broken in subtle ways, "language goes on holiday" (35), as Wittgenstein said, and one result is a certain kind of philosophy (as in the case of metaphysicians), and another result is a certain kind of madness {as in the case of /Vice in Wonderland). The allusion to Alice is not gratuitous. The Alice books were among Wittgenstein's favorites, no doubt because they are compendiums of linguistic jokes showing the lunacy that results when the function of certain features of language are misunderstood. Think of the episode when the White King tells Alice to look down the road and asks her if she sees anyone there. "I see nobody on the road" said Alice. "I only wish / had such eyes," responds the king. "To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance too!" What has gone wrong here? The joke is based on what some of Wittgenstein's followers called a "category mistake"—the miscategorization of certain linguistic facts and the drawing of absurd conclusions from the miscategorization. (According to Gilbert Ryle, who coined the term category mistake, this miscategorization was the error made by Descartes that resulted in the mind-body problem. He had placed "minds" in a similar category with bodies, making them "thinking things"—ghostly, spiritual beings that somehow cohabitated with physical beings, but no one could figure out how.) Or consider the case of the White Queen, who promises to pay her lady's maid "Twopence a week, and jam every other day" but then refuses to provide the jam on the grounds that it never is any other day. Surely this is language gone on holiday. What about the positivists' search for the simplest constituents of reality on which to base the scientific edifice? Wittgenstein asked, But what are the simple constituent parts of which reality is composed?— What are the simple constituent parts of a chair?—The bits of wood of which it is made? or the molecules, or the atoms?— "Simple" means: not composite. And here the point is: In what sense "composite"? It makes no sense at all to speak absolutely of the "simple parts of a chair.

So much for the search for atomic facts. In the Tractatus, "Wittgenstein had written, "Most of the propositions and questions of philosophy arise from our failure to understand the logic of our

36 language" (4.003). He still held more or less the same view in I he Investigations, but by I hen his conception of "the logic of our language" had changed radically. It was no longer the philosopher's job to reveal the hidden logic behind language; rather, it was to reveal the implicit logic of ordinary language (hence the term "ordinary language philosophy"). Philosophers were to show that a failure to grasp that implicit logic could result in "a bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language", and they were to show that unwarranted tampering with our ordinary way of thinking and talking about the world could produce a "linguistic holiday," which generates the jokes that make up much of the history of philosophy. Wittgenstein said, "My aim in philosophy is to show the fly the way out of the fly bottle". Apparently in Wittgenstein's native Vienna, a common flytrap was made by putting some honey in a vinegar bottle. The Phenomenological Tradition and Its Aftermath. Husserl. A number of European thinkers had continued to work well within the Continental philosophical tradition inaugurated by Descartes despite the unrelenting attack on that tradition by the logical positivists. Primary among them was Edmund Husserl (1855-1938), the founder of a philosophy that he called "phenomenology" (from the Greek phainomenon, meaning "appearance"— hence, the study of appearances). He traced the roots of his view to the work of Descartes. Like Descartes, Husserl placed consciousness at the center of all philosophizing, but Husserl had learned from Kant that a theory of consciousness must be as concerned with the form of consciousness as with its content (Descartes had failed to realize this), so he developed a method that would demonstrate both the structure and the content of the mind. This method would be purely descriptive and not theoretical. That is, it would describe the way the world actually reveals itself to consciousness without the aid of any theoretical constructs from either philosophy or science. This method laid bare the world of what Husserl called "the natural standpoint," which is pretty much the everyday world experienced unencumbered by the claims of philosophy and science. Writing about the natural standpoint in Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, Husserl said, I am aware of a world, spread out in space endlessly, and in time becoming and in time without end. I am aware of it, that means, first of all, I discover it immediately, intuitively, I experience it. Through sight, touch, hearing etc,. . . corporeal things . . . are for me simply there,. . . "present,"'' whether or not I pay them special attention. This world of the nature standpoint is the absolute beginning of all philosophy and science. It is the world as actually lived. Other world can be built upon the lived world but can never replace it or undermine it. For humen beings ultimatly there is only the lived world of the natural syandpoint. But Husserl wanted to «get behind» the content of the natural standpoint to reveal its structure. To do so he employed a methid like Descartes' radical doubt, a method that Husserl called «phenomenological reduction» (or epoch, a Greek word meaning "suspension of belief"). This method brackets any experience

37 whatsoever describes it while suspending all presuppositions and assumptions normally made about that experience. Bracketing the experience of looking at a coffee cup, for instance, requires suspending the belief that the cup is for holding coffee and that Its handle is for grasping. Bracketing reveals the way the cup presents itself to consciousness as a number of possible structures. (I can't see the front and the back at the same time, nor the top and the bottom, nor see more than one of its possible presentations at any given moment) If we apply the epoche to the more philosophically significant exampie of the experience of time, we must suspend all belief in clocks, train schedules, and calendars. Then we will discover that lived time Is always experienced as an eternal now, which Is tempered by a memory of earlier nows (the thenness of the past) and is always rushing into the semlexperienceable but ultimately nonexperienceable thenness of the future. Phenomenologically speaking, the time is always "now." To do anything is to do something now. You can never act then. Similarly, a phenomenological reduction of the experience of space reveals the difference between lived space and mapped space relived space is always experienced in terms of a here-there dichotomy, in which I am always here and everything else is always at different intensities of therenes. (Jean-Paul Sartre, Husserl's errant disciple, would later draw very pessimistic conclusions from this discovery.) So the here-now experience is the ground zero of the experience of space and time. It is somehow the locus of the self. One of Husserl's main insights (actually derived from the work of his teacher Franz von Brentano), and one that was to be Incorporated Into both the later phenomenological tradition and, In some cases, the analytic tradition, was his treatment of the intentionality of all consciousness (i.e., its referentiality). The Husserlian motto here is "All consciousness is consciousness of..." (This motto means there is no such thing as self-enclosed thought; one thinks about something. You can't be just aware—you have to be aware of something, and afraid of something, and concerned about something. There are no Intransitive mental states, not even Kierkegaard's "dread"—the fear of absolutely nothing. It is still the fear of nothing.) It is this intentionality (or referentiality) that distinguishes consciousness from everything else in the universe. Husserl claimed that the phenomenological suspension could be performed on the object of intentionality (e.g., the coffee cup) or on the act of consciousness itself. Therefore, he believed it was possible to step back from normal consciousness into a kind of pure consciousness, a transcendental ego, a self-behind-the-self, which, like Descartes' "I am" (but more deeply real), would be the starting point of all knowledge. Husserl's ideas get very complex here, and few of his disciples have chosen to follow him into these ethereal regions. Today, Husserl is most admired for his method. This method has had a number of outstanding adherents, including Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre. Shortly, we will review the philosophies of Heidegger and Sartre, Husserl's best-known, if most wayward, disciples, and we

38 will let them represent the outcome of the evolution of phenomenology Into existentialism. Heidegger. Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) was an early colleague of Husserl and a student of his phenomenology, but it soon became clear that his philosophical concerns were quite different from Husserl's. Heidegger wanted to "call us back to a remembrance of Being"—to return us to our primordial astonishment in its presence. We must come home to Being—stand in its presence and establish a harmonic concordance with it rather than merely intellectualize it. One thing that prevents us from returning home to Being is the language we employ to do it. It has become encrusted with the fragments and dust of a ruined past, and it must be cleansed and purged if it is to become a viable path to Being. Luckily (and quite conveniently, if you are German, as was Heidegger), of the modem languages, German is the closest to the truth, because it's less bespattered with lies and because it's more powerful and more spiritual than other languages—though ancient Greek, the language of the pre-Socratics themselves, remains the most powerful. The Greek of those first thinkers comes to us from a time when its speakers were direct witnesses to Being Heidegger mined this language, going into its deepest etymologies. For instance, he discovered that the Greek word for "being," Parousia, designates something that "stands firmly by itself and thus manifests and declares itself"and that the Greek word for "truth," aletheia, means "uncoveredness." But simply studying Greek or being able to speak German is not enough. A new beginning must be found that will be radically innovative and return us to origins at the same time. To this end, Heidegger generated a flood of technical vocabulary, to the delight of some and the annoyance of others. Take a look, for example, at one of his characterizations of the meaning of the word "care": "ahead-of-itself-Being-already-in-(the-world) as Being- alongside (entities encountered within-the-world)." It is not easy to see that these clumsy neologisms restore lost meanings— that Heidegger's artificial language is closer to the truth than is the language of everyday life. It is ironic that Heidegger's reasons for rewriting ordinary language are in some ways similar to those of Russell and the logical positivists. The latter created an artificial syntax because they believed it was closer to the hidden truth of language; Heidegger did so because he believed that it was closer to the hidden truth of Being. Humane have certain attitudes toward beings. In this respect, we are like other animals. But unlike other animals, humane also have an attitude toward Being itself. We "comport" ourselves toward it. We are unique not simply because only we can question Being, but also in that, in questioning Being, we put our own Being in question. We are the only being whose own Being is a question for itself. Therefore, our being is different. Heidegger designated that difference by saying that other beings are; we exist. He named human existence Dasein (being there). Unlike other beings, which are merely in the world, Dasein

39 has a world. Heidegger rejected the intellectualism of most philosophers who have seen the world as primarily the object of human knowledge, for him, knowing was just one way of being-in-the-world. Furthermore, knowing is itself not just an Intellectual act. To "understand" something is to understand it in the context of usage, to understand it as something serviceable or dangerous. Things are not just "present-at-hand"; they are not just objects for disinterested scientific Investigation; they are "ready-to-hand" The there of our being-there (Dasein) is filled with objects that are there for us, ready-to-hand. We have care or concern for them. This "care" is one of the mam characteristics of human existence; we care for the world around us, both the natural and the human world And when we express care not just for beings but for Being itself, we are our most authentic selves as humane. Being-within-the-world entails being-with-others. The there of Dasein is populated not only with objects for our use but also with the Dasein of others. Our relationship to others is neither that of presence-at-hand nor readiness-to- hand, for we must acknowledge that others make the same demands on us that we make on them. There is a danger, however, of giving in too much to their demands. We can "come not to be ourselves." We can be sucked into the third- person theyness of others. This form of inauthentic existence in which we live in the opinions and desires of the anonymous they is a form of fear that produces a hollowness. "Fallenness" is Heidegger's term for succumbing to this fear. Unfortunately, fallenness is not just a side effect of bad choices. It is of the essence of human existence. We have "fallen" into a world of others. But it is possible to come out of inauthenticity through Sorge: care for Being and care for beings, care for the future, for the past, and for the community. We are also rescued from inauthenticity through Angst, anxiety. We experience anxiety in the recognition of death. This anxiety is reveals to us our own freedom, for in the face of our imminent annihilation we must choose a life that justifies its own worth despite its necessary termination. Most of these ideas were developed in Heidegger's major work doing and Time, published in 1927. It contained two parts and ended with a series of questions that Heidegger promised to answer in a third part. But Part 3 was never written. One critic says that Heidegger himself felt that the path to Being had "come to a dead end" Heidegger changed his mind after 1927 concerning the key philosophical questions. There seems to be at least a changed of emphasis, in which language (the new path of being) almost eclipses Being, including the human being, as language swallows up the individual. «Languge is the house of being in which man ek-sists by dwelling.» It is not that humans speak language but that language speaks itself through humans. It follows therefore poets rather than philosophers are the true custodians of Being. Sartre. Another of Edmund Husserl's erstwhile disciples was Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1930). Besides being one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, Sartre was also an essayist, novelist, and playwright. His

40 early philosophical Ideas are developed in his novel Nausea (193d); in his treatises, Transcendence of the Ego (1936) and doing and Nothingness (1943); and in his essay "existentialism Is a Humanism" (1946). In these works, we see the influence not only of Husserl but also of Heidegger and Kierkegaard. First, let us look at Sartre's theory of consciousness. From Husserl, Sartre had leaned that consciousness is always referential, in that it always refers beyond Itself to an object. "Unreflected consciousness" is consciousness before it is reflected upon or philosophized about. When I read a novel, the object of the unreflected consciousness is the hero of the novel. When I run to catch a trolley, the object of the unreflected consciousness is "streetcar-to-be-caught." In unreflected consciousness, there is no self, no "I" to be found; only its objects exist—Don Quixote or the streetcar. Reflective consciousness is consciousness that reflects on itself. According to Sartre (and contrary to Descartes), the ego, or the I, is to be discovered only in reflected consciousness. Not only is it discovered there, but it also is actually partially created there. Once we study consciousness phenomenologically (bracket it, make it the object of reflective consciousness), we discover that it is "a monstrous . . . impersonal spontaneity" in which thoughts come and go at their will, not ours. This spontaneity is a form of dizzying freedom, according to Sartre, and contemplation of it leads to anguish. We actively struggle to impose order on this free spontaneity, and when we fail, neurosis and psychosis ensue. Sartre mentioned the case of as woman who dreaded her husband's leaving for work because she feared that upon his departure she would sit rude in the window like a prostitute. Because she knew she was free to do so, she feared she would do so. (This theme was inspired by Kierkegaard's account of dread. When God told Adam not to eat the apple, Adam then knew that he could eat it—that the was free to do so—and he knew that if he could, he might. That is, he experienced his freedom as dread.) In our own case, as m the case of that woman, sometimes the order we impose upon consciousness breaks down, and consciousness is revealed to us as 'he monstrous spontaneity that it is. As a philosophical exercise, Husserl had suspended all beliefs and all "normality" in the epoche, but Sartre discovered that an epoche can break in on us when we least expect it, not as a philosophical exercise but as a crisis of consciousness, as when we look into a chasm and suddenly feel the urge to throw ourselves in. This crisis of consciousness is what happens to Roquentin, the "hero" of Sartre's novel Nausea, as he sits on a park bench looking at the knotted roots of a chestnut tree. Suddenly, all the old assumptions break down, and he sees the tree not as a tree but as a "black, knotty, raw, doughy, melted, soft, monstrous, naked, obscene, frightening lump of existence." Suddenly, the tree's Being has presented itself to him. Roquentin discovers that tree's Being, has it reveals itself in the crisis of consciousness, is pure superfluity, pure excess.

41 The rationalists Spinoza and Leibniz were badly mistaken. Not only is Being not necessary, but it also is absurd. Far from there existing a "sufficient reason" for the being of Being, there is no reason for it to exist at all. So the Sartrean existentialist finds his or her own existence as a superfluity in an absurd world. Yet human beings do exist. They have been thrown Into a meaningless world without their permission. What Is the relation between human beings and the world? The most significant form of this relationship is that of "the question" By questioning the world, I reveal a nothingness in Being When I seek Pierre in a cafe and discover that Pierre is not there, I reveal a nothingness In reality. (Pierre's absence is real.) In the same way, I discover that a nothingness separates me from myself. There is a nothingness between me and my past (I am not who I was) and between me and my future (the person I will be is not who I am). This realization again makes me aware that "I await myself In the future. Anguish is the fear of not finding myself there, of no longer even wishing to be there! This anguish stems from my discovery that my self is not a stable, solid entity that lasts through time; rather, it is a creation that I must make and remake from moment to moment. Not only must I create myself, but I must also create my world. I do s o by bestowing values on the world. According to the pre-Sartrean view of freedom, values preexist my freedom. I am placed between these values, and my freedom consists in my ability to choose between these preexisting values. According to the Sartrean view, through freedom, I bestow value on the world by choosing aspects of it. freedom preexists values. Life has no meaning or value except that which I give to it. Ultimately, my choice of values cannot be justified because there are no eternal (Platonic) values, no stone tablets, no Scriptures to which I can appeal to justify my choices. In the final analysis, no set of values is objectively any more valuable than any other set. This discovery leads to more anguish. My freedom is anguished at being the foundation of values while being itself without foundation" Certainly my freedom is not absolute. Consciousness runs up against "facility" in existence (i.e., that which cannot be changed). If a boulder falls in my path, I cannot change the fact that it is there or that it is impenetrable. But I am free to interpret the meaning of its "thereness" for me. It may mean an obstacle to be conquered, or it may mean that my goal of reaching the mountain top is defeated, or I may Interpret it as an object of aesthetic contemplation or as a scientific specimen. "Situation" is what Sartre called the interpretation of facility, To Interpret facility is to create a world for me to Inhabit. I am always "in situation" and am always freely creating worlds. In fact, in this respect... Most people create worlds in "bad faith." That is, rather than facing up to their responsibility and freedom, people flee from them by denying them or by blaming them on others, on fate, or on "the Establishment."

42 But there can be no blaming in good faith. We cannot blame our Upbringing, our parents, our poverty (or our wealth), or the "hard times" because we alone determine the meaning that these things have for us We are always free because there are always alternative choices—the ultimate alternative is death. If I do not shoot myself, then I have chosen whatever is the alternative to death. A major complication in the experience of our freedom is that we must encounter other free beings. The unity that I have imposed on my consciousness is momentarily shattered when the Other looks at me and transforms me Into the object of his gaze. I can recover my own selfhood only by looking at him and transforming him into my object. (This Is like Hegel's master-slave relation, except that no synthesis is possible). "Hell," said : "is other people ". Sartre's philosophy ends with what many philosophers take to be a pessimism that reflects the plight of the human In the modern world. Sartre denied that he was a pessimist. Instead, he made heroes of us all. The authentic human being knows that all her acts are ultimately futile in the face of death and the absurdity of existence, yet she chooses to persevere. In God-like fashion, she creates worlds upon worlds. Like Sisyphus, she pushes her boulder dally up the steep Incline of existence, without excuse and without complaint. It is, after all, her boulder. She created it.

Structuralism and Poststructuralism. Beginning in the 1960s, Europe's fascination with phenomenology and existentialism gave way to an interest in a new movement called structuralism. This movement was in its inception a reaction against phenomenology and existentialism; nevertheless, its members kept returning to the themes raised by existential phenomenology. Saussure. Although structuralism had a major influence on philosophy, it actually began in the social sciences and found its inspiration in the turn-of-the- century work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). In his posthumously published Course of Genera/ Linguistics, agreeing with his contemporaries the pragmatists and anticipating the view of the later Wittgenstein, Saussure argued that "meanings" are neither names of fixed essences (as in rationalism) nor names of sensorial experiences (as in empiricism). Rather, the meaning of a linguistic phenomenon is a function of its location in an underlying linguistic structure. This linguistic object is not defined by some positive feature inherent to it, but rather in terms of the negative relations in which it stands to other objects in the system. (Both in terms of its sound [phonic value] and its meaning [semantic value], the word "bed" is what it is by not being "bad," "bid," "bod," or "bud.") According to Saussure, a language is a system of signs. A sign is a combination of a sound (or an audio-image) and an Idea (or concept). The former is called a "signifier," the latter a "signified." (This terminological distinction is germinal for all structuralist thinkers.) A sound can only be a sign

43 if it is related to a concept. Therefore, there must be a system of conventions that relates sounds to concepts. Saussure's linguistics studies this system. A major emphasis of Saussurean theory is on the arbitrary nature of the sign. That is to say, the relation between the signifier and the signified is a purely conventional one, not one based in nature. The sound "cat" could have denoted the idea "dog" but it just didn't turn out that way. There is no natural connection between the sound "cat" and the Ideas we have of that particular feline. There are exceptions—so-called onomatopoeia. But even these are usually more arbitrary than they seem, Dogs in California say, "Bow-Wow"; but in France they say, "Oua-Oua"; and in Germany, "Wau-Wau"; and in Italy, "Bau-Bau." There is an anti-Platonic philosophical Implication in this aspect of Saussurean theory. The sign is arbitrary at both ends. That is, there are no absolutes at either end. tooth the signifier and the signified evolve in relation to other entities within their audio-conceptual system and in relation to other such systems, which means that there are no fixed universal concepts. In that case, the Platonic ideal of absolute knowledge is a myth. So the signifier and the signified are both purely relational entities. They exist only insofar as they relate to other entities, and the relationship is mainly a negative one. Saussure said of signs, "Their most precise characteristic is being what the others are not." As Wittgenstein was to do later, Saussure drew an analogy between language and chess. The shape of the chess piece Is arbitrary. Any shape will do as long as the piece can be distinguished from other pieces with different functions. The Identity of a chess piece {or of a signifier, or of a signified, or of a sign) Is not dependent on some inherent essence that It has but is totally a function of differences within the system to which it belongs. As Saussure said, "there are only differences, without positive terms." Levi Strauss. At the end of his work, Saussure called for a new science, the general science of signs, which he named semiology, with linguistics as its model, even though linguistics would be only part of this science. In semiology, human conventions, rituals, and acts would be studied as signs (combinations of signifiers and signifieds). These behavioral signs would be demonstrated to be as arbitrary as linguistic signs and would be shown to stand in the same relationship to other parts of the behavioral system that linguistic signs do to language. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that structuralism is the science that Saussure called for, a science whose specific formulation is the creation of the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss (b. 1908). Most contemporary anthropology is concerned with the organization of specific societies. It tends to correspond to a form of anthropological functionalism in that it often explains social institutions and phenomena In terms of their utilitarian value within the culture. (E.g., any nomadic desert tribes that became dependent on swine herding would not survive. Therefore, the

44 prohibition against eating the flesh of pigs will become institutionalized in such societies. Hence "Jehovah's" prohibition against park.) Levi-Strauss rejects the functionalist interpretation of social phenomena. Many social institutions have no utility at all in and of themselves but take on meaning when related to all the other institutions within the society. Furthermore, rather than concerning himself exclusively with the organization of particular societies, Levi-Strauss looks for universal characteristics of all societies. All cultures, despite their many differences, are products of the human brain. Therefore, "there must be somewhere beneath the surface features common to all." The search for universals distinguishes Levi-Strauss from the mainstream functionalist movement In anthropology and puts him in a philosophical tradition that originated with Socrates and Plato and that is most clearly expressed in the modern period by Kant's search for synthetic a priori truths. What is new in Levi-Strauss is the claim that the human universals exist only latently at the level of structure and net; at the level of manifest fact. (Though, of course, Marx and Freud said something similar. And, Indeed, Marx and Freud, as well as Saussure, have influenced structuralism deeply.) When we look at Levi-Strauss's statement of his method, we see the impact of Saussurean linguistics on his thought because he treated cultural phenomena the way Saussure treated signifiers. 1. "Define the phenomenon under study as a relation between two or more terms, real or supposed" 2. "Construct a table of possible permutations between these terms." 3. Treat the table as the structure of necessary logical connections ("a sort of periodic chart of chemical elements"), which will demonstrate that the empirical phenomenon under study "is only one possible combination among othe's." Notice two things here. First, Levi-Strauss's method is a rationalistic method (rationalistic because its goal is the discovery of necessary logical relation, which are in fact a priori) in which empirical phenomena themselves are "demoted" and empiricism goes by the board. Second, there is offered here a kind of halfway house between freedom and determinism. There are choices, but they are severely restricted for both individuals and cultures. These choices are at the same time created and limited by the structural system of which they are a part. Levi-Strauss says, "human societies, like individual human beings . .. never create absolutely; all they do is choose certain combinations from a repertory of ideas." In The Savage Mind (La pensee sauvage, 1962), Levi-Strauss tries to demonstrate the essentially logical nature of all human thought, including that of so-called primitives. The logical foundation of all mental activity is the recognition of opposites, contrasts, and similarities. In this sense, the "savage mind" (perhaps better translated as "thinking in the raw") is as rational as any other mind. Furthermore, it demonstrates an exceptional awareness of the crude

45 sensory data of nature and an intuitive ability to detect analogous systems within the sensual vocabulary of colors, sounds, smells, and tastes. Levi-Strauss, in The Savage Mind, tries to destroy once and for all the myth ingrained in popular prejudice and supported by Levi-Strauss's anthropological predecessors that primitives are like children and think in some pre-adult manner. He accomplishes this goal with a two-edged argument. First, he demonstrates areas of typical primitive thinking that are far more sophisticated than our own. Second, he demonstrates examples of cultured thought that are in fact quite primitive. We need only consider our attitude toward such cultural icons (Jackson’ s hat, the chair in which President sits). Many people treat these articles like primitive fetishes. In summary, according to Levi-Strauss, universally valid principles of human thought hold for all peoples at all times. Historical and cultural contingencies can overlay these principles with levels of abstractions and technical obfuscations, but these contingencies never replace that which they disguise. To observe this universal logic in its purest form, we should study the "unpolluted" mind of pretechnical peoples. In such a way, we will discover the unity of the human race. Lacan. By the end of the 1970s, structuralism itself began to give way to a series of splinter groups that, opposed as they often were to one another, can all be designated by the term "poststructuralism." This "movement" is not really an outright rejection of structuralism. It is, rather, a radicalization and Intensification of some of its themes. Like structuralism, It found its home not only in philosophy but also in the social sciences, in psychoanalysis, and In literary criticism. The bridge between structuralism and poststructuralism was constructed by the French psychoanalyst Jacques lacan (1901-1981), as seen in his dense and often perversely obscure book Ecrits. Yet Lacan claimed not to be Inventing a new theory or even reinterpreting the theories of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, but simply to be reading Freud's text carefully (something he apparently thought others had failed to do). Undaunted by the fact that neurology had failed to produce the empirical evidence for psychoanalysis that Freud had anticipated, Lacan claimed to find its justification in linguistics. Psychoanalysis is, after all, "the talking cure." It is essentially about language. According to Lacan, "the unconscious is structured like a language." This epigram is an invitation to apply the insights of linguistics to the study of the human mind. There is, of course, such a thing as prelinguistlc experience. It gives the infant access to the Real, in all its Nietzschean disorder. The Real is experienced as pain and joy, but the child's access to language alienates it from the Real. Organic need (what Freud called "instinct" or Trieb) is experienced as an aboriginal lack. As organic need is translated into language, it becomes desire, and the original experience of lack is cast into the unconscious. Human existence is so hopelessly insatiable because underneath desire is a radical lack of being. But desire cannot address it directly because desire is language-bound.

46 Desire takes a metonymical course ("metonymy" refers to the displacement of meaning from one signifier to another signifier that is contiguous to the first, in terms of either meaning or sound; e.g., "He takes too much to the bottle" or any rhyme: "cat, fat, mat"); it moves from sign to tangential sign without ever being able to grasp the absolute lack that it conceals. Lacan's "desire is a metonymy" refers to this process. Desire is translated into demand, but demand is not really concerned with any particular object because no particular object can replace the forever-lost object. If we retrace the metonymical wanderings of true need (whirl i has been caught in the nets of the signifier), we find that desire, In its labyrinthine course, ends up with itself as its own object. Dei ill i desires desire. This is one meaning of Lacan's Infamous phrase, "Desire is the desire of the Other" Every desire is, finally, the to be desired by the Other, a desire to impose oneself upon the; Other. Ultimately, then, every demand is a demand for love. What have been repressed into the unconscious are not biological instincts because these have already been translated into words. It is words—signifiers— that have been consigned to the unconscious. "The unconscious [is] a chain of signifiers." In conscious language and thought, the emphasis is on the objectivity of the signified (i.e., the objectivity of meaning). This emphasis disguises the creativity of the signifier (the word). It obscures and even denies the fact that the signifier can slide easily past its normal frontiers to reveal amazing new relations between itself and its possible signifieds. Unconscious language and thought know this truth, but the Institutional strictures of conscious thought and language ("the discourse of reason" or Logos) ignore this scandalous wisdom. Conscious language uses conventional signs associated with fixed meanings. It must do so; otherwise we wouldn't understand each other. But the unconscious is freed from the necessity of public understanding. It can play with the signifier without regard for its real meaning. It can produce its own private "meanings." However, there is a bridge between consciousness and the unconscious. That bridge is poetry. Poetic language is close to a form of unconscious language. It constitutes a kind of intermediary level between conscious and unconscious discourse. ("…the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain thrilled me—filled me with terrors never felt before.") The poet hovers somewhere between the expressly public and the intensely private. According to Lacan, the difference between the patient and the poet is that the former's poetic play with the relationships among signifiers is strictly private. The psychotic who feared birds because he knew that, in French slang, police officers on bicycles are referred to as "swallows," lives in a purely private poetic world. He does so because of an Incommunicable personal experience that he has suffered, an experience that can be traced in the unconscious by following the network of signifiers in which his mind is enmeshed. What Lacan called the Imaginary designates the world of the Infant [and the world of some psychoses), a world In which the subject is lost in its own

47 imagery, In Its own fantasy. The "images" of the Imaginary are representations of lived experience before that experience Is alienated Into language. We deliver ourselves from the entrapment of the imaginary by entering into the fullness of language, which Is to say, by entering Into the Symbolic. By naming a thing, the subject distances herself from It. When she names it, she denies that she is it. Access to the Symbolic fixates the mind and rescues it from the undifferentiated flux of the Imaginary. It mediates between self and self, between self and thing. If there were, no possibility of "registering oneself in the Symbolic," there would be no possibility, of individuality because individuality requires differentiation. However, when the subject gains access to the Symbolic, that individual enters into a preestablished system with its own rules and structures. The self is assimilated into a network of relations in v the self is always an effect and never a cause. The subject becomes fashioned by the structure of language. The logic of the relations between signs replaces the lived experience of the Real. The subject becomes a prisoner of the autonomous order of signs. As in the later Heidegger, it is not the subject but the language that speaks. Derrida. Another important theorist in the Continental poststructuralist movement (and one who came to teach philosophy in southern Callifornia) is the French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) well at least he was trained in philosophy, but one of the hallmarks of his view is the demotion of philosophy from the privileged status it has always claimed for itself as arbiter of Reason. Traditional philosophy, which Derrida derides as logocentrism, has devalued other forms of writing, especially poetic, metaphorical, and literary writing, as being further from the Truth than is philosophical discourse. Philosophy only grudgingly uses language to express its insights into meaning and reality. Yet, according to Derrida, philosophical discourse suffers from the same vicissitudes as every other form of speech and writing, and every attempt even to say what one means by "meaning" and "reality" must necessarily self-destruct. So Derrida willingly plays twentieth-century Sophist to would-be twentieth-century Platos. His version of relativism derives from a radicalization of Saussure's linguistics. If, as Saussure had argued, every sign is what it is by not being the others, then every sign involves every other sign. Therefore, there is never any "meaning" fully present; all her, all meaning is infinitely deferred (Derrida recognize that this conclusion is true of his own meaning as well—that his discourse is parasitical on the discourse that he criticizes—but he accepts this paradox, playfully, albeit a little too playfully for le of his critics.) Every presence of meaning or of being (because "being" can only present itself in the context of "meaning") is an absence, and every absence is a presence. Derrida designates this fact of "surplus meaning" as " difference," wittingly misspelling the French word difference, punning on the fact that the French verb differer means both "to differ" and "to defer." In fact, punning le very much to the point here. Derrida's Idea can be partially understood by thinking of how almost all words have multiple meanings. "Dog" for instance, according to the Random house Dictionary, can

48 be correctly used to distinguish between domestic canines, on the one hand, and wolves, jackals, and foxes the other or it can Include all these animals. It can designate the . male canine, as opposed to the bitch, or can Include both. It can also refer to "any of various animals resembling a dog." It can designate "a despicable man or youth," an "ugly, boring, or crude girl or woman" or anybody in general, as in "a gay dog," can refer to feet, or to "something worthless or of extremely poor quality." It's also the name of "any of various mechanical devices for gripping or holding something," or it is a sausage (hot dog), or the object of ruin (to go to the dogs), or of unhappiness (a dog's life), or as a verb, it can mean to track with hostile intent, or to put on airs, and so on and so on. If Derrida is right, the word "dog" cannot help but carry with it some, or most, of these meanings in any of its uses. Every meaning is, to use Freud's language, "over-determined" (overloaded with significance). If we say, "but the context determines the meaning" we forget that the meaning also determines the context. Because of this constant excess and slippage of meaning, every text, philosophical or otherwise, ends up defeating the first principles of its own logic, as Derrida tries to demonstrate: The key philosophical dichotomies collapse in upon themselves, for example, reality-appearance, being- nothingness, knowledge-ignorance, certainty-doubt, theism-atheism, noumenon- phenomenon, fact-value, reason-unreason, waking-dreaming. Or, to use Derrida's language, they "deconstruct" themselves. (His form of analysis is known as deconstruction.) According to Derrida, the fact that all texts self- destruct is really a fact about language, hence about human thought. Yet every attempt to escape from "the prison-house of language" is an avenue leading back to it. And because, as Heidegger and Lacan pointed out, language creates the self (and not the other way around, as was traditionally supposed), the self itself is decentered and demoted under Derrida's deconstructive gaze. There are other important figures in the poststructuralist philosophical movement, such as Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari in France and Richard Rorty in America. Poststructuralism, associated with the larger cultural movement, postmodernism, has lost some of its impetus in the last twenty years.

3. CONSCIOUSNESS: PHILOSOPHICAL AND MEDICAL PERSPECTIVES

Explaining the nature of consciousness is one of the most important and perplexing areas of philosophy, but the concept is notoriously ambiguous. The abstract noun “consciousness” is not frequently used by itself in the contemporary literature, but is originally derived from the Latin con (with) and scire (to know). Perhaps the most commonly used contemporary notion of a conscious mental state is captured by Thomas Nagel’s famous “what it is like” sense (Nagel 1974). When I am in a conscious mental state, there is something it

49 is like for me to be in that state from the subjective or first-person point of view. But how are we to understand this? For instance, how is the conscious mental state related to the body? Can consciousness be explained in terms of brain activity? What makes a mental state be a conscious mental state? The problem of consciousness is arguably the most central issue in current philosophy of mind and is also importantly related to major traditional topics in metaphysics, such as the possibility of immortality and the belief in free will. The two broad, traditional and competing theories of mind are dualism and materialism (or physicalism). While there are many versions of each, the former generally holds that the conscious mind or a conscious mental state is non-physical in some sense, whereas the latter holds that, to put it crudely, the mind is the brain, or is caused by neural activity. It is against this general backdrop that many answers to the above questions are formulated and developed. There are also many familiar objections to both materialism and dualism. For example, it is often said that materialism cannot truly explain just how or why some brain states are conscious, and that there is an important “explanatory gap” between mind and matter. On the other hand, dualism faces the problem of explaining how a non-physical substance or mental state can causally interact with the physical body. Some philosophers attempt to explain consciousness directly in neurophysiological or physical terms, while others offer cognitive theories of consciousness whereby conscious mental states are reduced to some kind of representational relation between mental states and the world. There are a number of such representational theories of consciousness currently on the market, including higher-order theories which hold that what makes a mental state conscious is that the subject is aware of it in some sense. We will look trough the history on the understanding the topic of consciousness with theory of Psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud and concept of Carl Gustav Jung. Sigmund Freud (1856 -1939), physiologist, medical doctor, psychologist and father of psychoanalysis, was an influential thinker of the twentieth century. His main works: The Interpretation of Dreams; The Psychopathology of Everyday Life; Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. He is pioneer in the exploration of the mind and its motivating forces. Freud practiced medicine in Vienna, Austria, in the latter half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He was a neurologist by formal training. He encountered many patients who complained of ailments, but upon thorough examination, had nothing physically wrong with them. Freud deduced that their conditions were psychosomatic in nature. In other words, they were caused by a mental condition or disorder. If he got to the root of what was really bothering them, the physical manifestation of their psychic distress would alleviate. This was done through hypnosis, or sometimes by simply talking about it. Thus, psychoanalysis was born, the most influential psychological school of the twentieth century.

50 Freud was intrigued by the concept of the unconscious. He used the popular iceberg analogy to explain the workings of the mind. Our consciousness was a mere tip of the iceberg, and the unconscious was looming below the surface of our waking hours, a formidable force that was directing our thoughts and our actions in ways in which we were completely unaware. Why does a woman constantly sabotage relationships? Why does a hack writer lay fallow with writer's block as his deadline fast approaches? Why does a man get laryngitis the night before he must deliver a speech to a large audience? Why do people do things that seemingly make no sense and create unnecessary problems for themselves? Freud posited that this was the unconscious at work. The unconscious forces that clandestinely drive us are largely sexual and aggressive in nature, according to Freud. They are thoughts and impulses that are best kept under wraps. But the unconscious must find expression in some form. Just as matter is neither created nor destroyed, buried emotions do not go away. They lay dormant, and if not owned and faced, they will surface uncommented with, at best, embarrassing results. They must find expression in a socially acceptable form in order for the individual to stay psychologically fit. Two of the techniques of Freudian psychoanalysis are the interpretation of dreams and free association. Even while sleeping, the mind is busily processing data. Dreams are the mind's method of dealing with unresolved issues and baggage. Dreams speak to us in symbols, some obvious, others obscure. According to Freud, dreams are like one act plays and surreal videos that give us clues to what is really on our minds. The patient discusses his dreams with the doctor, who tries to interpret what the dream is really revealing. Freud once said, "Every dream is a wish," which means most of us have some very bizarre wishes indeed. Via free association, the psychiatrist also tries to unlock the mysteries of the unconscious. The patient reclines on a couch and chatters away about whatever comes to mind: memories, fantasies, issues of the day, resentments. Anything and everything is grist for the analyst's mill, who tries to find rhyme and reason amid the patient's rambling. The Oedipus Complex. Freud also came up with the infamous theory of the Oedipus Complex. Oedipus was a character in a play by the Greek playwright Sophocles. It tells the story of Oedipus, a king who, through a series of coincidences, happens to murder his father and then marry his mother. Upon discovering the truth, the horrified Oedipus gouges out his own eyes in penance. Freud felt that every young man goes through his internal Oedipus Complex, a rivalry with the father for the attentions of the mother. He suggests that young boys unconsciously want to get the father out of the picture and possess the mother, to put it politely. They are in a maelstrom of love and hate, torn with jealousy, desire, confusion, and rage. Healthy young men outgrow the Oedipus Complex, but pity the poor souls who not. They are walking wounded, and their dysfunction will continue to hound and cripple them unless they seek treatment.

51 Freud, a product of nineteenth century Europe, believed that the Oedipus Complex was a universal phenomenon. Other researchers believe that this is not an archetypal condition that spans all cultures. Freud assumed girls had a corresponding love-hate relationship with their mothers. He didn't assign it with its own name, but the distaff version was later called the Electro. Complex, named after a character from Greek drama who murdered her mother. The Personality. Freud divided the personality into three components:  The Ego is the part of a person that he or she is most aware of and that the rest of the world sees. It is the conscious, rational part of the personality.  The Id: The Id remains largely unconscious. It is the sensual, primal side of ourselves, pure instinct and libido. When the Id is allowed to run rampant, all manner of havoc ensues.  The Superego is the "conscience." It contains the ethics and values that have been instilled by parents and society. The Stages of Development. Freud also categorizes the stages of psychosexual development:  The Oral Stage is from birth to eighteen months. During this stage, the baby discovers the world via oral sensations.  The Anal Stage, from eighteen to thirty-six months, coincides with the toilet training period. Adults who get psychologically stuck in this stage are either fastidious and fussy or a total slob.  The Phallic Stage lasts from three to six years. Children become fascinated with their genitals, and the Oedipus Complex kicks in. Sexual feelings are suppressed in the Latency Stage, according to Freud. It lasts from age six to puberty. It is the period for boys when girls are "icky" and vice versa. The final stage is the Genital Stage, which starts at puberty and continues throughout life. The normal person begins what will hopefully be a happy and gratifying sexual life. Freudian psychoanalysis became enormously popular in medical and scientific circles, and Freud found himself a mentor with many protégés. As is always the case, the pupil rebels against his teacher, and these men of science and medicine adapted and built upon Freud's work. They all embraced the belief in the major role the unconscious plays, but many disagreed with Freud's emphasis on sex. Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) is the most famous follower of Sigmund Freud. Jung used Freud's psychoanalytic techniques in his medical practice, and both men agreed on the significant role played by the unconscious. Freud was fond of Jung and began to see him as his heir apparent, the successor who would carry on the Freudian school of thought. Eventually Jung and Freud had an acrimonious split about the nature of the unconscious. Jung veered away from the emphasis of sexual forces being the driving factors that could explain every action and motivation. Not thinking and acting as objective men of science, each felt betrayed, and the split led not only

52 to the end of a friendship and professional rapport, but it was instrumental in bringing about Jung's being shunned as a pariah by his fellows. Jung took a radical sabbatical wherein he indulged in the unheard of practice of self-analysis. He chronicled this in his memoir Memories, Dreams, Reflections and called it a "confrontation with the unconscious." Jungian theories and the Jungian school of thought were the result of this inward journey and his ideas are a major contribution to psychology, transcending it to embrace the worlds of mythology folklore, astrology, Eastern spirituality, and alchemy. The Collective Unconsious. While Freud was fond of the iceberg analogy to explain the unconscious (the unconscious part of our mind and personality being the 90 percent of the glacier that is below the surface), Jung made the comparison of a cork gently bobbing on a vast ocean. The cork is our conscious mind, and the ocean is the unconscious. The cork is tossed about at the whim of the cruel sea unless we get a handle of the nature of the true Self (of which we are only dimly aware, if at all) via the psychotherapeutic process he called analytical psychology. Jung's most famous theory is that of the collective unconscious, a shared memory of symbols, imagery, and memories that he called archetypes. These harkens back to the dawn of human consciousness and are common in all cultures and civilizations. Gender Bending. Jung also proposed that within every man there is an inner woman, and within every woman there is an inner man—a feminine and masculine energy, actually, which he labeled the anima (inner woman) and animus (inner man). He felt that you had to embrace that side of your self and own it in order to have optimum mental health. If the anima or animus was too powerful or too passive, you were prone to psychological problems. This is similar to Plato's notion on love that proposes that humans were once a large androgynous bloodlike creature embodying both genders. These creatures were split by the gods into men and women. And that is why each seeks out their counterpart to find balance and the other half of them that was long lost. Jung believed that this struggle goes on within each person whether we know it or not. This theory is often criticized these days, and Jung is accused of some politically incorrect gender stereotyping. He suggested a man with a dominant anima was an overemotional whiner, and the woman with a powerful animus was overbearingly bossy and obnoxious. And the cliché of a man trying to embrace his feminine side has become fodder for standup comics and sitcom writers. The Shadow. Jung has his own variation on Freud's theory of the Ego, Superego, and Id. Like Freud, Jung's definition of ego is the conscious part of the mind. The ego is that cork bobbing on the ocean, and its goal is to seek what Jung called individuation, bringing together all the myriad elements of the human psyche into one Self. Fully individuated individuals were the model of sound psychological wholeness.

53 Jung called his equivalent of the Id and Superego combined the Shadow. The Shadow is, in simple terms, a person's dark side, the impulses and desires and traits that remain beneath the surface after years of parental and societal pressure. Jung felt people have a tendency to project those negative shadow elements on people that we dislike. Think about it: Have you ever had an immediate dislike for someone for no apparent reason? And after time, if you are honest with yourself, you realize that you saw aspects of yourself in that person. Just as you can see your own soul reflected back at you through your beloved's eyes, you can see your shadow in the obnoxious neighbor or coworker. Jung felt that the objective was to own your shadow and not try to bury it. Burying it never works. The shadow will be heard, usually when you least expect it. Everyone has aspects of himself or herself that they're not proud of. Jung believed we must own it and integrate it on the path to Wholeness. Freud and Jung are the two most well-known psychologists of the twentieth century, but they're certainly not the only ones. Here, in brief, are some of the other major players in the world of psychology. Alfred Adler (1870-1937) was another of Freud's students who learned much from the maestro, but, like many others, differed with him on the sex issue. Adler believed that feelings of inferiority rather than sexuality were the main motivating unconscious force in people. In fact, he was the guy who coined the phrase "inferiority complex." People basically felt inferior, and much of psychological energy was spent finding ways to compensate for these feelings and strive for perfection. He researched and wrote about family dynamics and the role that birth order plays in personality development. He also got people off the Freudian couch and preferred the patient and doctor to sit face to face. This created a sense of equality and made the therapist less of an imposing authority figure. The Father of American Psychology is William James (1842-1909), brother of the novelist Henry James. His two-volume Principles of Psychology was the bible for a generation of American psychologists. His approach was Functionalist, proposing that the important purpose of psychological study was to examine the functions of the conscious. This involved studying selected subjects over a lengthy period of time, which consisted of observation and tests and was called longitudinal research. James was influenced by Darwin's theory of evolution. It was James and his research that took psychology out of the philosophical realm and placed it in the laboratory. He wrote many books, one of which, The Varieties of Religious Experience, influenced the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous.

4. PHILOSOPHY OF BEING

Ontology is theory of reality or theory of being. The big questions in ontology are these:  What is real and what is merely appearance?

54  Can there be a theory that draws the distinction between real it and appearance and accounts for everything that exists, or must these distinctions always remain contextual, ad hoc, and informal? The historical framework for ontological discussions has been in terms of the fool lowing categories: Monism: the view that there is only one reality or only one kind of thing that is real. Dualism: the view that there are two forms of reality or two kinds of real things, and that neither is reducible to the other. Pluralism: the view that, despite scientific attempts to reduce all components of reality to ever more basic elements, common sense is correct to tell us that reality is composed of many different kinds of real things. Nihilism: the view that nothing is real (or sometimes, as a moral/ doctrine that nothing deserves to exist). Dualism. Descartes’ version is the most radical form of dualism, and even though it is an extreme version, its very exaggeration throws light on the problems of dualism in general. Descartes circumscribed two distinct spheres of being: the mental (mind, or as Descartes sometimes calls it, "spiritual substance') and the physical (body, or "material substance"). According to Descartes, a body is "an extended thing" (rest extended) whose characteristics are these: extension, size, shape, location, divisibility, motion, and rest. At the other extreme is mind (or soul or self), which is "a thing which thinks" (rest cog tans). Descartes asks, "What is a thing which thinks? It is a thing which doubts, understands, conceives, affirms, denies, wills, refuses, which also imagines and feels." These two "things" are completely different from each other and can exist independently of each other. Descartes says: I rightly conclude that my essence consists solely in the fact that I am a thinking thing (or a substance whose whole essence or nature is to think). And although possibly (or rather certainly, as I shall say in a moment) I possess a body with which I am very intimately conjoined, yet because, on the one side, I have a clear and distinct idea of myself inasmuch as I am only a thinking and unexpended thing, and as, on the other, I possess a distinct idea of body, inasmuch as it is only an extended and unthinking thing, it is certain that this I (that is to say, my soul by which I am what I am), is entirely and absolutely distinct from my body, and can exist without it. ("Meditation If pp. 213-214) Descartes has established that, given his definition of mind and body, they can exist without each other. But the real question is how they can exist with each other. How a no extended spiritual substance cans locate anywhere have any effect on something as different from itself as inert matter? How can the human being be some strange combination of mind and body? Descartes addressed the issue in the following way: I am not only lodged in my body as a pilot in a vessel, but... I am very closely united to it, and so to speak so Intermingled with it that I seem to

55 compose with it one whole. For if that were not the case, when my body is hurt, I, who am merely a thinking thing, should not feel pain, for I should perceive this wound by understanding only, just as the sailor perceives by sight when something is damaged in his vessel. As Descartes says, our consciousness and our body are "so intermingled" as to "compose . . . one whole." On his account, how is this blew? Here is what Descartes has to say about this problem when he addresses it specifically: I had clearly ascertained that the part of the body in which the soul exercises its functions immediately is in nowise the heart, nor the whole of the brain, but merely the most inward of all its parts, to wit, a certain very small gland which is situated in the middle of its substance and so suspended above the duct whereby the animal spirits in its cavities have communication with e in the posterior, that the slightest movements which take place in it may alter very greatly the course of these spirits; and reciprocally that the smallest changes which occur in the course of the spirits may do much to change the movements of this gland. Descartes has selected what is now called the pineal gland age the locus of interaction between body and soul. Perhaps his logic was this: that gland doesn't seem to do anything else—probably it serves this function. But the real problem with selecting the pineal gland as the place where mind and body meet is that in doing so, Descartes has located mind, and as you will recall, "location" is a characteristic of body, not of mind. If Descartes locates the mind anywhere, he thereby transforms it into body, and then he becomes a materialist. This conclusion, of course, would be exactly the opposite of the one Descartes set out to prove, and his whole ontology seems to unravel right here. At this point, Descartes conveniently died of the common cold and left the paradox, to be sorted out by later generations. Materialistic Monism. Here is several doctrines: behaviorism, the mind- brain identity theory, eliminative materialism and functionalism. Behaviorism. Though this doctrine is primarily promulgated by psychologists, it has philosophical Import and philosophical disciples. It is the creature of the American psychologist JOHN WATSON (1578—1958). The several variations of behaviorism exist: hard behaviorism, soft behaviorism, and logical behaviorism. Hard behaviorism is the view that there are no such things as minds or mental events, mental states, or mental processes. There are only bodies in motion (and these motions are "behaviors"). From a commonsense point of view, it is difficult to accept the claim that the sentence "Mary is in pain" is either always false or always meaningless, or that the word "pain" merely designates a grouping of various behaviors (grimacing, groaning, grasping the "painful" limb, etc.). Soft behaviorism avoids some of the problems faced by hard behaviorism. It is the view that there may be minds and mental events, states, and processes but that methodologically, scientists can provide adequate explanations and

56 predictions of activity in general, human or otherwise, without ever referring to anything mental. What both versions of behaviorism assert is something like this: all statements about human activity, including statements about people's so-called mental life, can be translated Into statements about observable "behaviors" or, If not, can be shown to be either false or nonsense. So if I say, "Mary thinks it's going to rain," I should be able to show that making this statement is really shorthand for a whole bunch of other assertions. Behaviorism has some plausibility in a certain sense, we are all behaviorists vis-à-vis other people. Whatever you know about anybody, including your best friends, you know by observing their behavior. The view called logical behaviorism is an important philosophical theory. In one sense, however, perhaps a treatment of it doesn't belong precisely at this point of our discussion, because logical behaviorists are not necessarily materialists—some are and some aren't. We will inspect the version of logical behaviorism set forth by GILBERT RYLE (1900-1976), the British ordinary language philosopher. In his book The Concept of Mind he defined a category mistake. A category mistake is the mistake of taking a term or phrase that belongs in one logical or grammatical category and erroneously placing it in another category and then drawing absurd conclusions from that miscategorization. In fact, the whole of Lewis Carroll's books Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass is great repositories of category- mistakes. Consider the discussion between Alice and the White King. The King is concerned about two messengers he is awaiting and says to Alice: «Just look along the road, and tell me if you can see either of them.» «I see nobody on the road,» said Alice. «I only wish I had such eyes,» the King remarked in a fretful tone. «To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance too! Why, it's as much as I can do to see real people, by this light!» The source of the joke here is obvious. The sentences «I see somebody» and «I see nobody» look similar. Grammatically, they each have a subject, a verb, and an object. But the category-mistake is that of believing that therefore the terms «somebody» and «nobody» are both names of existing entities. Mind –Brain Identity Theory. The version of materialism referred to as the mind-brain identity theory does not deny the existence of mental events (as does hard behaviorism) or claim that mental terminology is really a reference to ways of doing things (as does logical behaviorism), father, as the name indicates, it claims that mental terms do name real entities but what they name are in fact neurological events. This theory has the advantage over most forms of behaviorism of not needing to deny the Cartesian and commonsensical claim that mental states exist that are experienced as essentially private. J. J. C. SMART wrote “sensations are nothing over and above brain processes.”

57 He is trying to establish that there is nothing incoherent in the idea (as its critics claim). Smart thinks that the forthcoming discovery that mental states and processes are just brain states and processes will be very much like the earlier discoveries that:  Lightning is an electrical discharge from cloud to cloud or cloud to surface.

 "Hater is H2O.  The morning star is the evening star. It is important to see that Smart is not claiming that the terms on the left side of the verb "is" mean the same things as the terms on the right side. So Start’s equation Is not just a linguistic one but a scientific one. It can be proved not by looking at words but by looking at facts. Early on, a number of philosophers (including Jerome Shaffer, Norman Malcolm, and Richard Taylor) registered objections to the identity theory's claim to be scientific by asking exactly what facts would have to be discovered to prove the identity theory true. Keep in mind the nature of a strict identity of the type that holds between the morning star and the evening star {and between mental events and brain events, according to Smart). In terms of spatial and temporal features, everything that is true of the one side of the equation must be true of the other. If the morning star is the evening star, and if the morning star is X miles from the sun at time T1, then the evening star must also be X miles from the sun at time T1. If the evening star has a mass of Y, then the morning star must have a mass of Y If there is any difference in these characteristics, then the morning star is not the evening star. What about thoughts and brain events? Do they have the same spatial and temporal features? But here's the rub. Does it make any sense at all to attribute spatial features to thoughts? Shaffer's point is not that it is impossible to prove that thoughts have location, nor that are located may turn out to be false, but that that view is absurd. You can say all sorts of things about their size, shape, color, weight. But what sense would there be in asking whether the realization that you left your lunch at home was a triangular or tubular realization, a yellow or a gray one, a light or a heavy one? According to Shaffer, if there are things that make perfect sense to say about brain states but are nonsense when said about mental states, then mental states are not brain states, and the identity theory is false (in the same way that if there were things that made perfect sense when said about the morning star but were nonsense when said about the evening star, then the morning star could not be the evening star). In other words, Shaffer is accusing Smart of committing a category-mistake. But correlation—even strict correlation—is not Identity. Even with the most advanced technological equipment, it would be Impossible to establish that just because thoughts are always correlated with events in the brain, they are identical with those events. Therefore, even If the mlnd-braln Identity theory were true, It could never be known to be true. It could not, as the philosophers of science say, be "falsified'' That is, no evidence could possibly exist that would

58 tend to establish its truth or falsity. This fact certainly detracts from the identity theory's claim to be scientific. Eliminative Materialism. According to this version, the identity "Mental events are brain events" should no longer be thought of as being like "The morning star is the evening star" but as being more like the following: «Zeus's thunderbolts' are discharges of static electricity» «Demonical possession' is a form of hallucinatory psychosis.» «The quantity of caloric fluid' is the mean kinetic energy of molecules.» «Unicorn horns' are narwhal’s horns.» In other words, the correct formula is no longer "X = Y" father, it is "What people used to call X is now known to be Y." Richard Forty suggests that future scientific discoveries may so upstage our current ordinary way of talking about "mental phenomena" that we may someday say, "My Fibers are stimulated," instead of, "I am in pain." Rorty is not actually claiming that a sentence like "I am In pain" is false but that there might someday prove to be a better way of making this report. (By "better," he means better in terms of explanation and predictability.) In fact, Forty seems loath to say that even sentences like "Zeus's thunderbolts are lighting up the evening sky" or "Dora is possessed bydemons" are false. (This reluctance is because he apparently thinks that terms get their meaning and their truth value from being part of a theoretical or quasi-theoretical system and not from some permanent and historical thing called «meaning») It is just that we have now eliminated these language games for "better" ones. Functionalism. Functionalism attempts to develop a theory of mind that takes advantage of the insights of all three fields of study as philosophy, computer science and neurology. Jerry Fodor and Hilary Putnam, David Armstrong, David Lewis, and William Lacan are the pioneers in functionalism. According to functionalism, the mind must be thought of not as a thing (such as a Cartesian substance or a brain) but as a system. A system is an ensemble of related components with a function. This function can be described as the job that the system accomplishes—what it gets done. Or, to put it differently, it is the way that the collection of components interacts with the environment. In defining functions it is as if we were giving job descriptions. Think of a nurse or a welder. To qualify for either position you must possess certain knowledge and skills and you must be able to perform certain actions. Such requirements are also true of artifacts like knives and engines. But two different knives or two different engines can be composed of very different materials. They remain knives or engines just so long as they are able to perform their functions—to cut and to produce power, respectively. Now, what function do minds perform? According to the functionalist model, minds primarily carry out computations. The process of computation can be characterized as the manipulation of symbols in accordance with formal rules. So far, it sounds as if the functionalists are defining minds as computers,

59 and, Indeed, most of them do not hesitate to say that computers think. But it is not only humans and computers that have minds, according to functionalism. Lower animals such as jellyfish or aliens such as Martians have minds if they can carry out computations. Functionalists want to avoid what they call "human chauvinism"—the error of defining minds so that, a priori, they could be attributed bonito humans. Functionalists like to say that mental phenomena are "multiply realizable." The same function or "job description" might be realized in physical systems that are very different from each other. In fact, if it could be demonstrated that a row of tin cans, or a row of tin cans and jellyfish, could produce computations, then the functionalists would assert that that "system" had a mind. And if it could be empirically established that there exist angels or gods that can engage In computation, then the functionalist would be committed to agreeing that they too had minds. Events in the brain are material events, but thoughts and Intentions are not material events. The brain relates to its products (mental events) in the same way that a computer relates to its computations. The solution to a mathematical problem—say, the square root of nine—whether reached by a human or a computer, is not itself a material state or event. Mental events are realized in parts of brains but are not themselves Identical to parts of brains. If we speak of minds or mental capacities we are abstracting from the brains that realize them and speaking about a higher level—the actions that the brains realize. These mental events enter Into causal networks. A decision or an intention can produce something in the world, so decisions and Intentions have causal power. We do not have to choose between the language of the programmer and the language of the engineer who builds the computer. They are both right; they are talking about different levels of reality. Similarly, we do not have to choose between the language of the neurologist and the language of common sense. Ordinary language is right. There are mental events (I do intend to go to the movies tonight), and they are real (my intention will produce some action). So we can say that functionalism is a form of materialism also. All mental events are realized in material systems. Pluralism. Ontological pluralism is the view that there is a plurality of real things and that this plurality cannot be reduced either to a duality or to an oneness. A version of this view emerged during the twenty-year period after World War II at the hands of a group of British philosophers. Under the influence of Cambridge philosopher G. E. MOORE'S (1873-1958) influential paper "A Defense of Common Sense" and the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, these philosophers defended a version of naive realism according to which reality is pretty much what it seems to be. There are humans, rocks, clouds, newts, prime numbers, plans, leopards, carrots, square roots, political parties, corporations, marriages, and birthday parties (just for starters). There are also symphonies. Is it physical, is it mental, or is it a combination of a physical thing and a mental thing? (question for YOU.)

60 5. PHILOSOPHIC ANTHROPOLOGY.

Anthropology as a science is a fairly recent discipline in the scheme of world history, but ever since mankind has formed societies and cultures, there have been people observing and commenting upon their societies as well as those of their neighbours. Explorers, crusaders, and others who were boldly going where no one had gone before were regularly finding strange new worlds and new civilizations in their travels. From the ancient seafaring peoples to Marco Polo to Christopher Columbus and those that followed him to the New World, any explorer who made observations and wrote about their travels was an anthropologist of sorts. Modern anthropology is, of course, a more systematic science with a tested and trustworthy methodology that examines humanity in all its glorious diversity of cultures and beliefs. Anthropology seeks to gain an understanding of the differences in civilizations as well as discovering many surprising similarities, thus enriching our understanding of ourselves. Anthropology can be broken down into the study of three main areas: society, culture, and evolution. Society and culture are often interchangeable expressions, though in the strict sense, culture would be the interactions and behavior patterns of a more complex society. Ethnocentrism. Charles Darwin is the most famous proponent of the theory of evolution. His book, On the Origin of Species, published in 1859, proposed the theory of natural selection. British philosopher Herbert Spencer put his spin on the evolutionary theory, applying it to humanity and calling it survival of the fittest. This form of social Darwinism was often used to justify colonialism and the xenophobic European feelings of superiority. This flaw in past anthropological studies is called ethnocentrism. This is the belief that your society is better than the one you are studying. A nineteenth- century European anthropologist confronting a primitive Polynesian tribe often found them inferior to himself and the world from which he came, thus his findings were replete with cultural biases. Civilization was associated with the trappings of the Industrial Age, and it was inconceivable that these laid-back beachcombers may be on to something. Ethnocentrism was the prevailing anthropological view for many years and it justified an inflated sense of European pre-eminence and rationalized a multitude of sins. Cultural Relativism. An influential anthropologist who sought to make anthropology more respectable was Franz Boas. He believed in fieldwork, living among the civilization you were studying for an extended period of time. He also rejected the ethnocentric and racist views of many of his predecessors. He trained a whole generation of anthropologists, and his work was the basis for the practice of cultural relativism. The contemporary anthropologist, now keenly aware of the analytic was and prejudices of previous anthropologist, starves not to judge work in the

61 Amazon, but that does not make one inferior to the other. Celebrating diversity is the watchword of modern anthropology. Comparisons can certainly be made, but judgments are to be avoided. Concept of Human Being through the History. If we look through the history of development of human thought we find that human being was one of the mystery for himself. An ancient maxim tells us that the proper study of man is man. The problem of man is an eternal and at the same time the most urgent of all problems. It lies at the heart of the philosophical questions of man's place and destination in a world that is being discovered and transformed in the name of humanity, the highest of all values. The main goal of social development is the formation of human abilities and the creation of the most favourable conditions for human self-expression. Physicists are perfectly right in stressing the difficulties of research into elementary particles. But they should not resent being told that such research is child's play in comparison with the scientific comprehension of games played by children! The rules of any game are only a conventionally marked path; children "run" along this path very capriciously, violating its borders at every turn, because they possess free will and their choice cannot be predicted. Nothing in the world is more complex or more perplexing than a human being. Many sciences study people, but each of them does so from its own particular angle. Philosophy, which studies humanity in the round, relies on the achievements of other sciences and seeks the essential knowledge that unites humankind. Idealism reduces the human essence to the spiritual principle. According to Hegel, the individual realises not subjective, but objective aims; he is a part of the unity not only of the human race but of the whole universe because the essence of both the universe and man is the spirit. The essence of man comprises both the spiritual sphere, the sphere of the mind, and his bodily organisation, but it is not confined to this. Man becomes aware of himself as a part of the social whole. Not for nothing do we say that a person is alive as long as he is living for others. Human beings act in the forms determined by the whole preceding development of history. The forms of human activity are objectively embodied in all material culture, in the implements of labour, in language, concepts, in systems of social norms. A human being is a biosocial being and represents the highest level of development of all living organisms on earth, the subject of labour, of the social forms of life, communication and consciousness. If we examine human existence at the organismic level, we discover the operation of laws based on the self-regulation of processes in the organism as a stable integral system. As we move "upwards", we encounter the world of the mind, of personality. At the organismic level, the human being is part of the natural interconnection of phenomena and obeys its necessity, but at the personal level his orientation is social. From the world of biology through psychology we enter the sphere of social history.

62 In ancient philosophy man was thought of as a "small world" in the general composition of the universe, as a reflection and symbol of the universe understood as a spiritualised organism. A human being, it was thought, possessed in himself all the basic elements of the universe. In the theory of the transmigration of souls evolved by Indian philosophers the borderline between living creatures (plants, animals, man and gods) is mobile. Man tries to break out of the fetters of empirical existence with its law of karma, or what we should call "fate". According to the Vedanta, the specific principle of the human being is the atman (soul, spirit, selfhood), which in essentials may be identified with the universal spiritual principle—the Brahman. The ancient Greeks, Aristotle, for example, understood man as a social being endowed with a "reasoning soul". In Christianity the biblical notion of man as the "image and likeness of God", internally divided owing to the Fall, is combined with the theory of the unity of the divine and human natures in the personality of Christ and the consequent possibility of every individual's inner attainment of divine "grace". The Age of the Renaissance is totally inspired by the idea of human autonomy, of man's boundless creative abilities. Descartes worked on the principle, cogito, ergo sum—"I think therefore I am". Reason was regarded as the specific feature of man. Soul and body were understood dualistically. The body being regarded as a machine, similar to that of the animals, while the soul was identified with consciousness. Proceeding from this dualistic understanding of man as a being belonging to two different worlds, the world of natural necessity and that of moral freedom, Kant divided anthropology into "physiological" and "pragmatic" aspects. The first should study what nature makes of man, while the second is concerned with what he, as a freely acting being, does, can or should make of himself. Here there is a return to the conception of man as a living whole which characterised the Renaissance. Unlike that of the animals, man's bodily organisation and sense organs are less specialised, and this is an advantage. He has to form himself, by creating a culture. Thus we arrive at the idea of the historical nature of human existence. For classical German philosophy the determining factor is the notion of man as a spiritually active being creating a world of culture, as a vehicle of reason. In criticising these ideas Feuerbach achieved an anthropological reorientation of philosophy centering it on man, understood primarily as a spiritually corporeal being, as a vital interlock ing of the «I» and the «you» According to Nietzsche, man is determined by the play of vital forces and attractions and not by the reason. Kierkegaard gives priority to the act of will, in which the individual, by making a choice, "gives birth to himself", ceases to be merely a "child of nature" and becomes a conscious personality, that is to say, a spiritual being, a being that determines itself. In personalism and existentialism the problem of personality is central. A human being cannot be reduced to any essence (biological, psychological, social or spiritual). Existentialism and personalism contrast the concept of individuality (being a part of the natural and

63 social whole) to that of personality, as unique spiritual self-determination, as "existence". The point of departure of the Marxist understanding of man is the human being as the product and subject of labour activity. ". . .The essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations."

6. SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY

The problem of justice is the key issue of social philosophy. This problem is usually seen as having to do with fairness and desert (deservedness) in meeting the claims of citizens and in the distribution of goods and services. The big question here is, What is the state's legitimate role in these activities? We will look at three views concerning this issue: the communist solution, the minimal-state solution, and liberalism. Communism. The political philosophy of Karl Marx (1818-1883) was greatly influenced by his early contact with the metaphysics of G. W. F. HEGEL (1770-1331), whose theory of reality is distinctly organistic. Marx's Materialism. Marx rejected Hegel's grandiose metaphysical schema, but he too tended toward organics. Not only did he see the human race as ecologically closely related to nature but Marx also saw the individual human as ecologically related to his or her society. Society is not merely the totality of individuals; rather, it is an organic whole that in certain ways creates Individual. Therefore, lord Marx, there can be no question of individual rights that how supersede social rights. Everything that an individual does is a result of the efforts of many people, living and dead. Hence, all products are in the sense social products and belong to society. Historical societies have been unjust, according to Marx, almost from the very beginning. This unjustness is because a minority of Individuals managed to wrest power and material wealth from their communal source, thereby setting up systems of privilege and generating social institutions that would guarantee those privileges—protected at first by armed thugs called "police" or "army," eventually by social institutions and internalized guilt. Ever since the original power grab, the history of the social world has always been the history of the quest for material justice. This quest has taken on the guise of class antagonism and sometimes of class warfare, where the Interest of the majority is pitted against the interests of the privileged minority is pitted against the interests of the privileged minority. Marx's optimistic teleological conception of history tells him that the interests of the few versus the Interests of the ma lento the Many, According to Karl Marx must finally triumph. Marx's materialistic organics, based as it is on categories from economics and sociology rather than physics, is such that the socioeconomic structure of society is a very powerful determinant of the individual in society. So the problem is not simply that unjust socioeconomic structures of power create

64 unfair conditions for Individuals; rather, they create mutilated individuals. For example, Marx writes: The alienation of the worker in his object is expressed as follows in the laws of political economy: the more the worker produces the less he has to consume; the more value he creates the more worthless he becomes; the more refined his product the more crude and misshapen the worker; the more call lazed the product the more barbarous the worker; the more powerful the work the more feeble the worker; the more the work manifests intelligence the more the worker declines in intelligence and becomes a slave of nature. Labor certainly produce marvels for the rich, but it produces privation for the worker. It produces palaces, but hovels for the worker. It produces beauty, hill deformity for the worker. It replaces labor by machinery, but it casts some of the workers back into a barbarous kind of work and turns the others into machines. It produces intelligence, but also stupidity and cretinism for the workers. According to Marx's positive, optimistic conception of human nature, humans are naturally creative, productive, artistic, aesthetic beings who must express their being in their products. (Humans thus objectify their subjectivity.) Marx prefers the name Homo Faber (man the maker) over Homo sapiens (man the knower) because, for him, all knowing follows upon doing and making. So another effect of unjust socioeconomic systems is that the Individual's being is stolen from her. She does not produce as a natural outlet of her creative urge; rather, she is forced to sell her work to another person. Her work is stolen from her and becomes a part of an economic system that is hostile to her own interests. This effect is what Marx calls "alienated labor" and here is what he says about it: What constitutes the alienation of labor? First, that the work is external to the worker, that it is not part of his nature; and that, consequently, he does not fulfill himself in his work but denies himself, has a feeling of misery rather than well being, does not develop freely his mental and physical energies but is physically exhausted and mentally debased. The worker therefore feels himself at home only during his leisure time, whereas at work he feels homeless. His work is not voluntary but imposed, forced labor. It is not the satisfaction of a need, but only a meaner for satisfying other needs. Its alien character is clearly shown by the fact that as soon as there is no physical or other compulsion it is avoided like the plague. External labor, labor in which man alienates himself, is a labor of self-sacrifice, of mortification. Finally, the external character of work for the worker is shown by the fact that it is not his own work but work for someone else, that in work he does not belong to himself but to another person. Marx’s Vision of Society. So what would a just society look like for Marx? First social production must be addressed to what he calls true her than false needs. True needs derive from our real nature as social beings (e.g., the need for food, shelter, clothing, love, and education). False needs are any artificial needs of the privileged that are at the expense of the true needs of the majority, any exaggeration of true needs that are instilled in some while others

65 go without (the need for man scions, luxurious clothes, and gourmet excesses) or the instilment of economic needs in the masses whose real goal is not satisfaction but profit for the privy legged owning class. Second, the foundations of social production (natural resources, means of production, means of distribution) must not be privately owned but must be socially owned and democratically controlled. Third, social production must be such that Individual workers are not forced to enter Into streams of specialization that constrain the natural abundance of the creative urge. No one may be objectified in a specific role—become the waiter, the teacher, the janitor, the physicist, or even the neurosurgeon. Marx does not mean that no one can specialize. A person may spend years training to learn neurosurgery, but still, one does not become the neurosurgeon. In a famous passage in which Marx announces the abolition of "the division of labor" he says: In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic. Under these conditions, the motto of justice will be “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” Here we will have the recovery of true human nature, the release of the human creative potential, and for the first time, true individuality because true individuality requires "true consciousness" (recognition that the needs of the Individual and the needs of the society are Identical) and unconstrained creativity—which is really where individual differences come into play. The Minimal State. At the opposite pole from Marx's communist society (or "communalist" society) is the idea of the minimal state. This state would have the legitimate power to prevent the use of force and fraud and to punish such uses but, without the express consent of all adult citizens, could have the legitimate power to tax or confiscate property in order to perform any actions above and beyond these minimal duties. No public works or eyetie of aid to the needy would be justified. Such a minimal state has been defended in a much- read and greatly discussed book by ROBERT NOZICK (1935-2002), called Anarchy, State, and Utopia. The starting point for Natick’s defense is Locke's "state of nature" In which, as we have seen, Individuals have a natural right to "life, liberty, health, and property." Natick holds the view that only a minimal state can defend these rights without itself becoming a violator of them. The reason the minimal state is the maximum state allowed is that any more extensive state must finance its projects through taxation, and if this taxation is not consented to by some Individuals, it will violate their rights. Of course, the minimal state taxes its citizens for the protective services it offer them, and only those who pay the tax receive the benefits. According to Natick, beyond this, uncommented taxation is on a par with forced labor. It makes the government

66 part owner of you (because on the Locke a principle from which Natick’s argument proceeds, you own yourself, and your labor is an extension of yourself) and is Indistinguishable from semi slavery. Natick criticizes both socialism (of which communism is a version) and liberalism (which, like socialism, claims that fairness demands some kind of redistribution of wealth) on the grounds that they are what he calls "patterned" theories of justice rather than historical theories. That is, they Impose a certain kind of pattern on the distribution of goods (e.g., Marx's "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need") that has nothing to do with the history of the goods distributed. This distribution would be fine, says Natick, if goods fell from heaven like manna. But, in fact, most goods come to us with a history. They are already encumbered, already owned—purchased, traded, earned, or received as a gift. Those goods, or "holdings," are covered by an absolute right to them by their owners—a right who’s overriding would be unjust. This right pertains if the initial acquisition was just and if all subsequent transactions with it are just. Furthermore, people have a right to transfer holdings. I can trade or give away things I own (which means there is a right to inheritance). Finally, people have a right to demand rectification. In an anarchy (the "state of nature"), I have a right to defend myself and my property against those who would injure me, or my holdings, steal from me, or defraud me, and I have the right to punish those who do so. In a minimal state, I give up the right to punish others personally, by my own hand, but I do have the right to demand that the state perform these protective and punitive functions (though there are no other demands I can make on the state). The implication of the minimal state concept is that only an unrestricted capitalism can produce a just society and that any state that prohibits "capitalist acts between consenting adults" is a tyranny. Natick seems to recognize that one consequence of his view is that some people will amass great wealth and power while others will struggle in poverty. But he believes that this unfortunate side effect of his system is nevertheless consistent with justice. On the first page of his book, Natick says that he knows many readers will reject his conclusions, which are "so apparently callous toward the needs and sufferings of others." Throughout his argument, he does little to alleviate this concern, though he does make a gesture in its direction by subscribing to Locke's proviso that, in acquiring property, «one must leave enough for others.» Natick’s theory is essentially Utopian in the worst sense of the term: it has no practical relevance. Like the Garden of Eden before the Fall it can offer no insight into the problems of what we are to do here and now, since we are left ignorant of what principles are to inform our choice. The theory has application nowhere. Liberalism.The liberal state is pretty much what exists today in the West democraties: a large degree of free enterprise with capital and many of the natural resources in private hands but regulated by the sate in order to foster low

67 inflation and high employment. Tax –financed system social security tries to control poverty for thouse cannot work or for whom no work exist. The presupposition behind liberalism is that society is necessarily much more complex than it is seem to be either Marxian orr Nozickian utopias –that is is necessarily a cooperative enterprise and that therefore its products and wealth are partially the result of cooperation., but also that there will necessarily be competition both in producing and obtainig the goods. Any adequate theory of justice will have to balance these legitimate claims and find a formula for dismissing illegitimate claims. Rawls thinks that such a theory, once formulated, could apply to a democratic capitalist society or a democratic socialist society. In any case, society must have a public school system, must be dedicated to equality of economic opportunity, must have social security, and must define a minimum standard of living below which its citizens will not be forced to exist. Rawls's conception of justice is "justice as fairness." Besides guaranteeing that all citizens will get a reasonable share of the social goods, the doctrine of fairness consists of a set of constraints on what people may do to each other in the pursuit of those goods. On the one hand, Rawls thinks that no theory of justice can be justly forced down people's throats—the correct theory would have to be one that rational people would somehow arrive at by themselves. On the other hand, Rawls is pretty sure he knows what such a theory would look like. Justice would be whatever was chosen by rational, self-interested, unobvious people who knew that they would have to inhabit the society created by their mutual agreement but who did not know what personal characteristics they would bring to that society (i.e., they wouldn't know their race, their physical and mental abilities, their Inheritances, or their social backgrounds). Such people, Rawls says, would choose the following principles In the following order: 1. Equal and maximum liberty (political, intellectual, and religious) for each person consistent with equal liberty for others. 2. Wealth and power to be distributed equally accept where inequalities would work to the advantage of all and where there would be usual opportunity to achieve individually advantageous positions. If these principles are true, then It fool lows (unlike in Natick’s theory) that the only society that can be just is an liberal society that partially redistributes wealth and income for the benefit of its most disadvantaged members. Notice that Rawls's theory, like Plato's, begins with a political myth— a "noble lie," In Plato's myth, people are told that their memories past are really only memorize of a dream and what they believe of themselves. Similarly, Rawls’ myth establishes what he culled me "veil of ignorance," in which the facts we know about our selves are set aside (our spy ecological, physical, eelier, and racial characteristics), The myth also: we are not envious, we rationally pursue obi self-interest. If you tell Newly that his myth is only myth, of that none of it is true, he will respond that it is merely a philosophical device for use

68 as an analytic tool to demonstrate the rationality of a certain kind of society. Rawls's veil of ignorance allows the political philosopher to acknowledge the intuitive fact that some inequalities in a naturally evolving society are unjust because they are undeserved. It is unjust that some should have to suffer through life because they were born with less and that others are surrounded by excessive amounts of goods due to the mere accident of birth. The veil allows Rawls to arrive rationally at a conclusion that he intuits to be true, namely, that the society can only be just if it partially redistributes wealth for the benefit of its most disadvantaged. In short, it shows how a just society requires that we all be transformed from Hobbes Ian egoists into Kantian universalisms. The veil purports to show that if we were forced to enter into a society that we would negotiate with others, denuded of all the characteristics that were ours merely by accident of birth, we would choose the liberal society.

69 7. PHILOSOPHY OF CULTURE

Civilisation depends on culture for its development and existence and, in its turn, provides the conditions for the existence and development of culture. Historically culture precedes civilisation. Usually culture is understood as the accumulation of material and spiritual values. This is a broad and largely correct interpretation but it leaves out one main fact, and that is the human being as the maker of culture. Culture is quite often identified with works of art, with enlightenment in general. This definition is too narrow. Nor can one agree with the notion that culture embraces only the sphere of intellectual production, even if we take this sphere to include the whole of science. Such an interpretation leaves out a great deal. For example, the culture of physical labour, administration, of personal relationships, and so on. Reducing culture to the intellectual sphere results in an elitist approach depriving culture of its nationwide significance. But any person may make a contribution to culture, and not only artists, writers, or scientists. The concept of culture is an integral and all-embracing concept which includes various phenomena, ranging from the cultivated blackcurrant bush to La Gioconda, and methods of administrating the state. Culture defines everything that man does, and how he does it, in the process of self-fulfilment. Culture is the method of the self-realisation of the individual and society, the measure of the development of both. Various fields in knowledge— ethnography, archeology, history, literary criticism and so on—study the various spheres of culture. What we are interested in here is not the numerous spheres in which cultural activity of various peoples, nations, ethnic groups, social groups and individuals have manifested themselves, but the essence of culture, i. e., culture as a philosophical category. We may gain some idea of the meaning of culture by turning to the etymology of the word, which can be traced back to the Latin cultura, deriving from the word colere, meaning both to "cultivate" and to "worship". It is a curious fact that the very origin of the word culture contains the wisdom of the people's understanding of culture as the worshipful cultivation of something, particularly the land. The word "culture" was thus from the beginning related to good action. And action usually means assimilation of our world in some form or another. It may therefore be said that culture is a kind of prism, through which everything essential to us is refracted. Every nation, every level and form of civilisation, and every individual attains knowledge of the world and a mastery of its principles and laws to the extent that it masters culture. The forms of culture are a kind of mirror that reflects the essence of every enterprise, its techniques and methods, and the contribution which it makes to the development of culture itself. In this sense man himself is a phenomenon of culture, and not only of nature. If we may attempt an analogy, it may be said that culture is the opened, read and understood pages of the "book of life", pages which when assimilated by the individual become his selfhood.

70 Culture is not merely a matter of skill raised to the level of art, but also a morally sanctioned goal. Culture manifests itself in ordinary consciousness and everyday behaviour, in labour activity and the attitude that one adopts to such activity, in scientific thought and artistic creation and the vision of their results, in self-control, in one's smile and manner of laughing, in love and other intimate relationships, which the individual may elevate to unexpected heights of tenderness and spiritual beauty. The truly cultured person shows all these facets in every manifestation of his selfhood. Culture is characterised by the vital ideals of humankind, of the individual, the social group, the class and society as a whole. The more significant these ideals, the higher the level of culture. In what forms does culture exist? First of all in the form of human activity, which is generalised into certain modes or methods of its realisation, in the sign or symbolic forms of the existence of the spirit, and finally in palpable material forms, objects, in which the individual's purposeful activity finds its embodiment. As something created by human beings, culture is at the same time a necessary condition for humanity's cultural existence and development. Outside culture the individual cannot exist as a human being. As water permeates soil, culture permeates every pore of social and individual life. When studying one or another culture We usually think of it as something relatively independent. In reality, culture exists as a historically evolved system comprising its objects, its symbolism, traditions, ideals, precepts, value orientations and, finally, its way of thought and life, the integrating force, the living soul of culture. In this sense culture exists supraindividually, while at the same time remaining the profoundly personal experience of the individual. Culture is created by mankind, by the nation, the class, the social group and the individual. The objective forms in which culture exists are the fruit of the creative activity of the people as a whole, the masterpieces of geniuses and other great talents. But in themselves the objective and symbolic forms of culture have only a relatively independent character; they are lifeless without man himself and his creative activity. All the treasures of culture in their palpable material form come to life only in the hands of a person who is capable of revealing them as cultural values. In defining civilisation we stressed that it arose historically after culture and on its basis. The two form what is to a great extent a unified social formation, but their unity is internally contradictory and may in some respects become diametrically so. For example, nature accepts everything from culture but by no means everything from civilisation. A generally cultured attitude to nature presupposes the rational use of its forces without violating their natural harmony. Such forms of the spiritual life of society as science, literature and art are facts of culture. They organise and ennoble human feelings and serve as the plastic means that connects the reason and the heart in a single whole, thus eliminating the disharmony that often arises between them. The general cultural significance of science is enormous. It raises society and human beings to a higher level of spiritual development, thus increasing the power of reason. In

71 science, however, a fact of culture is, above all, what is directly or indirectly aimed at improving the higher intellectual principles in man and society. And one certainly cannot describe as culture or the making of culture any activity which is deliberately aimed at destroying the achievements of reason and of human hands. Science is a beneficial phenomenon of the mind. But how much evil it brings and may yet bring in unscrupulous hands! Civilisation is organically linked with the advance of technology. But the main thing in technological progress is, or should be, its humane orientation. It is important to know what a certain technology gives to man and what it takes away from him. The face of culture bears the imprint of humanity, and anything that is against humanity is not culture but anti-culture. For example, such highly technical sophisticated means of murder and violence as war, torture, and imprisonment, have nothing in common with culture, although they occur in civilised societies. Can the brutalities of despotic regimes be described as a phenomenon of culture? Can the means of mass annihilation be called a material reality of culture? It would be a great sacrilege to recognise such things as cultural realities, even when acknowledging the inevitability of their existence. All this is a creation of civilisation, but not of culture. This contradiction between culture and civilisation may also be found in the individual, the self. The adjective "cultured" presupposes something more than the acquisition of the ability to solve complex intellectual problems or to behave properly in society. Culture in the true sense presumes the observation of all the formal elements of socially accepted standards not as something external but as an integral part of the personality, of consciousness and even subconsciousness, of its habits. These standards then acquire a true and lofty spirituality, which is something more than obedience to certain rules. The culture of both the individual and society has various degrees of sophistication. Every educated person may at times have a good opinion of himself. He may feel that he is cultured, and even intellectual ly advanced. But true culture and intellect are something very elevated and also very profound. They imply not only a subtle, sophisticated cast of mind developed through education but also a restless conscience, a bitter sense of discomfort when one is pursued by doubts as to the truth or falsehood of a situation. They imply concern and compassion for the fate of the people. An intellectual person knows that intellect is not an aim in itself but the dedication of one's life to others, the altruistic service of truth, goodness and beauty. All this is what we mean when we say a person is cultured. And we also mean the ability and courage to take responsibility for things that may have no direct bearing on ourselves but affect other people, and not only our near ones, but the people in general, the whole of humanity. People are not born cultured; they become so through education and upbringing. Every individual learns to be cultured. The objective and symbolic forms of culture are not implanted in man, they are merely given to him as the subject for study. In order to master them, to make them his own, to incorporate them in the structure of his personality and

72 thus cultivate that personality, a person must enter into special relations with them through other people and subject himself to what is called upbringing, an active process that involves both the educator and the educated in culture making, without which the life of contemporary or any other society would be inconceivable. Upbringing or education is itself historical. At first, in the earliest stages of human society, as with small children, education was simply imitative of the elementary actions of others. But this process becomes educative inasmuch as it takes place under the control of educators. With the passage of time it becomes more and more complex. Until, finally, such forms arise as school and college education and training on scientifically evolved principles. At the same time the boundlessly rich school of life as well as self-education also play the part of educator. Without education and self-education there could be no culture, and certainly no cultural progress. It is education that relays cultural values from one generation to another and helps to multiply them. The constant accumulation of cultural values places increasingly complex demands on education as a most essential form of the creation of culture. Culture is a social phenomenon that embraces not only the past and the present, but also the future. Like everything else in life, culture is historical. The primitive horde and the tribal society and all the subsequent forms of organisation, all the stages of civilisation are characterised by their own peculiar way of life, perception of the world, and levels of consciousness. The culture of all peoples throughout history is permeated to some extent by religion. This is expressed in various rituals, forms of worship, in deities, in art, in philosophy and even in science. It is hidden in the very fabric of language—even an atheist, for example, may say several times a day "goodbye", which originally meant "God be with you". Without some fundamental knowledge of the history of religion it is impossible to understand our human biography, the biography of the human race, and to become a cultured person generally. For example, primitive society was full of animist, magic and mythological beliefs and this left its imprint on the whole system of the life, thought, emotions and interrelations of people and their relationship with nature. The ancient Orient is characterised by an urge to achieve complete union between man and nature, the extinction of the self in nirvana, understood as the highest level of the existence of energy. An intuitive integral knowledge of the world and of human nature permeates the whole of human existence and the spiritual life of human beings. This is a kind of knowledge in which philosophy, art, religion, science and social psychology are all intrinsically merged. The philosophy of the ancients was steeped in an awareness of the cosmic element and its exponents thought in terms of images which were plastic and almost geometrically integrated; and this was expressed in science, philosophy, art and everything else. The Middle Ages had a special type of culture related to the desire to achieve a personal absolute—God. Medieval culture is a culture of religious spirituality and the mortification of the flesh in the name of this

73 spirituality with its orientation on the heavenly kingdom as the highest ideal of earthly existence, to which all the spheres of the life of society are subordinate. When capitalism came into being, everybody began to claim the right of free manifestation of his creative ego. The whole mode of human existence changed. The standards of culture also changed. Everything was subjected to the judgement of human reason and everything that failed this test was rejected. Society was rife with individualism, calculation and pragmatism. Socialism has brought different ideals and standards of culture that are permeated with a profound and comprehensive humanism, as expressed in the maxim: everything for the benefit of man and everything in the name of man. The freedom of every person is seen as an indispensable condition for the freedom of all. This is the truly humane principle of life and standard of cultural development that permeates the whole world outlook of socialist society. These are very general outlines of the historical types of culture and are not intended to draw strict dividing lines between them. It should also be stressed that to this day in many parts of the world huge masses of people on our planet adhere, in varying degrees, to some kind of religious belief and this is true not only of "simple folk" but also of highly educated people. At the same time growing numbers of people are estranged from this form of culture. The striking thing is the vitality and social power of religious culture, which provides a kind of spiritual integrating principle for whole nations and also for various social groups within one or another nation. This extremely complex social and psychological phenomenon needs investigation in the context both of world history and the present day. The dominating role of certain forms in relation to others is characteristic of culture. In the Middle Ages religion clearly played the dominating role; its values were placed higher than anything else. The religious-philosophical consciousness is the dominant form of culture in the Orient. Literature and music were the prime factors in all Russian culture of the 19th century, just as, a little earlier, philosophy and music played the dominant role in Germany. The development of culture does not follow a straight ascending line. It is beset with contradictions, that can be both beneficial and harmful, and signal decline as well as achievement. The wisdom of the people, folk wisdom, for example, has amassed a great wealth of empirical discovery connected with healing. But how much has been lost or passed unnoticed or deliberately ignored through the "ignorance of the wise"? The rediscovery and rehabilitation of what is reasonable in folk culture but has been "tarnished" is also a contribution to culture, and a very important one. The contradictory nature of culture finds expression also in the fact that every culture has progressive, democratic and antidemocratic, reactionary, regressive tendencies and ele ments. This is expressed in Lenin's idea that there are two cultures in the national culture of every class-divided society. The expression "mass culture" is today extremely popular in the West. It is mostly used with a tinge of scorn, meaning something "watered down for the majority". But the concept of mass culture may also be understood positively. Socialism

74 has made culture accessible to the masses, to millions of ordinary people, who previously vegetated in a state of ignorance and illiteracy. Today the peoples who have shaken off colonial oppression are vigorously and with all their strength striving towards the heights of modern culture. What is imposed or implanted under the guise of "mass culture" in the capitalist countries has a political and ideological implication—the reinforcement of the power of the bourgeoisie. The term "mass culture" becomes negative when the masses are not raised to the level of real culture, when "culture" itself is refabricated to suit the primitive tastes of the backward sections of the population and itself declines, degenerates to a level so low as to be an affront to all real cultivation of the senses. The mass of the people with its great fund of folk wisdom is presented with stupidity in the guise of culture and the sacred majesty of true culture's historical mission is insulted in the process. If cultural progress may be defined as the growth of spirituality both in individuals and society as a whole, its regress is expressed in a lack or decline of such spirituality. And this is not compensated by material wellbeing. In the developed capitalist countries the ordinary person is sur rounded by an abundance of consumer goods, but society as a whole is in the midst of a moral crisis. Crime, drug addiction, mental sickness and even suicide are on the increase. In the bourgeois world the further progress of civilisation goes hand in hand with a decline in its spiritual values. This was pointed out and expressed long ago in a morbidly acute form by Nietzsche and Spengler. According to Nietzsche, the whole of European culture had for long been in a state of mounting torment and tension, which was carrying it to its destruction. European culture, he thought, was thrashing about, violently, convulsively like a flood seeking an outlet, with no thought of its own actions and even fearing to consider them. While acknowledging the multiplicity of local cultures, each of which was passing through its life cycle and dying, Spengler maintained that civilisation was the dusky end of culture, its ossified body. Why were two such positive concepts, expressed in such fine words, so sharply contrasted? Both thinkers, horrified by the crisis they observed in the world of capital, were painfully aware that certain destructive principles had arisen and were gaining momentum in civilisation, which both produced cultural values and put them at risk of total destruction. What Nietzsche and Spengler failed to see, however, was that the destructive principles were not inherent either in civilisation or culture, but in the character of the socio-political relations of the society they were studying. In respects politics determines the vector of the forces of both civilisation and culture. It is generally known that a disproportion very often arises between the level of civilisation, particularly its technico-economic reality, and the level of culture that has been achieved, and that this disproportion may become paradoxical. The times of the oil lamp and the wooden plough were graced with

75 brilliant achievements in art, literature and philosophy. We have only to think of the great cultures of ancient Greece and even more the ancient Orient, the age of the Renaissance, and of Russian culture, which in conditions of serfdom astonished the world. This does not mean, of course, that beneficial urges of the mind require difficult circumstances, although there is a modicum of truth in this notion. Great works of art have indeed often been created in very hard conditions, as though they required some kind of resistance, a kind of "purgatory" in order to test the strength of their all-conquering power. But this in no way suggests that the difficulties themselves give rise to greatness. Difficulties are not its "parents" but merely its stern "examiners"! By no means all nations who are known for their backwardness in the technical and economic spheres have created masterpieces of world cultural significance. Here there is a mystery which demands a solution. At one time cultures tended to be extremely self-contained, closed. In the course of their comprehensive historical development they became more open to all kinds of influences and a process of interaction of cultures took p lace. Life evolves increasingly flexible mechanisms for this interaction, which helps to raise the whole culture to a higher level. Despite their uniqueness of the subtle fabric of any given culture, whose threads go back into the distant past, the various types of culture are in principle comparable, and a dialogue of mutual understanding can, and does, take place between them. Culture in its individual and socio psychological expression is also characterised by the means with which it assimilates other cultures and its relation to them. Indifference or even hostility to the unique aroma of "alien" cultural values indicate a low level of development of one s own culture. Today one may observe a tendency towards the flowering of national cultures, one feels the great potential of ethnos. One may assume that further human progress will take place in the form of a mounting rational mutual enrichment of the cultures of West and East in the historical sense of the term. The overall unity of the general principles of human thought does not preclude a certain historical specific in the philosophies and other forms of culture. The predominantly analytical Western mind, which dissects everything into parts with its scientific scalpel, will be enriched by the intuitive integrating spirit of the Orient, by borrowing its subtle truths and perceptions and in its turn enriching them. World culture can only gain from this beneficial and probably indispensable synthesis which can be achieved without dimming the unique and rich colours of the local cultures.

76 8. PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE

The philosophical treatment of love transcends a variety of sub-disciplines including epistimology, metaphysics, religion, human nature, politics and ethics. Often statements or arguments concerning love, its nature and role in human life for example, connect to one or all the central theories of philosophy, and is often compared with, or examined in the context of, the philosophies of sex and gender. The task of a philosophy of love is to present the appropriate issues in a cogent manner, drawing on relevant theories of human nature, desire, ethics, and so on. The Nature of Love: Eros, Philia, and Agape. The philosophical discussion regarding love logically begins with questions concerning its nature. This implies that love has a “nature,” a proposition that some may oppose arguing that love is conceptually irrational, in the sense that it cannot be described in rational or meaningful propositions. For such critics, who are presenting a metaphysical and epistemological argument, love may be an ejection of emotions that defy rational examination; on the other hand, some languages, such as Papuan do not even admit the concept, which negates the possibility of a philosophical examination. In English, the word “love,” which is derived from Germanic forms of the Sanskrit lubh (desire), is broadly defined and hence imprecise, which generates first order problems of definition and meaning, which are resolved to some extent by the reference to the Greek terms, eros, philia, and agape. Eros. The term eros (Greek erasthai) is used to refer to that part of love constituting a passionate, intense desire for something, it is often referred to as a sexual desire, hence the modern notion of “erotic” (Greek erotikos). In Plato's writings however, eros is held to be a common desire that seeks transcendental beauty-the particular beauty of an individual reminds us of true beauty that exists in the world of Forms or Ideas (Phaedrus 249E: “he who loves the beautiful is called a lover because he partakes of it.” Trans. Jowett). The Platonic-Socratic position maintains that the love we generate for beauty on this earth can never be truly satisfied until we die; but in the meantime we should aspire beyond the particular stimulating image in front of us to the contemplation of beauty in itself. The implication of the Platonic theory of eros is that ideal beauty, which is reflected in the particular images of beauty we find, becomes interchangeable across people and things, ideas, and art: to love is to love the Platonic form of beauty-not a particular individual, but the element they posses of true (Ideal) beauty. Reciprocity is not necessary to Plato’s view of love, for the desire is for the object (of Beauty), than for, say, the company of another and shared values and pursuits. Many in the Platonic vein of philosophy hold that love is an intrinsically higher value than appetitive or physical desire. Physical desire, they note, is held in common with the animal kingdom. Hence, it is of a lower order of reaction

77 and stimulus than a rationally induced love—that is, a love produced by rational discourse and exploration of ideas, which in turn defines the pursuit of Ideal beauty. Accordingly, the physical love of an object, an idea, or a person in itself is not be a proper form of love, love being a reflection of that part of the object, idea, or person, that partakes in Ideal beauty. Philia. In contrast to the desiring and passionate yearning of eros, philia entails a fondness and appreciation of the other. For the Greeks, the term philia incorporated not just friendship, but also loyalties to family and polis-one’s political community, job, or discipline. Philia for another may be motivated, as Aristotle explains in the Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII, for the agent’s sake or for the other’s own sake. The motivational distinctions are derived from love for another because the friendship is wholly useful as in the case of business contacts, or because their character and values are pleasing (with the implication that if those attractive habits change, so too does the friendship), or for the other in who they are in themselves, regardless of one’s interests in the matter. The English concept of friendship roughly captures Aristotle’s notion of philia, as he writes: “things that cause friendship are: doing kindnesses; doing them unasked; and not proclaiming the fact when they are done” (Rhetoric, II. 4, trans. Rhys Roberts). Aristotle elaborates on the kinds of things we seek in proper friendship, suggesting that the proper basis for philia is objective: those who share our dispositions, who bear no grudges, who seek what we do, who are temperate, and just, who admire us appropriately as we admire them, and so on. Philia could not emanate from those who are quarrelsome, gossips, aggressive in manner and personality, who are unjust, and so on. The best characters, it follows, may produce the best kind of friendship and hence love: indeed, how to be a good character worthy of philia is the theme of the Nicomachaen Ethics. The most rational man is he who would be the happiest, and he, therefore, who is capable of the best form of friendship, which between two “who are good, and alike in virtue” is rare (NE, VIII.4 trans. Ross). We can surmise that love between such equals-Aristotle’s rational and happy men-would be perfect, with circles of diminishing quality for those who are morally removed from the best. He characterizes such love as “a sort of excess of feeling”. (NE, VIII.6) Friendships of a lesser quality may also be based on the pleasure or utility that is derived from another’s company. A business friendship is based on utility–on mutual reciprocity of similar business interests; once the business is at an end, then the friendship dissolves. Similarly with those friendships based on the pleasure that is derived from the other’s company, which is not a pleasure enjoyed for who the other person is in himself, but in the flow of pleasure from his actions or humour. The first condition for the highest form Aristotelian love is that a man loves himself. Without an egoistic basis, he cannot extend sympathy and affection to others (NE, IX.8). Such self-love is not hedonistic, or glorified, depending on the pursuit of immediate pleasures or the adulation of the crowd, it is instead a reflection of his pursuit of the noble and virtuous, which culminate

78 in the pursuit of the reflective life. Friendship with others is required “since his purpose is to contemplate worthy actions… to live pleasantly… sharing in discussion and thought” as is appropriate for the virtuous man and his friend (NE, IX.9). The morally virtuous man deserves in turn the love of those below him; he is not obliged to give an equal love in return, which implies that the Aristotelian concept of love is elitist or perfectionist: “In all friendships implying inequality the love also should be proportional, i.e. the better should be more loved than he loves.” (NE, VIII, 7,). Reciprocity, although not necessarily equal, is a condition of Aristotelian love and friendship, although parental love can involve a one-sided fondness. Agape. Agape refers to the paternal love of God for man and for man for God but is extended to include a brotherly love for all humanity. (The Hebrew ahev has a slightly wider semantic range than agape). Agape arguably draws on elements from both eros and philia in that it seeks a perfect kind of love that is at once a fondness, a transcending of the particular, and a passion without the necessity of reciprocity. The concept is expanded on in the Judaic-Christian tradition of loving God: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might” (Deuteronomy 6:5) and loving “thy neighbour as thyself” (Leviticus 19:18). The love of God requires absolute devotion that is reminiscent of Plato’s love of Beauty (and Christian translators of Plato such as St. Augustine employed the connections), which involves an erotic passion, awe, and desire that transcends earthly cares and obstacles. Aquinas, on the other hand, picked up on the Aristotelian theories of friendship and love to proclaim God as the most rational being and hence the most deserving of one’s love, respect, and considerations. The universalist command to “love thy neighbor as thyself” refers the subject to those surrounding him, whom he should love unilaterally if necessary. The command employs the logic of mutual reciprocity, and hints at an Aristotelian basis that the subject should love himself in some appropriate manner: for awkward results would ensue if he loved himself in a particularly inappropriate, perverted manner! (Philosophers can debate the nature of “self- love” implied in this-from the Aristotelian notion that self-love is necessary for any kind of inter-personal love, to the condemnation of egoism and the impoverished examples that pride and self-glorification from which to base one’s love of another. St. Augustine relinquishes the debate–he claims that no command is needed for a man to love himself (De bono viduitatis, xxi.) Analogous to the logic of “it is better to give than to receive”, the universalism of agape requires an initial invocation from someone: in a reversal of the Aristotelian position, the onus for the Christian is on the morally superior to extend love to others. Nonetheless, the command also entails an egalitarian love- hence the Christian code to “love thy enemies” (Matthew 5:44-45). Such love transcends any perfectionist or aristocratic notions that some are (or should be) more loveable than others. Agape finds echoes in the ethics of Kant and

79 Kierkergaard, who assert the moral importance of giving impartial respect or love to another person qua human being in the abstract. However, loving one’s neighbor impartially (James 2:9) invokes serious ethical concerns, especially if the neighbor ostensibly does not warrant love. Debate thus begins on what elements of a neighbor’s conduct should be included in agape, and which should be excluded. Early Christians asked whether the principle applied only to disciples of Christ or to all. The impartialists won the debate asserting that the neighbor’s humanity provides the primary condition of being loved; nonetheless his actions may require a second order of criticisms, for the logic of brotherly love implies that it is a moral improvement on brotherly hate. For metaphysical dualist, loving the soul rather than the neighbor’s body or deeds provides a useful escape clause-or in turn the justification for penalizing the other’s body for sin and moral transgressions, while releasing the proper object of love-the soul-from its secular torments. For Christian pacifists, “turning the other cheek” to aggression and violence implies a hope that the aggressor will eventually learn to comprehend the higher values of peace, forgiveness, and a love for humanity. The universalism of agape runs counter to the partialism of Aristotle and poses a variety of ethical implications. Aquinas admits a partialism in love towards those we are related while maintaining that we should be charitable to all, whereas others such as Kierkegaard insist on impartiality. Recently, Hugh LaFallotte (1991) has noted that to love those one is partial towards is not necessarily a negation of the impartiality principle, for impartialism could admit loving those closer to one as an impartial principle, and, employing Aristotle’s conception of self-love, iterates that loving others requires an intimacy that can only be gained from being partially intimate. Others would claim that the concept of universal love, of loving all equally, is not only impracticable, but logically empty-Aristotle, for example, argues: “One cannot be a friend to many people in the sense of having friendship of the perfect type with them, just as one cannot be in love with many people at once (for love is a sort of excess of feeling, and it is the nature of such only to be felt towards one person)” (NE, VIII.6). The Nature of Love: Further Conceptual Considerations Presuming love has a nature, it should be, to some extent at least, describable within the concepts of language. But what is meant by an appropriate language of description may be as philosophically beguiling as love itself. Such considerations invoke the philosophy of language, of the relevance and appropriateness of meanings, but they also provide the analysis of “love” with its first principles. Does it exist and if so, is it knowable, comprehensible, and describable? Love may be knowable and comprehensible to others, as understood in the phrases, “I am in love”, “I love you”, but what “love” means in these sentences may not be analyzed further: that is, the concept “love” is irreducible-an axiomatic, or self-evident, state of affairs that warrants no further intellectual intrusion, an apodictic category perhaps, that a Kantian may recognize.

80 The epistemology of love asks how we may know love, how we may understand it, whether it is possible or plausible to make statements about others or ourselves being in love (which touches on the philosophical issue of private knowledge versus public behavior). Again, the epistemology of love is intimately connected to the philosophy of language and theories of the emotions. If love is purely an emotional condition, it is plausible to argue that it remains a private phenomenon incapable of being accessed by others, except through an expression of language, and language may be a poor indicator of an emotional state both for the listener and the subject. Emotivists would hold that a statement such as “I am in love” is irreducible to other statements because it is a nonpropositional utterance, hence its veracity is beyond examination. Phenomenologists may similarly present love as a non-cognitive phenomenon. Scheler, for example, toys with Plato’s Ideal love, which is cognitive, claiming: “love itself… brings about the continuous emergence of ever-higher value in the object–just as if it were streaming out from the object of its own accord, without any exertion (even of wishing) on the part of the lover” (1954). The lover is passive before the beloved. The claim that “love” cannot be examined is different from that claiming “love” should not be subject to examination-that it should be put or left beyond the mind’s reach, out of a dutiful respect for its mysteriousness, its awesome, divine, or romantic nature. But if it is agreed that there is such a thing as “love” conceptually speaking, when people present statements concerning love, or admonitions such as “she should show more love,” then a philosophical examination seems appropriate: is it synonymous with certain patterns of behavior, of inflections in the voice or manner, or by the apparent pursuit and protection of a particular value (“Look at how he dotes upon his flowers-he must love them”)? If love does possesses “a nature” which is identifiable by some means-a personal expression, a discernible pattern of behavior, or other activity, it can still be asked whether that nature can be properly understood by humanity. Love may have a nature, yet we may not possess the proper intellectual capacity to understand it-accordingly, we may gain glimpses perhaps of its essence-as Socrates argues in The Symposium, but its true nature being forever beyond humanity’s intellectual grasp. Accordingly, love may be partially described, or hinted at, in a dialectic or analytical exposition of the concept but never understood in itself. Love may therefore become an epiphenomenal entity, generated by human action in loving, but never grasped by the mind or language. Love may be so described as a Platonic Form, belonging to the higher realm of transcendental concepts that mortals can barely conceive of in their purity, catching only glimpses of the Forms’ conceptual shadows that logic and reason unveil or disclose. Another view, again derived from Platonic philosophy, may permit love to be understood by certain people and not others. This invokes a hierarchical epistemology, that only the initiated, the experienced, the philosophical, or the

81 poetical or musical, may gain insights into its nature. On one level this admits that only the experienced can know its nature, which is putatively true of any experience, but it also may imply a social division of understanding-that only philosopher kings may know true love. On the first implication, those who do not feel or experience love are incapable (unless initiated through rite, dialectical philosophy, artistic processes, and so on) of comprehending its nature, whereas the second implication suggests (though this is not a logically necessary inference) that the non-initiated, or those incapable of understanding, feel only physical desire and not “love.” Accordingly, “love” belongs either to the higher faculties of all, understanding of which requires being educated in some manner or form, or it belongs to the higher echelons of society-to a priestly, philosophical, or artistic, poetic class. The uninitiated, the incapable, or the young and inexperienced-those who are not romantic troubadours-are doomed only to feel physical desire. This separating of love from physical desire has further implications concerning the nature of romantic love. The Nature of Love: Romantic Love. Romantic love is deemed to be of a higher metaphysical and ethical status than sexual or physical attractiveness alone. The idea of romantic love initially stems from the Platonic tradition that love is a desire for beauty-a value that transcends the particularities of the physical body. For Plato, the love of beauty culminates in the love of philosophy, the subject that pursues the highest capacity of thinking. The romantic love of knights and damsels emerged in the early medieval ages (11th Century France, fine amour) a philosophical echo of both Platonic and Aristotelian love and literally a derivative of the Roman poet, Ovid and his Ars Amatoria. Romantic love theoretically was not to be consummated, for such love was transcendental motivated by a deep respect for the lady; however, it was to be actively pursued in chivalric deeds rather than contemplated-which is in contrast to Ovid’s persistent sensual pursuit of conquests! Modern romantic love returns to Aristotle’s version of the special love two people find in each other’s virtues-one soul and two bodies, as he poetically puts it. It is deemed to be of a higher status, ethically, aesthetically, and even metaphysically than the love that behaviorists or physicalists describe. The Nature of Love: Physical, Emotional, Spiritual. Some may hold that love is physical, i.e., that love is nothing but a physical response to another whom the agent feels physically attracted to. Accordingly, the action of loving encompasses a broad range of behavior including caring, listening, attending to, preferring to others, and so on. (This would be proposed by behaviorists). Others (physicalists, geneticists) reduce all examinations of love to the physical motivation of the sexual impulse-the simple sexual instinct that is shared with all complex living entities, which may, in humans, be directed consciously, sub- consciously or pre-rationally toward a potential mate or object of sexual gratification. Physical determinists, those who believe the world to entirely physical and that every event has a prior (physical cause), consider love to be an extension of the chemical-biological constituents of the human creature and be

82 explicable according to such processes. In this vein, geneticists may invoke the theory that the genes (an individual’s DNA) form the determining criteria in any sexual or putative romantic choice, especially in choosing a mate. However, a problem for those who claim that love is reducible to the physical attractiveness of a potential mate, or to the blood ties of family and kin which forge bonds of filial love, is that it does not capture the affections between those who cannot or wish not to reproduce-that is, physicalism or determinism ignores the possibility of romantic, ideational love—it may explain eros, but not philia or agape. Behaviorism, which stems from the theory of the mind and asserts a rejection of Cartesian dualism between mind and body, entails that love is a series of actions and preferences which is thereby observable to oneself and others. The behaviorist theory that love is observable (according to the recognizable behavioral constraints corresponding to acts of love) suggests also that it is theoretically quantifiable: that A acts in a certain way (actions X,Y,Z) around B, more so than he does around C, suggests that he “loves” B more than C. The problem with the behaviorist vision of love is that it is susceptible to the poignant criticism that a person’s actions need not express their inner state or emotions—A may be a very good actor. Radical behaviorists, such as B. F. Skinner, claim that observable and unobservable behavior such as mental states can be examined from the behaviorist framework, in terms of the laws of conditioning. On this view, that one falls in love may go unrecognised by the casual observer, but the act of being in love can be examined by what events or conditions led to the agent’s believing she was in love: this may include the theory that being in love is an overtly strong reaction to a set of highly positive conditions in the behavior or presence of another. Expressionist love is similar to behaviorism in that love is considered an expression of a state of affairs towards a beloved, which may be communicated through language (words, poetry, music) or behavior (bringing flowers, giving up a kidney, diving into the proverbial burning building), but which is a reflection of an internal, emotional state, rather than an exhibition of physical responses to stimuli. Others in this vein may claim love to be a spiritual response, the recognition of a soul that completes one’s own soul, or complements or augments it. The spiritualist vision of love incorporates mystical as well as traditional romantic notions of love, but rejects the behaviorist or physicalist explanations. Those who consider love to be an aesthetic response would hold that love is knowable through the emotional and conscious feeling it provokes yet which cannot perhaps be captured in rational or descriptive language: it is instead to be captured, as far as that is possible, by metaphor or by music. Love: Ethics and Politics. The ethical aspects in love involve the moral appropriateness of loving, and the forms it should or should not take. The subject area raises such questions as: is it ethically acceptable to love an object, or to love oneself? Is love to oneself or to another a duty? Should the ethically minded person aim to love all people equally? Is partial love morally acceptable

83 or permissible (that is, not right, but excusable)? Should love only involve those with whom the agent can have a meaningful relationship? Should love aim to transcend sexual desire or physical appearances? May notions of romantic, sexual love apply to same sex couples? Some of the subject area naturally spills into the ethics of sex, which deals with the appropriateness of sexual activity, reproduction, hetero and homosexual activity, and so on. In the area of political philosophy, love can be studied from a variety of perspectives. For example, some may see love as an instantiation of social dominance by one group (males) over another (females), in which the socially constructed language and etiquette of love is designed to empower men and disempower women. On this theory, love is a product of patriarchy, and acts analogously to Karl Marx’s view of religion (the opiate of the people) that love is the opiate of women. The implication is that were they to shrug off the language and notions of “love,” “being in love,” “loving someone,” and so on, they would be empowered. The theory is often attractive to feminists and Marxists, who view social relations (and the entire panoply of culture, language, politics, institutions) as reflecting deeper social structures that divide people into classes, sexes, and races. This article has touched on some of the main elements of the philosophy of love. It reaches into many philosophical fields, notably theories of human nature, the self, and of the mind. The language of love, as it is found in other languages as well as in English, is similarly broad and deserves more attention.

84 9. PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.

The big questions here are: Are there any good reasons for believing in God's existence or nonexistence? What kind of God exists or does not exist? What are the implications of God's existence or nonexistence for humans? It looks as though every culture that has ever flourished has had some concept of divinity. Of course, it doesn't follow from that fact that therefore there is a divinity. The question "Why do so many people believe in gods?" is a very complicated one because it entangles us in a thicket of psychological, sociological, anthropological, and philosophical—not to mention purely religious— issues. We shall be primarily Interested In the philosophical issues, which means that we will attend to the kinds of arguments to consider when asking whether there are any good reasons to believe or disbelieve in the existence of god(s). Theism. The late medieval period was one in which, astonishingly, there does not seem to have been any atheism (though there was much heresy). If this is true, then it isn't quite accurate to say that the "proofs" of the Middle Ages provided reasons for believing in God because apparently no alternative existed. Rather, it's as if the medieval were giving an account to themselves of the rational status of their belief—or their knowledge—of God. The Ontological Argument. ANSELM of Canterbury (1033-1109), was probably offering his meditation as a form of worship or a gift that could not possibly add anything to God's store but one that Nevertheless would be pleasing in God’s sight. Here is Anselm’s introduction: “I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand. For this also I believe, that unless I believed, I shoud not understand.” Anselm goes on to refer to the “fool” of Psalms 53:1, who “says in his heart, “There is no God.” Even this fool is convinced that something exists in the understanding, at least, than which nothing greater can be conceived. For when he hears of this he understands it. And whatever is understood exists in the understanding. And assuredly that than which nothing greater can be conceived, cannot exist in understanding alone. For suppose it exists in the understanding alone: then it can be conceived to exist in reality, which is greater. Therefore, if that than which nothing greater can be conceived exists in the under standing alone, the very being than which nothing greater can be conceived, is one than which a greater can be conceived. But obviously this is impossible. Hence, there is no doubt that there exists a being than which nothing greater can be conceived, and it exists both in the understanding and in reality. And it assuredly exists so truly that it cannot be conceived not to exist. For it is possible to conceive of a being which cannot be conceived not to exist, Hence, if that than which nothing greater can be conceived, can be

85 conceived not to exist, it is not that than which nothing greater can be conceived. But this is an irreconcilable contradiction. There is, then, so truly a being than which nothing greater can be conceived to exist, that it cannot even be conceived not to exist; and this being thou art, O Lord our God. Let's try to simplify this argument a bit. 1. It is possible to conceive of a being "than which nothing greater can be conceived" (By "greatest," Anselm does not mean "biggest," but "most perfect.") 2. If that being than which nothing greater can be conceived exists only in the mind, then it is not the greatest being that can be conceived (because it is always possible to conceive of a greater one, viz., one that exists not only in the mind but outside the mind as well). 3. Therefore the possibility of conceiving a being than which nothing greater can be conceived entails the logical necessity of the real existence of such a being. 4. This being than which nothing greater can be conceived is the being we call God. This argument looks suspicious. It appears as though it should be pretty easy to knock over, but it is a slippery argument and more resistant to criticism than you might think. Maybe we can get a little clearer about the structure of the argument if we paraphrase a simpler version of it, one expounded by Rene Descartes some five hundred years after Anselm's version. It goes something like this: 1. God, by definition, is that being that is absolutely perfect. 2. It is more perfect to exist than not to exist. 3. Therefore, to conceive of God (i.e., to conceive of a being that is absolutely perfect) is necessarily to conceive of him as existing (because to conceive of God as not existing is self-canceling). 4. Therefore, to say "God does not exist" is to contradict oneself. 5. Therefore, the sentence "God exists" is necessarily true. If Descartes’ or Anselm's version of this argument (which has come to be known as the ontological argument) bothers you, it is probably because you think there is some illegitimate move in it from a mere definition (an a priori claim) to a statement of fact (an a posteriori claim). In that case, you might want to challenge Descartes’ version of the argument, perhaps at step 2, by saying that the assertion "It is more perfect to exist than not to exist" is a debatable value judgment, not a necessary truth of logic. But Descartes could retort that if it is a value judgment, it is one you obviously accept because if you had thought that nonexistence was better than existence, you would have shot yourself this morning. The fact that you are here proves that you accept the value of existence. So you can only reject step 2 hypocritically. In spite of this defense, one may well feel that some sleight of hand is involved in the ontological argument. Indeed, even Thomas Aquinas, that most religious of philosophers thought the argument was invalid. One of the most famous critiques of the proof was written by David Hume. The following

86 passage is taken from his posthumously published Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion: I shall begin with observing that there is an evident absurdity in pretending to demonstrate a matter of fact, or to prove it by any arguments a priori. Nothing is demonstrable unless the contrary implies a contradiction. Nothing that is distinctly conceivable implies a contradiction. Whatever we conceive as existent, we can also conceive as non-existent. There is no being; therefore, whose non-existence implies a contradiction. Consequently there Is no being whose existence is demonstrable. I propose this argument as entirely decisive and am willing to rest the whole controversy upon it. Hume's point boils down to this: it is always illegitimate to move from a pure definition to a statement of fact about reality. Definitions are only about the relation between meanings and as such are purely representations of logic and of linguistic conventions. Statements of fact about reality are always based on observation. Because Anselm's proof moves from the purely ideational sphere to the factual sphere without any reference to observation, its argument must be invalid. Hume is certainly correct in thinking that if there is a problem with the proof, it has to do with the transition from the realm of pure ideas to the realm of factual reality. But is Hume correct in saying that we can never move from the realm of definition to statements about existence? Consider the definition of a "square circle" (four-sided equilateral figure any point of which is equidistant from its center). We can deduce the following: no square circles exist." If even once we can go from a definition to a statement of fact about reality, then Hume's argument loses much of its force. Hume's criticism implied that there must be something wrong with the logic of Anselm's argument. Another well-known and more modern criticism is that there is something wrong with its grammar. Look at this famous passage from the Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant: Being is evidently not a real predicate, or a concept of something that can be added to the concept of a thing. It is merely the admission of a thing and of certain determinations in it. Logically, it is merely the copula of a judgment The proposition, God is almighty, contains two concepts, each having its object, namely, God and almightiness. The small word is, is not an additional predicate, but only serves to put the predicate in relation to the subject. If, then, I take the subject (God) with all its predicates (including that of almightiness) and say, God is, or there is a God, I do not ascribe a new predicate to the concept of God, but I only posit the subject by itself, with all its predicates, in relation to my concept, as its object. Both must contain exactly the same kind of thing, and nothing can have been added to the concept, which expresses possibility only, by my thinking its object as simply given and saying, it is. And thus the real does not contain more than the possible. A hundred real dollars do not contain a penny more than a hundred possible dollars.

87 The central points of Kant's criticism are contained in the first line and the last line of the passage: "Being [existence] is evidently not a real predicate" and "A hundred real dollars do not contain a penny more than a hundred possible dollars." These points can be clarified by returning to Descartes’ version of the argument. Descartes saw "perfection" as a predicate of God in exactly the same way that he saw "three-sidedness" as a predicate (or attribute or characteristic) of any triangle. Then he saw "existence" as following from perfection, so "existence" becomes a predicate of God. Now, Kant's claim that existence is not a predicate at all, hence not a predicate of God, might be demonstrated by imagining the following game called "Guess the Predicate." Suppose I take something from my pocket and hide it in my hand behind my back and allow you to ask questions concerning its characteristics, to which I will answer either yes or no. You may ask, "Is it green?" "Is it round?" "Is it heavy?" But could the question "Does it exist?" be a move in this game? The rules of the game already presuppose the existence of the object. If the object does not exist (i.e., if I have nothing in my hand), then I am not playing the game at all. I am simply deceiving you. Kant’s criticism certainly does seem to have identified a linguistic weakness, if not a logical error, in the ontological proof. Is that the end of the story? Probably not. I mentioned earlier that Anselm's argument has proved to be tremendously versatile and elastic, able to bounce back from apparently deadly assaults. For example, the twentieth-century American philosopher Orman Malcolm has claimed to have discovered in Anselm's writings a version of the ontological proof that is Immune to Kant's criticism. The argument, paraphrased, runs something like this: 1. If God does not exist, his existence is logically impossible (because by definition God is eternal and independent so he cannot come Into being or be caused to come into being). 2. If God does exist, his existence is logically necessary (because ho cannot have come into existence [for the reasons given above] or cease to exist, for if he did, he would be limited, and by definition God Is unlimited). 3. Hence, either God's existence is logically impossible or it le logically necessary. 4. If God's existence is logically impossible, then the concept of God It self contradictory. 5. The concept of God is not self-contradictory. 6. Therefore, God's existence is logically necessary. 7. Therefore, God exists. It was Immanuel Kant who gave the name "ontological proof to the kind of argument invented by St. Anselm. As we vet seen, ontological means having to do with the study of being," and Kant noticed that Anselm's argument was derived purely from the logical analysis of the concept of a "most real being" or a "most perfect being," hence the name "the ontological argument." Notice that, unlike the argument we shall now examine, Anselm's argument is a

88 very Platonic one. It is derived from "pure reason." In it, "most perfect" and "most real" turn out to be identical (as on the top of Plato's Line). And it is an exclusively a priori argument. The Cosmological Argument. There is another kind of argument for God's existence, which Kant called cosmological. It's called cosmological because the first premise of such an argument makes reference to some observable fact in the world (“cosmos”) and is therefore an argument with an a posteriori first premise. Surely the most famous versions of cosmological arguments were formulated by THOMAS AQUINAS (1225-1274), whose thought has inspired most Catholic philosophy ever since his time. Take a look at one of the arguments from Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theological: In the world of sense we find there is an order of efficient causes. There is no care known (neither is it, indeed, possible) in which a thing is found to be the efficient cause of itself; for so it would be prior to itself, which is impossible. Now in efficient causes it is not possible to go on to infinity, because in all efficient cause following in order, the first is the cause of the intermediate cause, and the intermediate cause is the cause of the ultimate cause, whether the intermediate cause be several or one only. Now, to take away the cause is to take away the effect. Therefore, if there be no first cause among efficient causes, there will be no ultimate, nor any intermediate cause. But if in efficient causes it is possible to go to infinity, there will be no first efficient cause; neither will there be an ultimate effect, nor any intermediate efficient causes; all of which is plainly false. Therefore it is necessary to admit a first efficient cause to which everyone gives the name of God. The term efficient cause is one St. Thomas borrowed from Aristotle, and it is roughly equivalent to what we mean today by the word "cause." Therefore, Thomas's argument seems to boil down to this: 1. Every event in the observable world is caused by some event prior to it. 2. Either (a) the series of causes is infinite, or (b) the series of causes goes back to a first cause, which is itself uncaused. 3. But an infinite series of causes is impossible. 4. Therefore, a first cause exists outside the observable world; this first cause is God. Hume's Criticism of the Cosmological Proof. Philosophers like Hume and Rant, who rejected this argument, attacked the first and third premises and also questioned the conclusion. Hume is probably most famous for his critical analysis of the concept of "causality." Suffice it to say that Hume asserts that no wood reason at all exists to claim to know the first premise because it cannot be proven a priori that every event is caused, and no set of observations can establish it a posteriori either. Also, Hume thought that the third premise was false. Why is an infinite series of causes impossible? Unlike Thomas, Hume believed that nothing in the concept

89 of a series of causes required that there be a beginning other than the need arbitrarily imposed by the human mind. Hume thought that no matter what event you imagine, you can always imagine an earlier event preceding it, regardless of how far back into time the imagination goes, just as an infinite series of numbers is possible in mathematics. Therefore, there is no logical contradiction in notion of an "infinite series of causes." Because there are no observable data with which to prove the third premise, Hume concluded that wry, must remain at least skeptical concerning its claim. Finally, even if the argument were valid from steps 1 through 3, would it prove the existence of the Christian God in whom St. Thomas believed? Aristotle himself, from whom Thomas borrowed elements of his cosmological proof, believed in a narcissistic God who was so "Into him" that he did not even know that human beings existed. Surely Thomas would not have wanted to prove the existence of that God. Lest we think that Hume his soundly refuted the cosmological Argo mint once and for all, I should mention that recent Theistic scholars have warned that Thomas's bargainer complicated than it appears. Involving both a horizontal system of causes (In which an Infinite series of causes cannot be ruled out) and a hierarchical system of dependencies (which, according to Narcissus Thomas, cannot admit of an infinite regress). This version of the argument, with its "hierarchy of dependencies," is much more Platonic than the earlier one, reminding us as it does of Plato's Simile of the Line. A refutation of this interpretation of the proof would involve a rejection of Platonic metaphysics. Atheism. We have seen that each of the arguments for God's existence is problematic, but perhaps no more so than the arguments attempting to prove that God does not exist. Such proofs are arguments for atheism. Notice that some of these arguments will be kinds of reverse ontological proofs, trying to show that the very concept of God as Western culture has conceived it is self- contradictory. Other arguments here will be kinds of reverse cosmological proofs, trying to show that certain facts in the world are incompatible with the concept of God. Here are the truncated versions of a few. 1. God's omniscience is incompatible with the freedom he gave his creatures. 2. God is defined as omnipotent, but nothing can be defined as omniponent becase the concept of omnipotence is incoherent. 3. God’s omnibenevolence is incompatible with his creation of the devil and of eternal punishment. 4. God’s omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence and omnicreativity are not campatible with the presence of evil in the world. Most of these arguments had already appeared in the medieval world, not as real attempts to raise doubts about God's existence—atheism was never a serious threat in the Middle Ages—but as a pretext for theologians to flex their philosophical muscles while clarifying to themselves their understanding of God's nature. Yet it is obvious that one of these problems—the problem of evil —is more powerful than the others. The medieval world was so full of suffering

90 at all levels that the argument from evil daily crossed the minds of many of the faithful. We know about this reoccupation from the great number of sermons and theological tracts whose goal was to counteract the thoughts and emotions caused by the suffering, either by explaining away the appearance of evil, or by showing why evil was compatible with God's grace. Indeed, in the Middle Ages, even at the intellectual level, the arguments for God's existence may have been trying to hold in abeyance the unthinkable, that is, that the world was as it appeared—chaos and horror. During great periods of the Middle Ages famine and plague were Interrupted only by violence and death at the hands of marauding troops undisciplined by any rulers or rules. It must have seemed like the visions of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (pestilence, war, famine, and death) depicted in the Book of Revelations, except that in the Bible, the chaos and horror were part of God's plan. That is, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse wanes; theft area suffering was seen (After Albrecht Darer) not as evidence against God's existence, but evidence for it. Yet, there must have been moments when the question crept across the minds of suffering individuals and of observers of such suffering: What if this is all there is? What if there is no God? What if the center does not hold? Part of medieval piety involved the silent acceptance of an idea that had been articulated by the ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes: "When Zeus is toppled, chaos succeeds him, and whirlwind rules"—an idea that would later be expressed by Ivan Karamazov, a character in a novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky: "If there is no God, everything is permitted." After a thousand years, the medieval period did come to end, and when it did, totalizing obsession with God ended. There are many reasons for this loosening of vicelike grip religion had on the Western mind during this period, and most of these reasons are historical and sociological rather than purely philosophical. Feurbach's «Religion of Man». In his book The Essence of Christianity (1541), Feuerbach tried to show that religious beliefs were basically the result of confusion about human potentiality and that this confusion and the resultant beliefs prevented any serious solution of human problems. Feuerbach's theory went something like this: The human being is fundamentally good and as a species has certain legitimate aspirations that have been present more or less from the beginning of the race. These aspirations are the will to achieve love, truth, beauty, happiness, wisdom, purity, and strength, among others. That is, every human community has aspired, consciously or unconsciously, to achieve and express these values (shades of Plato!). But life was hard, individually and collectively, and these ideals were rarely realized. Natural disasters, wars, social chaos, and plagues resulted in these ideals receding, as it were, through the clouds into the sky. Then suddenly a strange thing happened. (Unfortunately, Feuerbach does not give us much detail on how it was supposed to have happened.) The clouds opened up, and those same ideals returned in a new, powerful form, as the voice of God. And the great dialectical irony of history is

91 that those same beautiful ideals that were expressions of true human nature now returned to earth in the form of religion and crushed the human being to the ground. According to Feuerbach, the "and don't you ever forget it" line is "the essence of Christianity" and, in fact, the essence of all organized religion. He believed that religious history and text are replete with illustrations of thesis. Feuerbach, like Marx after him, was a socialist, and he believed that a truly human society (i.e., a socialist society) would in fact finally be able to achieve those ideals of love, truth, beauty, happiness, wisdom, peril long that are our legitimate aspirations. It seems as though Feuerbach, recognizing the tremendously important role religion has played in the history of human culture, thought that the only thing standing in the way of such an Ideal human world was religion. If humans could only see that they had alienated their subjective essence, objectifying In It a foreign, artificial being, "God" then they could reclaim that essence and build a heaven on earth. It is as though Feuerbach believed that, upon perusing The Essence of Christianity, the reader would suddenly see that human alienation was in fact religious alienation. Marx's Response to Feuerbach. Karl Marx was tremendously impressed by Feuerbach's book, and at one point early in his career, Marx claimed that the only correct way to philosophize was to "pass through the fiery brook." Inspect these passages on religion written by Marx against Karl Marx Crosses the Fiery Brook Feuerbach: Feuerbach starts out from the fact of religious self-alienation, the duplication of the world into a religious, imaginary world and a real one. His work consists in the dissolution of the religious world into its secular basis. He overlooks the fact that after completing this work, the chief thing still remains to be done. For the fact that the secular foundation detaches itself from itself and establishes itself in the clouds as an independent realm Is really to be explained only by the self-cleavage and self-contradictoriness of this secular basis. The latter must itself, therefore, first be understood in Its contradiction and then, by removal of the contradiction, revolutionized in practice, Thus, for Instance, once the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must then itself be criticized in theory and revolutionized in practice. Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress of the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of an unnplrll oil situation. It is the opium of the people. The language that Marx uses in these passages is a bit difficult it is fairly easy to see Marx's objection to Feuerbach's theory. According to Marx, Feuerbach correctly sees that religion is a form of alienation but falsely believes that the solution to the problem is the critique of religion. Marx claims that religion is not the cause of the disease; rather it is the symptom. The disease is the world's social organization. When Marx says that the earthly family must be “criticized in theory and revolutionized in practice,” he means that the holy family (Mary, Jesus, and Joseph) Man Inverted projection into the skies of a real problem on earth. Marx claimed that marriage in contemporary

92 European society was a form of legalized forced prostitution and that the role of the fathers "head of the family" was a form of violent tyranny over mother and child. This view, he thought, gets dialectically reversed in the religious view of the holy family. For Marx, there is no use in Outlawing religion. When the tyranny, prostitution, and exploitation of the real family are abolished, religion will simply disappear. This claim is controversial, to say the least, but it ought to be obvious that if Marx's theory is true, then Feuerbach's critique of religion is inadequate. Notice that one of the ironies in the theories of both Feuerbach and Marx is that there is a significant sense in which religion contains the truth—a spiritual truth that should become a social truth. This sense was more clearly visible in Marx's writings even than in Feuerbach's. Remember that, for Marx, religion is "the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, the spirit of an unspiritual situation. It is the opium of the people." This view is hardly an absolute indictment of religion. Usually that last line is quoted in isolation from its context, in which case one thinks of opium as a soporific that lulls one into a grinning, drooling, undignified stupor. But Marx had in mind opium's medicinal powers. It kills the pain. And for Marx, the pain is real, so that at least religion is addressing the correct issue, human misery.

10. PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

Philosophy of history, the philosophical study of human history and of attempts to record and interpret it, 'History' in English (and its equivalent in most modern European languages) has two primary senses: (1) the temporal progression of large-scale human events and actions, primarily but not exclusively in the past; and (2) the discipline or inquiry in which knowledge of the human past is acquired or sought. This has led to two senses of 'philosophy of history', depending on which "history" has been the object of philosophers' attentions. Philosophy of history in the first sense is often called substantive (or speculative), and placed under metaphysics. Philosophy of history in the second sense is called critical (or analytic) and can be placed in epistemology Substantive philosophy of history. In the West, substantive philosophy of history is thought to begin only in the Christian era. In the City of God, Augustine wonders why Rome flourished while pagan, yet fell into disgrace after its conversion to Christianuty. Divine reward and punishment should apply to whole peoples, not just to individuals. The unfolding of events in history should exhibit a plan that is intelligible rationally, morally, and (for Augustine) theologically. As a believer Augustine is convinced that there is such a plan, though it may not always be evident. In the modern period, philosophers such as Vico and Herder also sought such intelligibility in history. They also believed in a long-term direction or purpose of history that is often opposed to and makes use of the purposes of individuals. The most elaborate and best-known example of this approach is found in Hegel, who thought that the gradual realization of

93 human freedom could be discerned in history even if much slavery, tyranny, and suffering are necessary in theprocess. Marx, too, claimed to know the laws - in his case economic - according to which history unfolds. Similar searches for overall "meaning" in human history have been undertaken in the twentieth century, notably by Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975), author of the twelve-volume Study of History, and Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), author of Decline of the West. But the whole enterprise was denounced by the positivists and neo- Kantians of the late nineteenth century as irresponsible metaphysical speculation. This attitude was shared by twentieth-century neopositivists and some of their heirs in the analytic tradition. There is some irony in this, since positivism, explicitly in thinkers like Comte and implicitly in others, involves belief in progressively enlightened stages of human history crowned by the modern age of science. Critical philosophy of history. The critical philosophy of history, i.e., the epistemology of historical knowledge, can be traced to the late nineteenth century and has been dominated by the paradigm of the natural sciences. Those in the positivist, neopositivist, and postpositivist tradition, in keeping with the idea of the unity of science, believe that to know the historical past is to explain events causally, and all causal explanation is ultimately of the same sort. To explain human events is to derive them from laws, which may be social, psychological, and perhaps ultimately biological and physical. Against this reductionism, the neo-Kantians and Dilthey argued that history, like other humanistic disciplines (Geisteswissenschaften), follows irreducible rules of its own. It is concerned with particular events or developments for their own sake, not as instances of general laws, and its aim is to understand, rather than explain, human actions. This debate was resurrected in the twentieth century in the English-speaking world. Philosophers like Hempel and Morton White (b.1917) elaborated on the notion of causal explanation in history, while Collingwood and William Dray (b.1921) described the "understanding" of historical agents as grasping the thought behind an action or discovering its reasons rather than its causes. The comparison with natural science, and the debate between reductionists and anti-reductionists, dominated other questions as well: Can or should history be objective and value-free, as science purportedly is? What is the significance of the fact that historians can never perceive the events that interest them, since they are in the past? Are they not limited by their point of view, their place in history, in a way scientists are not? Some positivists were inclined to exclude history from science, rather than make it into one, relegating it to "literature" because it could never meet the standards of objectivity and genuine explanation; it was often the anti-posi-tivists who defended the cognitive legitimacy of our knowledge of the past. In the non-reductionist tradition, philosophers have increasingly stressed the narrative character of history: to understand human actions generally, and past actions in particular, is to tell a coherent story about them. History, according to W. B. Gallie (b.1912), is a species of the genus Story. History does not thereby become fiction: narrative remains a "cognitive instrument" (Louis

94 Mink, 1921-83) just as appropriate to its domain as theory construction is to science. Nevertheless, concepts previously associated with fictional narratives, such as plot structure and beginning-middle-end, are seen as applying to historical narratives as well. This tradition is carried further by Hayden White (b.l928), who analyzes classical nineteenth-century histories (and even substantive philosophies of history such as Hegel's) as instances of romance, comedy, tragedy, and satire. In White's work this mode of analysis leads him to some skepticism about history's capacity to "represent" the reality of the past: narratives seem to be imposed upon the data, often for ideological reasons, rather than drawn from them. To some extent White's view joins that of some positivists who believe that history's literary character excludes it from the realm of science. But for White this is hardly a defect. Some philosophers have criticized the emphasis on narrative in discussions of history, since it neglects search and discovery, deciphering and evaluating sources, etc., which is more important to historians than the way they "write up" their results. Furthermore, not all history is presented in narrative form. The debate between pro- and anti- narra-tivists among philosophers of history has its parallel in a similar debate among historians themselves. Academic history in recent times has seen a strong turn away from traditional political history toward social, cultural, and economic analyses of the human past. Narrative is associated with the supposedly outmoded focus on the doings of kings, popes, and generals. These are considered (e.g. by the French historian Fernand Braudel, 1902-85) merely surface ripples compared to the deeper-lying and slower-moving currents of social and economic change. It is the methods and concepts of the social sciences, not the art of the storyteller, on which the historian must draw. This debate has now lost some of its steam and narrative history has made something of a comeback among historians. Among philosophers Paul Ricoeur has tried to show that even ostensibly non-narrative history retains narrative features. Historicity. Historicity (or historicality: Geschichtlichkeit) is a term used in the phenome-nological and hermeneutic tradition (from Dilthey and Husserl through Heidegger and Gadamer) to indicate an essential feature of human existence. Persons are not merely in history; their past, including their social past, figures in their conception of themselves and their future possibilities. Some awareness of the past is thus constitutive of the self, prior to being formed into a cognitive discipine. Modernism and the postmodern. It is possible to view some of the debates over the modern and postmodern in recent Continental philosophy as a new kind of philosophy of history. Philosophers like Lyotard and Foucault see the modern as the period from the Enlightenment and Romanticism to the present, characterized chiefly by belief in "grand narratives" of historical progress, whether capitalist, Marxist, or posi-tivlst, with "man" as the triumphant hero of the story. Such belief is now being (or should be) abandoned, bringing modernism to an end. In one sense this is like earlier attacks on the substantive philosophy of history, since it unmasks as unjustified moralizing certain beliefs

95 about large-scale patterns in history. It goes even further than the earlier attack, since it finds these beliefs at work even where they are not explicitly expressed. In another sense this is a continuation of the substantive philosophy of history, since it makes its own grand claims about large-scale historical patterns. In this it joins hands with other philosophers of our day in a general historicization of knowledge (e.g., the philosophy of science merges with the history of science) and even of philosophy itself. Thus the later Heidegger - and more recently Richard Rorty-view philosophy itself as a large-scale episode in Western history that is Hearing or has reached its end. Philosophy thus merges with the history of philosophy, but only thanks to a philosophical reflection on this history as part of history as a whole. Oswald Arnold Gottfried Spengler (1880-1936) is German philosopher of history, whose famous work, The Decline of the West (1918-1922) combined Nietzschean poetic argument with a pessimistic view of the permanence of humankind's achievements. According to Spengler, Western culture is doomed, Spengler's special approach to history. He himself called it the "physiogmatic" approach -- looking things directly in the face or heart, intuitively, rather than strictly scientifically. Too often the real meaning of things is obscured by a mask of scientific-mechanistic "facts." Hence the blindness of the professional "scientist-type" historians, who in a grand lack of imagination see only the visible. The following are his basic postulates: 1. The "linear" view of history must be rejected, in favor of the cyclical. Heretofore history, especially Western history, had been viewed as a "linear" progression from lower to higher, like rungs on a ladder -- an unlimited evolution upward. Western history is thus viewed as developing progressively: Greek ' Roman ' Medieval ' Renaissance ' Modern, or, Ancient ' Medieval ' Modern. This concept, Spengler insisted, is only a product of Western man's ego -- as if everything in the past pointed to him, existed so that he might exist as a yet-more perfected form. This "incredibly jejune and meaningless scheme" can at last be replaced by one now discernible from the vantage-point of years and a greater and more fundamental knowledge of the past: the notion of History as moving in definite, observable, and -- except in minor ways -- unrelated cycles. 2. The cyclical movements of history are not those of mere nations, states, races, or events, but of High Cultures. Recorded history gives us eight such "high cultures": the Indian, the Babylonian, the Egyptian, the Chinese, the Mexican (Mayan-Aztec), the Arabian (or "Magian"), the Classical (Greece and Rome), and the European-Western. Each High Culture has as a distinguishing feature a "prime symbol." The Egyptian symbol, for example, was the "Way" or "Path," which can be seen in the ancient Egyptians' preoccupation -- in religion, art, and architecture (the pyramids) -- with the sequential passages of the soul. The prime symbol of the Classical culture was the "point-present" concern, that is, the fascination with the nearby, the small, the "space" of immediate and logical visibility: note here

96 Euclidean geometry, the two-dimensional style of Classical painting and relief- sculpture (you will never see a vanishing point in the background, that is, where there is a background at all), and especially: the lack of facial expression of Grecian busts and statues, signifying nothing behind or beyond the outward. The prime symbol of Western culture is the "Faustian Soul" (from the tale of Doctor Faustus), symbolizing the upward reaching for nothing less than the "Infinite." This is basically a tragic symbol, for it reaches for what even the reacher knows is unreachable. It is exemplified, for instance, by Gothic architecture (especially the interiors of Gothic cathedrals, with their vertical lines and seeming "ceilinglessness"). The "prime symbol" effects everything in the Culture, manifesting itself in art, science, technics and politics. Each Culture's symbol-soul expresses itself especially in its art, and each Culture has an art form that is most representative of its own symbol. In the Classical, they were sculpture and drama. In Western culture, after architecture in the Gothic era, the great representative form was music -- actually the pluperfect expression of the Faustian soul, transcending as it does the limits of sight for the "limitless" world of sound. The high-water mark of a High Culture is its phase of fulfillment -- called the "culture" phase. The beginning of decline and decay in a Culture is the transition point between its "culture" phase and the "civilization" phase that inevitably follows. The "civilization" phase witnesses drastic social upheavals, mass movements of peoples, continual wars and constant crises. All this takes place along with the growth of the great "megalopolis" -- huge urban and suburban centers that sap the surrounding countrysides of their vitality, intellect, strength, and soul. The inhabitants of these urban conglomerations -- now the bulk of the populace -- are a rootless, soulless, godless, and materialistic mass, who love nothing more than their panem et circenses. From these come the subhuman "fellaheen" -- fitting participants in the dying-out of a culture. With the civilization phase comes the rule of Money and its twin tools, Democracy and the Press. Money rules over the chaos, and only Money profits by it. But the true bearers of the culture - the men whose souls are still one with the culture-soul are disgusted and repelled by the Money-power and its fellaheen, and act to break it, as they are compelled to do so - and as the mass culture-soul compels finally the end of the dictatorship of money. Thus the civilization phase concludes with the Age of Caesarism, in which great power come into the hands of great men, helped in this by the chaos of late Money- rule. The advent of the Caesars marks the return of Authority and Duty, of Honor and "Blood," and the end of democracy. With this arrives the "imperialistic" stage of civilization, in which the Caesars with their bands of followers battle each other for control of the earth. The great masses are uncomprehending and uncaring; the megalopoli slowly depopulate, and the masses gradually "return to the land," to busy themselves there with the same soil-tasks as their ancestors centuries before. The turmoil of

97 events goes on above their heads. Now, amidst all the chaos of the times, there comes a "second religiosity"; a longing return to the old symbols of the faith of the culture. Fortified thus, the masses in a kind of resigned contentment bury their souls and their efforts into the soil from which they and their culture sprang, and against this background the dying of the Culture and the civilization it created is played out. Predictable Life Cycles. Every Culture's life-span can be seen to last about a thousand years: The Classical existed from 900 BC to 100 AD; the Arabian (Hebraic-semitic Christian-Islamic) from 100 BC to 900 AD; the Western from 1000 AD to 2000 AD. However, this span is the ideal, in the sense that a man's ideal life-span is 70 years, though he may never reach that age, or may live well beyond it. The death of a Culture may in fact be played out over hundreds of years, or it may occur instantaneously because of outer forces -- as in the sudden end of the Mexican Culture. Also, though every culture has its unique Soul and is in essence a special and separate entity, the development of the life cycle is paralleled in all of them: For each phase of the cycle in a given Culture, and for all great events affecting its course, there is a counterpart in the history of every other culture. Thus, Napoleon, who ushered in the civilization phase of the Western, finds his counterpart in Alexander of Macedon, who did the same for the Classical. Hence the "contemporaneousness" of all high cultures. In barest outline these are the essential components of Spengler's theory of historical Culture-cycles. In a few sentences it might be summed up: Human history is the cyclical record of the rise and fall of unrelated High Cultures. These Cultures are in reality super life-forms, that is, they are organic in nature, and like all organisms must pass through the phases of birth-life-death. Though separate entities in themselves, all High Cultures experience parallel development, and events and phases in any one find their corresponding events and phases in the others. It is possible from the vantage point of the twentieth century to glean from the past the meaning of cyclic history, and thus to predict the decline and fall of the West. Arnold Joseph Toynbee (April 14, 1889 - October 22, 1975) is British historian whose twelve-volume analysis of the rise and fall of civilizations, A Study of History, 1934 - 1961, (also known as History of the World) Arnold Toynbee rejected Spengler's view that civilizations rise and fall according to an inevitable cycle. He dismissed racial degeneration as a cause of civilizations breaking down, and he dismissed ecology as a factor. The Athenians, he pointed out, responded to overpopulation on a thin soil by taking to the sea as a commercial empire. Toynbee chose to explain history not by the successes and failures of empires, nation-states or ethnicity but by a civilization's response to its challenges. For Toynbee a civilization fails when it ceases to exist. He is described as saying that civilizations are not murdered, they commit suicide – by not meeting their challenges. Toynbee wrote that Nomadic civilization failed because of energies consumed in providing pasture for herds. He wrote that the

98 Polynesians failed because they responded to the challenge of the sea with no instrument better than a canoe. The question of Toynbee's definition of failure emerges. About people meeting their civilization's challenges, Toynbee wrote of Gandhi with his spinning wheel trying to reconstruct an imaginary past. He wrote of Lenin attempting to leap into an imagined future. And he wrote a lot about the place of Jesus Christ in history. In his article "Christianity and Civilization," Toynbee does a summing up, describing Christianity as a means of meeting the challenge that Western civilization faces: Thus the historical progress of religion in this world, as represented by the rise of the higher religions and by their culmination in Christianity, may, and almost certainly will, bring with it, incidentally, an immeasurable improvement in the conditions of human social life on Earth. Toynbee categorized five civilizations that have survived: 1) Western civilization: Western Europe, the Commonwealth of Nations, the U.S., Latin America. 2) Orthodox Christian civilization: Russia and the Orthodox sections of southeastern Europe. 3) Islamic civilization. 4) Hindu civilization. 5) Far Eastern civilization: China, Korea, Japan. Toynbee described humanity's ordeal with a lot of specifics, but he left much that needed explanation. For many historians his civilization categories are not useful. His civilizations are cultural, and since ancient times cultural diffusion has been frequent and significant. People have changed culturally, and their response to new challenges can be described in a worthwhile manner without considering Toynbee's civilization labels. This is especially so as the world has become more globalized. The different civilizations that Toynbee has categorized have blended. His so-called civilizations will grow or decay together in what has become a smaller and more interconnected world.

99 11. PHILOSOPHY OF POLITICS

Political philosophy concerns itself with the proper organization of human beings into groups governed by law or by Instinct. It asks questions about legitimate and illegitimate political power: Why are members of political collectives (nations, states, townships, etc.) bound to submit to the laws of these collectives? What legitimately holds the collectives together: blood? land? birth? consent? contract? If consent or contract, must such agreements be formal, or may they be informal? In a famous passage, Jean-Jacques Rousseau once wrote, "Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains." This idea is an appropriate one with which to begin a discussion of political philosophy. In a significant sense we, like the beasts of the field and the birds of the sky, are "born free." It was once believed that some people were born to be slaves to others or to be their natural servants, but in our culture, we no longer believe that. We are not born with any natural masters. Yet, Rousseau says, everywhere we are in chains. Well, that view is surely a bit exaggerated, but looks at it this way. In civilized society, rules govern almost every aspect of our behavior—rules tell us what we have to wear, how we must behave with other people, where we can and cannot go, how fast we must do it, and in what circumstances it is all right to say certain things but not others, furthermore, all these rules are enforced by an Implied threat of immediate violence and eventual loss of property, freedom, and in some cases, even life. Just breaking a fairly simple rule, such as that against jaywalking—if you persist in breaking the rule numerous times in sequence contrary to the advice of a passing "peace officer"—can produce Billy clubs, body searches, and handcuffs. So in a sense, Rousseau is right. We perform all our acts looking up the barrel of a gun. This point raises one of the key questions in political philosophy—Why should we put up with it? This is just a rhetorical way of posing some of the big questions in this area, such as these:  Are we naturally political, or is the polity cal body a mere artifice? (If the latter, is it a necessary one, or could we do without it?)  Is there a real distinction between legitimate and illegitimate authority? If so, how can we draw that distinction?  Is revolution ever justified when political legitimacy is challenged, and if so, under what conditions? Plato. Plato shared the typical Greek view that we are naturally social beings. But the "naturalness" of our sociality stems from a natural weakness on our parts as Individuals. As individuals, we are not self-sufficient. From our necessary dependence on each other Plato deduces a kind of natural division of labor along class lines, with skilled laborers and artisans forming one class, a military police caste forming another, and philosophers forming a third, the ruling class, which is created by promoting older members of the military caste. The lower class is incapable of philosophy (though there is no clear explanation in the Republic why some people are capable of it and others are not—it seems that these abilities and disabilities must be congenital). He suggests that those

100 unfit from birth or habit for the rule of reason must be forced or tricked into submitting to it. The work and productivity of the laboring class is needed by society, and it and others are not—it seems that these abilities and disabilities must be congenital). He suggests that those unfit from birth or habit for the rule of reason must be forced or tricked Into submitting to it. The work and productivity of the laboring class is needed by society, and these workers must be rewarded for their output. Hence, they are allowed to have families, are, paid salaries, and are allowed to wear gold and silver decorations. The military caste is capable of philosophy, so its members are able to understand that their virtues of courage and determination are their own rewards. In a remarkable passage, Plato has Socrates describe to Glaucon the conditions in which the two upper classes will live: "Then besides this education any sensible man would say that we must provide their lodgings and their other property such as will not prevent them from being themselves as good guardians as they can be, and such as will not excite them to do mischief among the other citizens.... First of all, no one must have any private property whatsoever, except what is absolutely necessary. Secondly, no one must have any lodging or storehouse at all which is not open to all comers. Then provisions must be so much as is needed by athletes of war, temperate and Wave men, and there must be fixed allowances for them to be supplied by the other citizens as wages for their guardianship, so much that there shall be plenty for the year but nothing over at the end. They must live in common, attending in messes as if they were in the field. As to gold and silver, we must tell them that they have these from the gods as a divine gift in their souls, and they want in addition no human silver or gold; they must not pollute this treasure by mixing it with a treasure of mortal gold, because many wicked things have been done about the common coinage, but theirs is undefiled. They alone of all in the city dare not have any dealings with gold and silver, or even touch them, or come under the same roof with them, or hang them upon their limbs, or drink from silver or gold. In this way.... whenever they get land of their own and houses and money, they will be householders and farmers instead of guardians, masters and enemies of the rest of the citizens instead of allies; so hating and hated, plotting and plotted against, they will spend all their lives fearing enemies within much more than without, running a course very near to destruction, they and the city together. For all these reasons,” I said, “let us agree on this manner of providing our guardians with lodging and all the rest, and let us lay it down by law. What do you say?” “I agree wholly with you,” said Glaucon. Furthermore, we are told that for the "guardians" (the military and ruling castes), there will be no families as such: "no one must have a private wife of his own, and the children mute be common, too, and the parents shall not know the child nor the child its parent". So sexual relations will be by lottery—though there is a hint that the lottery is rigged and that the rulers know who is sleeping

101 with whom. Hence, the upper classes will produce children according to eugenic principles. Plato prescribes a kind of absolute communism but only for the upper classes. This system will protect them from the greed that permeates the lower, more Ignorant class; and as we saw, greed is allowed to motivate the workers and the artisans but is always contained and controlled by the philosopher rulers and their military allies. Like Karl Marx some 2,250 years later, Plato saw society as natural but capable of being undermined by greed if not structured in such a way as to contain it. In the Republic, a character named Adeimantus points out that the Ideal city Socrates is describing may, through its totalitarian practices, be immune to the dangers of greed, but it can still be corrupted by envy. The lower class will envy the upper classes because of their power and intellect gene, and the upper classes will envy the lower class because life at that level just seems more fun. In order to answer this objection, Plato has Socrates make a very curious suggestion, one that plagues political science to our day. (Indeed, Socrates admits that he is quite embarrassed to have to make the suggestion.) The suggestion is that all members of the City—including the rulers—be told a lie about why they must accept the order of things. Plato calls it a "noble lie," and it is introduced in the Republic when, with some trepidation, Socrates says: "Here goes, then, although I don't know how 1 shall dare, or what words to use. Well, I will try first to convince the rulers themselves and the soldiers, then the rest of the city; and this is the story. The training and education we were giving them was all a dream, and they only imagined all this awe happening to them and around them; but in truth they were being molded and trained down inside the earth, where they and their arms and all their trap pings were being fashioned. When they were completely made, the earth their mother delivered them from her womb; and now they must take thought for the land in which they live, as for their mother and nurse, must plan for her and protect her, if anyone attacks her, and they must think of the other citizens as brothers also born from the earth." "I am not surprised," [Glaucon] said, "that you war. "There was good reason for it," I said, "but never mind, listen to the rest of the fable. ‘So you are all brothers in the city,’ we shall tell them in our fable, 'but while God molded you, he mingled gold in the generation of some, and those are the ones fit to rule, who are therefore the most urn geld silver in the assistants; and iron and brass in farmer' craftsmen. Then because of being all akin you would beget your likes for the most part, but sometimes a silver child may be born from a golden, or golden from a silver, and so with all the rest breeding amongst The rulers are commanded by God first and foremost that they be good guardians of no person so much as of their own children, and to wig in else so carefully as which of these things is mingled in their souls. If any child of theirs has a touch of brass or iron, they will not be merciful to him on any account, but they will give him the value proper to his nature, and punch him away among the craftsmen or the farmers; if again one of them has the gold

102 or silver in his nature, they will honor him and lift him among the guardians or the assistants, since there is an oracle that the city will be destroyed when the brass or the iron shall guard it.' Now have you any device to make them believe this fable?" This passage is very curious and even quite discouraging. It is curious because, as has been mentioned, part of the job of the Republic was to destroy the authority of myth in the Greek world and to replace it with the authority of reason (i.e., philosophy), yet here Plato is required to create a new myth to keep the City cohesive. And it is discouraging because Plato is admitting that reason itself is not strong enough a force to bind the City together. It is especially striking that even the rulers must be lied to, despite the fact that humans are supposed to be naturally social. Plato raises a specter that has haunted some thinkers even in our century: the idea that perhaps a society can remain vibrant and vital only if it has a myth about itself that it can tell itself. And unfortunately, these myths are usually nationalistic and ethnocentric, hence often aggressive, arrogant, xenophobic, racist, and imperialistic. The great twentieth-century sociologist Emile Durkheim thought that when a society lost the capacity to tell itself such a myth, anomie (a sense of loss of meaning and direction) set in. Anomie leads to both cultural and individual suicide, according to Durkheim. Thomas Hobbes. In the modern period, a number of Important philosophers addressed "the big questions" of political philosophy. Thomas Hobbes's book Leviathan (1651) had as one of its main goals the resolution of the problem of politics. Hobbes had a very distinctive view of human motivation, a view called "psychological egoism," according to which all human actions are motivated by self-interest. Hobbes's political views presuppose the truth of psychological egoism, and even though that theory was rather soundly criticized in our earlier discussion as an unsuccessful account of individual human actions, it must be said that it is probably more acceptable as a political model, or perhaps a political metaphor. When we think not of individuals but of foreign policies of various nations, it is difficult to believe that they are not motivated by what their framers conceive as the interest of the nation; or when we think of negotiations between labor and management groups, it is hard to imagine them as motivated by pure altruism. So perhaps Hobbes's psychological egoism is a little less offensive here than in a discussion of morality, though here, too, its harshness may taint Hobbes's political views. Like the authors of the American Declaration of Independence, Hobbes begins his essay with the assumption that all people are equal. But his reasons for this assumption are very different from those of the Founding Fathers, who believed that our equality was a kind of moral state into which we were all created by our maker. Hobbes asserted the thesis of equality as a purely physical fact. Even the strongest or smartest among us is not so strong or so smart that two or three weaker, dumber ones could not overcome

103 him or her. One may have some slight advantage over another but not enough to make a difference in the long run. We humans are, after all, more or less the same. Now, given the fact that human nature is selfish, power-mongering, and equally distributed, Hobbes tries to imagine what human beings would be like in a "state of nature," that is, in a condition prior to any civil state, any rule by law. Concerning such a condition, Hobbes says: From this equality of ability, arises equality of hope in the attaining of our ends. And therefore if any two men desire the same thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies; and in the way to their end, which is principally their own conservation, and sometimes their delectation only, endeavor to destroy, or subdue one another. ... Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arte; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

To this bleak and depressing picture, Hobbes now adds:

To this war of every man, against every man, this also is consequent; that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law; where no law, no injustice. Force, and fraud, is In war the two cardinal virtues. Justice and injustice are none of the faculties neither of the body, nor mind. If they were, they might be in a man that was alone in the world, as well as his senses, and passions. They are qualities that relate to men in society, not In solitude. It is consequent also to the same condition, that there be no propriety, no dominion, no mine, and thane distinct; but only that to be every man's, that he can get; and for so long, as he can keep it. And thus much for the ill condition, which man by mere nature is actually placed in; though with a possibility to come out of it, consisting partly in the passions, partly in his reason. So Hobbes's view is this: concepts like right and wrong, justice and injustice, and "mine and thane" (property) are concepts generated by law, hence dependent on law. In the absence of law, these concepts cannot be meaningful. Furthermore, the concept of law is itself dependent upon power. A law with no power behind it is not authoritative because it cannot be enforced. This view is called legal positivism, and according to injustice is whatever legality calls just,

104 and what is legal has been established as legal by the powers that be and for just as long as they are able to enforce the law. According to this tradition (pretty much the tradition of Thrasymachus and Machiavelli), talk about "unjust laws" simply doesn't make much sense. (In this tradition, calling a law morally unjust doesn't carry any weight because the "moral sphere" is just a fantasy, the mental projection of an Ideal legal system where the power of the rulers is replaced by the power of an Imagined God) Notice at the end of the previous anxiously pessimistic passage there was one glimmer of hope. Hobbes said, "And thus much for the ill condition, which man by mere nature Is actually placed in; though with a possibility to come out of it, consisting partly in the passions, partly in his reason." The passionate part of our self desperately desires to survive. (How else could we acquire power and enjoy pleasure?) And there is a natural right to attempt to do so. Hobbes writes:

The RIGHT OF NATURE ... is the liberty each man hath, to use his own power, as he will himself, for the preservation of his own nature; that is to say, of his own life; and consequently, of doing anything, which In his own judgment, and reason, he shall conceive to he the aptest means thereunto. ... And because the condition of man ... is a condition of war of every one against every one; in which case every one is governed by his own reason; and there is nothing he can make use of, that may not be a help unto him, in preserving his life against his enemies; it followed, that in such a condition, every man has a right to every thing; even to one another's body. And therefore, as long as this natural right of every man to every thing endured, there can be no security to any man, how strong or wise so ever he is, of living out the time, which nature ordinarily allowed men to live. Hobbes assumes that in a state of nature there will be a general scarcity of goods. Because not enough goods exist for everyone's survival and flourishing in such a state of nature, each becomes an enemy of all others. In this condition, even though I have a right to try to survive, in fact, there isn't much likelihood of my lasting very long. So, based on our passions alone, we would not survive long enough to enjoy the goal of the natural right. But at this point our reason comes into play. It sees associated with what Hobbes calls «natural law.»

A LAW OF NATURE ... is a precept or general rule, found out by reason, by ethic a man Is forbidden to do that which is destructive of his life, or teeth away the means of preserving the same; and to omit that by which he thinker h it may be best preserved.

105 Because none of us has much chance of survival if we each blindly pursue our' own natural right, we must appeal to our reason and the "natural law" that reason discovers: And consequently it is a precept, or general rule of reason, that every man, ought to endeavor peace, as far as he has hope of obtaining it; and when he cannot obtain it, that he may seek, and use, ail helps, and advantages of war. The first branch of which rule, contained the first, and fundamental law of nature; which is, to seek peace, and follow it. the second, the sum of the right of nature; which is, by all means we can, to defend ourselves. From this fundamental law of nature, by which men are commanded to endeavor peace, is derived this second law; that a man be willing, when others are, so too, as far forth, as for peace, and Defense of himself he shall think it necessary, to lay down this right to all things: and be contented with so much liberty against other men, as he would allow other men against himself. Foil as long as every man holdout this right, of doing any thing he liked; so lord are all men In the condition of war. But if other men will not lay down their right, as well as he; then there is no reason for anyone, to divest himself of lies: for that were to expose himself to prey, which no man is bound to, rather than to dispose himself to peace. So the idea of natural right is the foundation of Hobbes's social contract. My natural right justifies my use of violence against you if I perceive the use of such violence as being in the interest of my survival. Unhappily for me, your use violence against me is equally justified. So I agree to renounce my right to use violence against you if you agree to renounce your right to use violence against me. How ever, our contract is conditional because each of us will break it the moment we think the other is not going to hold to it. This con tract does not provide a very stable peace, especially if Hobbes is correct in attributing to each of us a selfish and power-mongering nature. If I see any advantage to myself in breaking the contract, I will do it. None of us can sleep very easily. In fact, none of us dares sleep at all in this tenuous peace. The solution to this dilemma requires another step in the contract. All of us must agree to transfer our right to violence and our right to sovereignty over ourselves to a mutually agreed-upon sovereign (a parliament or a monarch), which now has absolute political authority over us. In exchange for absolute power (including an army), this sovereign promise to pass laws that create a state of peace. Basically, the sovereign promises to restrain and punish anyone who breaks the initial part of the contract and uses violence against any other member of this newly created artificial body, the state. Hobbes realizes that there are no guarantees that the sovereign won't abuse its absolute power. In fact, it's almost certain the sovereign will do so, given his, her, or their egoistic propensities, nevertheless, even abused authority is better than no authority, according to Hobbes. Furthermore, it is hoped that the sovereign will use both its passion (the egoistic side) and its reason (the natural law) and realize that a peaceful state is beneficial to it as well, because otherwise the angry populace may revolt and kill the sovereign. Notice,

106 however, that in Hobbes's political system, revolt is never creamy) legitimate unless it succeeds because only power legitimates for Hobbes. However, not even the legitimate absolute tyrant can pass a law that succeeds in taking away my natural right. This is because that right is inalienable except by my uncorked consent. No law can remove my right to resist law if the law tries to deprive me of my life. We see that for Hobbes, the state is an artifice (a monster, a "leviathan") but a necessary one. Legitimate authority is empowered authority. Political bodies themselves determine what counts as just or unjust, so in one sense they cannot be unjust. Yet even when they create a sense of injustice, they are almost always better than their alternative. For this reason we accept the gun constantly aimed at us and the threat of state violence. No matter how brutal the state is, it is the best show in town. Its alternative is chaos, misery, and death, a condition wherein life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short!' Any state is better than no state. You may not like politics, but according to Hobbes, only because of politics does the social center hold. When the social contract that creates political authority falls, human life is plunged into an abyss. “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold”, the centre cannot hold.” John Locke. Locke, writing fifty years after Hobbes, used much of the same language as Hobbes did but with very different meanings. For example, Locke too discusses a «state of nature» but for him, this would be the moral state into which all of us are boom by virtue of being God's creatures, Hobbes had obviously Intentionally kept God out of political theory, not because Hobbes was an atheist (he may or may not have been), but because he thought God belonged no more in political science than he did in physics and because Hobbes was sick of tyrants justifying their power by something called "divine right." But though Locke was also against the so-called divine right of kings, he had no qualms against grounding his political theory in a religious belief. For him, God's power plays a role similar to that of secular power In Hobbes's theory, so for Locke, God created humans and gave them basic rights, the right to "life, health, liberty, and possessions." Each of us is born into a moral "state of nature" in which these rights are ours, along with certain moral obligations that Locke calls the "law of nature" which, as in Hobbes's philosophy, is a law of reason. To understand political power right, and derive it from its original, we must consider what state all men are naturally in, and that is a state of perfect freedom to order their actions and dispose of their possessions and persons as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave or depending upon the will of any other man. ... The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it which obliges every one; and reason which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it that, being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions; for men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent and infinitely wise Maker—all the servants of one sovereign master, sent into the world by his order, and about his business—they are his property

107 whose workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one another's, pleasure; and being furnished with like faculties, sharing all in one community of nature, there cannot be supposed any such subordination among us that may authorize us to destroy another, as if we were made for one another's uses as the inferior ranks of creatures are for ours'' As we have seen, for Locke, God's law creates natural property. Let's look at this curious idea. According to the biblical account, God created the earth and provided it with natural resources for the benefit of humankind. As was indicated earlier, Locke, like Hobbes, was anxious to counter monarchical claims of divine right to property, and he used the biblical account to do so, and then added a philosophical touch of his own. In his Two Treatises of Government, Locke wrote, "the earth and all that is therein ... belongs to mankind in common ... and ... nobody has originally a private dominion, exclusive of the rest of mankind." Now, the one uniquely natural piece of property we each have is our own body. The property right we have to our bodies can be extended to that which is created by our bodies' labor. Though the earth and all inferior creatures be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person; this nobody has any right to but himself. The labor of his body and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labor with, and pined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature hath placed it in; it hath by this labor something annexed to it that excludes the common right of other men. For this labor being the unquestionable property of the laborer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough and as good left in common for others... . It will perhaps be objected to this that "if gathering the acorns, or other fruits of the earth, etc., makes a right to them, then any one may engross as much as he will." To which I answer: not so. The same law of nature that does by this means give us property does also bind that property, too. "God has given us all things richly" (I Tim. vi. 17), is the voice of reason confirmed by inspiration. But how far has he given it us? To enjoy. As much as any one can make use of to any advantage of life before it spoils, so much he may by his labor fix a property in; whatever is beyond this is more than his share, and belongs to others... . I think it is plain that property in that, too, is acquired as the former. As much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is his property... Nobody could think himself injured by the drinking of another man, though he took a good draught, who had a whole river of the same water left him to quench his thirst; and the case of land and water, where there is enough for both, is perfectly the same.

108 Then one may accumulate as much "natural property" as one can use without its spoiling so long as one leaves enough for everyone else. This idea reveals a tremendous attitudinal difference between Locke and Hobbes. Hobbes's political philosophy presupposes a condition of scarcity. Lock's presupposes a condition of abudance. Lock's picture of human nature is much more generous than Hobbes's. We might consider the possibility that Locke and Hobbes are both right. Under conditions of abundance, altruism, generosity, and magnanimity it might be natural virtues; under conditions of scarcity, stinginess and cold-heartedness might be natural. Back to Locke's concept of "natural property." When he turns to hoe analysis of money, he says, "And thus came In the use of money—some lasting thing that men might keep without spoiling, and that, by mutual consent, men would take In exchange for the truly useful but perishable sup ports of life". So there is nothing wrong with hoarding money or passing it along to your sons and daughters so long as you leave enough for others because "gold and silver may be hoarded up without injury to anyone” This doctrine was very convenient for Locke and his well- to-do friends and somewhat counteracted the radicalness of his view that the land belongs to whoever tills it. But it failed to recognize that the excess save accumulation of wealth is a form of power that can be used to undermine the moral state of equality into which we were all supposed to be born. Locke believed that his theory of our natural moral status (the state of nature) entailed a theory of justifiable punishment. He wrote: And thus in the state of nature one man cornea by a power over another; but yet no absolute or arbitrary power to use a criminal, when he has got him in his hands, according to the passionate heats or boundless extravagancy of his own will; but only to reattribute to him, so far as calm reason and conscience dictate, what is proportionate to his transgression, which is so much as may serve for reparation and restraint; for these two are the only reasons why one man may lawfully do harm to another, which Is that we call punishment. In transgressing the law of nature, the offender declares himself to live by another rule than that of reason and common equity, which is that measure God has set to the actions of men for their mutual security; and so he becomes dangerous to mankind, the tie which is to secure them from injury and violence being slighted and broken by him. Which being a trespass against the whole species and the peace and safety of it provided for by the law of nature . . . every man hath a right to punish the offender and be executioner of the law of nature. So in the state of nature, each of us has the right to our "life, liberty, health, and property." If any person violates the rights of others, that person alienates himself from the state of nature and thereby forfeits his own natural rights. He has thus earned a punishment, which ought to be meted out. On the principle that "the punishment must fit the crime" (Gilbert and Sullivan), even capital punishment is possible in the state of nature:

109 By the same reason may a man in the state of nature punish the lesser breaches of that law? It will perhaps be demanded: with death? I answer: Each transgression may be punished to that degree and with so much severity a will suffice to make it an ill bargain to the offender, give him cause to repent, and terrify others from doing the like. Every offence that can be committed in the state of nature may in the state of nature be also punished equally, and as far forth as it may in a commonwealth. We see here that Locke's theory of justice is retributive (the criminal has earned the punishment with his acts and we owe it to him) and preventative (he will be restrained from committing similar crimes). In terms of distributive justice, Locke's state of nature is a meritocracy. That is, one may own only as much property as one merits by virtue of one's labor (or inherits from the labor of one's ancestors). In Thomas Hobbes's political theory, the conditions under which the citizens would probably revolt were pretty predictable, but there could be no such thing as legitimate revolt because legitimacy is determined by law, and the sovereign has been given the authority to create law by the social contract. In Locke, however, a very clear doctrine of legitimate revolution exists, once again grounded in our God-given moral condition, the state of nature. Locke wrote: There is, therefore, secondly, another way whereby governments are dissolved and that is when the legislative or the prince, either of them, acts contrary to their trust. ... The legislative acts against the trust reposed in them when they Endeavour to invade the property of the subject and to make themselves or any part of the community masters or arbitrary disposers of the lives, liberties, or fortunes of the people. . . . Since it can never be supposed to be the will of the society that the legislative should have a power to destroy that which every one designs to secure by entering into society, and for which the people submitted themselves to legislators of their own making. Whenever the legislators Endeavour to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience. So the function of the political state is to guarantee our moral state. In this sense, the political state is potentially superior to the state of nature because the latter lacks Impartial judges, precise laws, and sufficient power to uphold the moral law. The justification of the political state is the consent of its citizens. The citizens consent to submit to political authority only with the proviso that such political authority will do whatever is necessary to protect our natural rights. This proviso Is Locke's f Social contract." But the citizen is bound to the contract only as long as the government upholds its end of the contract. Locke thought that the populace should not go lightly into a condition of revolt. Because of the Seriousness of such a condition, all sorts of attempts should be made to Correct the abuses of power before a revolution is declared. But if the istle not only fails to uphold the citizens' rights to life, health, liberty, and

110 property, but also becomes the violator of those rights, then revolution is justified. Jean –Jacques Rousseau. Jean –Jacques Rousseau (1712 -1778), like Locke, believed that all humans are born free and autonomous and that the only legitimate government is one that preserver and maximizes that condition. Again, like Locke, he believed that such legitimacy can come about only through consent to a social contract. However, he believed that such legitimacy in fact existed nowhere in his time and that even the English parliament, in, deceived themselves coming their own freedom fact, we began they with Rousseau’s word’s: "Man is born free, and every where he is in chain. Indeed he thought that man were boom both law , and good but that society hid imprisoned them and had corrupted their goodness. Let’s take a look at his diagnosis of the political situation of his time and hoe peppy nun for it. Consistent with theories of Hobbes and Locke, Rousseau begins his analysis with an account of the “state of nature”. Like Hobbes, and unlike Locke, Rousseau claims that in a condition outside the social order, there would be no morality (no "ought" no "duty"). However, it is possible to talk about virtues in the state of nature. For example, Rousseau takes it that self-love (amour de soi) is a natural virtue, a natural virtue, natural good. Anyone who lacks it is In some sense perverted and is incapable, of truly moral development. (Notice that Jesus' moral teaching— "Love thy neighbor as thyself"— also presupposes self-love as a necessary condition of morality.) Similarly, according to Rousseau, we have (contrary to Hobbes's claim) a natural pity or pain at the misfortune of other. Unfortunately, traditional societies pervert the first of these virtues (self-love) and invert the second (pity). Self-love is turned into pride (amour proper), and pity is transformed into its opposite—delight in other' misery. Pride results from anxious reflection about oneself and the need to feel superior. This need Induces one to compare oneself forever with other, to the extent that one finds one's most exquisite pleasure in the misfortune or inferiority of others. Pride and envy are encouraged everywhere by traditional social organization, but in truth, they prevent one from developing into a full person. This speculation leads Rousseau to the view (in Emile) that a truly correct education of a child would require the child to be as far from society's corrupting influences as possible. The child should be reared in as nearly a "state of nature" as can be arranged (hence, the understandable but misleading attribution to Rousseau of the philosophy of "back to nature"). In this primary state, the child will be allowed to develop her own natural virtues. Such a child, left to her own devices, learns through trial and error, not theories, through facts, not words, through sensations and feelings, not abstractions. This child is freed from the necessity of holding "opinions" and lives a happy, self-sufficient, timeless existence unaware of artificial needs or worries about the future. The child will be taught to read; only book allowed in her education will be Robinson Crusoe! Those who have read only Emile sometimes think that Rousseau was calling for the abolition or mineralization of the state and

111 demanding a "return to nature" for all. But they have failed to see that, for Rousseau, if one remained at the state of natural virtues, one would fall to develop fully one's humanity. The state of natural virtues must be developed into a moral state, and morality and politics go hand in hand. The move from natural virtuousness to morality involves the development of our social being. Only by filling out the social side of our nature (which was necessarily underdeveloped in childhood) can we find our fullest freedom. But if society is to be a natural extension of the self, it must be consistent with our natural virtues and with our free and rational status. (A society founded on sheer force would be both unnatural and unjust.) The natural and just society will be constituted by the social contract, which Rousseau describes: The clauses of this contract are so determined by the nature of the act that the slightest modification would make them vain and ineffective; so that, although they have perhaps never been formally set forth, they are everywhere the same and everywhere tacitly admitted and recognized. ... These clauses, properly understood, may be reduced to one—the total alienation of each associate, together with ail his rights, to the whole community; for, in the first place, as each gives himself absolutely, the conditions are the same for all; and, this being so, no one has any interest in making them burdensome to others. Moreover, the alienation being without reserve, the union is as perfect as it can be, and no associate has anything more to demand: for, if the individuals retained certain rights, as there would be no common superior to decide between them and the public, each, being on one point his own judge, would ask to be so on all; the state of nature would thus continue, and the association would necessarily become inoperative or tyrannical. Finally, each man, in giving himself to all, gives himself to nobody; and as there is no associate over whom he does not acquire the same right as he yields others over himself, he gains an equivalent for everything he loses, and an Increase of force for the preservation of what he has. If then we discard from the social compact what is not of its essence, we shall find that it reduces itself to the following terms: "Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and, in our corporate capacity, we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole." At once, in place of the individual personality of each contracting party, this act of association creates a corporate and collective body, composed of as many members as the assembly contains voters, and receiving from this act its unity, its common identity, its life, and its will.''

112 12. PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION

Philosophy of education a branch of philosophy concerned with virtually every aspect of the educational enterprise. It significaly overlaps other, more mainstream branches (especially epistimology and ethics, but even logic and methaphysics). The field might almost be constructed as «series of footnotes» to Plato's Meno,wherein are raised such fundamental issues as whether virtue can be taught; what virtue is; what knowledge is; what relation between knowledge of virtue and being virtue is; what the relation between knowledge and teaching is; and how whether teaching is possible. While few people would subscribe to Plato's doctrine (or convenient fiction, perhaps) in Meno that learning by being taught is a process of recollection, the paradox of inquiry that promts this doctrine is at once the root text of the perennial debate between rationalism and empiricism and profoundly unsetting indication that teaching passeth understanding. Mainstream philosophical topics considered within an educational context tend to take on a decidedly genetic cast. So, e.g., epistimology, which analitic philosophy has tend to view s a justificatory enterprise, becomes concerned if not with historical origins of knowledge claims with their genesis within the mental economy of person generally –in consequence of their educations. And even when philosopher of education come to endorse something akin to Plato's classic account of knowledge as justified true belief, they are inclined to suggest, than, that the conveyance of knowledge via instruction must somehow provide the student with the justification along with the true belief –thereby reintroducing a genetic dimention to a topic long lacking one. Perhaps, indeed, analitic philsophy's general (thought not universal) neglect of philosophy of education is traceable in some measure to the latter's almost inevitably genetic perspective, which the former tended to decry as armchair science and as a treat to the autonomy and integrity of proper philosophical inquiry. If this has been a basis for neglect, then philosophy's more recent, postanalytic turn toward naturalized inqueries that reject any dichotomy between emperical and philsophical investigations may make philsophy of education a more inviting area. Education is the general ground upon which rest any effort to actualize full or idea humanity. Philosophers of each epoch articulate theories of education in their respective worldviews, so much so that without the education component, the entire edifice of the system falls. Moreover, each of them articulates a specific kind of education that will bring about or maximize the highest possibility of attaining the kind of human cultivation of character that each of them seeks. For Confucius, Plato rigorous and guided education is the cornerstone of development of the highest human ideal; therefore, social structure must be ordered fundamentally around the mechanism of the education in order for society to generate from within in itself its own highest and best leaders.

113 Confucianism exist as a socio-political theory as much ort more than as a religious philosophy. Confucius advances his view that harmony in human social and political life occurs when superior men govern. Following this claim, as a philosophical theory of social and political development that educates men to prepare them for varying levels of government service , all the way to being principal advisors to the Emperor. Confucius, however, concerned himself with people as a whole, not only with would –be rulers, and with society as a whole. A hallmark of Confucius' thought is his emphasis on education and study. Confucius explains that to strive to actualize any of the virtues of life and service without learning is a variety of deception. The virtues somehow do not become virtuous without being accompanied by, or acquired through, education or learning. He disparages those who have faith in natural understanding or intuition and argues that the only real understanding of a subject comes from long and careful study. Study, for Confucius, means finding a good teacher and imitating his words and deeds. A good teacher is someone older who is familiar with the ways of the past and the practices of the ancients. (See Lunyu 7.22) While he sometimes warns against excessive reflection and meditation, Confucius' position appears to be a middle course between studying and reflecting on what one has learned. “He who learns but does not think is lost. He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger.” (Lunyu 2.15) Confucius, himself, is credited by the tradition with having taught altogether three thousand students, though only seventy are said to have truly mastered the arts he cherished. Confucius is willing to teach anyone, whatever their social standing, as long as they are eager and tireless. Elsewhere in the Analects, Confucius says “I’ve spent days without food and nights without sleep, hoping to purify thought and clarify mind. But it’s never withought sleep, hoping to purify thought and clarify mind. But it’s never done much good. Such practice –they’re nothing like devoted study. ” Devoted study and learning develop the moral virtues of cleanliness of heart and mind. Traditional ascetic practice such as fasting or sleeping deprivation are ineffective. Confucian “superior men” or “gentlemen” were master studens and practitioners of what later came to be called the Confucian Classsics, or the Canon of the Literati. The text included in the canon expanded over time, but the oldest, most venerable portion of the canon which often bears the title of “scripture” includes five text: Shu Ching (Book of History); Shih Ching (Book of Songs); Yi Ching (Book of Changes); Chi’un-Ch’iu (Spring and Autumns) and Li Ching (Book of ritual). Confucian superior men were scholars whose mastery of the content of the these texts and others qualified them as worthy to serve as government officials, provincial governors, and imperial advisors. The various text of the Confucian canon provide extensive instruction on the cultivation of character aligned with the classic virtues of humaneness, property, prudence, uprightness, incorruptibility, frugality, filial piety, benevolence, discipline, and sincerity. Additionally, they taught exellence in music, poetry,

114 and other knowledge. He taught his students morality, proper speech, government, and the refined arts. While he also emphasizes the “Six Arts” – ritual, music, archery, chariot-riding, calligraphy, and computation –it is clear that he regards morality the most important subject. Confucius' pedagogical methods are striking. He never discourses at length on a subject. Instead he poses questions, cites passages from the classics, or uses apt analogies, and waits for his students to arrive at the right answers. “I only instruct the eager and enlighten the fervent. If I hold up one corner and a student cannot come back to me with the other three, I do not go on with the lesson.” (Lunyu 7.8). Confucius' goal is to create gentlemen who carry themselves with grace, speak correctly, and demonstrate integrity in all things. His strong dislike of the sycophantic “petty men,” whose clever talk and pretentious manner win them an audience, is reflected in numerous Lunyu passages. Confucius finds himself in an age in which values are out of joint. Actions and behavior no longer correspond to the labels originally attached to them. “Rulers do not rule and subjects do not serve,” he observes. (Lunyu 12.11; cf. also 13.3) This means that words and titles no longer mean what they once did. Moral education is important to Confucius because it is the means by which one can rectify this situation and restore meaning to language and values to society. He believes that the most important lessons for obtaining such a moral education are to be found in the canonical Book of Songs, because many of its poems are both beautiful and good. Thus Confucius places the text first in his curriculum and frequently quotes and explains its lines of verse. For this reason, the Lunyu is also an important source for Confucius' understanding of the role poetry and art more generally play in the moral education of gentlemen as well as in the reformation of society. Recent archaeological discoveries in China of previously lost ancient manuscripts reveal other aspects of Confucius's reverence for the Book of Songs and its importance in moral education. These manuscripts show that Confucius had found in the canonical text valuable lessons on how to cultivate moral qualities in oneself as well as how to comport oneself humanely and responsibly in public. Although Plato's Republic is best known for its definitive defense of justice, it also includes an equally powerful defense of philosophical education. Plato's beliefs on education, however, are difficult to discern because of the intricacies of the dialogue. Not only does Socrates (Plato's mouthpiece in the dialogue) posit two differing visions of education (the first is the education of the warrior guardians and the second is the philosopher-kings' education), but he also provides a more subtle account of education through the pedagogical method he uses with Glaucon and Adeimantus. Human being takes origin form the Earth: God places the metals as Gold, Silver and Iron there. However human being has one Earth -mother they are different, their character depends on metal content. Gold people are guardians; the Silver is solder and The Iron are peasant. There is no quarantine that The Gold gives a birth to the Gold; it also can be the Silver or the Iron. All three

115 roles complete a society. However this society is hierarchical, where the Gold rules. To know metal content (nature) people should be tested. Each human studies in basis school, after according his ability he goes in special school. On each educational level human study for development of his best quality. Education helps in balance of spirit and body. Socrates suggests that the guardians be controlled through an education designed to make them like "noble puppies" that are fierce with enemies and gentle with familiars (375a). Education in music for the soul and gymnastics for the body, Socrates says, is the way to shape the guardians' character correctly and thereby prevent them from terrorizing the citizens. Thus, the guardians' education is primarily moral in nature, emphasizing the blind acceptance of beliefs and behaviors rather than the ability to think critically and independently. Socrates says that those fit for a guardian's education must by nature be "philosophic, spirited, swift, and strong" (376 c). The guardians must be lovers of learning like "noble puppies" who determine what is familiar and foreign by "knowledge and ignorance" (376 b). Unlike the philosopher-kings appearing later in the book, these philosophically natured guardians approve only of that with which they are already familiar and they attack whatever is new. Although music is the most important component in the guardians' education, equilibrium between music and gymnastics is important for the production of moral guardians. Because a solely gymnastic education causes savagery and a purely musical education causes softness, the two must be balanced. Socrates says, The man who makes the finest mixture of gymnastic with music and brings them to his soul in the most proper measure is the one of whom we would most correctly say that he is the most perfectly musical and well harmonized (412a). Education in music and gymnastics will be compulsory for youths, and their progress and adaptability will be watched and tested throughout their development. Those who resolutely hold onto the convictions instilled in them by education will be chosen as guardians and those who rebel against the city's ideology will be rejected (413d-414a). Socrates says to plan very detailed Curriculum of guardians. Not all music and tales is useful to study, because it can be destructive for their nature. Instead of giving examples of appropriate tales, Socrates attacks the great poets, Hesiod and Homer, for creating inappropriate tales. He says that these poets' tales include bad lies, which further unrealistic images of the gods and heroes (377e). Gods must never be shown as unjust for fear that children will think it acceptable and honorable to do injustice. Tales cannot depict fighting among the gods and, further, children must actively be told that citizens have never been angry with one another (378c). By hearing such tales, youths will learn the importance of unity and will be disinclined to fight amongst themselves when they are grown. Children must be told that the gods are not the cause of all things, only those which are good and just (380c).

116 After being compelled to expound on the details of the city (including communism and gender equality), Socrates admits that the city should be ruled by philosopher-kings (503b) and, furthermore, that the previous account of the guardians' education was incomplete (504b). Socrates now acknowledges that the nature necessary in philosopher-kings is rare. Quick, fiery natures suited to music are usually too unstable for courage in the face of war, and trustworthy, brave natures that excel in war are often slow intellectually (503c-d). Thus, potential philosopher-kings must receive a new form of education that will identify, test, and refine their philosophical natures. Socrates says, "It must also be given gymnastic in many studies to see whether it will be able to bear the greatest studies, or whether it will turn out to be a coward" (503e). From this, it seems that education does not make men a certain way, as in the first account. Instead, education serves to identify those who are capable of philosophizing and helps to strengthen the characters of those who are capable. Furthermore, the philosopher-kings education will teach true love of learning and philosophy, as opposed to the false love of learning of the "noble puppies" (376b). The philosopher-kings' education aims beyond the attainment of the four virtues and includes the greatest and most beneficial study: that of "the good" (505a). Knowledge of the good is the ultimate virtue; without it the attainment of other virtues is impossible. Using the discussion of justice, Socrates formulates an active model of the educational process and guides his students through the levels of intelligibility and knowledge. He follows the path of the divided line, of which the "first [is] knowledge, the second thought, the third trust, and the fourth imagination" (534a). Beginning by imagining the just city, Socrates initiates the educational progression from large images to small ones. Early in the dialogue, Socrates suggests that the idea of justice should be sought first in a large city, for it is there that it will be most visible, and then in individuals (369a). After teaching imagination, Socrates moves onto trust by introducing an education that requires rulers to blindly trust the educative tales they are told. Next, he teaches about thought through his discussion of the philosopher-kings' education and dialectics. Finally, Socrates arrives at knowledge of what is. He acknowledges that his proposed regime and its philosopher-kings are implausible and, instead, the real goal is to establish an ordered, just regime within oneself.

117 13. PROBLEMS OF DIALECTIC THEORY

Dialectics and metaphysics. Dialectics is a theory of the most general connections of the universe and its cognition and also the method of thinking based on this theory. Anyone who wants to find a rational orientation in the world and change the world must have a knowledge of the dialectics of life and thought. Dialectical thinking has its roots far back in the past. Dialectics has its origins in ancient society, both among the Chinese and the Greeks, where thinkers sought to understand Nature as a whole, and saw that everything is fluid, constantly changing, coming into being and passing away. The most striking example was Heraclitus, who saw the world as being in constant flux, intrinsically contradictory, an eternally living fire blazing up and dying down according to certain laws. Heraclitus of Ephesus held that all is in constant change, as a result of inner strife and opposition. One way to proceed — the Socratic method — is to show that a given hypothesis leads to a contradiction; thus, forcing the withdrawal of the hypothesis as a candidate for truth. The ideas of dialectics run right through the history of the development of human thought. They were profoundly expressed in such great thinkers as Kant and Hegel. In Hegel, dialectics embraces the whole sphere of reality and the life of the mind. Dialectical thought reached its highest peak in the philosophy of Marxism, in which materialist dialectics is expressed in a system of philosophical principles, categories and laws. Dialectics arose and develops historically in a struggle against the metaphysical method, which is characteristically one-sided and abstract and inclined to absolutise certain elements within the whole. Metaphysical views have taken various historical forms. While Heraclitus stressed one aspect of existence—the changeability of things, which the Sophists extended to complete relativism, the Eleatic philosophers in their criticism of the Heraclitean principle of flux, concentrated on another aspect, on the stability of existence and went to another extreme in supposing that everything was changeless. Thus, some philosophers dissolved the world in a fiery flux while others crystallised it into immovable rock. In modern times metaphysics has taken the form of an absolutising of the analysis and classification techniques in the cognition of nature. Because they are constantly repeated in scientific research, the techniques of analysis, experimental isolation and classification have gradually imparted to scientific thinking certain general ideas suggesting that in nature's "workshop" objects exist in isolation, as it were, apart from one another. As philosophy and the specialised sciences have developed the focus of the struggle between dialectics and metaphysics has shifted from attempts to explain the connection of things to interpretation of the principle of development. Here metaphysical thought emerged at first in the form of simple evolutionism, and then in various concepts of "creative evolution". While the former hypertrophies quantitative and gradual changes, ignoring qualitative transitions and breaks in gradualness, the latter

118 absolutise the qualitative, essential changes without perceiving the gradual quantitative "preparatory" processes leading up to them. So metaphysical thought is inclined to "jump" to extremes, to exaggerate some aspect of the object: its stability, recurrence, relative independence, and so on. In cognition this leads to idealism or dogmatism and, in practice, to the justification of stagnation and reaction. The only antidote to metaphysics and dogmatism, which is metaphysics in another form, is dialectics, which will not tolerate stagnation and sets no limits to cognition and its scope. Dissatisfaction with what has been achieved is the element of dialectics, and revolutionary activity is its essence. Hegelian Dialectics is based on three (or four) basic concepts: 1. Unity and Struggle of Opposite; 2. Quantity and Quality Changes; 3. Negation of Negation. Principals of Unity and Struggle of Opposite. Oppositeness is a relationship supported by mutually excluding, mutually generating, mutually conditioning and mutually permeating elements and tendencies. Oppositeness are the aspect of a single process, object or phenomenon that condition their movement and development. Unity of Opposite shows in their integration; Integration of opposites in the former may involve delay or never happen at all and then development could be delayed or terminate. Conflict of Opposites shows in their mutual conditionality, which is in that opposites should be commensurable to more or less resemble and correspond to each other. Principals of Quantity and Quality Changes. Quality is the inner, substantial specificity of an object, one identical to its being. The important attributes of Quality are changes and structure of items. Quantity indicates how many times and to what degree a given qualitative specificity or property is represented in a given formation. Quality and Quantity is in dialectic unity. There is no quantity without reflection of quality, and there is no quality without quantity. That unity of Quality & Quantity displays in measure. Measure is quantitative internal, within which a given quality is retained When a measure emerges from its bounds this would result in a new quality and new measure is leap. Every qualitative formation corresponds to a definite quantitative expression. One could quantatively compare highly different objects, but only after one has found a common quality in them. Development takes place in the form of continuous quantitative changes, which accumulate at a definite stage to cause a leap and transition from an old quality and measure to new quality and new measure. Principals of Negation of Negation. Every development assumes transition from the old to the new, from previous quality to more perfect quality, from one stage to another. It could take place either metaphysically or dialectically. By involving basically new elements, a new quality shall at the

119 same time retain continuity to take from the past everything that had already justified itself to be able to work and develop. Characterizing the law of negation of negation Hegel in formalized form presented it as a formation of thesis into antithesis (the 1st negation) to make the antithesis turn into synthesis (2nd negation). In the course of the 2nd negation the object would revert to itself, as it were, to its initial stage, but a higher qualitative level. This would happen not only with the thesis, but with every process. The complete cycle of an object’s development would involve its dialectical negation & transition into an oppositeness, and then a second negation accompanied by reversion to the stating state at a higher qualitative level the before Categories. In philosophy, categories are extremely general, fundamental concepts reflecting the most essential, law-governed connections and relationships of reality. Categories are the forms and stable organising principles of the thought process and, as such, they reproduce the properties and relations of existence in global and most concentrated form. Categories are the result of generalisation, of the intellectual synthesis of the achievements of science and socio-historical practice and are, therefore, the key points of cognition, the moments when thought grasps the essence of things. This is the starting-point for the analysis of the diversity (individual and particular, part and whole, form and content, etc.). The categories are universal and lasting because they reflect what is most stable in the universe. Moreover, in the process of history the content, role and status of the categories change and new categories (system, structure, for example) arise. Categories are the universals which reflect quality things and processes of reality; and work according with dialectics laws; Categories are interrelative and integrative; one could not exist without other; each pair is unity of Opposite. There are the next categories: individual and universal; essence and phenomenon; cause and effect; form and content; necessity and chance; possibility and reality. The concept of universal connection. Nothing in the world stands by itself. Every object is a link in an endless chain and is thus connected with all the other links. And this chain of the universe has never been broken; it unites all objects and processes in a single whole and thus has a universal character. We cannot move so much as our little finger without "disturbing" the whole universe. The life of the universe, its history lies in an infinite web of connections. Whereas the interconnection of things is absolute, their independence is relative. In the sphere of non-organic nature there exist mechanical, physical and chemical connections, which presuppose interaction either through various fields or by means of direct contact. In a crystal, which is an ensemble of atoms, no individual atom can move in complete independence of the others. Its slightest shift has an effect on every other atom. The oscillations of particles in a

120 solid body are, and can only be, collective. In living nature there exist more complex connections — the biological, which are expressed in various relations between and within species and also in their relations with the environment. In the life of society connections become more complex and we have production, class, family, personal, national, state, international and other relationships. Connections exist not only between objects within the framework of a given form of motion of matter, but also between all its forms, woven together in a kind of infinitely huge skein. Our consciousness can contain no idea that does not express either imagined or real connections, and in its turn this idea must of necessity be a link in a chain of other ideas and conceptions. What is a connection? It is a dependence of one phenomenon on another in a certain relationship. The basic forms of connection may be classified as spatial, temporal, causal and consequential, necessary and accidental, law- governed, im mediate and mediate, internal and external, dynamic and static, direct and feedback, and so on. Connection does not exist by itself, without that which is connected. Moreover, any connection has its basis, which makes such connection possible. For example, the gravitational properties of material systems condition the force connection of cosmic objects; atomic nuclear charge is a connection in the periodic system of the elements; material production and the community of interests serve as the basis for the connections between human beings in society. The materiality of the world conditions the connection of everything with everything else, expressed in the philosophical principle of universal connection. In order to realise this or that connection there must be certain conditions. They differ for various systems. Investigation of the various forms of connections is the primary task of cognition. Connection is the first thing that strikes us when we consider anything. We, of course, do not always think about such things. And this is natural enough, for one cannot think only in terms of universal connections when deciding simple everyday or even specific scientific problems. However, on the philosophical level, when one tries to consider universal problems, one cannot adopt the position of never looking further than one's nose. This brings us to the methodological conclusion that in order to know an object in reality, one must embrace, study all its aspects, all the immediate and mediate connections. This is what drives scientific thought in its search for systematic connections everywhere, both in particulars and in the whole. If we deny the principle of universal connection, and particularly the essential connections, this has a disastrous effect not only on our theory but also on our practice. For example, forest-cutting reduces the bird population and this, in its turn, increases the number of agricultural pests. Destruction of forests sands up rivers, erodes the soil and thus leads to a reduction in harvests. There are no birds or animals in nature that are absolutely harmful. The wolf, for example, because it eats other animals, including the weak and the sick, acts as a regulator of their

121 numbers. Paradoxically, the mass extermination of wolves, far from protecting other species, actually reduces their numbers, due to the spread of disease. So everything in the world is connected with something else. And this universal interconnection, and also the connection of the elements within the whole at any level, form an essential condition for the dynamic balance of systems. Interaction. The human individual, for example, is not a lone traveller amid the jungles of existence. He is a part of the world interacting in various ways with that world. Separate cultures are not closed, isolated islands. They are like great waves in the ocean of history, which work upon each other, often merging into even broader waves, often clashing with waves of a different dimension, so that the regular rhythm of the rise and fall of individual waves is broken. Like any other system, an organism or a society lives and functions as long as there is a certain interaction of the elements in these systems or of the systems themselves with other systems. Everything that happens in the world may be attributed to the interaction of things, one element of which is equilibrium. Interaction is a process by which various objects influence each other, their mutual conditioning or transmutation and also their generation of one another. Interaction is a kind of immediate or mediate, external or internal relationship or connection. The properties of an object may manifest themselves and be cognised only through its interconnection with other objects. The category of interaction is extremely versatile and may be used in various senses. In some cases interaction is understood as the general basis or condition for the development of events; in others it has the meaning of a complex causal relationship. But interaction is most widely understood as a special form of causal connection, namely the two-way relationship. Interaction operates as an integrating factor by which the parts in a certain type of whole are united. For example, electromagnetic interaction between a nucleus and electrons creates the structure of the atom. The material unity of the world, the interconnection of all the structural levels of existence is achieved through the universality of interaction. The chain of interaction is never broken and has neither beginning nor end. Every phenomenon is a link in the general universal chain of interaction. In the immediate sense interaction is causal. Every cause is simultaneously both active and passive in relation to another cause. The origin and development of objects depend on interaction. Every qualitatively defined system has a special type of interaction. Every kind of interaction is connected with material fields and involves transference of matter, motion and information. Interaction is impossible without a specific material vehicle. The modern classification of interaction distinguishes between force and informational interactions. Physics knows four basic types of force interaction, which provide the key to our understanding of the infinitely diverse processes of nature. These are the gravitational, the electromagnetic, the so-called strong

122 (nuclear) interactions, and the weak (decay) interactions. Every type of interaction in physics has its own specific measure. Biology studies interaction at various levels: in molecules, cells, organisms, populations, species, biological communities. The life of society is characterised by even more complex forms of interaction, for society is a process and product of interaction both between people and between man and nature. Unless we study interaction in its general and concrete manifestations we cannot understand the properties, structures or laws of reality. Not a single phenomenon in the world can be explained out of itself, without taking into account its interactions with other objects. Interaction is not only the initial point of cognition but also its culminating point. Development. Any type of connection or interaction must take a certain direction. Nothing in the world is final and complete. Everything is on the way to somewhere else. Development is a definitely oriented, irreversible change of the object, from the old to the new, from the simple to the complex, from a lower level to a higher one. The vector of a developing phenomenon is towards acquisition of the fullness of its essence, towards self-fulfilment in various new forms. The new is an intermediate or final result of development in relation to the old. Changes may involve the composition of the object (its quantity or quality), the type of connection of the elements of the specific whole, its function, or its "behaviour", that is to say, the means by which it interacts with other objects and, finally, all these characteristics taken as a whole. Development is irreversible. Nothing passes through one and the same state more than once. Development is a dual process: the old is destroyed and replaced by something new, which establishes itself in life not simply by freely evolving its own potential but in conflict with the old. The crucial feature of development is time. Development takes place in time and only time reveals its direction. Even the history of the concept of development goes back to the formation of the theoretical notions of the direction of time. The ancient cultures had no knowledge of development in the true sense. They saw time as moving in cycles and all events were thought to be predestined. The old way of thinking was that the sun must rise and set and hasten to its destined resting place, the wind would blow where it listeth and return in its courses, what was bound to happen would happen, and what was done would always be done, and there was nothing new under the sun. The idea of a universe, perfect and complete, on which the whole ancient view of the world rested, precluded any question of oriented change that might give rise to new systems and connections. Any such change was understood as the evolution of certain possibilities that had been inherent in things from the beginning and had simply been hidden from view. With the rise of Christianity, the notions of time and its linear direction begin to be applied to the intellectual sphere, and, as experimental science takes shape, these notions gradually begin to blaze a trail in the study of nature, giving birth to the ideas of natural history,

123 of oriented and irreversible changes in nature and society. The turning-point here was the creation of cosmology and the theory of evolution in biology and geology. The idea of development then became firmly established in natural science and has since become an object of philosophical investigation. This orientation of the sciences on the idea of development substantially enriched it with a world-view and methodological principles and played an essential heuristic role. For instance, biology and the history of culture showed that the process of development was neither universal nor homogeneous. If we consider development on a major scale, such as organic evolution, it is quite obvious that certain interactions of processes taking different directions are at work within it. The general line of progressive development is interwoven with changes that give rise to blind alleys of evolution or even paths of regress. Alongside processes of ascending development we find degradation and decay of systems, descents from the higher to the lower, from the more perfect to the less perfect, and a lowering in the level of organisation of systems. An example of degradation is to be found in biological species that die out because of their failure to adapt to new conditions. Degradation of a system as a whole does not mean that all its elements are beginning to disintegrate. Regress is a contradictory process: the whole falls apart but certain elements in it may progress. What is more, a system as a whole may progress while certain of its elements fall into decay. Thus, the progressive development of biological forms as a whole goes hand in hand with the degradation of certain species. Cyclical processes such as the transmutation of elementary particles play a significant role in the universe. The branch of progressive development known to science consists of the pre-stellar, the stellar, the planetary, the biological, the social and hypothetical metasocial stages of the structural organisation of matter. On the cosmic scale the processes of progressive and regressive development would appear to be of equal significance.

124 14. EPISTEMOLOGY

Epistemology (from Greek episteme, 'knowledge', and logos, 'explanation'), the study of the nature of knowledge and justification; specifically, the study of (a) the defining features, (b) the substantive conditions or sources, and (c) the limits of knowledge and justification. The latter three categories are represented by traditional philosophical controversy over the analysis of knowledge and justification, the sources of knowledge and justification (e.g., rationalism versus empiricism), and the viability of skepticism about knowledge and justification. Kinds of knowledge. Knowledge can be either explicit or tacit. Explicit knowledge is self-conscious in that the knower is aware of the relevant state of knowledge, whereas tacit knowledge is implicit, hidden from self- consciousness. Much of our knowledge is tacit: it is genuine but we are unaware of the relevant states of knowledge, even if we can achieve awareness upon suitable reflection. In this regard, knowledge resembles many of our psychological states. The existence of a psychological state in a person does not require the person's awareness of that state, although it may require the person's awareness of an object of that state (such as what is sensed or perceived). Philosophers have identified various species of knowledge: for example, propositional knowledge {that something is so), non-propositional knowledge of something (e.g., knowledge by acquaintance, or by direct awareness), empirical (a posteriori) propositional knowledge, non-empirical (a priori) propositional knowledge, and knowledge of how to do something. Philosophical controversy has arisen over distinctions between such species, for example, over (i) the relations between some of these spedes (e.g., does knowing-how reduce to knowledge-that?), and (ii) the viability of some of these species (e.g., is there really such a thing as, or even a coherent notion of, a priori knowledge?). A primary concern of classical modern philosophy, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was the extent of our a priori knowledge relative to the extent of our a posteriori knowledge. Such rationalists as Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza contended that all genuine knowledge of the real world is a priori, whereas such empiricists as Locke, Berkeley, and Hume argued that all such knowledge is a posteriori. In his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant sought a grand reconciliation, aiming to preserve the key lessons of both rationalism and empiricism. Since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a posteriori knowledge has been widely regarded as knowledge that depends for its supporting ground on some specific sensory or perceptual experience; and a priori knowledge has been widely regarded as knowledge that does not depend for its supporting ground on such experience. Kant and others have held that the supporting ground for a priori knowledge comes solely from purely intellectual processes called "pure reason" or "pure understanding." Knowledge of logical and mathematical truths typically serves as a standard case of a priori knowledge,

125 whereas knowledge of the existence or presence of physical objects typically serves as a standard case of a posteriori knowledge. A major task for an account of a priori knowledge is the explanation of what the relevant purely intellectual processes are, and of how they contribute to non-empirical knowledge. An analogous task for an account of a posteriori knowledge is the explanation of what sensory or perceptual experience is and how it contributes to empirical knowledge. More fundamentally, epistemolo-gists have sought an account of prepositional knowledge in general, i.e., an account of what is common to a priori and a posteriori knowledge. Ever since Plato's Meno and Theaetetus (c.400 B.C.), epistemologists have tried to identify the essential, defining components of knowledge. Identifying these components will yield an analysis of knowledge. A prominent traditional view, suggested by Plato and Kant among others, is that prepositional knowledge {that something is so) has three individually necessary and jointly sufficient components: justification, truth, and belief. On this view, prepositional knowledge is, by definition, justified true belief. This is the tripartite definition that has come to be called the standard analysis. We can clarify it by attending briefly to each of its three conditions. The belief condition. This requires that anyone who knows that p (where 'p' stands for any proposition or statement) must believe that p. If, therefore, you do not believe that minds are brains (say, because you have not considered the matter at all), then you do not know that minds are brains. A knower must be psychologically related somehow to a proposition that is an object of knowledge for that knower. Proponents of the standard analysis hold that only belief can provide the needed psychological relation. Philosophers do not share a uniform account of belief, but some considerations supply common ground. Beliefs are not actions of assenting to a proposition; they rather are dispositional psychological states that can exist even when unmanifested. (You do not cease believing that 2 + 2 = 4, for example, whenever your attention leaves arithmetic.) Our believing that p seems to require that we have a tendency to assent to p in certain situations, but it seems also to be more than just such a tendency. What else believing requires remains highly controversial among philosophers. Some philosophers have opposed the belief condition of the standard analysis on the ground that we can accept, or assent to, a known proposition without actually believing it. They contend that we can accept a proposition even if we fail to acquire a tendency, required by believing, to accept that proposition in certain situations. On this view, acceptance is a psychological act that does not entail any dispositional psychological state, and such acceptance is sufficient to relate a knower psychologically to a known proposition. However this view fares, one underlying assumption of the standard analysis seems correct: our concept of knowledge requires that a knower be psychologically related somehow to a known proposition. Barring that requirement, we shall be hard put to explain how knowers psychologically possess their knowledge of known propositions.

126 Even if knowledge requires belief, belief that p does not require knowledge that p, since belief can typically be false. This observation, familiar from Plato's Theaetetus, assumes that knowledge has a truth condition. On the standard analysis, if you know that p, then it is true that p. If, therefore, it is false that minds are brains, then you do not know that minds are brains. It is thus misleading to say, e.g., that astronomers before Copernicus knew that the earth is flat; at best, they justifiably believed that they knew this. The truth condition. This condition of the standard analysis has not attracted any serious challenge. Controversy over it has focused instead on Pilate's vexing question: What is truth? This question concerns what truth consists in, not our ways of finding out what is true. Influential answers come from at least three approaches: truth as correspondence (i.e., agreement, of some specified sort, between a proposition and an actual situation); truth as coherence (i.e., interconnectedness of a proposition with a specified system of propositions); and truth as pragmatic cognitive value (i.e., usefulness of a proposition in achieving certain intellectual goals). Without assessing these prominent approaches, we should recognize, in accord with the standard analysis, that our concept of knowledge seems to have a factual requirement: we genuinely know that p only if it is the case that p. The pertinent notion of «its being the case» seems equivalent to the notion of «how reality is» or «how things really are». The latter notion seems essential to our notion of knowledge, but is open to controversy over its explication. The justification condition. Knowledge is not simply true belief. Some true beliefs are supported only by lucky guesswork and hence do not qualify as knowledge. Knowledge requires that the satisfaction of its belief condition be "appropriately related" to the satisfaction of its truth condition. This is one broad way of understanding the justification condition of the standard analysis. More specifically, we might say that a knower must have adequate indication that a known proposition is true. If we understand such adequate indication as a sort of evidence indicating that a proposition is true, we have reached the traditional general view of the justification condition: justification as evidence. Questions about justification attract the lion's share of attention in contemporary epistemology. Controversy focuses on the meaning of 'justification' as well as on the substantive conditions for a belief's being justified in a way appropriate to knowledge. Current debates about the meaning of 'justification' revolve around the question whether, and if so how, the concept of epistemic (knowledge-relevant) justification is normative. Since the 1950s Chishoim has defended the following deontological (obligation-oriented) notion of justification: the claim that a proposition, p, is epistemically justified for you means that it is false that you ought to refrain from accepting p. hi other terms, to say that p is epistemically justified is to say that accepting p is epistemically permissible - at least in the sense that accepting p is consistent with a certain set of epistemic rules. This deontological construal enjoys wide representation in contemporary

127 epistemology. A normative construal of justification need not be deontological; it need not use the notions of obligation and permission. Alston, for instance, has introduced a non-deontological normative concept of justification that relies mainly on the notion of what is epistemically good from the viewpoint of maximizing truth and minimizing falsity. Alston links epistemic goodness to a belief's being based on adequate grounds in the absence of overriding reasons to the contrary. Some epistemologists shun normative construals of justification as superfluous. One noteworthy view is that 'epistemic justification' means simply 'evidential support' of a certain sort. To say that p is epistemically justifiable to some extent for you is, on this view, just to say that p is supportable to some extent by your overall evidential reasons. This construal will be non-normative so long as the notions of sup-portability and an evidential reason are non-normative. Some philosophers have tried to explicate the latter notions without relying on talk of epistemic permissibility or epistemic goodness. We can understand the relevant notion of "support" in terms of non- normative notions of entailment and explanation (or, answering why-questions). We can understand the notion of an "evidential reason" via the notion of a psychological state that can stand in a certain truth-indicating support relation to propositions. For instance, we might regard non-doxastic states of "seeming to perceive" something (e.g., seeming to see a dictionary here) as found ational truth indicators for certain physical-object propositions (e.g., the proposition that there is a dictionary here), in virtue of those states being best explained by those propositions. If anything resembling this approach succeeds, we can get by without the aforementioned normative notions of epistemic justification. Foundationalism versus coherentism. Talk of foundational truth indicators brings us to a key controversy over justification: Does epistemic justification, and thus knowledge, have foundations, and if so, in what sense? This question can be clarified as the issue whether some beliefs can not only (a) have their epistemic justification non-inferentially (i.e., apart from evidential support from any other beliefs), but also (b) provide epistemic justification for all justified beliefs that lack such non-inferential justification. Foundationalism gives an affirmative answer to this issue, and is represented in varying ways by, e.g., Aristotle, Descartes, Russell, C. I. Lewis, and Chishoim. Foundationalists do not share a uniform account of non-inferential justification. Some construe non-inferential justification as self -justification. Others reject literal self-justification for beliefs, and argue that foundational beliefs have their non-inferential justification in virtue of evidential support from the deliverances of non-belief psychological states, e.g., perception ("seem-ing-to-perceive" states), sensation ("seem-ing-to-sense" states), or memory ("seeming-to-remember" states). Still others understand non-inferential justification in terms of a belief's being "reliably produced," i.e., caused and sustained by some non-belief belief-producing process or source (e.g., perception, memory, introspection) that tends to produce true rather than false beliefs. This last view takes the causal source of a belief to be crucial to its

128 justification. Unlike Descartes, contemporary foundationalists clearly separate claims to non-inferential, foundational justification from claims to certainty. They typically settle for a modest foundationalism implying that foundational beliefs need not be indubitable or infallible. This contrasts with the radical foundationalism of Descartes. The traditional competitor to foundationalism is the coherence theory of justification, i.e., epistemic coherentism. This is not the coherence definition of truth; it rather is the view that the justification of any belief depends on that belief's having evidential support from some other belief via coherence relations such as entailment or explanatory relations. Notable proponents include Hegel, Bosanquet, and Sellars. A prominent contemporary version of epistemic coherentism states that evidential coherence relations among beliefs are typically explanatory relations. The rough idea is that a belief is justified for you so long as it either best explains, or is best explained by, some member of the system of beliefs that has maximal explanatory power for you. Contemporary coherentism is uniformly systemic or holistic; it finds the ultimate source of justification in a system of interconnected beliefs or potential beliefs. One problem has troubled all versions of coherentism that aim to explain empirical justification: the isolation argument. According to this argument, coherentism entails that you can be epistemically justified in accepting an empirical proposition that is incompatible with, or at least improbable given, your total empirical evidence. The key assumption of this argument is that your total empirical evidence includes non-belief sensory and perceptual awareness-states, such as your feeling pain or your seeming to see something. These are not belief-states. Epistemic coherentism, by definition, makes justification a function solely of coherence relations between propositions, such, as propositions one believes or accepts. Thus, such coherentism seems to isolate justification from the evidential import of non- belief awareness-states. Coherentists have tried to handle this problem, but no resolution enjoys wide acceptance. Causal and contextualist theories. Some contemporary epistemologists endorse contextualism regarding epistemic justification, a view suggested by Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Kuhn, among others. On this view, all justified beliefs depend for their evidential support on some unjustified beliefs that need no justification. In any context of inquiry, people simply assume (the acceptability of) some propositions as starting points for inquiry, and these "contextually basic" propositions, though lacking evidential support, can serve as evidential support for other propositions. Contextualists stress that contextually basic propositions can vary from context to context (e.g., from theological inquiry to biological inquiry) and from social group to social group. The main problem for contextualists comes from their view that unjustified assumptions can provide epistemic justification for other propositions. We need a precise explanation of how an unjustified assumption can yield evidential support, how a non-probabie

129 belief can make another belief probable. Contextualists have not given a uniform explanation here. Recently some epistemologists have recommended that we give up the traditional evidence condition for knowledge. They recommend that we construe the justification condition as a causal condition. Roughly, the idea is that you know that p if and only if (a) you believe that p, (b) p is true, and (c) your believing that p is causally produced and sustained by the fact that makes p true. This is the basis of the causal theory of knowing, which comes with varying details. Any such causal theory faces serious problems from our knowledge of universal propositions. Evidently, we know, for instance, that all dictionaries are produced by people, but our believing that this is so seems not to be causally supported by the fact that all dictionaries are humanly produced. It is not clear that the latter fact causally produces any beliefs. Another problem is that causal theories typically neglect what seems to be crucial to any account of the justification condition: the requirement that justificational support for a belief be accessible, in some sense, to the believer. The rough idea is that one must be able to access, or bring to awareness, the justification underlying one's beliefs. The causal origins of a belief are, of course, often very complex and inaccessible to a believer. Causal theories thus face problems from an accessibility requirement on justification. Intemalism regarding justification preserves an accessibility requirement on what confers justification, whereas epistemic externalism rejects this requirement. Debates over intemalism and ex- ernalism abound in current epistemology, but ntemalists do not yet share a uniform detailed account of accessibility. The Gettier problem. The standard analysis of knowledge, however elaborated, faces a devastating challenge that initially gave rise to causal theories of knowledge: the Gettier problem. In 1963 Edmund Gettier published a highly influential challenge to the view that if you have a justified true belief that p, then you know that p. Here is one of Gettier's counterexamples to this view: Smith is justified in believing the false proposition that (i) Jones owns a Ford. On the basis of (i). Smith infers, and thus is justified in believing, that (ii) either Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona. As it happens, Brown is in Barcelona, and so (ii) is true. So, although Smith is justified in believing the true proposition (ii). Smith does not know (ii). Gettier-style counterexamples are cases where a person has justified true belief that p but lacks knowledge that p. The Gettier problem is the problem of finding a modification of, or an alternative to, the standard analysis that avoids difficulties from Gettier-style counterexamples. The controversy over the Gettier problem is highly complex and still unsettled. Many epistemologists take the lesson of Gettier-style counterexamples to be that propositional knowledge requires a fourth condition, beyond the justification, truth, and belief conditions. No specific fourth condition has received overwhelming acceptance, but some proposals have become prominent. The so-called defeasibility condition, e.g., requires that the justification appropriate to knowledge be "undefeated" in the general sense that some appropriate subjunctive conditional concerning

130 defeaters of justification be true of that justification. For instance, one simple defeasibility fourth condition requires of Smith's knowing that p that there be no true proposition, q, such that if q became justified for Smith, p would no longer be justified for Smith. So if Smith knows, on the basis of his visual perception, that Mary removed books from the iibrary, then Smith's coming to believe the true proposition that Mary's identical twin removed books from the library would not undermine the justification for Smith's belief concerning Mary herself. A different approach shuns subjunctive conditionals of that sort, and contends that propositional knowledge requires justified true belief that is sustained by the collective totality of actual truths. This approach requires a detailed account of when justification is undermined and restored. The Gettier problem is epistemologically important. One branch of epistemology seeks a precise understanding of the nature (e.g., the essential components) of propositional knowledge. Our having a precise understanding of propositional knowledge requires our having a Gettier-proof analysis of such knowledge. Bpistemologists thus need a defensible solution to the Gettier problem, however complex that solution is. Skepticism. Epistemologists debate the limits, or scope, of knowledge. The more restricted we take the limits of knowledge to be, the more skeptical we are. Two influential types of skepticism are knowledge skepticism and justification skepticism. Unrestricted knowledge skepticism implies that no one knows anything, whereas unrestricted justification skepticism implies the more extreme view that no one is even justified in believing anything. Some forms of skepticism are stronger than others. Knowledge skepticism in its strongest form implies that it is impossible for anyone to know anything. A weaker form would deny the actuality of our having knowledge, but leave open its possibility. Many skeptics have restricted their skepticism to a particular domain of supposed knowledge: e.g., knowledge of the external world, knowledge of other minds, knowledge of the past or the future, or knowledge of unperceived items. Such limited skepticism is more common than unrestricted skepticism in the history of epistemology. Arguments supporting skepticism come in many forms. One of the most difficult is the problem of the criterion, a version of which has been stated by the sixteenth-century skeptic Montaigne: "To adjudicate [between the true and the false] among the appearances of things, we need to have a distinguishing method; to validate this method, we need to have a justifying argument; but to validate this justifying argument, we need the very method at issue. And there we are, going round on the wheel." This line of skeptical argument originated in ancient Greece, with epistemology itself. It forces us to face this question: How can we specify what we know without having specified how we know, and how can we specify how we know without having specified what we know? Is there any reasonable way out of this threatening circle? This is one of the most difficult epistemological problems, and a cogent epistemology must offer a defensible solution to debaters who most influence public opinion and policy

131 have rarely availed themselves of that pre-dsification. Recent work in philosophy of education, however, has taken up some major educational objectives - moral and other values, critical and creative thinking - in a way that promises to have an impact on the actual conduct of education. Philosophy of education, long isolated (in schools of education) from the rest of the academic philosophical community, has also been somewhat estranged from the professional educational mainstream. Dewey would surely have approved of a change in this status quo.

15. PHILOSOPHY OF GLOBAL PROBLEM

Global problems in the modern sense of the world begun to be mentioned only after the World War 2, even if already the World War 1 and the world economic crisis of the 30s hinted that the most important problems of the humankind development were globalising. Each of the global problems has its economic as well as non-economic dimension. V. Jenícek in his article “Global problems of the world – structure, urgency” describes the division of global problems into three big groups, as follows (Jenícek 2004):  inter-social global problems  natural-social global problems  anthropo-social global problems  inter-social global problems Inter-social global problems are usually ranked as the highest in hierarchy, into the first group. They are connected with the mutual impact of the different social and economic systems and the global co-ex istence of humankind in the conditions of different value criteria and ideologies, as well as different reactions to the global social situations with the principal clash of interests. here, there are usually included the problems like: – the problem of diverting world wars, nuclear, eventually other conflicts connected to the problematic of armament (the problem of war and peace). At present, there gains in importance also the fight towards terrorism – the problem of the social and economic backwardness of developing countries, eventually the whole north-South relationship – the problem of solving global debts, the relation- ship of the indebted and creditors – The problem of the international relationships (namely economic) changes under the new conditions formed namely by the scientific and technological progress. Sometimes the question of scientific and technological process is, with regard to its importance and the relationship to internalisation and interdependence, ranked as a special global problem of the optimal utilisation of scientific and technological progress in different social and economic conditions. This problematic used to be most often connected with the need to reconstruct the system of international economic relationships. it is then

132 obvious, that it regards problems which origin inside human society as the result of mutual antagonisms and contradictory interests of its pasts. however, people live also in complicated relationships to the bio-sphere, eco- sphere and the nature in general. Therefore, the second big group of problems regards the harmonisation of these relationships. Natural-social global problems. These so-called natural-social global problems issue form the interrupted relationships between the nature and human society, when the population growths but natural resources remain rather constant. Moreover, economic growth, consumer life-style and the general growth of human needs evokes a number of these problems or worsens them by pollution. Also the phenomenon of man entering the cosmic space brings about complications. in this group, the heterogeneity of understanding the problems by the individual authors is the highest, i.e. either individual understanding of the problem of food, raw materials, energetic and other natural resources scarcity, or their connecting into the complex problems of these natural resources efficient utilisation. The increased difficulties in each of these areas contributes to their individual understanding, while, on the other hand, the fact that they are of the common base and are interconnected by their reasons as well as conse- quences contributes to their connecting together. in this text, we observe rather the first way, and that not only because of the growing difficulties in each independent area, but also for the reason of lucid presentation and, last but not least, also with regard to the world trend of specialisation in the global problems research sphere. Into the second group of natural-social global problems, there are most often included the following problems: environmental problem; raw material and energy problem; population problem; food, respectively nutrition problem. Anthroposocial global problems. Lastly, the third group of anthropo- social problems includes the general human problems of the social, cultural and humanitarian-ethical nature. Sometimes, they are ranked as one great complex problem (so- called problem of the future of man), sometimes this group is divided into a number (10–15) of partial “sub-global” problems the common denominator of which are the shortcomings of the development of man in the relationship to the life and social conditions created by himself. here belong different kinds of the unequal approach to education, health care, housing, culture, human rights, eventually also serious defects in their securing or a disharmonic and uncontrolled development (e.g. accelerated urbanisation) etc. The complex problem of the future of man is set by most authors as an independent problem, since the existence of the global problem of the future of man is the issue of all the questions, problems and relationships determining the life of man and human society. However, this complex problem cannot be solved as such, but only through the solution of other global problems as well as of the problems of a different order. The problem of the future of man basically falls into two partial problems. First, the problem of the future of man in the biological sense of the word, as the future of the “homo sapiens” genus.

133 Secondly, also as the problem of the future of the individual, non-repeatable, creative and active human being in all its relationships, relations and life manifestations. Today mankind all over the world is suffering from multidimensional crisis such as terrorism, population-explosion, denial of human rights, economic inequality, racial discrimination, vanity of cultural superiority, ideological extremism, religious intolerance, nationalism, social injustice, poverty, starvation exploitation of nature, oppression of weaker section by powerful and rich, ecological imbalance, natural calamities, consumerism and so on. The development of human society is inseparable from the development of nature; however, at the same time human society and nature as such have their own specific laws and rules. Human society is much more active in its interaction with nature that nature itself. Therefore, society is the active element determining the changes, and that both in the world as well as national frame, which do not exclude each other. All global problems then exist on the world scale and, at the same time, also as a manifestation of the global problems on the national scale. Both ways of their existence are influencing and determining each other.

16. FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS OF PHILOSOPHY No matter from what direction the thinker is proceeding along the "philosophical road", he must cross the bridge known as "the basic question of philosophy". As he does so he must, whether he likes it or not, decide on which side of the river of philosophical thought he will remain—the materialist or the idealist side. But he may find himself in mid-stream, in the position of dualism, that is to say, recognition of two equal and independent substances in the universe—material and spiritual. The basic question of philosophy is that of the relationship of thinking to being. It presupposes acknowledgement of the existence of an objective, i.e., independent of human consciousness, reality and a subjective, spiritual reality—representations, thoughts, ideas—and a certain relationship between them. Which comes first—matter or consciousness? Which generates which? Does matter at a certain stage of development generate its finest flower—the reason? Or does the world spirit create the material world? Or perhaps they have coexisted eternally as equal substances in their own right and are in some way interacting? Such is the first aspect of the basic question of philosophy. Its second aspect comes down to the following. Can man and mankind in general know the objective laws of the world by the power of their own consciousness? Or is the world unknowable? In examining the first aspect implied in the basic question of philosophy the thinker inevitably finds himself in one of two camps, materialism or idealism (or dualism), while in examining the second aspect of the question he takes a stand either in favour of the fundamental possibility of knowing the world or in favour of agnosticism, that is, denial of this possibility. Why is the question of the relation of thinking to being—a seemingly very abstract question—considered to be the basic philosophical question?

134 Because from the nature of the answer we give, as from the source of a great river, there flow not only directly contrasting interpretations of all other philosophical problems but also the general theoretical, world-view questions posed by any science, moral phenomena, standards of law and responsibility, phenomena of art, political events, problems of education, and so on. We cannot consider any philosophical question unless we first solve the basic question of philosophy. To illustrate, let us take the example of the concept of causality. Materialism presumes that this concept reflects an objective, i.e., independent of human consciousness, process of generation of some phenomena by others. But Hume, for example, denied the existence of causality in nature. He believed that it was habit that taught people to see certain phenomena as the causes of others, for instance, the blow of an axe and the falling of a tree. We have indeed become accustomed to see the result follow the action that causes it. But this habit is based on the continuous consideration of the objective connection of phenomena and did not arise by itself. According to the materialist principle, all authentically proved concepts, categories, propositions, inferences, laws and theories have a substantially objective character and do not depend on the whim of man. Idealism, on the other hand, is inclined to regard them merely as mental constructions. For example, the materialist scholar of literature studying the work of Shakespeare begins by sorting out what objective social conditions predetermined the character and inspiration of the dramatist's work. The idealists, on the other hand, are inclined to attribute his work to the depth of the individual spirit of this genius and ignore the social conditions in which he lived and wrote. If one takes the moral sphere, it is immediately obvious how contrasting the solutions to the basic question of philosophy may be. Are man's moral qualities innate or given by God, or are they formed by life, by upbringing. As applied to history, the basic question of philosophy appears as a relationship between social being and social consciousness. On how this relationship is interpreted depends the answer to the question: what determines man's destiny, what guides history—ideas, the rational powers of historic individuals, or the material production carried on by the people of a given society and the economic relationships that arise from this process. Consequently, the basic question of philosophy is not simply the question of the relation between thinking and being in general, but more specifically, that of the relation between social consciousness and social being, that is to say, the objective relations between people formed on the basis of their production of material goods. The materialist under standing of the basic question of philosophy as applied to history is expressed fully and simply: social being ultimately determines social consciousness and social consciousness, derivatively, has an active influence on this being. Consideration of the basic question shows that in approach ing any question of either theory or practice it is extremely important to distinguish the primary from the secondary, the objective from the subjective, the real processes of life from their interpretation in various theories, the material driving forces of

135 society from the ideal motivations, the material interests of people, social groups from their reflections in the mind. Materialism teaches our thinking to see in our mental constructions, in our artistic, political and other ideas and images the objective content determined by the external world, by life. Idealism, on the other hand, hypertrophies the spiritual principle, treats it as absolute. In politics, for example, this attitude may have dangerous consequences for the people; idealism sometimes results in political adventurism. This happens when a politician ignores the objective laws of history, the will of the masses, the existing economic relations, and tries by the power of his own volition to impose his own ideas, which run counter to the real, law-governed current of events. The main trends in philosophical thought were and have remained materialism and idealism. Why? Because there are only two paths. Either we must take the material world as our starting point and deduce from it consciousness and connect everything spiritual with the material or, on the other hand, taking consciousness as the starting point, we must deduce from it the material world and separate the spiritual from the material and oppose spirit to matter. Philosophers are divided into two great camps according to how they have decided this basic question. Those who assume that spirit existed before nature, who believe ultimately in the creation of the world by the power of the spirit, make up the idealist camp. Those who recognise matter as the basic principle, that is to say, the substance of everything that exists, form the various schools of materialism. Materialism understands the world as it is in fact, without attributing to it any supernatural qualities and principles. Explanation of the world from the world itself is the methodological principle of materialism. It maintains that the connections between ideas in people's heads reflect and transform the connections between phenomena in the world. Matter at its highest level of organisation is the "mother" and consciousness is its spiritual "child". And just as children cannot come into the world and exist apart from or before their parents, so consciousness could not appear or exist before matter: consciousness is a function of matter and an image of what exists. To the extent that people in living their lives cannot help considering the fact of the objective existence of the world, so they act as materialists: some spontaneously, others consciously, on a philosophical basis. Certain scientists sometimes dissociate themselves from materialism while spontaneously working on its principles. On the other hand, the supporters of philosophically conscious materialism not only consistently advocate such a solution of the basic question of philosophy but also substantiate and uphold it. Idealism is in general related to the desire to elevate the spirit to the maximum degree. In speaking with such veneration of the spiritual, of the idea, Hegel assumed that even the criminal thought of the evil-doer was greater and more to be marvelled at than all the wonders of the world. In the ordinary sense idealism is associated with remoteness from earthly interests, constant immersion in pure thought, and dedication to unrealisable dreams. Such "practical idealism" is contrasted to "practical materialism", which its

136 opponents, wishing to belittle it, present as a greedy desire for material goods, avarice, acquisitiveness, and so on. Idealism is divided into two basic forms: objective and subjective. The objective idealists, beginning from the ancients and ending with those of the present day, recognise the existence of a real world outside man, but believe that the world is based on reason, that it is ruled by certain omnipotent ideas which guide everything. Consciousness is hypertrophied, separated from man, from matter, and converted into a supra-individual, all-embracing reality. Reality is considered to be rational and the reason is interpreted as the substance, the basis of the universe. All things and processes are thus spiritualised. Such a notion of the superhuman and supernatural spiritual essence, the world reason, the world will, the absolute idea, is essentially a religious notion. For example, in Hegel the "absolute idea" is quite often called simply god, an impersonal, objective, logical process, while nature and the history of society are its guided other- being. Reason is the soul of the world. It resides in the universe, it is its immanent essence. This implies that reason exists by itself in the world, apart from rational beings. The universe knows what it is, and from where, to where and how it is moving.The idealist answer to the basic question of philosophy need not essentially be that reason must be taken as primary. This is characteristic only of rationalist idealism. Irrationalist forms of idealism take as their starting-point the blind will, the unconscious "vital urge": everything in the world is wound up, programmed, as it were, striving towards some thing. From the standpoint of subjective idealism it is only through inadequate knowledge that we take the world as we see it to be the actually existing world. According to this conception, the world does not exist apart from us, apart from our sense perceptions: to exist is to exist in perception! And what we consider to be different from our sensations and existing apart from them is composed of the diversity of our subjective sensuality: colour, sound, forms and other qualities are only sensations and sets of such sensations form things. This implies that the world is, so to speak, woven out of the same subjective material of which human dreams are composed. To the subjective idealists it appears that our efforts to reach beyond consciousness are futile and it is therefore impossible to acknowledge the existence of any external world that is independent of consciousness. It is a fact that we know the world only as it is given to man, to the extent to which it is reflected in our consciousness through sensations. But this certainly does not mean that the world when reflected in consciousness somehow dissolves in it like sugar in water. All the experience of humanity, the history of science and practice show that the objects of perception continue to exist even when we do not perceive them, i.e., before perception, during perception and after perception. In short, their existence is not dependent on the act of their perception.The reader may legitimately ask: have there really been any philosophers who maintain such a strange philosophy as subjective idealism, a

137 philosophy that for so many centuries was subjected not merely to criticism but to sarcastic ridicule? On the ordinary empirical level, surely it is only madmen, and only a few of them, who can deny the independent existence of the world. In practice, the subjective idealists (Berkeley, Fichte, Mach) probably did not behave as if they believed there was no external world. These ideas were strictly reserved for the sphere of theoretical thought. It must be stressed that materialism and idealism are two extreme, polarised trends. Between them there are infinite gradations. In the work of many idealists one finds certain materialist propositions and, conversely, all pre- Marxist materialists were idealists in the interpretation of the phenomena of social life. They believed that opinions rule history. One of the most convinced materialists, Democritus, did not deny the existence of gods and demons, but believed that they, too, were made out of atoms. In primitive idealism— mythology—even the gods are composed of matter. They are material and sensuously tangible. The history of philosophy has recorded many materialists who even believed that the world had been created by god. These were the so- called deists. There are philosophers who, like Aristotle, wavered between materialism and idealism to such an extent that it is often hard to decide which trend they should belong to. Idealism cannot be interpreted as a mere whim of erring philosophers, brilliant though some of them were. It has its ( epistemological and social roots. The point is that cognition of the world is a complex and extremely contradictory, by no means straightforward process, which usually takes a zigzag or circuitous course and moves in spirals. It involves bursts of imagination, cool common sense, cunning, power of logic, and various plausible and implausible assumptions. In this riotous flood of creative, investigatory thought, ranging first in one direction and then in another and sometimes running into blank walls, there is, as the whole experience of man's intellectual life testifies, an unavoidable risk of mistakes and misinterpretations. As Lenin aptly and laconically expressed it, only the person who does nothing makes no mistakes. Consequently, we have to face the fact that the process of knowing contains the built-in possibility of thought becoming separated from reality and wandering into the sphere of fantasy, when purely abstract assumptions are accepted as a kind of reality. Take, for example, subjective idealism, what is its basic epistemological assumption? Things, their proper ties are directly given to us in the form of sensations and their subjective images are understood as existing where their objects are located. Is this true? Yes, it is. For example, the image of a green leaf relates to the leaf itself and we perceive this "greenness" as belonging to the leaf itself, just as we perceive the "blueness" of the sky as belonging to our own "firmament". But any biophysicist will tell us that "greenness" and "blueness" are merely sensations reflecting the visible spectrum of electromagnetic oscillations of certain frequencies and wavelengths and that in themselves the waves are "not green" and "not blue". The materialist separates the subjective form, in which the object is given to us,from its objective source, which exists by itself. The mistake of subjective idealism lies

138 in the fact that it interprets this subjective form of the givenness of the object as the object itself, that is to say, reduces things to sensations and sensations to things. The objective idealists elevate human thought and its products—concepts, ideas and culture in general—to the status of the absolute. The historically formed standards of morality, law, the rules of thinking and language, the whole spiritual life of society tower above the reason of the individual, as if they were something stable and relatively independent. People experience the continual influence of this supra-individual existence of spirit and submit to its commands often with no less obedience than, say, to the laws of gravity. Suffice it to recall the overwhelming impact of such feelings as shame, conscience, honour, and justice. In ancient times people measured their actions according to the unwritten rules of their ancestors that had been retained in the memory and handed down from generation to generation. The individual consciousness grew accustomed to being dominated by certain supra-individual ideas, social standards retained in human memory and in the form of the "social memory", in language. This relative independence of the spiritual life of society was elevated by imagination into something absolutely independent, into Reason divorced not only from living and thinking people but also from society, from matter in general, so that thinking and its products were elevated to a special spiritual realm, the immanent essence of the universe. And this was objective idealism. Its epistemological roots go down deep into history, when the progress of cognitive activity and the penetration of reason into the essence of things triggered the process of formation of abstract concepts. The problem arose of relating the universal and the particular, the essence and its manifestations. It was not easy for man to understand how the universal reflected in, for example, the concept of beauty was related to the individual form of its existence in a given individual. A beautiful person lives and dies but the idea of beauty survives him and proves to be indestructible. A wise man departs this life but wisdom, as something universal, common to all wise men who ever lived, live or will live in the future, survives in the system of culture as something existing above the individual. This universal, reflected in the concepts (beauty, wisdom, reason, law and so on), came to be identified with the concept itself. The universal features in things and the concept of the universal became merged in the consciousness, forming an objective-idealist alloy, in which the universal was divorced from its individual existence, apart from which it could not exist at all, and acquired the status of an independent essence. Objective idealism begins when the idea of a thing is conceived not as a reflection of the thing but as something eternally existing before the thing, embodied in the thing and determining the thing in its structure, properties and relationships and continuing to exist after the destruction of the thing. Thus Pythagoras thought of numbers as independent essences ruling the world, and Plato regarded general concepts as a special realm of pure thought and beauty that had engendered the world of

139 visible reality. The idea of a thing created by man precedes the existence of the thing itself. The thing in its given form is derived from the aim, the intention of its creator, let us say, a carpenter. The greater part of the things that surround us are the result of man's creative activity, they are something created by man. The idea of creation has become for man a kind of prism through which he regards the whole world. This idea is so deeply rooted that he does not find it easy to set it aside and think of the world as something not created by anybody and existing eternally. The idea of the eternity of existence contradicts all the facts of our life, in which nearly everything is created, one might say, before our very eyes. So the eternal, uncreated existence of the world simply did not fit into people's heads and still does not fit in with many people's thinking. The level of science was very low and this gave rise to the assumption that there must be some universal creator and lord of all things. This idea was strengthened also by the fact that so much in the world was strikingly harmonious and purposeful. Application of the principle of rationality to everything is, in fact, idealism. Reason is regarded as the spiritual centre of the universe, and its influence as the thing that makes the world go round. Everything is illuminated by its all-pervasive rays. This is world-guiding reason. For the objective idealist Hegel, just as for Plato, the whole universe is a living, thinking creature whose parts bear the invisible traces of the whole. Such are the epistemological and psychological roots of idealism. Its social roots lie in the separation of mental from physical labour and the counterposing of the first to the second and also in the appearance of exploitation. There arose a social elite, which conceived the notion that ideas, reason should have priority in the life of society while physical labour should be considered the lot of slaves. These tendencies towards overrating the intellectual principle in life were extended to the whole universe. Such an approach was reinforced by the class interests of the ruling elite. Idealist propositions interlock and sometimes even coincide with religion that urges people to submit. Idealism is linked with religion and, directly or indirectly, provides its theoretical expression and substantiation. Over idealism there always hovers the idea of a god. Subjective idealism, compelled to be inconsistent in defending its principles, allows the objective existence of a god. The universal reason of the objective idealists is essentially a philosophical pseudonym for god: the supreme reason conceives itself in its creations. At the same time it would be a vulgarisation to identify idealism with religion. Philosophical idealism is not a religion but the road to religion through one of the forms of the complex process of human knowledge. They are different ways of being aware of the world and forming an attitude to it.

140 REFERENCE

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141 GLOSSARY

A posteriori – a belief, proposition, or argument is said to be a posteriori if its truth or falsity can be established only through observation. Classical empiricism was an attempt to show that all significant knowledge about the world is based on a posteriori truths. A priori – a belief, proposition, or argument is said to be a priori if its truth or falsity can be established independently of observation. Definitions, the propositions of arithmetic, and the principles of logic are usually held to be a priori. Classical rationalism was an attempt to show that all significant knowledge about the world is based on a priori truths, which most of the rationalists associated with innate ideas. Aesthetics – sometimes used interchangeably with the term philosophy of art (as is done in this book), and sometimes as a broader concept that comprises discussion of both art and of those natural phenomena that provoke appreciation of their beauty or grandeur. This field studies artistic concepts, such as art itself, representation, realism, and abstraction, and the nature of argument and judgment about goodness or badness in art. Agnosticism – a view that holds open the possibility that God exists but that claims we do not know, or cannot know, whether in fact a deity exists. Analytic philosophy – the view that, in philosophy, logical analysis and analysis of meaning must be prior to the construction of philosophical theories about the world. Analytical philosophers believe that certain key concepts in ordinary language and in scientific, moral, religious, and aesthetic discourse are philosophically vague or misleading. Philosophical problems can be solved and pseudo-philosophical problems can be dispelled through the clarification of these concepts. The theories that analytical philosophers do generate tend to be demonstrations of the logical relations among these different realms of discourse rather than grandiose metaphysical schemes. Although many of the pioneers of this school were continental Europeans, the movement has become primarily an Anglo-American one. Analytic proposition – a proposition is analytic if its negation leads to a self-contradiction. For example, "squares have four sides" is analytic because its negation, "squares do not have four sides," is a self-contradiction. See also tautology, conceptual truth, and a priori. Anarchism – the political doctrine according to which the state is both unnatural and unjustifiable because it necessarily violates the rights of individuals. Atheism – the view that there is no God. Atomism – as an ontological theory, the view that the ultimate building blocks of reality are basic, irreducible particles of matter—atoms. (This view is a version of materialism.) As an epistemological theory, the view that the

142 ultimate building blocks of knowledge are basic, Irreducible, perceptual units— sense data. (This view, called "psychological atomism," is a version of empiricism.) Axiology – the general term for the theory of values. It incorporates aesthetics and ethicsatheism The view that there is no God. Behaviorism – the theory that only observable, objective features of human or animal activity need be studied to provide an adequate scientific account of that activity. See also hard behaviorism, soft behaviorism, and logical behaviorism. Categorical imperative – the name given by Immanuel Kant to a purported universal moral law: in one form, "So act that the maxim of your action could be willed as a universal law"; in another form, "So act as to treat humanity . . . always as an end, and never as merely a means." Category-mistake – a key philosophical error noted by the British ordinary language philosopher Gilbert Kyle wherein a term that belongs to one logical category is mistakenly categorized as belonging to another. Then faulty questions are asked based on the miscategorization. An example would be {according to Ryle) Descartes’ assuming that the mind is a thing In the same way that the body is a thing and then asking how these two "things" interact. Causal explanation – a mechanical kind of explanation In which the object or event to be accounted for is rendered intelligible by demonstrating how that object or event follows necessarily from antecedent objects or events. Causal explanations are usually represented in terms of natural laws. Contrast with teleology. Cognitive science – an Interdisciplinary study involving philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and computer science, stressing the computational model of the mind. See also functionalism. Coherence theory of truth – the theory that a proposition is true If it coheres with the body of all the other propositions taken to be true, that is if follows logically from those propositions, or supports them and Is supported by them, or at least does not contradict any of them. This theory, which opposes both the correspondence theory of truth and the pragmatic theory of truth, has been especially appealing to rationalists. Communism – the political theory that advocates the abolition of private property art asserts that goods must be held in common and that the ideal social unit is the commune. See also Marxism. Compatibilism – the view that determinism does not exclude freedom or responsibility rather, all three can coexist simultaneously in the same system. Sometimes calls soft determinism. Conceptual truth – a proposition expresses a conceptual truth if that truth is based on a merely logical relationship rather than on an empirical fact.

143 For example, "widows are female" is a conceptual truth. See also analytic proposition, tautology, and a priori. Conceptualism – the epistemological view that concepts are generalized Ideas existing only in the mind but that they are derived and abstracted by the mind from real similarities and distinctions in nature. Contingent (or contingency) – a relation between two objects or ideas is contingent if one of the terms of the relationship could exist without the other. For example, Descartes says that the relation between the soul and the body is contingent because the soul can exist without the body, and bodies can exist without souls. Conventionalism – the claim that a certain body of facts has been established by human convention and not by nature, by social agreement and not by the way the world is prior to human intervention. E.g., some people believe that gender roles are Impose by nature, others believe they are Imposed by convention. correspondence theory of truth The theory that a proposition is true if it corresponds with the facts. "Caesar crossed the Rubicon" is true if and only if there was In fact a man called Caesar, and he did in fact cross the Rubicon; otherwise, the proposition is false. This theory, which opposes both the coherence theory of truth and the pragmatic theory of truth, has been especially appealing to empiricists, cosmological argument An attempt to establish God's existence by deducing it from some observable facts in the world. For example, Thomas Aquinas's claim that from the observation of causal chains in the world we can deduce the necessity of a "first cause," or God. Creationism – the view that Darwin's theory of natural selection is false, and that the intricate complexity of the world indicates that the world was created by a higher power. Determinism – the view that every event occurs necessarily. Every event follows inevitably from the events that preceded it. There is no randomness in reality; rather, all is law governed. Freedom either does not exist (hard determinism) or exists in such a way as to be compatible with necessity (soft determinism). Dialectic – in the philosophies of Hegel and Marx, the dialectic is a mechanism of change and progress in which every possible situation exists only in relation to its own opposite. This relationship is one of both antagonism and mutual dependency, but the antagonism (a form of violence) eventually undermines the relationship and overthrows it. (However, sometimes the term "dialectical" is used only to emphasize a relationship of reciprocity between two entities or processes.) Distributive justice – the form of justice that is achieved in a society when the opportunities and material goods of the society are fairly distributed in ways that recognize both the contributions and needs of all members of the society.

144 Dualism – the ontological view that reality is composed of two kinds of beings, usually (as in Descartes) minds and bodies. Efficient cause – a term from Aristotelian philosophy designating one of the four kinds of causes in the world—the physical force operating on the object undergoing change (e.g., the sculptor's chiseling of a piece of granite). (The other three Aristotelian causes are "the material cause" [the piece of granite], "the formal cause" [the idea of the statue in the mind of the sculptor], and "the final cause" [the ultimate purpose of the statue].) Ego – in psychoanalysis, the name of the rational, most conscious, social aspect of the psyche, as contrasted with the id and superego. Egoism – a theory of motivation according to which the motive behind all acts either is self-interest (psychological egoism) or ought to be self-interest (moral egoism). See also hedonism. Eliminative materialism –a materialistic theory of mind according to which sentences that seem to refer to nonmaterial conscious states (such as "I have a headache") can be eliminated in favor of more accurate sentences referring to material states (such as "My C-fibers are firing"). Empiricism – the epistemological view that true knowledge is derived primarily from sense experience (or, in "purer" strains of empiricism, exclusively from sense experience). For these philosophers, all significant knowledge is posteriori, and a priori knowledge is either nonexistent or tautological. The "classical" empiricists were the seventeenth- and eighteenth- century Britons (Voce, Berkeley, and Hume), all of whom denied the existence of innate ideas and conceived of the human mind as a "blank slate" at birth. Enlightenment – the A philosophical movement of the eighteenth century characterized by the belief in the power of reason to sweep away superstition, Ignorance, and injustice. Epistemology – theory of knowledge. The branch of philosophy that answers questions such as: What is knowledge? What, if anything, can we know? What is the difference between opinion and knowledge? Eros – the Greek word for sexual love; the name of the Greek god of love, which in psychoanalytic theory becomes the name of a purported "life instinct" and is opposed to Thanatos, the "death Instinct.” Ethics – moral philosophy. The branch of philosophy that answers questions such as: Is there such a thing as the Good? What is "the good life"? Is there such a thing as absolute duty? Are valid moral arguments possible? Are moral judgments based only on preference? Ethnocentrism – the biased belief that one's own ethnic, social, or cultural group holds values that are superior to those of other groups, leading to an attitude that blinds the believer to the values of other cultures or social systems.

145 Existentialism – a twentieth-century philosophy associated principally with Jean-Paul Sartre but also thought to encompass the work of art Jaspers, Simone de Beauvoir, Martin Heidegger, Gabriel Marcel, Albert Camue, and Miguel de Unamuno, among others. More of a shared attitude than a school of thought, it can nevertheless be roughly defined by saying with Sartre that existentialists are those who believe that, in the case of humans, "existence precedes essence." This is the thesis that there is no human nature that precedes our presence In the world. All humans individually create humanity at every moment through their free acts. Experience – as a technical term in empiricist epistemology, the term designating the data provided directly by the five senses. See also sense data. Experimental – a theory or proposition is experimental if observable evidence is pertinent to its confirmation or falsification. See also a posteriori, synthetic proposition, and principle of falsifiability. Expressionism – a theory of art according to which the function of art is to find release, to express and articulate a kind of emotional knowledge that is somehow deeper than knowledge of merely empirical or scientific fact?. Feminism – the sociopolitical theory and practice defending women's dignity and rights against male chauvinism and male-dominated power structures that have denied legal and social equality to women and have demeaned, marginalized, and constricted women throughout history. Formalism – a theory of art that distinguishes between form and content In art and claims that the aesthetic a fact is found exclude in formal if. m urea of art rather than, e.g., in autobiographical, emotional, epistemological, historical, religious, or political features. Forms – usually associated with the philosophies of Plato or Aristotle. For Plato (in whose philosophy the word "Form" is capitalized in this text), everything that exists in the physical or conceptual world is in some way dependent upon Forms, which exist independently of the world but are the models [essences, universals, archetypes) of all reality, forms are eternal, unchangeable, and the ultimate object of all true philosophizing. For Aristotle too, forms are the essences of things, but they exist in things and are not independent of them. The form of an object and its function are ultimately related. Free will – the ability to make choices that are either uncorked, undetermined, or uncaused; or, if caused, are caused exclusively by the agent her- or himself. Freedom – freedom exists if there are such things as free acts and free agents, that is, if some acts are performed in such a way that the authors of those acts could legitimately be held responsible for them. Some philosophers (called libertarians) say that these acts do exist, that some acts are freely chosen from among genuine alternatives, and that therefore determinism is false. ("I did X,

146 but under exactly the same circumstances, I could have done Y instead. Therefore X was a free act.") Other philosophers (called soft determinists) also say that free acts exist but define "free acts" not in terms of genuine alternative choices but in terms of voluntary acts. ("I wanted to do X, and I did do X; therefore X was a free act") Still other philosophers (called hard determinists), while agreeing with the definition of "free act" given by libertarians, deny that any such free acts or agents exist. Factionalism – a currently popular theory in the philosophy of mind according to which minds are not "things"; rather, they are systems capable of interacting with their environment through computational activity. Any computational system capable of manipulating symbols to solve problems can be said to have mental states, according to functionalism, whether those systems be brains, computers, or extraterrestrials. In the case of humans, those mental states (desires, hopes, expectations, etc.) are real (i.e., are causally effective). They are realized in the brain but are not themselves brain states. The computations of computers are not themselves physical states but are realized in physical components of the computer hardware. Functionalists consider themselves to be materialists, but they oppose the mind-brain identity theory and eliminative materialism. Gestalt psychology – the theory according to which perception does not occur as the summation of a number of perceptual parts; rather, these perceptual parts themselves are derived from the general perceptual field, which has properties that cannot be derived from any or all of the parts. Hard behaviorism – the view that there are no minds and that, therefore, psychology can study only "behaviors"—an ontological view as opposed to the merely methodological view "I soft behaviorism. Hard determinism – the view that determinism is true and that therefore freedom and responsibility do not exist. Contrast with soft determinism. hedonism A theory of motivation according to which the motive behind all acts either la Hypothetical imperative –the name given by Immanuel Kant to the nonmetal use of the word "ought'.' This use of "ought" can always be stated in a hypothetical form (e.g., "You ought to be nice to people if you want them to like you"). Innate idea – an idea present at birth, hence, a priori. Intentionality – as used in the philosophy of mind, the referential feature of mental phenomena; their "about ness." Mental states refer to objects beyond themselves. One thinks about something, looks at something, alludes to something, is afraid of something. The term covers intentions in the no technical sense ("She intended to drop her philosophy class") but also desires, hopes, expectations, and fears. A major question in materialist theories in the

147 philosophy of mind is How is it possible for certain material objects (brains or parts of brains) to have Intentionality in this sense? Idealism – the ontological view that, ultimately, every existing thing can be shown to be spiritual or mental (hence, a version of monism), usually associated in Western philosophy with Berkeley and Hegel. Legal positivism – the view that justice and legal legitimacy are defined exclusively by the established political powers. Liberalism – the political view that advocates a democratic government and asserts that the state has a legitimate right and an obligation to set standards of living below which none of its citizens may be forced to live and to enforce laws providing equal opportunity and distributive justice. Logic – the branch of philosophy that studies the structure of valid Inference; a purely formal discipline, interested in the structure of argumentation rather than in its content. Logical behaviorism – the epistemological and ontological view that all meaningful mentalist terms can ultimately be traced back to some observable behavior. Logical construct – a term from twentieth-century empiricism naming an entity that can be inferred from sense data. For example, the belief that a table exists independently of our perceptions is based on an inference drawn from our perceptions. In this view, only sense data can be known directly. Logical constructs can be known only indirectly. Logical entailment – a relation of logical necessity between two concepts or Propositions – if concept or proposition X necessarily implies concept or proposition Y, then X logically entails Y. The assertion of X with the simultaneous denial of Y would constitute a self-contradiction; for example, the concept "brother" logically entails both the concept "sibling" and the concept "male." Logical positivism (or logical empiricism) – a school of philosophy that flourished between the two world ware according to which the only cognitively meaningful utterances are those of science. All other utterances can be shown, under analysis, to be merely expressions of emotions or to be nonsense. Logical possibility – something is logically possible if its idea contains no self-contradiction (such as the idea of a one-million-sided figure). Conversely, something is logically impossible if its idea does contain a self- contradiction (such as the idea of a four-sided circle). Logos – (1) Greek term meaning "word" or "study," from which is derived the English term "logic" and the "-logiest" of "biology," "sociology," etc. (2) In Plato, a term designating the rational justification of beliefs. (3) As opposed to Mythos, Logos designates a scientific or philosophical account of the world.

148 Marxism – a political or philosophical doctrine based on the writings of Karl Marx: politically a form of communism, philosophically a form of materialism known as dialectical materialism. Materialism – the ontological view that all reality can be shown to be material in nature (e.g., that "minds" are really brains). Metaethics – if ethics is a "first order" analysis of morality (e.g., answering questions such as, What we must do to fulfill our duty?), metaethics is a "second order" analysis of morality (e.g., answering questions such as, What is the meaning of the word "duty"?). Metaethics, then, is the analysis of the meaning of moral concepts and of the logic of moral argumentation. Metaphysics – the branch of philosophy that attempts to construct a general, speculative worldview: a complete, systematic account of all reality and experience, usually involving an epistemology, an ontology, an ethics, and an aesthetics. Mind-brain identity theory – the ontological view that minds and brains are not two different kinds of things; rather, that all references to minds and mental states are really references to brains and brain states. Monism – the ontological view that only one entity exists (e.g., as in Spinoza) or that only one kind of entity exists (e.g., as in Hobbes and Berkeley). Mode – a property of an essential property. 'For example, for Descartes, "thought" is an essential property of "mind" and "understanding" is a property, or mode, of thought. Moral realism – the ethical view that there are moral facts that can be the basis of moral judgments. Therefore moral judgments need not be merely subjective, or merely expressions of preference, or merely projections from the human mind. Mysticism – the view that a special experience can transcend ordinary rational procedures and provide a direct intuition of the presence of God or an extraratlonal insight into ultimate truth. Mythos – the whole body of myths, legends, and folktales that attempts to make sense of the world by placing it in a narrative context tracing things back to their supernatural origins. Sometimes contrasted with Logos, naive realism The prephilosophical epistemology and ontological attributed to the per-son-in- the-street, according to which the perceptual data in the mind accurately represent the external world as it actually is. natives The psychological or epistemological view that there are certain innate ideas, principles, or structures in the mind that organize the data of consciousness. necessary condition X is a necessary condition of Y if: Y cannot exist in the absence of X. For example, oxygen is a necessary condition of fire. See also sufficient condition. Nihilism – as an ontological view, the theory that nothing exists; as a moral view, the theory that there are no values or that nothing deserves to exist.

149 Ontology – the method Involves "bracketing" certain features of experience, stripping them of all assumptions and presuppositions, and laying bare their essence. Occlusion shape – an objective geometric shape of a physical figure that is relative to the line of vision between eye and object, producing such natural visual phenomena as the foreshortening of a prone body when seen feet first, or the elliptical appearance of a coin when seen from certain angles. Ockham's razor (or Occam's razor) – a principle of simplification derived from the medieval philosopher William of Ockham, according to which if there are two competing theories, both of which account for all the observable data, the simpler of the two is the preferable theory. "Do not multiply entities beyond necessity" Ontological argument – an a priori attempt to prove God's existence by showing that, the vary concept of God, his existence can be deduced, this argument has been defended by ;a number of religion;, philosopher:, in the platonic tradition it was first formulated by st. Anselm and appears in one form or another in the work of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Hegel. It has some able twentieth-century defenders (e.g., Charles Hartshorne and Norman Malcolm). But it has been rejected by some notables, too, including St. Thomas, Hume, Kant, and Kierkegaard. ontology Theory of being. The branch of philosophy pursuing such questions as: What is real? What is the difference between appearance and reality? What is the relation between minds and bodies? Are numbers and concepts real, or are only physical objects real? To ask about something's ontological conditions is to ask its status in reality. ordinary language philosophy A strong movement in Anglo-American analytic philosophy, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, that saw philosophy's main task as the conceptual and logical analysis of ordinary language as it related to philosophical problems. This school rejected the attack on ordinary language that was engineered by earlier analytic philosophers such as Bertrand Russell and the logical positivists. Rather, ordinary language philosophers held that many philosophical errors were the result of disdain for ordinary language and a confusion about the nature of meaning. The confusion would be eliminated not through the construction of artificial mathematical languages, but only by careful attention to the nuances of ordinary language. Major participants in this school included John Austin, Gilbert Ryle, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Organiciem – the ontological view that reality is more like an organism than like a machine—that the whole is more real than any of the parts and that the parts are dependent on the whole for their reality. Pantheism – the view that everything is divine, that God's "creation" is in fact identical with God: from the Greek pan (all) and theist (god). Paradigm shift – a moment in Intellectual history when the key conceptual apparatus of an age gives way to new ones, as when the essentially

150 theological view of reality in the medieval world gave way to a more secular one involving new standards of judgment and criteria of evidence. Phenomenology – a philosophical school created by Edmund Husserl employing a method of analysis that purports to arrive at the pure data of consciousness and thereby provide the foundation for epistemology and ontology. The method Involves "bracketing" certain features of experience, stripping them of all assumptions and presuppositions, and laying bare their essence. Pleasure is (psychological hedonism) or ought to be pleasure (moral hedonism). See also egoism. Pluralism – the ontological view that reality is composed of a multiplicity of things or different kinds of things and that this multiplicity cannot be reduced to one or two categories. Postmodernism – a loosely applied term (1) designating an intellectual posture sceptical of epistemologies, ontologies, and institutions (governmental, academic, military, medical, religious) of the modern Western tradition; (2) challenging the basic tenets of liberalism, humanism, individualism, and capitalism: (3) designating a fascination with popular culture and the domination ontology over human endeavors: (4) dwelling on the contemporary demotic ■ that privilege signs and Images over substance and truth, reproduction over production, and represents talon over reality. Pragmatism – an American philosophy that claims that the meaning of an Idea can be established by determining what practical difference would be produced by believing the idea to be true and that the truth of an Idea can be established by determining the idea's ability to "work." Pragmatic theory of truth – this theory asserts that to talk about the truth of a proposition is to talk about Its power to "work," that is, its ability to put the individual who considers the proposition into a more satisfactory and effective relationship with the rest of the world. This theory employs the correspondence theory of truth and the coherence theory of truth not as criteria of truth but as two of several tests of efficacy. According to the pragmatic theory, the truth is relative and not absolute. Primary qualities – a term from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century epistemology and ontology designating properties that Inhere In material bodies Independently of our perception of them (e.g., size, shape, location, and divisibility). Contrast with secondary qualities. Principle of falsifiability – a criterion of scientific meaning set forth by Sir Karl Popper according to which a proposition or theory is scientific only if it is framed in such a way that it would be possible to state what kind of evidence would refute or falsify the theory, if such evidence existed.

151 Proposition – as employed in this text, a proposition is whatever is asserted by a sentence. The sentences "It's raining" "Es regnet," and "Llueve" all assert the same proposition. Psychoanalysis – the name given by Sigmund Freud to his method of psychotherapy, eventually becoming a theory of the mind, of selfhood, and of culture, in which psychological and social phenomena are traced to their origins in the unconscious mind. Psychological atomism – the radical empiricist epistemology held by Locke, Berkeley, and Hume (though not named as such until the twentieth century, when it was also defended by the logical positivists) that all empirical knowledge is built up from simple, discrete mental data, such as the primitive sensory experiences of colors, sounds, and tastes. (See also sense data.) Reconstruction – the intellectual creation of the late French philosopher Jacques Derrida; based on his eccentric but provocative reading of the linguistic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure, deconstruction is a theory of texts (philosophical, fictional, legal, scientific) according to which, because of the very nature of thought and language, almost all traditional texts can be shown to "deconstruct" themselves, to undermine and refute their own theses. Or, deconstruction is the activity of demonstrating that a particular text undermines and refutes itself. Secondary qualities – a term from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century epistemology and ontology designating perceived qualities (such as colors, tastes, odors) that appear to be real properties of material objects but in fact actually exist only in perception and are caused by the properties that do exist in material objects, viz., by primary qualities. Semiotics (Sometimes called semiology.) –the study of the structure of the System of signs, and of the signs therein – a "sign" is an arbitrary mark, sound, or image that has become imbued with meaning by virtue of its membership in a system of conventionality. Language is the most obvious case of such a system of signs, but behaviors, rituals, and institutions can also be studied semiotically. Sense data – a sense datum is supposedly that which is perceived immediately by any one of the senses prior to interpretation by the mind. Sense data include the perceptions of colors, sounds, tastes, odors, tactile sensations, pleasures, and pains. Classical empiricism based itself on the supposed epistemologically foundational nature of sense data. Skepticism (or skepticism) – a denial of the possibility of knowledge. General skepticism denies the possibility of any knowledge; however, one can be skeptical about fields of inquiry (e.g., metaphysics) or specific faculties (e.g., sense perception) without denying the possibility of knowledge in general.

152 Soft behaviorism – the view that there is no need to Include "minds" in the scientific study of humans, whether or not minds exist. The study of "behaviors" and their physical causes is sufficient for a complete psychology. Contrast with hard behaviorism. Soft determinism – also called compatibilism. The view that determinism is true but that freedom and responsibility can exist despite the truth of determinism. Contrast with hard determinism. Solipsism – the view that the only true knowledge one can possess is knowledge of one's own consciousness. According to solipsism, there is no good reason to believe that anything exists other than oneself. Structuralism – "based on the philosophical anthropology of the late French theorist Claude Levi-Strauss (but also finding followers in all the human sciences), the view that the human mind is universal in that everywhere and in every historical epoch, the mind is structured In such a way as to process its data in terms of certain general formulas that give meaning to those mental data. Despite the generality of these logical formulas, each historical social system geographically and linguistically produces epistemological categories that differ radically from other systems. E.g., even though the concept of "the raw and the cooked" (the name of a book by Levi-Strauss) is universal, what is determined to be edible or inedible differs from culture to culture. Sublimation – a term central to psychoanalysis that names the process whereby certain antisocial drives are directed away from their primary goal (the satisfaction of sexual or aggressive desires) and transformed into the production of socially valuable higher culture—art, religion, philosophy, law, science, and so on. Substance – in philosophy, traditionally the term naming whatever is thought to be the most basic Independent reality. Aristotle defined a substance as whatever can exist Independently of other things, so that a horse or a man (Aristotle's examples) can exist Independently, but the color of the horse or the size of the man cannot. The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century rationalists took the idea of substance as independent being so seriously that one of their members, Spinoza, claimed there could be only one substance in the world (I.e., only one thing), namely, God, because only God could exist Independently. Under Berkeley's criticism of material substance and Hume's criticism of spiritual substance, the concept of substance was very much eroded. It turned up again in Kant but only as a "category" of knowledge, not as a basic reality itself. sufficient condition P is a sufficient condition of Q if the presence of P guarantees the presence of Q. For example, the presence of mammary glands in an animal is a sufficient condition for calling that animal a mammal. (It is also a necessary condition for doing so.)

153 Superego – in psychoanalysis, the component of the psyche that counteracts antisocial desires and impulses of the id by attaching conscious and unconscious feelings of guilt to them. Synthetic proposition – a proposition is synthetic if its negation does not lead to a self-contradiction. For example, "Jupiter has a square moon" is synthetic because its negation, "Jupiter does not have a square moon," is not self-contradictory (usually associated with a posteriori propositions; the opposite of analytic propositions). Tabula rasa – Latin for "blank slate!' Empiricism from John Locke forward assumed that the mind is a tabula rasa at birth and that all knowledge must be inscribed on that blank slate by experience. Tautology – a proposition is a tautology if it is in some way repetitive or redundant. For example, definitions are tautological because their predicates are equivalents of the term being defined. See also analytic propositions. Teleological argument – an attempt to deduce God's existence from the fact that there is purposeful behavior in nature on the part of nonintelllgent beings. (E.g., the "purpose" of the sharp point on the bottom of an acorn is to break the surface of the ground when the acorn falls.) Teleology – the study of the evidence for the existence of purpose, design, and intentionality in both human and nonhuman domains. A teleological explanation is an explanation in terms of goals, purposes, or Intentions (from the Greek telos = goal). For example, "John closed the window because he didn't want his budgie to escape" and "An acorn has a sharp tip on its bottom in order to break the ground when it falls from the tree" are both teleological explanations because they describe behavior In terms of intentions and goals. Contrast with causal explanation. Theism – belief in the existence of God or gods. Theoretical entity – a term from twentieth-century empiricism naming entitles that exist only as parts of theories, not parts of reality. For example, "the average American housewife" is a theoretical entity. Transformational grammar – a system of grammatical analysis that uses a set of algebraic formulas to express relations between elements in a sentence or between different forms or tenses of a phrase, such as active, passé, future, and present trompe I’ ceil French for "trick of the eye," designating a form of painting whose goal is to produce an illusion that appears to be reality so that the viewer does not realize that she is looking at an artwork. Utilitarianism – the moral and social philosophy of Jeremy Bingham and John Stuart Mill according to which the value of any action or legislation can be derived from the principle of utility, which advocates «the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number of people»

154 TEST 1. An intellectual movement originating from 19th century that wanted the Russian Empire to be developed upon values and institutions derived from its early history, tradition of Russian is A. Slavophilia B. Westernizm C. Existentialism D. Idealism E. Syllogism 2. Way of liberation from negative thinking, by Fyodor Dostoevsky A. practice of yoga B. make good deals C. crying D. traveling E. confession 3. It is the name of a method whose primary goal was the clarification of thought A. pragmatism B. phenomenology C. existentialism D. rationalism E. structuralism 4. Analytical philosophers who assumed that "science is innocent unless proved guilty, while philosophy is guilty” A. Moore B. Bertrand Russell C. August Conte D. Derrida E. Freud 5. A school of philosophy that flourished between the two world ware according to which the only cognitively meaningful utterances are those of science A. empiricism B. analytic school C. logical positivism D. structuralism E. hermeneutic 6. A philosophical school created by Edmund Husserl employing a method of analysis that purports to arrive at the pure data of consciousness and thereby provide the foundation for epistemology and ontology A. phenomenology B. epistemology C. modernism D. positivism E. pragmatism 7. According to existentialism what is most critical angst

155 A. bad mark B. disagreement C. love D. death E. discovery 8. Author of book “Being and Time” is A. Søren Kierkegaard B. Friedrich Nietzsche C. Hegel D. Martin Heidegger E. More 9. A twentieth-century philosophy associated principally with Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger. This is the thesis that: there is no human nature that precedes our presence in the world. A. existentialism B. pragmatism C. logical positivism D. hermeneutic E. structuralism 10. In psychoanalysis, the component of the psyche that counteracts antisocial desires and impulses of the id by attaching conscious and unconscious feelings of guilt to them A. consciousness B. id C. ego D. superego E. unconsciousness 11. The view of this school is that the human mind is universal in that everywhere and in every historical epoch, the mind is structured in such a way as to process its data in terms of certain general formulas that give meaning to those mental data. A. phenomenology B. epistemology C. modernism D. positivism E. structuralism 12. He said, "the unconscious is structured like a language." A. Levi –Strauss B. Freud C. Lacan D. Fromm E. Adler 13. Author of “The Interpretation of Dreams” A. Soren Kierkegaard B. Sigmund Freud

156 C. Levi –Strauss D. Friedrich Nietzsche E. Martin Heidegger 14. In psychoanalysis, the name of the rational, most conscious, social aspect of the psyche A. id B. ego C. superego D. consciousness E. unconsciousness 15. A term central to psychoanalysis that names the process whereby certain antisocial drives are directed away from their primary goal and transformed into the production of socially valuable higher culture A. transformation B. mobility C. association D. sublimation E. visualization 16. Author of concept Gender Bending A. Carl Gustav Jung B. Sigmund Freud C. Levi –Strauss D. Friedrich Nietzsche E. Fromm 17. The view that there are two forms of reality or two kinds of real things, and that neither is reducible to the other A. dualism B. monism C. nihilism D. materialism E. pluralism 18. The view that, despite scientific attempts to reduce all components of reality to ever more basic elements, common sense is correct to tell us that reality is composed of many different kinds of real things A. dualism B. monism C. nihilism D. materialism E. pluralism 19. The view that there is only one reality or only one kind of thing that is real. A. dualism B. monism C. nihilism D. materialism

157 E. pluralism 20. He gave the term Homo Faber (man the maker) A. Marx B. Hegel C. Lenin D. Hobbes E. Sartre 21. Continual change of its density, composition, saturation and concentration from the lower limit to the upper limit A. Space B. Time C. Movement D. Reflection E. Sound 22. Laws—similar to that of the Periodic Table describe A. Mechanical movement B. Physical movement C. Biological movement D. Psychological movement E. Chemical movement 23. Social movement created by A. carriers—bodies commensurable with man B. carriers—atoms, electrons C. carriers—living organisms D. carriers—man and human society E. carriers—the brain and the nervous system 24. He said: "Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains." A. Jean-Jacques Rousseau B. Plato C. Machiavelli D. Freud E. Hobbes 25. A theory of the most general connections of the universe and its cognition and also the method of thinking based on this theory. A. epistemology B. dialectics C. universal laws D. materialism E. idealism 26. Philosopher why proposed dialectical statment «You cannot step into the same river twice» A. Hegel B. Hobbes C. Heraclitus D. Parmenides

158 E. Haideger 27. Spengler is aouthor of book A. Christianity and Civilization B. Thus Spoke Zrathustra C. The Decline of the West D. The World as Will and Idea E. History of Western Philosophy 28. How gave the cosmological proff of existing God A. Aquina B. Machiavelli C. Augustine D. Freud E. Marx 29. The term is used to refer to that part of love constituting a passionate, intense desire for something A. philia B. agape C. love D. eros E. will 30. The view that there is no God A. atheism B. theism C. monism D. pluralism E. materialism

ANSWERS

Question no. Answer Question no. Answer 1 A 16 A 2 E 17 E 3 A 18 E 4 B 19 E 5 C 20 A 6 A 21 C 7 D 22 E 8 D 23 A 9 A 24 A 10 D 25 B 11 E 26 C 12 C 27 C 13 B 28 A 14 B 29 D 15 D 30 A

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