Dezembro 9, 2008

Pedro da Fonseca

Called in his own time ‘the Portuguese Aristotle’, Pedro da Fonseca was a sixteenth-century Jesuit philosopher and theologian. Schooled as a Thomist, Fonseca was a master of the Greek, Arabic and scholastic traditions, which enabled him to pursue his own independent line on various issues dealt with by Aquinas and Aristotle. As reflected in his publications, his chief accomplishments were in logic and metaphysics. He authored two very important and widely used works: a clear, comprehensive and systematic textbook in logic (Institutionum dialecticarum) and an edition of Aristotle’s Metaphysics with translation plus explanation and commentary. A third shorter work of introduction to logic (Isagoge philosophica) was also influential.

1 Life

Pedro da Fonseca (Petrus Fonseca) was born at Cortiçada (now Proença-a-Nova) in Portugal. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1548. After a period of noviciate, in 1551 he enrolled at the newly founded University of Évora, where between 1552 and 1555 he studied theology and also taught philosophy in 1552–3. From 1555 to 1561, he taught philosophy in the Jesuit-directed College of Arts at the University of Coimbra. During this last period, Fonseca promoted the idea of a Cursus Conimbricensis which later became a reality through the efforts of fellow Jesuits at Coimbra (see Collegium Conimbricense). From 1561 to 1564 he served the Jesuits in various administrative roles. In 1570 he received his doctorate in theology at Évora and became chancellor there. From 1572 to 1582 he served in Rome as general assistant for the Jesuit Province of Portugal. While in Rome, he worked with others on a ‘Plan of Studies’ (Ratio studiorum) which was later adopted by the Society of Jesus. Returning to Portugal in 1582, he became a Jesuit superior in Lisbon and then a visitor for the province. In 1592, he was again in Rome, a delegate to the fifth General Congregation of the Society, which among other things legislated that the Jesuits should follow Aristotle in philosophy. He died in Lisbon.

2 Logic

Fonseca’s contribution to philosophy is in two main parts, logical and metaphysical. In logic, he authored two important works. The first was Institutionum dialecticarum libri octo (Eight Books of Dialectical Instructions). Published at Lisbon in 1564 and re-edited fifty-two more times by 1625, it was adopted as a textbook, especially by the Jesuits, throughout Europe, America and the Far East. The second work was a much shorter Isagoge philosophica (Philosophical Introduction), which was published initially in 1591 and re-edited eighteen times up to 1623. More than a simple commentary on the Isagōgē of Porphyry (§§2, 5), Fonseca’s book was a new introduction to the Organon of Aristotle (§4). After a brief preface and a proem, he devoted six chapters to a general treatment of universals, particulars and the abstraction of one from the other. Then over five chapters he treated the five universals (genus, species, difference, property and accident) of Porphyry. Finally, in Chapter 12 he treated ‘certain other species of universals [connected with the logic of the Trinity and the Incarnation] which pagan philosophers did not know’ (Isagoge philosophica: 61).

The Institutionum dialecticarum is a systematic presentation of Aristotelian formal logic. Book 1 consists of thirty-two chapters in which Fonseca treats successively of the necessity, the names and the nature of logic. He distinguishes it from dialectic as Aristotle speaks of this in his Topics and then goes on to discuss nouns, verbs and signs (formal and instrumental as well as natural and conventional). After discussion of concepts as signs, he treats terms as equivocal (including analogical) and univocal, concrete and abstract, connotative and absolute, common and singular, transcendent and supertranscendent, positive and negative, contradictory and non-contradictory, as well as of first and second intention, and so on. Book 2 concerns the universal and covers much of the same matter (for example, genus, species and so on) treated in his Isagoge, plus the ten categories of Aristotle. Book 3 deals with various types of proposition. Book 4 covers division and Book 5 treats of definition. Book 6 deals with consequence, argumentation, invention and judgment, syllogisms, enthymemes, and induction. Book 7 is concerned with demonstration, dialectical reasoning, ‘places’ (or seats of argument), teaching procedure and the art of disputation. Book 8 mainly concerns fallacies, but Fonseca also treats supposition, ampliation, restriction and appellation in detail. As for the Aristotelian character of the Institutionum dialecticarum, Ferreira Gomes ([1564] 1964: xlvi–xlvii) notes that in them Aristotle is cited 600 times and he quotes a 1597 editor to the effect that Fonseca’s work covers the Aristotelian logic so well that it makes Aristotle’s own work, apart from its historical value, almost useless (see Logic, Renaissance).

3 Metaphysics

Comprising four quarto volumes, Fonseca’s In libros Metaphysicorum Aristotelis Stagiritae (Commentary on the Books of Aristotle’s Metaphysics) contains a critical Greek text which he himself established from the best available manuscripts and printed editions. Through the four volumes, in a right-hand column matching the Greek to the left, he has given a fine Latin translation. An explanation of the text follows each chapter and then commentary ‘by way of question’ (per modum quaestionis) on most of the chapters through the first nine books of the Metaphysics. Published posthumously, Books 10, 11, and 12 continue to give the Greek and Latin plus the explanation, while Books 13 and 14 give only the text in the two languages. The questions, which contain Fonseca’s own thought on subjects metaphysical, were developed in scholastic fashion. After asking a particular question, Fonseca, through a series of ‘sections’, presents objections and opinions, clarifies terms and concepts, gives and proves his own answer, and then returns to answer the objections raised in support of other views. Extraordinarily well versed in the earlier Greek, Arabic and scholastic traditions, Fonseca wherever possible follows the lead of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, but with a decided independence.

After rejecting opinions which hold that the subject of metaphysics is God, Aristotelian ‘separate substances’, or being in the categories, Fonseca says that the first and adequate subject of metaphysics is being in so far as it is common to God and creatures (In libros Metaphysicorum IV c.1 q.1 s.3). Understood in this way, being is analogous, although as said of species within one genus or of individuals within one species it is univocal. Between God and creatures, between created substance and accidents, between different classes of accident, and between real being and being of reason, being is analogous by analogies both of proportion and of attribution. As God is related to his being, so in proportion a created substance is related to its being. Likewise, as created substance and its being are related, so in proportion is an accident related to its being. Again, as one kind of accident is disposed to its existence so is each other kind of accident to its existence. And as real beings are disposed to their being, so beings of reason are to theirs (Metaphysicorum IV c.2 q.1 s.5, 7). An analogy of attribution obtains among accidents as an analogy of two things to a third (that is, created substance), while between accidents and substance it is analogy of one to the other. The same is true of beings of reason among themselves and then in comparison with real being; for beings of reason do not depend less upon real beings than do accidents upon substance. Again, a creature is being only by attribution or reference to God. Pursuing this, Fonseca distinguishes between formal and objective concepts. A formal concept is an ‘actual likeness’ (actualis similitudo) of a thing that is understood, produced by the intellect in order to express that thing. An objective concept is that thing which is understood in so far as it is conceived through the formal concept. Both the formal and the objective concept of being are one, but not perfectly so for the reason that they do not prescind perfectly from the concepts of the members which divide being. Being as such is transcendent as are also the concepts of thing, something, one, true and good (Metaphysicorum IV c.2 q.2 s.1, 4–5; q.5 s.2) (see Being).

In God alone there is a perfect identity of essence and existence. In every creature, essence is distinct from existence, but not as one thing from another. Rather, says Fonseca, a created essence is as distinct from its existence as a thing from its ultimate intrinsic mode. In this opinion, he tells us, he is following Alexander of Hales and Duns Scotus (§12) (Metaphysicorum IV c.2 q.3 s.4). It is possible that here Fonseca has also to some extent anticipated the Suárezian doctrine of modes.

Excluded from the subject of metaphysics are accidental beings (entia per accidens) and beings of reason. An accidental being, in the sense excluded, is a juxtaposition of two or more beings which lack any (intrinsic) relation to one another (Metaphysicorum IV c.1 q.1 s.3). Beings of reason are those which exist only inasmuch as they are objects of understanding. Within such beings of reason, as they stand in contrast with mind-independent real beings, Fonseca distinguishes a proper being of reason from one which is fictitious. Properly taken, a being of reason is one whose being depends upon the understanding in such way that it can still be said of real beings, for example, the concepts of genus, species, and the like. A fictitious being as such is a being whose essence depends upon the understanding in such way that it cannot be said of any real being, for example, a chimera, a goat-stag, or the like (Metaphysicorum IV c.7 q.6 s.5).

Dezembro 9, 2008

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein was born in Vienna on 26 April 1889 and died in Cambridge on 29 April 1951. He spent his childhood and youth in Austria and Germany, studied with Russell in Cambridge from 1911 to 1914 and worked again in Cambridge (with some interruptions) from 1929 to 1947.

His first book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , was published in German in 1921 and in English translation in 1922. It presents a logical atomist picture of reality and language. The world consists of a vast number of independent facts, each of which is in turn composed of some combination of simple objects. Each object has a distinctive logical shape which fits it to combine only with certain other objects. These objects are named by the basic elements of language. Each name has the same logical shape, and so the same pattern of possibilities of combination, as the object it names. An elementary sentence is a combination of names and if it is true it will be a picture of the isomorphic fact formed by the combination of the named objects. Ordinary sentences, however, are misleading in their surface form and need to be analysed before we can see the real complexity implicit in them.

Other important ideas in the Tractatus are that these deep truths about the nature of reality and representation cannot properly be said but can only be shown. Indeed Wittgenstein claimed that pointing to this distinction was central to his book. And he embraced the paradoxical conclusion that most of the Tractatus itself is, strictly, nonsense. He also held that other important things can also be shown but not said, for example, about there being a certain truth in solipsism and about the nature of value. The book is brief and written in a simple and elegant way. It has inspired writers and musicians as well as being a significant influence on logical positivism.

After the Tractatus Wittgenstein abandoned philosophy until 1929, and when he returned to it he came to think that parts of his earlier thought had been radically mistaken. His later ideas are worked out most fully in the Philosophical Investigations , published in 1953.

One central change is from presenting language as a fixed and timeless framework to presenting it as an aspect of vulnerable and changeable human life. Wittgenstein came to think that the idea that words name simple objects was incoherent, and instead introduced the idea of ‘language games’. We teach language to children by training them in practices in which words and actions are interwoven. To understand a word is to know how to use it in the course of the projects of everyday life. We find our ways of classifying things and interacting with them so natural that it may seem to us that they are necessary and that in adopting them we are recognizing the one and only possible conceptual scheme. But if we reflect we discover that we can at least begin to describe alternatives which might be appropriate if certain very general facts about the world were different or if we had different interests.

A further aspect of the change in Wittgenstein’s views is the abandonment of sympathy with solipsism. On the later view there are many selves, aware of and co-operating with each other in their shared world. Wittgenstein explores extensively the nature of our psychological concepts in order to undermine that picture of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ which makes it so difficult for us to get a satisfactory solution to the so-called ‘mind-body problem’.

Although there are striking contrasts between the earlier and later views, and Wittgenstein is rightly famous for having developed two markedly different philosophical outlooks, there are also continuities. One of them is Wittgenstein’s belief that traditional philosophical puzzles often arise from deeply gripping but misleading pictures of the workings of language. Another is his conviction that philosophical insight is not to be gained by constructing quasi-scientific theories of puzzling phenomena. Rather it is to be achieved, if at all, by seeking to be intellectually honest and so to neutralize the sources of confusion.

1 Life

Wittgenstein was the eighth and last child of a wealthy Austrian industrialist. From 1903-8 he was educated on the assumption that he would be an engineer and in 1908 he came to Manchester to study aeronautics. He continued with this for three years, but at the same time developed his interest in philosophy. He was particularly engaged with logic and the foundations of mathematics, in connection with which he read Frege (§§6-10) and Russell (§§4-11). In October 1911 he gave up engineering and, on Frege’s advice, came to Cambridge to study with Russell. In the 1914-18 war he served in the Austro-Hungarian army and during this time completed the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922).

For a time Wittgenstein thought that the Tractatus said everything which could be said in philosophy, and so he turned to other things. From 1920 to 1926 he was a schoolteacher in Austria, though this was not a success, since he was severe and demanded too much of his pupils. In 1926-8 he helped to design a house for his sister. In 1927 he resumed philosophical discussion with some members of the Vienna Circle, and in 1929 he returned to Cambridge, lecturing there from 1930 to 1936. From 1936 to 1938 he visited Norway and Ireland, returning to Cambridge in 1938 and being appointed professor there in 1939. He held the chair until 1947, although from 1941 to 1944 he was given leave of absence to work first at Guy’s Hospital, London, then at the Royal Victoria Infirmary, Newcastle. After resigning his chair in 1947 he lived in various places, Ireland chief among them, and also visited America.

Wittgenstein impressed those who met him with the power of both his intellect and personality. He had an intense concern for truth and integrity which exerted great attraction, but which also made him difficult to deal with, since he was liable to accuse others of superficiality or dishonesty. He greatly disliked what he perceived as the artificiality and pretentiousness of academic life. His later ideas became known in the 1930s and 1940s through the circulation of copies of The Blue and Brown Books (1958) and reports of his lectures. They acquired considerable influence with some who found them inspiring, but others thought them irritatingly obscure.

2 Works and method of writing

Throughout his life Wittgenstein wrote down his thoughts in notebooks, returning to the same topics many times, trying to get the most direct and compelling formulation of the ideas. He then made selections and arrangements from these remarks, followed by yet further selection, reworking and rearrangement. The Tractatus was the only book published during his lifetime. In 1930 he assembled what we now know as the Philosophical Remarks, a work still having much of the outlook of the Tractatus and also showing considerable sympathies with verificationism, and in 1932-4 he wrote the Philosophical Grammar, in which some central themes of the later philosophy are foreshadowed. But he was not satisfied with either of these, and from 1936 onwards worked on various versions of what we now know as the Philosophical Investigations (1953), which he hoped would provide a definitive presentation of his thought. The earlier half of the volume is the part of his work with which he was most nearly satisfied, but he was never fully content with any of it, and in 1949 he abandoned the project of completing it.

The other books we have under his name are all early or intermediate versions of material, left in his papers and edited and published after his death. The Notebooks are preliminary versions of ideas which later became the Tractatus. The Blue and Brown Books were prepared so as to help his students in 1932 and 1933. Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (1956) contains ideas he worked on from 1937 to 1944 and which he intended at that time to form the second part of the Investigations (rather than the psychological topics we now have). From 1944 onwards he worked mainly on philosophical psychology: Zettel (1967), Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology I and II (1980) and Last Writings on Philosophical Psychology I and II (1982) are from these years. From 1950 to 1951 we also have On Certainty (1969) and Remarks on Colour (1977). Another source for his views is records of his conversations and lectures taken by friends and pupils.

3 The picture theory of meaning

The Tractatus consists of nearly eighty printed pages of numbered remarks. The numbers do not run consecutively but are designed to indicate the relative importance and role of the remarks. There are seven major sentences and each of them (except 7) has subordinate and clarificatory remarks following it, labelled ‘2.2′, ‘5.4′ and so on, down as far as such numbers as ‘4.0312′.

The topics that preoccupied Wittgenstein when he arrived in Cambridge included the nature of logical truth and Russell’s Theory of Types (see Theory of types). On both of these matters Russell held that we need an account of very general features of the world and of the kinds of things in it. But Wittgenstein soon came to think that the route to insight was through the contemplation of the nature and presuppositions of individual meaningful sentences such as ‘Socrates is wise’ and that this contemplation showed Russell’s approach to be misguided.

The central fact about such individual sentences is that each says one thing – that Socrates is wise, for example – but is essentially such that it may be either true or false. A false sentence is both out of touch with the world, inasmuch as it is false, but also in touch with the world, inasmuch as it succeeds in specifying a way that things might be. Wittgenstein holds that all this is possible only because the sentence is complex and has components which represent elements of reality, which exist whether the sentence is true or false and are (potentially) constituents of states of affairs. So, in rough illustration, ‘Socrates’ represents Socrates and ‘is wise’ represents wisdom. The truth or falsity of the sentence then depends on whether these elements are or are not assembled into a fact.

Not all sequences of sentence components are acceptable. A mere list of names (for example, ‘Socrates Plato’) does not hang together as a sentence. And although it looks as if we may apply a predicate to itself (as in ”’is in English” is in English’ or ”’is wise” is wise’) it seems important to disallow such sequences as truth-evaluable sentences, on pain of falling into Russell’s paradox. Russell’s account of these matters is that elements of reality come divided into different types – individuals, properties and so on – and that a sentence is to be allowed as meaningful, and so truth-evaluable, only if the elements picked out by the components are of suitably related types.

Wittgenstein maintains, against this, that we do not need rules to bar sentences which would lead to paradox, because when we properly understand the nature of our language we see that we cannot formulate the supposed sentences in the first place. We think we can only because we have misidentified that component in ‘Socrates is wise’ the presence of which in the sentence attributes wisdom to Socrates. This component is not the phrase ‘is wise’ but the property which the word ‘Socrates’ has when the words ‘is wise’ are written to the right of it. To see why this is plausible, consider the fact that there could be a language in which properties are attributed to people by writing their names in different colours. For example, we could claim that Socrates is wise by writing ‘Socrates’ in red letters. In such a language we could never formulate any analogue to ”’is wise” is wise’ because we could not take the redness of ‘Socrates’ and make it red. And although in English we have given a linguistic role to ‘Plato’ (as representing Plato) we have not given any role to the property of a name which it acquires when we write ‘Plato’ to the right of it. That is why a mere list of names does not hang together to make a statement.

Wittgenstein generalizes this idea to claim that the formal properties of any element of the world, that is, the properties which fix its potential for combining into facts with other elements, must be mirrored in the formal properties of the linguistic component which represents it. So the kind of item which says something, and which we often wrongly think to be a complex object, is really a fact. In a sentence certain linguistic components are put together experimentally in a structure which mirrors the formal structure of some possible state of affairs (see Theory of types §1 ).

4 Negation and tautology

This account does away with the need for a theory of types and Wittgenstein holds that the ideas invoked by Russell to explain the nature of logical truth are similarly unnecessary. Russell’s view was that logical truths, such as that all sentences of the form ‘p or not p’ are true, should be explained by pointing to relations holding between some very abstract kind of logical items – negation, disjunction and the like.

Wittgenstein maintains that the negation sign is not a component of a sentence and so does not represent any element of a possible fact (in the quasi-technical sense of ‘component’, ‘element’ and ‘represent’ introduced above). Rather it is the visible mark of an operation one can perform on a meaningful sentence to produce another sentence. The role of the second sentence is to deny that things are as they would need to be to make the first sentence true.

To see the force of this, we must look again at the account of truth given above. What makes a negative sentence true is not the presence of some ‘not-ness’ in a fact but rather the absence of that (the combination of elements) which would have made the unnegated sentence true. Similar accounts are to be given of the other so-called logical constants. Thus ‘or’ does not stand for a possible element in a fact but is a sign by which one can correctly link two sentences if the components of either are so combined as to yield a truth.

Logical tautologies thus do not reveal the nature of special logical objects. Such sentences as ‘It is raining or it is not raining’ do not say anything. But their possibility is a corollary of the existence of a language adequate to say the kind of thing which can be said. So contemplating them can draw our attention to the logical structure of the world (see Logical constants; Logical form; Logical laws ).

5 Simples

The ideas outlined in the last two sections are already present in the sets of notes which Wittgenstein wrote in late-1913 and 1914. But the Tractatus in its complete form incorporated several further important ideas. One of these, perhaps adopted from Frege, is the view that sense must be determinate, that is, that every meaningful sentence must be either true or false in every possible state of affairs. But Wittgenstein differs from Frege in thinking that ordinary language, although misleading in surface form, is in order, and so already fulfils this condition of determinacy.

Determinacy entails that there must be what Wittgenstein calls ‘objects’, that is, utterly simple, eternal and unalterable elements, out of which all facts are composed. Moreover the links between our language system and reality must be set in place at this basic level. Suppose that language-world links were set up so as to connect a basic linguistic component with some element of reality which was not basic. The existence of this element would be contingent and would depend upon some simpler elements being suitably combined in a fact. A sentence containing this imagined basic component is clearly not true in a world where the simpler elements are not suitably combined. But it is equally unhappy to say that it is false, because the component itself does not specify what the simpler elements are or that they must be combined, and so it is no part of its meaning that their failure to be combined is relevant to its falsehood. To insist on the undefinability of this imagined basic element of language is to insist that it has meaning only through its connection with the item it represents. So in a world lacking that item it has no meaning, and sentences containing it are neither true nor false. But this, given the assumption of determinacy of sense, is a reductio ad absurdum of the idea that meaning can be conferred in this imagined way.

We may have an apparently basic sentence component which is linked to a contingently existing item (for example ‘Socrates’ as a name of Socrates). But this is only possible because a definition of that component can be given in our language system. The link between Socrates and his name is thus not a basic point of attachment between language and the world (contrary to the impression given in our earlier rough-and- ready example). It is a consequence of these ideas that there must be a complete analysis of every sentence of our language which reveals it to be a truth-functional combination of elementary propositions, the components of which are simple signs representing objects.

But what are these simple objects? Wittgenstein, like Russell but unlike Frege, does not allow for any contrast between sense and reference within the meaning possessed by names of simples. This puts one demand on simples: they cannot be items with distinguishable aspects, that is, items which can be conceived of in several logically distinct ways. If they were, then there would also be the possibility of one name for a simple as conceived one way and another non-synonymous name for it as conceived another way – contrary to the denial of the sense-reference distinction. So a simple is the kind of thing which, if apprehended in such a way that it can be named, is apprehended exactly as it is in its entirety.

In so far as Wittgenstein drops any hints, it is that simples are phenomenally presented items, such as points in the sensory field and the properties they have, for example, shades of experienced colour. But he cannot give this answer officially because to do so would clash with another of the themes brought to prominence in the later development of the Tractatus . This is the claim that all necessity is logical necessity, and hence would be revealed as tautological in a complete analysis (see §7 below). A corollary of this is that all atomic facts are independent of each other and no elementary proposition can entail or be the contrary of any other. Such things as colours cannot then be ‘objects’ because attribution of different colours to one thing, as in ‘a is red’ and ‘a is green’, produces sentences which are contraries.

The topics so far discussed are treated primarily in the remarks following the main sentences numbered 2, 3 and 4. The remarks following 5 and 6 deal mainly with implications of this atomist conception for certain issues in logic (generality and identity for example) and for the nature of science, mathematics and statements of probability. On the last mentioned subject, Wittgenstein’s brief remarks are one important source for the approach later developed by Rudolf Carnap (see Carnap, R. §5; Logical atomism §1 ).

6 Thought, self and value

Wittgenstein writes, ‘There is no such thing as the subject that thinks or entertains ideas’ (5.631). His grounds for this are similar to those of Hume, namely that a unified, conscious self cannot be an element in any encountered fact. Hence no such item can be among those objects represented in thought. So reports of the form ‘A believes that p’, which seem to mention such a subject, are really of the form ‘”p” says that p’. They report the existence of a sentential complex, the components of which are correlated with the elements of the potential fact that p. There are then no selves in the contingent, encountered world but, at best, bundles of sentence-like items.

But Wittgenstein does not discard the notion of subject completely. The notion he rejects is that of the subject `as conceived in psychology’. But the notion of the `metaphysical’ subject he thinks important. On this latter he says, ‘What the solipsist means is quite correct; only it cannot be said but makes itself manifest’ (5.62), and ‘The subject does not belong to the world: rather, it is a limit of the world’ (5.632).

One reading of this sees it as holding that I cannot prise apart the world and my experience of it. My own experience is directly available to me and any claim I make about the world must at the same time articulate that experience. Others’ experiences, by contrast, are available to me only through noises or movements in my world. Another interpretation stresses the idea that a representation is always from a point of view which is not represented in it. A third view connects these remarks with the idea of projection. Wittgenstein speaks of using a propositional sign as a projection of a possible situation by thinking out its sense. So a subject might be the origin of the lines of projection which link representing items with what they represent and whose existence is thus presupposed by their meaningfulness. ‘The world is my world: this is manifest in the fact that the limits of language (of that language which alone I understand) mean the limit of my world’ (5.62). So perhaps Wittgenstein’s idea is that the existence of a unique self (me) at the limit of the world is shown by the existence of representations which are meaningful to me.

Wittgenstein also offers, in the closing pages of the Tractatus , a number of gnomic remarks about value, death and the mystical, among them that no value exists in the world, that ethics cannot be put into words, that the will as a subject of ethical attributes cannot alter facts but only the limits of the world, that at death the world does not alter but comes to an end, that feeling the world as a limited whole is the mystical and that the solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem. These claims are to some extent intelligibly grounded in ideas concerning the self and what can be said. But they also represent a leap of development beyond those, a leap which comes in part from Wittgenstein’s experiences in the First World War and the religious convictions to which his always intense and serious outlook then led him.

7 Saying and showing

Wittgenstein says that by reading the Tractatus one may come to grasp certain things about the nature of meaning, reality and value, among them the kinds of things outlined above. But he also claims that these things cannot be said but only shown, and the attempt to say them ends up producing nonsense (6.54). Most of the Tractatus itself is thus nonsense. This claim is highly paradoxical and may seem to be unnecessary and grandiose mysticism, especially when viewed as part of the same package as the difficult remarks about the will and solipsism. But this is unfair. In many of its applications, the claim is well motivated, given the picture theory of meaning.

Most of the linguistic manoeuvres which Wittgenstein condemns as nonsensical are attempts to say things which are both necessary but also substantive – that is, not mere tautologies. Thus they include moves to assign elements of reality or language to their logical types (‘Socrates is a particular’), related attempts to describe the logical forms of sentences or facts and also efforts to list the simples. (Claims about what is valuable could also have this status of seeming to be both substantial and necessary.) But if the picture theory of meaning holds in complete generality there cannot be such statable necessary truths. To say, for example, that object b is F we require that there be a linguistic representative of b (‘b’) and one of F-ness (the property of having ‘F’ to the right) which can be combined or not, just as b and F-ness can be combined or not. There must be complexity and there must therefore be the possibility of dissociation as well as association. But if b and F-ness necessarily go together (for example, Socrates must be a particular) then b cannot be dissociated from F-ness and it is a confusion to imagine that its being F is a fact with a composite structure. Hence it is also a confusion to imagine that it is something of the kind which can be said, on the account of saying which is offered by the picture theory.

8 Variant interpretations of the Tractatus

The above account summarizes what the Tractatus seems to say. Wittgenstein’s overall intention in writing it is disputed. One traditional ‘metaphysical’ reading takes him to present a strongly realist outlook. There is a world of simple objects with a determinate structure independent of thought and this structure constrains and explains the nature of meaningful representation. We cannot say what this structure is, or describe the relation between reality and language. But the book aims to show us these things.

A second ‘therapeutic’ reading sees Wittgenstein as seeking to undermine the temptation to make such metaphysical claims. ‘ “Is wise” is wise’ is plain nonsense, like ‘Frabble is wise’, because we have given no meaning to ‘is wise’ as a referring expression. No further explanation of its nonsensicality is needed or could be given. The attempt to find one, by appeal to some further fact about the nature of what predicates represent just leads us to formulate more nonsensical verbiage. We may explore the form of our language from the inside but we cannot explain that form by appeal to something external to it. Reflection on the articulation of reality must at the same time be reflection on the articulation of representation since the idea of reality can only be the idea of what makes representations true. ‘What is not representable by meaningful representations’ can only mean ‘what is represented by nonsense’. But nonsense represents nothing.

Defenders of this second interpretation believe that Wittgenstein’s intention in writing the Tractatus was to release us from the temptation to fruitless philosophical theorizing. Some of them also believe that Wittgenstein intends the completion of the therapy to be relinquishing the show-say distinction itself as nonsensical, and hence relinquishing also the idea of there being any insights to be gained by reading the book. In favour of this so-called ‘resolute’ interpretation are the facts that some therapeutic intentions are plainly embodied in the work and that Wittgenstein’s project looks inconsistent without the final move. He strives to make apparent to us what he takes to be the requirements for any speech to be meaningful, namely that it be capable of picturing contingent states of affairs. Can it be that he then, in all seriousness, suggests that there are linguistic moves by which things are shown (moves which are therefore meaningful in some sense) which do not meet the requirements?

Against the resolute reading one may note that the removal of a muddle which hinders fruitful thought may also present itself as an increase in self-understanding or a coming to know better how to think. The process of reflection which dissolves the muddle and the better view it results in may both have natural verbal expressions. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus view of language, as solely a system for picturing contingent states of affairs, does not allow for the meaningfulness of such utterances. But his later view recognises a greater variety of kinds of meaningful speech, including (for example) utterances which have the form of indicative statements but whose role is that of acknowledgements of rules of language. We may thus think of Wittgenstein in the Tractatus as either irresolute and inconsistent but in practice already recognizing the variety of human discourse, or as resolute and consistent but closing his eyes to that variety.

The Tractatus, whether read in a metaphysical or a therapeutic way, shows Wittgenstein gripped by the conviction that there is just one set of possible concepts. The basic constituents of thought and of reality are, he takes it, fixed once and for all, independent of any contingencies of the interests and circumstances of human beings. And sentences have an analysis which if spelt out would make clear to us something we are not now (explicitly) aware of, namely the nature of the fundamental objects which compose states of affairs and which are represented by the simple signs of any meaningful language. These commitments – to analysis, objects and simplicity – themselves embody substantial philosophical claims and they provide central targets for Wittgenstein’s later reconsiderations.

9 Transition

At the time of writing the Tractatus Wittgenstein took a lofty tone about simple objects; he had proved that they existed and it was of no importance that we cannot say what they are. But in the first years of his return to philosophy in 1927-31 one thing which occupied his attention was the detailed workings of various parts of our language, notably those involved in talking of shape, length and colour and other observable properties of items around us. His aim in considering them was to fill in that earlier gap by giving an account of the fundamental features of both language and the world.

He soon became convinced that the idea of independent elementary propositions was indefensible. For example, the incompatibility of ‘a is red’ and ‘a is green’ cannot be explained (contrary to what he had urged in the Tractatus ) by analysing the two propositions and showing that one contains some elementary proposition which contradicts an elementary proposition in the analysis of the other. Rather the whole collection of colour judgments come as one set, as the marks along the edge of a ruler come as a set. To measure an object we hold a ruler with its marks against the object, that is, in effect we hold up a whole set of possible judgments of length, and we read off which is correct; to see that one judgment is correct is to see at the same time that all the others are incorrect. Something similar holds for colour and for many other concepts, except that in these cases the ‘ruler’ is not physically present. The differences between concepts have to do with the logical shapes of their ‘rulers’ and with the different methods by which they are compared to reality.

Other topics which occupied Wittgenstein at this time were those of psychological phenomena and the use of the word ‘I’. And he also worked extensively on the nature of mathematics. Ideas in common with those of the logical positivists are apparent in some of the writings of this time. Indeed the slogan known as the verification principle - ‘the meaning of a proposition is its method of verification’ – may have originated with Wittgenstein. But he found it impossible to accept this as a clear statement which could provide one of the starting points for elaborating a philosophical system. He was aware of further puzzles and was temperamentally incapable of putting them on one side for the purpose of building an intellectual construct which might be based on misapprehension and which failed to address questions which still perplexed him (see Logical positivism §§3-4; Vienna Circle §2 ).

10 Dismantling the Tractatus picture

Paragraphs 1-242 of the Philosophical Investigations (roughly the first third of the book) are generally agreed to provide the most focused presentation of some of the central ideas of Wittgenstein’s later outlook, in the context of which his views on philosophy of mind, mathematics and epistemology can helpfully be seen. We may divide the paragraphs into three groups: §§1-88 raise a variety of interrelated difficulties for the outlook of the Tractatus , §§89-142 discuss the nature of logic, philosophy and truth, and §§143-242 contain the so-called rule-following considerations.

The first group has two main targets: first, the idea that most words have meaning in virtue of naming something and, second, the idea that meaning requires determinacy and so exactness. Against the former Wittgenstein points out that different words function in different ways. To understand ‘five’, for example, a person needs to be able to count and behave appropriately on the result of a counting; to understand a colour term might, by contrast, involve knowing how to compare the specimen to be judged with a sheet of samples. To teach language one must train a person to produce and respond to words in the context of everyday activities such as fetching things, measuring, building, buying and selling. We can throw light on meaning by reflecting on simple ‘language games’, involving such integration of speech and action. To say that every word names something is like saying that every tool in the tool box modifies something. We can describe things this way if we insist: ‘The saw modifies the shape of the board; the ruler modifies our knowledge of a thing’s length’. But such assimilation may lead us to overlook important variety rather than representing a useful insight. To get someone to understand a word it is not enough to bring them face-to- face with the supposed referent while repeating the word. In order to profit from the confrontation, the learner must know what kind of word is being taught (for a number, shape, colour, and so on). And this in turn involves already being at home with the everyday activities into which remarks using the word are woven. ‘For a large class of cases – though not for all – in which we employ the word ”meaning” it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language’ (1953: §43 ).

On the second topic Wittgenstein remarks that drawing a contrast between ’simple’ and ‘complex’ depends upon context and interest. Items which might be seen as complex in one context could be taken as simple in another and vice versa. So these notions and the related notion of exactness are context-relative. A word does not become unusable and hence meaningless because its use is not everywhere bounded by rules. That we can imagine circumstances in which a given description would seem inappropriately vague or in which we would not know whether to say that it was true or false is no criticism of its current use and hence no argument that it does not have meaning. Hence the idea that every meaningful sentence must have some underlying analysis in terms of simples is mistaken.

Each sort of word is at home in its own language game. But there are not always clear- cut relations of subordination or dependence between different language games. There are many predicates (for example, ‘intention’, ‘thought’, ’statement’, ‘number’, ‘game’) which clearly do not name simples, because they have interesting richness and apply to complex items. But it is not the case that such predicates must have an analysis in terms of ’simpler’ predicates. Search for such an analysis may reveal instead a ‘family resemblance’. Persons who recognizably belong to the same family may have various resemblances, of build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament and so on, which ‘form a complicated network of similarities, overlapping and criss-crossing’ (1953: §66 ), without one set of such resemblances being necessary and sufficient for having the appearance of a member of that family.

On the basis of this survey of the actual workings of language, Wittgenstein then concludes that the Tractatus picture of a detailed crystalline structure present in both world and language is an illusion.

But perhaps the considerations outlined require only minor tinkering with the Tractatus picture? We might say: ‘Certainly linguistic representations of states of affairs are put to various uses, in commands, jokes, stories etc., as well as in straight reports; also what degree of exactness we need is fixed by context; hence we should accept that for many practical purposes vague remarks are adequate. But none of this shows that we must discard the Tractatus picture of a fully determinate world, structured by simples; nor does it show that the idea of constructing a complete and exhaustive description of it need be abandoned. All it shows is that our everyday language mirrors the world less accurately than an imaginable ideal scientific language.’ That such a reading is inadequate is shown by considering the remarks on rule- following found in paragraphs 143-242.

11 Rule-following

By ‘rule’ Wittgenstein does not mean an abstract standard according to which some act may be judged right or wrong. Rather he means a concrete item, such as a noise, mark or gesture, which is presented to a person and by attending to which they direct their behaviour, the link between rule and response being learned and conventional. An enormous number of human activities can be seen as instances of rule-following. They include imitating the gestures and noises which others make, copying shapes, converting marks into noises as in reading music, chanting the number sounds in sequence, and so on. More generally, both nonverbal behaviour in response to verbal instruction (fetching a book when told to do so) and also producing linguistic reports (where the world itself is the guide and the utterance is the response) may be described as rule-following. Rule-following is thus at the heart of linguistic competence. If we further accept that coming to use a rich and expressive language is an indispensable part of coming to grasp complex concepts and to make reflective judgments, then rule- following is also at the heart of our lives as thinking creatures.

It is generally agreed that Wittgenstein has telling negative points to make about one attractive but misleading picture of rule-following. On this picture, to understand a rule, for example, to grasp what is meant by ‘Add two’, it is necessary and sufficient to have a certain sort of item, an image, feeling or formula, occur in the mind when the instruction is heard. For example, having a mental image of two blocks appearing at the end of a line of blocks is the sort of thing which might be imagined to constitute understanding ‘Add two’. This image is supposed to do two things. First, it helps bring about that the person goes on to produce a particular response, for example, saying ‘Eight’ if the previously given number was six; second, it sets a standard by which that response can be judged correct or incorrect.

But the picture will not do. A person might have such an image while responding to ‘Add two’ as if it meant ‘Multiply by two’. Moreover their behaviour (the regular patterns of action, what seems to be regarded as a mistake, and so on) could show that for them, ‘Add two’ actually means ‘Multiply by two’. So images guarantee neither subsequent behaviour nor the appropriateness of a particular standard of assessment.

What this case makes us see is that an image, feeling or formula is merely another rule- like object (that is, a potential vehicle of meaning) rather than the meaning itself. An item is not automatically a self-interpreting sign, that is, one which fixes and enforces a certain reading of itself, simply in virtue of existing in the mind rather than in the outer public world. So images and the like are not sufficient for understanding; but neither are they necessary, since in many cases they do not occur. Typically when someone responds to everyday and familiar language they just act unhesitatingly and spontaneously, without consulting any inner item.

To teach someone to follow a rule, for example, to understand ‘Add two’, we put them through a finite amount of training, primarily by working through examples of adding two. These examples may appear to be another resource for pinning down meaning. But being only finite in number, they are bound to have more than one feature in common. Thus they do not themselves determine a unique interpretation for the sign we associate with them. A learner might exhibit a future bizarre divergence from what is expected, for instance by saying that adding two to 1000 yields 1004. And if this occurred it would suggest that they had all along been struck by some feature other than the one intended.

The central point here is that, for there to be meaning, the rule-followers must have fixed on one rather than another of the various similarities between the teaching examples and have associated it with the rule, that is, with the mark or sign to which they respond. ‘The use of the word ”rule” and the use of the word ‘’same” are interwoven’ (1953: §224 ). But neither the examples nor the rule itself determine which similarity this is; and imagined inner surrogates, in which we would like to see the relevant resemblance encapsulated, turn out to be equally inefficacious.

These reflections do not just undermine one picture of the psychology of understanding. They are also relevant to the picture presented by the Tractatus. If there were a fixed structure for world and language as envisaged in the Tractatus, then there would exist items, namely the simple objects, which would fix the one and only absolute standard of similarity. If there is a simple which is a common element in two separate facts then there is a basic real resemblance between those facts; if not, not. Every other real resemblance which can be meaningfully labelled, for example, by the predicates of everyday language or science, must be founded in simples. A putative linguistic expression which is not tied to some definite combination of simples is, on the Tractatus view, an expression without meaning which is merely randomly applied. Further, as we saw earlier, a simple is the kind of thing which, when apprehended, must be apprehended as it is. So representing a simple, whether by a direct cognition of it or by having in mind something which encapsulates its nature, is to be aware of a self-interpreting item, something which dictates what is to count as ‘the same’. But this sort of confrontation is what the rule-following considerations suggest to be unintelligible.

Thus the discussions of §§143-242 can be seen as interweaving with and reinforcing those of §§1-88. The whole undermines not only the idea of closeness of fit between a Tractatus world and everyday language, but the underlying conception of that world itself, namely as already determinately articulated into facts by simples which we can apprehend (see Meaning and rule-following §§1-2).

12 The later picture of meaning

The Tractatus offers us a world articulated, independently of our detailed human concerns, into value-free facts which are the subject matter of the natural sciences together with a mind confronting that world and attempting to mirror it in its thoughts. It also tells us that there is (in some sense) only one subject and that it is an item at the limit of the world which cannot act responsibly in the world.

However attractive the first element here, everyone would agree that there is something seriously wrong with the solipsism of the second. So one essential move in amendment is to reintegrate the psychological and the metaphysical subjects of the Tractatus, by making the self responsibly active, bringing it in from the limit and locating it firmly in the world, together with other selves. We may do this while leaving in place the idea of the world as the totality of value-free facts. Then the existence of the self which is now located in the world must be some subset of such facts. This yields an extremely powerful and attractive overall picture, namely the picture of reductive naturalism. But it also generates many philosophical puzzles, those to do, for example, with giving naturalistic accounts of consciousness, free will, rationality and so on.

This overall picture cannot be Wittgenstein’s, however, if §11 is right in its reading of the rule-following considerations. The idea of an independently articulated world is not acceptable to him. We cannot understand our concepts by pointing to simples which reveal themselves as the ultimate constituents in any world and so make evident to us the necessity and defensibility of our way of thinking. To understand meaning we must look at use, at how our actions and concepts are interwoven. The fact that makes a sentence true is grasped through seeing when the sentence is correctly used, and that in turn is grasped only by seeing the full shape of the language games in which it is used. For a concept to be truly applicable to the world, and so for its corresponding property to have instances, is not for it to pick out some simple which is among the timelessly given building-blocks of all worlds. Rather it is for the life of which use of that concept is a part to be liveable in this world. Wittgenstein thus moves from a form of the correspondence theory of truth in the Tractatus to a redundancy theory in the Investigations (see Truth, correspondence theory of; Truth, deflationary theories of).

The self need not, on this view, be an assemblage of value-free facts. Neither need we conceive it as a unique metaphysical limit to the world. It is rather a living, human locus of abilities, a person who can be trained to follow rules, to use and respond to language, in the way normal humans can. And since concepts are aspects of our way of life rather than items built into the one conceptual scheme and underpinned by simple objects, understanding what it is to have a particular concept involves ‘assembling reminders’ about how it works for us and how our various activities and ways of talking build together into our way of life.

If it is correct to conceive of understanding as an ability, then the exercise of this ability in everyday situations will often be just some confident, spontaneous action or utterance, which the subject will not be able to justify by pointing to something, other than the situation or words responded to, which guided them.

‘How am I able to obey a rule?’ – if this is not a question about causes, then it is about the justification for my following the rule in the way I do. If I have exhausted the justification I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: ‘This is simply what I do’.

(1953: §217)

But this need not worry us. ‘To use a word without justification does not mean to use it without right’ (1953: §289 ). The fact is that we do find such confident and unhesitating responses in ourselves. Also we (usually) agree with others; and where we do not we (usually) agree on how to settle the dispute. So we have no reason to doubt that in general we do indeed mean what we take ourselves to mean.

Indeed we can put things more strongly than this. It is not just that it is sensible, practically speaking, for me to make a leap of faith and decide to carry on as if I and others mean what it seems we mean. We have no more choice about this than we do about taking ‘Eight’ to be the right response to ‘Add two to six’. The language game of ascribing meanings to the remarks of ourselves and others is as central and indispensable to a recognizably human life as anything in our linguistic repertoire. Moreover the rich and complex social world in which we find ourselves sustains our practice of so doing. So we and our meanings are just as much part of the world as the stars, rocks and trees around us. And since we are no longer committed to the idea of one totality of facts, those of value-free natural science, this recognition does not now produce cramps or pressures to reductive manoeuvres (see Private states and language §4 ).

13 Alternative readings

The account of §§10-12 presents Wittgenstein as inviting us to abandon the idea of our meanings and judgments being securely moored to something given to us and for which we have no responsibility. We see that there is no guarantee of any unique conceptual scheme to be revealed by analysis, or of a world articulated once and for all in terms of its categories. We are instead to become aware of our involvement in and responsibility for our own judgments and the way of life of which they are part. We are also to acknowledge that we cannot prove the unique correctness of our way of life and its associated concepts. (The arguments of the Investigations against the position of the Tractatus thus have much in common with themes explored by other late-nineteenth-century and twentieth-century thinkers, such as Nietzsche, William James, Heidegger, Quine and Derrida (see Nietzsche, F. §6; Heidegger, M. §§2-4; Quine, W.V. §5 ).) But, the reading given in §12 implicitly suggests, this need not lead us to scepticism about the notions of meaning, fact, objectivity or truth.

This interpretation, although not idiosyncratic, is by no means generally accepted. There are a large number of differing construals of Wittgenstein’s overall intention, many of which have in common that they present the consequences of abandoning the Tractatus view as more radical and/or more deflationary, than is suggested in §12.

One interpretation stresses a contrast between the Tractatus and the later writings which is different from any highlighted earlier. It takes the rule-following considerations to show that we cannot make sense of grasp of meaning which fixes truth conditions independent of our ability to verify that they obtain. The later Wittgenstein is thought to insist (as against his earlier self) that all meaning be explicated by appeal to assertibility conditions rather than such possibly verification- transcendent truth conditions and he is recruited onto the antirealist side of the debate in the dispute between realism and antirealism.

Another much discussed view is presented by Saul Kripke . If there were facts about meaning, he argues, they would have to be constituted by something about past behaviour or present occurrences in the mind. So §§143-242 can be read as showing that there are no facts about meaning. Our practice of labelling remarks ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’ and ascribing ‘meanings’ to them has a role in our social life. But such linguistic moves do not have truth conditions. Instead they have only appropriateness conditions. We are licensed to make them when others in our community keep in step with us in certain ways in their patterns of utterance.

Yet a third interpretation takes it that Wittgenstein espouses relativism. One response to the idea that there are no simples is to take it that the world is a featureless mush or unknowable something. Any apparent structure in it is then imposed by us. Hence the familiar physical and social world we experience is a creation of ours. But there are several possible but incompatible ways of imposing structure, one of which we are physiologically and/or socially caused to adopt. So no judgment can claim to be ‘true’ in a non-relative sense; at best it can be ‘true for us’.

An important issue in assessing this third view is what status Wittgenstein intended for the sketched alternative ways of responding to language teaching. Certainly they need enough feasibility to dislodge the conviction that there is one and only one possible way of dividing up the world. On the other hand it is not clear that he takes us to be entitled to assert that there are conceptual schemes which are both incompatible with ours and also fully possible.

Many other readings are also possible, detecting in his writings elements of pragmatism, behaviourism and even deconstructionism (see Behaviourism, analytic ; Deconstruction; Pragmatism §2; Realism and antirealism §4; Relativism ).

A general question is whether Wittgenstein should be read as a philosophical theorist or as a therapist offering to relieve us of the impulse to construct philosophical theories. To take him to be offering anti-realist, sceptical or relativist views is to see him as a theorist. Those who read him as a theorist in his later work are also likely to favour a metaphysical reading of the Tractatus, seeing it too as expressing a philosophical theory, for example some version of realism. Other commentators (representing a mainstream view) see him as shifting from a theoretical stance in the Tractatus to a therapeutic one in the later work. Yet a third group favours a therapeutic reading of his intentions throughout and believes that the ideas offered in the Tractatus are much more similar to those of the later work than is often supposed.

This entry assumes that the second approach is right, at least in that the Tractatus embodies commitments which are, in effect, theoretical and which Wittgenstein later recognized and criticized as such. But it allows also that the third group may well be correct in thinking that Wittgenstein’s overt intentions always had a therapeutic aspect. (It may also be that the distinction between theory and therapy is less clear-cut than previously assumed.)

14 Philosophy of mind

The Tractatus picture of the relation of language to its subject matter is especially attractive in the case of some psychological notions. A sensation such as pain is easily conceived as a phenomenon which impresses its nature and identity conditions on one who has it, independent of external circumstances or bodily behaviour. The private language argument (§§243-71) examines this idea in the light of the earlier discussion of meaning. One aim is to show that our actual use of terms for sensations does not and could not conform to the pattern suggested.

The rule-following considerations suggest that no standard for what is to count as ‘the same’ can be fixed merely by uttering a word to oneself while being vividly aware of what one experiences. For one kind of item rather than another to come into focus out of the indefinite variety potentially presented in an experience, that experience must be embedded in one kind of life rather than another. Relatedly, for a word to have meaning there must be some extended practice in which its use has a point. This is as true of sensation words as of any others. We teach and use them in a complex setting of physical circumstances and expressive bodily behaviour. This setting, says Wittgenstein, is not externally and contingently linked to sensation but is an integral part of the sort of life in which the general category ’sensation’ makes sense and in which particular sensations can be individuated.

Wittgenstein considers many other topics in philosophical psychology, among them intention, expectation, calculating in the head, belief, dreaming and aspect perception. A constant theme is the need to counter the attraction of the model of name and object, which (together with such things as the special authority which each person has to pronounce on their own psychological states) leads us to conceive of the ‘inner’ as a special mysterious realm, distinct from the ‘outer’ or physical. He offers such general remarks as ‘An ”inner process” stands in need of outward criteria’ (1953: §580 ). He also returns repeatedly to the idea that authoritative first-person psychological claims should be seen as expressions or avowals of those states which we are inclined to insist that they describe. These sorts of moves have led to the idea that he denies the existence of the ‘inner’ and is really a behaviourist.

He was aware of the risk of this reading:

‘But you will surely admit that there is a difference between pain-behaviour accompanied by pain and pain-behaviour without any pain?’ – Admit it? What greater difference could there be? – ‘And yet you again and again reach the conclusion that the sensation itself is a nothing.’ Not at all. It is not a something, but not a nothing either!

(1953: §304)

Thoughts and experiences are, on his view, necessarily linked to expressive behaviour. ‘Only of a living human being and what resembles (behaves like) a living human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees; is blind; hears; is deaf; is conscious or unconscious’ (1953: §281). But this does not mean either that any reduction of the mental to the behavioural is possible or that the psychological is not real. To see Wittgenstein’s view sympathetically it is important to keep in mind the upshot of §§1-242. There is no a priori guarantee of some privileged set of classifications (for instance, those of natural science) in terms of which all others must be explained. To understand any phenomenon we must get a clear view of the language games in which terms for it are used; and the logical shapes of these may be very different from those which are initially suggested by the pictures which grip us (see Private language argument §§ 1-3 ).

15 Philosophy of mathematics

Platonism in mathematics involves two claims, that there is a realm of necessary facts independent of human thought and that these facts may outrun our ability to get access to them by proofs. Platonism is attractive because it accounts for several striking features of mathematical experience: first that proofs are compelling and yet may have conclusions which are surprising, and second that we seem to be able to understand some mathematical propositions without having any guarantee that proofs of them exist.

Wittgenstein never accepted Platonism because he always took the view that making substantive statements is one thing, while articulating the rules for making them is another. So-called necessary truths clearly do present rules of language, inasmuch as accepting them commits one to allowing and disallowing certain linguistic moves. Wittgenstein holds that it is therefore a muddle to think that such formulations describe some particularly hard and immovable states of affairs. Thus in the Tractatus mathematical propositions are treated together with tautologies as sets of signs which say nothing, but show the logic of the world.

Nevertheless the Tractatus view has some kind of affinity with at least the first claim in Platonism, inasmuch as the rules of our language, on which mathematics rest, are rules of the only logically possible language. But when Wittgenstein comes to see linguistic rules as features internal to our (possibly varying) practices, the resulting picture is unwelcoming even to this. We cannot now assume there to be such a thing as ‘the logic of the world’, whether to be shown or said. Instead, in Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics , he explores ideas of the following kinds.

At a given time we have linguistic practices directed by certain rules. Someone may now produce a proof of a formula which if accepted would be a new rule – for example, ‘14+3=17‘. It is natural to think that to accept this is to unpack what we were already committed to by our understanding of ‘17′, ‘+’, and so on. But the rule- following considerations unsettle this assumption because they undermine the idea of an intellectual confrontation with an abstract item which forces awareness of its nature upon us and they also bring to our attention the element of spontaneity in any new application of a given term. Rather to accept the proof and its outcome is to change our practices of applying signs like ‘17′, because it is to adopt a new criterion for judging that seventeen things are present, namely that there are two groups of fourteen and three. Hence to accept the proof is to alter our concepts. What makes mathematics possible is that we nearly all agree in our reaction to proofs, and in finding them compelling. But to seek to explain this by pointing to Platonic structures is to fall back into incoherent mythology.

The present author’s own view is that it is persistent uneasiness with the first claim in Platonism which primarily motivates Wittgenstein’s reflections on mathematics. But those who see him as an antirealist will put more stress on hostility to the second claim (the idea of verification transcendence) and certainly some of Wittgenstein’s remarks (for example, his suspicion of the application of the law of excluded middle to mathematical propositions) have affinities with ideas in intuitionistic logic. A third reading will bring out the conventionalist-sounding elements, on which we choose what linguistic rules to adopt on pragmatic grounds.

In addition to reflections on the nature and use of elementary arithmetical claims, Wittgenstein also applies his ideas to some more complex constructs in mathematical logic, such as the Frege-Russell project of deriving mathematics from logic, Cantor’s diagonal argument to the non-denumerability of the real numbers, consistency proofs and Gödel’s theorem. His general line here is not that there is anything wrong with the mathematics but that the results have been misconstrued, because they have been interpreted against a mistaken background Platonism. Some mathematical logicians claim that Wittgenstein has not understood properly what he is discussing. His views on consistency and Gödel in particular have aroused annoyance (see Antirealism in the philosophy of mathematics §2; Intuitionism; Realism in the philosophy of mathematics §2 ).

16 Ethics, aesthetics and philosophy of religion

In the Tractatus Wittgenstein consigns ethics to the realm of the unsayable, and he takes the same line in his ‘Lecture on Ethics’ ([1929] 1993 ). Here he says that ethics (which he links to aesthetics and religion) arises from a tendency in the human mind to try to express in words something – roughly the existence and nature of absolute value - which seems to manifest itself to us in certain experiences. (He gives as an instance the experience of finding the existence of the world miraculous.) It is essential to this impulse that it seeks to go beyond the world and significant language; so it is bound to issue in utterances which are nonsensical. Nevertheless, he says, he has the greatest respect for this impulse and would not for his life ridicule it.

This position resembles the emotivism associated with logical positivism in distinguishing ethical utterances sharply from those of science (that is, those which are capable of rational assessment, and can be true or false). But it also differs from it in being, in spirit, an ethical realism, albeit of a mystical kind.

In his later writing he rethought his views on meaning, mathematics and the mind but did not return to any sustained discussion of ethics or aesthetics (although there are scattered remarks, particularly on the aesthetics of music, in Culture and Value (1980)). One interpretation of the later outlook, however, provides a hospitable setting for an ethical realism of a less mysterious kind, one which allows for the statement and rational discussion of truth-evaluable ethical claims. Philosophers of meta-ethics taking themselves to be working within a Wittgensteinian outlook have urged that our inclination to insist on a dichotomy between fact and value, or between cognition and feeling, should be resisted, as the outcome of the grip on us of some misapplied picture. Moreover Wittgenstein’s emphasis on attention to the actual workings of language could encourage a distinctive approach to first order ethical questions (see Wittgensteinian ethics §2 ). But he himself never developed this, nor does he engage with issues in political philosophy.

The later outlook enjoins us to study each distinctive area of language as far as possible without preconceptions. If we do this for religious language, Wittgenstein holds, we shall see that religion is not a kind of science and hence is not open to criticism on the grounds that, as science, it is unconvincing (see, for example, ‘Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough ([1931] 1993) ). Some take it that this implies that no religious utterance can be properly subject to any criticism other than that coming from inside the same religious community or tradition.

17 Epistemology

One familiar traditional philosophical problem is that of scepticism, that is, whether we can rightly claim to know such things as that physical objects exist independent of our perception, that the world was not created five minutes ago and so forth.

Wittgenstein’s most extended discussion of these issues is in On Certainty (1969). He starts from the kinds of examples invoked by G.E. Moore in his attempt to combat scepticism, such as ‘Here is a hand’ and ‘The Earth has existed for a long time before my birth’ (see Moore, G.E. §§3-4 ). Moore is wrong, Wittgenstein thinks, in taking it that we are plainly entitled to assert that we know these things. But Moore is right in thinking that the claims form an interesting class. It is impossible to conduct life and thought without taking some things entirely for granted, and the propositions Moore identifies are the articulated forms of things which play this role for us. They help to define our world picture and underpin the procedures by which other claims (ones that are in fact doubted and tested) can be assessed. But they cannot themselves be assessed because there is nothing relatively more certain by which we can get leverage on them. Someone who seems to doubt them is thought mad and, from a first-person point of view, when I imagine doubting such things I contemplate a situation in which I would no longer know how to reason about anything. There are close links between these themes and the idea that the workability of any language game presupposes certain very general facts of nature.

The relevance of this for the traditional question of scepticism is that it is, in its form, misconceived. The central use of ‘know’ is in connection with propositions where testing is possible. Hence one who uses it in connection with the propositions which help define our worldview (as is in fact done only in philosophy and not in ordinary life) has extended the word to a situation where procedures do not exist for assessing either the first-order claim or the claim to knowledge of it. This is not to say that the word ‘know’ is unintelligibly and wrongly used in the philosophical debate. We can sympathize with the sceptical impulse, which springs from awareness of the fact that our language games are not based on grounds which compel us to adopt them or guarantee their continued success. But we can also sympathize with the anti-sceptical position which insists that acceptance of these central propositions underpins our being able to do any thinking at all, so that claims to doubt them are empty (see Scepticism ).

18 Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy

In two central respects Wittgenstein stands squarely within the main historical tradition of philosophy, first in the nature of the issues which excited and intrigued him intellectually – meaning, the self, consciousness, necessity – and second (going back to the roots of the tradition) in his being a ‘lover of wisdom’, that is, one who is seriously concerned about having a right stance to the world both intellectually and practically and who is committed to the use of the intellect (among other things) in helping to achieve this.

But he differs from many philosophers in his conviction that a great number of traditional philosophical problems are the result of some deep kind of muddle, and in his belief that the answers given and the way they are debated hinder rather than help us in achieving wisdom. This conviction gripped him from very early on and philosophical thought therefore presented itself to him as a tormentingly difficult struggle to be honest and to free himself from misleading preconceptions.

So the word ‘philosophy’ has, in all his writings, two uses. On one it describes a body of confused utterances and arguments, arising largely from misunderstanding of the workings of language, and on the other it describes an activity of helping people to get free of the muddles. Another important continuity is his insistence that there cannot be philosophical theories and that the helpful activity of philosophy ought only to consist of making uncontentious statements, of describing and assembling reminders. In the context of the picture theory of meaning, this is comprehensible (see §7). But it is less clear that it is required by the later view.

In part Wittgenstein is here stressing that we cannot have the kind of explanation of our concepts which the Tractatus picture seemed to promise. Our form of life cannot be grounded but only described and lived. In part he is questioning the impulse to look for quasi-scientific theories of the nature of philosophically puzzling phenomena. But these two interrelated points do not obviously add up to a complete embargo on anything which could be called ‘philosophical theory’. It is in the spirit of the later philosophy to point out that there are many different kinds of things which can be called ‘theories’. Everyone engaged in reflection on the topics Wittgenstein considers (including Wittgenstein himself) finds it natural to articulate in words the states they arrive at and to engage with these words and those of others in the mode of further comment and assessment.

We become aware here, and at many other places, of the open-ended and unfinished nature of Wittgenstein’s reflections. His writings have aroused great devotion because of the honesty and depth which many find in them. But it is important not to treat them with superstitious reverence. Rather they should be read in the spirit in which he intended, namely as an invitation to explore with as much integrity as possible one’s own perplexities and what would resolve them.

Dezembro 9, 2008

Eric Voegelin

Throughout his career, Voegelin was concerned with modernity; unlike his contemporaries he sought the explanation of its character and deformities (especially totalitarianism) in the restoration of ‘political science’ as Plato and Aristotle understood it. He therefore explored order in the individual’s soul, political society, history and the universe, and its source in God. He did so by studying the representation of order in philosophy (Eastern as well as Western) and in revelation and myth. Voegelin concluded that ‘gnosticism’, the misinterpretation of the insights of myth, philosophy and revelation as descriptions of some future perfected society, and the wilful denial of transcendence and human limitation, represented the essence of modernity.

1 Life and works

By profession and self-description, Eric Voegelin was a political scientist, but philosopher, political theorist, theologian, mystic and intellectual historian would be equally accurate and equally misleading titles. Expelled by the Nazis from a lectureship at Vienna University, where he had studied, taken his Ph.D. and worked as Hans Kelsen’s assistant, Voegelin lectured in political science at Baton Rouge, Louisiana from 1942 until 1958. He then took up Max Weber’s former chair at Munich University. In 1969 he returned to the USA as Distinguished Scholar in the Hoover Institute, Stanford, California, and remained there until his death. His intellectual power and astonishing scholarly range have been widely acknowledged. His main endeavour was to reconstitute the study of politics, a project publicly initiated in his The New Science of Politics (1952) and partly executed in his Order and History (1956–87), as well as many other books and articles.

2 Critique of contemporary social science and philosophy

Voegelin’s permanent concern was with order and disorder in the soul and in society, and the nature of modernity. Originally prompted by the rise of the totalitarian movements, of which he had first-hand experience, this concern was widely shared by academics. However, Voegelin’s public stance was confrontational, and his insistence that knowledge of Mesopotamian, Israelite, Greek, Roman and medieval history and philology, as well as of myth and non-Western cultures, was indispensable to the restoration of a genuine science of order won him few friends. His condemnation of positivism was comprehensive, but he regarded the 1960s and 1970s debate between positivists and their opponents as merely a theoretically more impoverished re-run of its early twentieth-century predecessor (see Positivism in the social sciences). He interpreted both modernity and totalitarianism as ‘gnosticism’ (see §4). He made sweeping claims about the ‘essence’ of modern ‘-isms’, ‘climates of opinion’, doctrines and movements, and about the mediations between these and the thought of the ‘representative’ thinkers he identified as their progenitors. His philosophical vocabulary is often difficult (drawing on Greek philosophy), and although bilingual and eloquent, he sometimes relies on a background of untranslatable German terms, most notably when he identifies ‘the tension (Spannung) to the Ground (Grund) of divine Being (Sein)’ as both the source and the object of the philosopher’s quest (1956: 2).

3 Reality and consciousness

The questions Voegelin addresses are familiar to phenomenology and existentialism (Alfred Schütz was his lifelong friend, and he was deeply sympathetic to L’homme révolté of Camus), and were formulated in explicit critical confrontation with Kant, Hegel, Comte, Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Husserl and Heidegger. Of contemporary philosophies, he found something to praise in every contemporary philosophy except positivism and Marxism, which (in his view) yielded virtually nothing valuable enough to compensate for their persistent ‘prohibition’ of fundamental questions.

At the centre of Voegelin’s thinking is the metaphysical question of Leibniz, Schelling and Heidegger: Why is there something? Why not nothing? Why are things as they are? The quest for the answer is ‘philosophy’, which is not epistemology but the love of knowledge. Knowledge can only be knowledge of truth and reality, and reality is not merely or mainly to be found in external objects, which non-philosophical experience, ordinary language and ideologies suppose to exhaust reality. Reality is experienced in consciousness, which in its exploring never encounters anything in the universe which is not of its own ‘substance’. What is encountered at the limit is a transcendent order, or structure, of being which has its Beginning or ground (archê) and its End (telos) in the Beyond, or divine. And individuals (there is no consciousness except the consciousness of individuals) apprehend reality in this ultimate sense, not as external observers, but as ‘participant observers’. This reality, the ‘utterly real’ (realissimum) of myths, philosophers and mystics, the order of the universe and the ‘divine ground of [all] being’ that generates and sustains it and towards which it tends, is sought and found, the finding being experienced as the divine revealing itself: theophany.

There are three kinds of theophany: the wisdom of myth; ‘philosophy’ (paradigmatically Plato’s); and the Revelation of the Old Testament and (paradigmatically) Christ in Paul and St John. These are equally valid explorations of the experience of reality, compact in the case of myth, differentiated in philosophy and revelation. Each such exploration is culturally specific and personal (although the experiences are available to all who do not deliberately close them off), and becomes luminous only through language symbols. Some of these explorations have been epochal, rendering previous symbolizations (for example, the intra-cosmic gods of myth) obsolete and breaking historical time into a ‘before’ and ‘after’ the irruption of the divine. But none can ever be final, or perfectly adequate, or make sense independently of the experience of reality from which it arises.

Voegelin’s exploration of the nature of consciousness becomes ever more complex, since he must transcend solipsism and relativism, but rejects the privileged vantage point of the transcendental ego postulated by Kant, Fichte and Hegel; for Voegelin there is no such vantage point. And neither mystery nor the tensions inherent in the human ‘In-between’ are to be abolished. Nor must the symbols whereby this experience of transcendence and order becomes luminous be broken away from their engendering experience. Conversely, philosophical exploration of reality can never be symbol-free; consciousness and symbols always emerge from reality simultaneously, and language and experience are inseparable. The history of consciousness thus becomes a tracking of the trail of symbols and doctrines to their source in experience.

4 Gnosticism and political order

The experience of reality has profound implications, not only for the order of the philosopher’s or prophet’s own soul, but also for their apperception of true order in society and meaning in history. Voegelin’s historical work always centred on the former. As to the latter, he focused on ‘derailments’ and perversions of insight into order by ‘gnosticism’ (the essence of modernity) from antiquity onwards, culminating in totalitarianism (see Totalitarianism). His two attempts at a historical account of order in society and history foundered. In the 1940s, he abandoned an already well-advanced history of political ideas, because ideas, doctrines and doctrinal disputes of any sort are merely a lifeless (or pernicious) residue, when sundered from the experience which they symbolically articulate, or pervert. In Order and History (1956–87), Voegelin intended to present symbolizations of experience and their representation in political order as a meaningful historical sequence. His fidelity to evidence, however, made this impossible, and he came to see the idea of a unilinear history of mankind as itself misguided. ‘Mankind’ is a symbol intelligible only in the context of a common relation to the divine; empirically, mankind is no more a historic unity than ‘cat-kind’. He excoriated all equations of the history of mankind with the history of Western high culture, or what he called Western ecumenical imperialism. Nor, although there is meaning in history, is there a meaning of history. And any idea of a unilinear history terminating in the self-revelation (egophany) of a Condorcet, Hegel, Comte, Marx, Husserl or Heidegger, he saw as the height of the lust for power and a disease of the soul (see Historicism).

He construed such derailments as grounded in a refusal to recognize the inevitably circumscribed and uncertain character of human existence as the divine-human ‘In-between’ (Plato’s metaxy); this refusal makes man instead of God the measure of all things. Philosophers and prophets can counteract this evil only to a limited extent. The ground has already been occupied by others (individuals and societies) who claim to know reality and to be able accurately to represent it by the time that they arrive. The philosophers and prophets in turn can offer only symbolizations which are inevitably couched in an object-oriented language and are thus always liable to misrepresentation, especially since philosophy and myth have no certainties or definitive answers of their own to propound; and they cannot abolish empirical reality and its disorder and injustice. In particular they cannot abolish the profound sense of injustice of the subjects of ‘ethnic’ orders (that is, culturally cohesive and territorially limited polities) conquered by ‘ecumenical’ orders (polities aiming at a more or less inclusive empire). To such individuals, ‘ethnic’ orders had represented the order of the universe; ‘ecumenical’ empires represent nothing except the triumph of naked power.

Gnosticism, whether as a pernicious potential within Christianity, or stemming from other sources, insulates itself against reality by prohibiting metaphysical questions (notably Marx’s ruling out such questions as irrelevant for ‘socialist man’), and by ‘immanentizing’ (interpreting the symbols of transcendence as descriptions of some present or future perfect mankind or society). It may remain mere speculation, or it may become a political force in times of disorientation and disorder, taking the form of political activism, ‘liberation’, revolution or nihilism. Voegelin sees a similar, but less resolute and destructive infidelity to reality in doctrinaire religion and progressivism of all kinds.

It would have been absurd for Voegelin to present his own insights as a doctrine, even for the sake of remaking the now vanished link between symbols and their engendering experience provided in the past by myth, religion and authority. And it may be the case that humankind finds reality or uncertainty difficult to bear, especially when it lacks a stable institutional tradition and common sense (which the UK and the USA in Voegelin’s view still had). Although he was no cultural pessimist, it did not surprise Voegelin that he did not ‘find many, or favourable hearers’.

Dezembro 9, 2008

Teilhard de Chardin

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin taught that the evolutionary process is governed by a ‘law of complexification’ which dictates that inorganic matter will reach ever more complex forms, resulting in inorganic matter being followed by organic matter and organic matter being followed by conscious life forms. Viewed by observers, humans are material systems within a larger physical system. Viewed introspectively, a human being is a self-conscious creature possessed of freedom and rationality, with the capacity for action and inquiry. Each element in the world has some form of this dual ‘exterior’ aspect and ‘interior’ aspect, though consciousness arises only late in the evolutionary history. Teilhard de Chardin saw neither reason to doubt that matter can give rise to mind, nor any basis for reducing mind to matter. The prospects for humanity are gratifying, as evolution, following the law of complexification with the cooperation of human choice, moves to an Omega point at which Christ’s fullness will include as his ‘body’ a unified humanity that is at peace.

Scientific critics of Teilhard de Chardin’s theory have charged that his optimism involves extrapolation far beyond what the present evidence warrants. Theological critics have argued that he does not sufficiently consider the degree of evil in the world; optimism can only be justified if we assume that evil can be redeemed by transcendent divine action, because immanent evolutionary processes may not suffice.

1 Life

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the fourth of eleven children, received his secondary education at the Collège Notre-Dame at Mongre, and, at eighteen, entered the Society of Jesus. He read Bergson’s writings, and an association with Eduard Le Roy, a Bergsonian scholar, deepened the Bergsonian influence on Teilhard de Chardin’s thought. While his views often sparked keen dissent within the Church, he remained a Jesuit and a loyal Catholic. Repeated requests to the Church for permission to publish his best-known work, Le Phénomène humaine (1953), were refused, and it was published only posthumously. He sought a way to unite his ‘love for God’ and his ‘love for the world’. The product was not merely a view which sanctions the dignity of scientific endeavour, but a complex worldview in which cosmic evolution is the process by which God brings into being a ‘fullness of Christ’ that includes a morally and spiritually mature humanity and a fully developed natural environment.

Teilhard de Chardin taught in the Jesuit College in Cairo (1906–8), served in the First World War, and taught at the Catholic Institute in Paris; when he was fired from this post, he travelled to China. He was a distinguished geologist and palaeontologist, especially concerned with human prehistory, and in China participated in the palaeontological researches surrounding the discovery of Peking Man. He was associated with many expeditions and became director of the research office of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. After the Second World War, he was offered a chair at the Collège de France, but instead went to New York, where he was made permanent assistant at the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. He was an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Society of Great Britain, and an honorary member of the Academy of Sciences of New York, as well as a member of the French Academy of Sciences and the American Association for Geology.

2 Priest and scientist

It was Teilhard de Chardin’s goal to find for himself, and then share with others, a worldview that unified his theological beliefs as a Catholic and professional beliefs as a scientist. He thus developed a synthesis of Catholic theology and evolutionary theory which he claimed was satisfactorily founded in evidence and reason. In it, he rightly remarked, the traditional juridical and political terms in which much of Catholic thought had come to be classically expressed were replaced by terms derived from the natural sciences, although he extended them beyond their native home in scientific theory. It would seem that he thought these terms received much less stretching at his hands than many of his readers, both scientists and theologians, suppose.

It seems clear as well that while Teilhard de Chardin had apologetic interests – he wanted to argue for his faith – and communication interests – he wanted his faith to be intelligible to modern readers – he had a more basic motivation. He thought that his newly crafted worldview was a natural and appropriate convergence of the picture of the world presented descriptively by evolutionary science, and the doctrines of an orthodox (if nontraditionally stated) Catholicism; his main reason for presenting his worldview was that he thought it was true.

Teilhard de Chardin described his intellectual project as providing a phenomenology of the physical universe – a description of the universe that arises from and is justified by what the natural sciences have discovered the world to be. The resulting account of things has a surprising consequence. Included in his notion of a phenomenology is that it should say what the functions of the phenomena are and give an account of the purposiveness that phenomena actually exhibit. His account of the function and purpose of the evolutionary process is, of course, controversial. He contends, for example, that since the evolutionary process has plainly produced human beings, and we see no new species on the horizon to replace them, it is in humanity that we find the best clue to understanding the process. This in effect involves him in thinking in terms of final as well as efficient causes (to put the matter in traditional language), and in viewing this as part of what is properly included in a phenomenology that is scientifically based.

Teilhard de Chardin viewed the universe in both theistic and evolutionary terms; the world owes its existence and structure to God, and God is immanent in it. The universe is an immense organic whole which is driven by its inner energies toward greater and greater order and complexity. His notion of evolution is cosmic, not simply biological; within the framework of his evolutionary theory there appear not only mutating forms of life but also inorganic matter and, ultimately, social and cultural systems.

3 Optimism and evolution

Much has been written about the medieval view of an orderly universe, quite limited in scope, created for human habitation, and centred on our earth, whose plants and animals served human ends. Earth was a rather manageable habitation which served its resident landlords rather well as a temporary home until their real home was reached in the afterlife. Then astronomers revealed the vastness of the universe, physicists discovered that the same laws applied beyond the moon as applied below it and that the universe is a vast machine, biologists found a minuscule universe of a vastness comparable to the macrocosm, Darwin robbed humanity of its uniqueness, and Freud stole from humanity its fundamental rationality. The result is a universe in which human beings live a precarious unfree existence in a natural environment that is at best neutral, while beset with inner forces that threaten what sanity they possess as they wait for entropy to wind things down.

Without considering how accurate all this is, either as regards medieval or modern thought, perhaps the broad strokes of the preceding paragraph give some sense of what Teilhard de Chardin was fighting. He insisted that the very evolutionary theory that played a significant role in questioning the uniqueness and hence special worth of human beings, when properly understood and articulated, restored that very uniqueness and worth. He denied that the universe was machinelike, static, deterministic, neutral or unfriendly to human existence, or doomed to an inelegant ending. He held that humanity is an entirely natural denizen of the world without thinking that the existence of human beings is to be naturalistically explained – not, at any rate, if ‘being naturalistically explained’ denies either human rational and volitional transcendence of determining conditions or theological explanation of the evolutionary process.

Teilhard de Chardin suggested that the earth’s history has three phases. First, there is the cooling of the earth’s crust and the presence of inorganic matter. In the second stage, organic matter arises as life emerges and diversifies. The third stage begins with the appearance of mind. Geosphere is succeeded by biosphere, biosphere is followed by noosphere. While the first stage leads naturally to the second, and the second to the third, both later stages none the less contain something qualitatively new. In the third stage, there is a qualitative shift in the nature of the evolutionary process itself as the products of evolution become capable of contributing to, and potentially directing, the future of the process.

Humanity, Teilhard de Chardin held, is ‘separated [from the other elements of the evolutionary process] by a chasm – or a threshold – which it cannot cross. Because we are reflective we are not only different but quite other. It is not a matter of change of degree, but a change of nature, resulting from a change of state’ ( [1953] 1959: 165–6). Thus the evolutionary process exhibits discontinuity within continuity in an ascent from less to more organized forms of matter. Material synthesis and complexity are viewed as one aspect of the same stuff that, in its highly complex versions, has intellectual and spiritual capacity as another aspect.

4 Beginning and goal

Teilhard de Chardin saw human beings as both the end or goal of the evolutionary process and as a new evolutionary beginning, not to be replaced by a new species. Evolution now and in future is a process under new rules; humans act freely in the context of natural laws, rather than one nonintelligent event following another. Without supposing that detailed projections are possible, he took the future to be the key to the past and believed that science justifies an optimistic forecast of the future of humanity. It is likely that this optimism, grounded at least in intent in a rationally developed worldview, is part of the explanation for the enthusiasm Teilhard de Chardin’s views often elicit.

Currently, humanity experiences diverse cultures and forms of intellectual life; it is an often warring, significantly immature species. None the less, humanity’s capacity for self-conscious thought and action provides a new layer or sphere on the surface of the earth – a ‘noosphere’ that is the unique environment of human beings, shared not even with the highest nonhuman animals. This sphere too is subject to the law of complexification, and thus there will be a cultural unification in which humans learn to live in love and peace. When this ‘Omega point’ is reached, a united humanity will serve as the body of Christ, and Christ will have achieved the fullness that it has been the point of evolution to produce.

It follows from Teilhard de Chardin’s views that it is important to understand the world in terms of theistic cosmic evolution. While there are powerful tendencies to ‘complexification’ in nature, once human beings arrive on the scene there is in principle the possibility of their acting sufficiently unwisely or wickedly as to postpone, diminish or even prevent the arrival of the Omega point. After all, according to Teilhard de Chardin’s view (though this is certainly not unique to his perspective), the course of evolution is now significantly in human hands; none the less, it is plainly his view that optimism is justified concerning the prospects of the Omega point actually being reached. The later chapters of the book of evolution seem sure to be happy ones.

For Teilhard de Chardin, Christ himself is primarily the Cosmic Goal of the evolutionary process (‘Christ’ here is intended to refer to both the Second Person of the Christian trinity and his ‘body’ of collective mature humanity). The redemption that Christ provides according to the Christian message is seen in cosmic as well as individual terms, and for Teilhard de Chardin, these cosmic terms are seen along the lines of a gradual and predictable change for the better, and are conceived more in terms of immanence than transcendence.

5 Criticisms

Teilhard de Chardin’s scientific critics, even those who agree that the course of evolution is now partly under human management, find in rising population, environmental pollution and decreasing resources significant grounds for being dubious about evolutionary optimism. They worry that entropy in the long run will end human life and that increasing specialization will diminish the quality of life. Most fundamentally, they find in Teilhard de Chardin’s perspective an extrapolation that goes far beyond anything they discover in actual science, and are unconvinced that anyone who follows his lead will thereby be walking in the overall direction (if any) suggested by scientific conclusions. Thus they see little or no justification in actual scientific theory for Teilhard de Chardin’s Christian cosmic evolutionism.

Theological critics (for example, Smulders 1967 and Thielicke 1964) have worried that the ‘in principle’ possibility of human evil, manifested individually and institutionally, might not be too deep for real confidence in any immanent process leading to a cosmic kingdom of God. They view Teilhard de Chardin as taking altogether insufficient account of the depth of evil in the human heart and in the institutions that we have created. It seems to them all too likely that the outcome will be at least no better than what we currently experience unless there is special divine intervention of a sort not really in the spirit of his theory.

Teilhard de Chardin sees sin as an inevitable feature of the evolutionary process, which is to be overcome as the law of complexification works in concert with right human choices and actions. This seems to his critics to involve a sort of self-healing theory of the universe in which they have no great confidence. Much of the Christian tradition has insisted on a significantly greater role for transcendent divine action than seems evident in, or consistent with, Teilhard de Chardin’s conception of things. For most of that tradition, the Fall is neither a fall ‘up’ towards maturity, nor an inevitable part of a process that leads upward. It has thought in terms of people, and often also of nature, as needing regeneration, not merely time to develop. Its optimism rests more on faith and hope in the activities of a transcendent Saviour than on faith in the progressive unfolding of immanent principles built by the Creator into the creation. Thus Teilhard de Chardin’s Christian critics stress that the problem that Christ came to deal with was our sin, which includes not only individual wrong actions knowingly performed, but a commitment to a style of life centred on our own apparent advantage in disregard to the will of God and the good of others. Christ is thus the Saviour who dies for our sins and rises again for our justification, the Judge who condemns both sin and the unrepentant sinner who clings to sinfulness and rejects forgiveness and grace, and the Lord of all Creation. The Christian critics argue that Teilhard de Chardin subordinates the roles of Saviour and Judge to that of Lord of Nature in a way that trims the sails of Christian doctrine to fit the masts of evolutionary optimism.

At times asserting that his views arose naturally and with considerable evidential support from the data of science, Teilhard de Chardin at other times emphasized the tentative and partial nature of his perspective. At the least, he coherently placed a massive amount of scientific data within a theological perspective that most of his colleagues had dismissed or ignored, and (perhaps not altogether intentionally) illustrated the fact that scientific data, as philosophers of science say, ‘underdetermine’ the world views based on them.

Dezembro 9, 2008

Jean Piaget

The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget was the founder of the field we now call cognitive development. His own term for the discipline was ‘genetic epistemology’, reflecting his deep philosophical concerns. Among Piaget’s most enduring contributions were his remarkably robust and surprising observations of children. Time after time, in a strikingly wide variety of domains, and at every age from birth to adolescence, he discovered that children understood the world in very different ways from adults.

But Piaget was really only interested in children because he thought they exemplified basic epistemological processes. By studying children we could discover how biological organisms acquire knowledge of the world around them. The principles of genetic epistemology could then be applied to other creatures, from molluscs to physicists. Piaget’s other enduring legacy is the idea that apparently foundational kinds of knowledge were neither given innately nor directly derived from experience. Rather, knowledge was constructed as a result of the complex interplay between organisms and their environment. Piaget saw this view as an alternative to both classical rationalism and empiricism.

1 The stages of development

Piaget described development as a series of wide-ranging stages. At each stage children had quite different basic logical and representational capacities, which underpinned all their behaviour. Infants initially arrived in the world with nothing but motor reflexes and sensory systems. During infancy they elaborated these basic capacities into complex contingent instructions for behaviour, which related actions and sensations. Piaget called these ‘sensori-motor schemas’. Infants could make substantial progress even within this apparently limited framework. They learned a great deal about objects, space, action and causality. Nevertheless, there were, quite literally, no representations of the world in infancy, and no conception of a world independent of the infant’s experience. There were only instructions for action.

Piaget defended this position with examples of apparently peculiar and irrational behaviour in infancy. One set of examples involved infants’ attempts to obtain interesting objects. Six month-old infants behaved as if objects that disappeared under a cloth no longer existed. If they were in the midst of reaching for an object and it was hidden under a cloth, they would give up their attempt to get it. Later, they learned that pulling the cloth would make the object reappear. But if the object was hidden under one cloth and then under another they would continue to search under the original cloth. Similarly, 9-month-olds who learned to pull a blanket towards them to get an object on top of the blanket would continue to do so even when the object was placed to one side of the blanket.

Children only developed the capacity to represent the external world symbolically at about 18 months. This new kind of representation was reflected in the development of language, pretend play and deferred imitation. These symbolic representations also allowed children to understand that there was a world independent of their experience of it. And they enabled children to solve problems ‘in their heads’, without actually having to act on the world.

These representations, however, initially had little logical or causal structure. They were ‘pre-operational’. As a result preschool children were unable to perform even simple logical and causal reasoning. When they were asked to explain natural phenomena they resorted to animistic explanations, or to explanations in terms of their own desires, and they might reverse cause and effect. For example, a 3-year-old child who was asked why it got dark at night might reply that it got dark because we need to sleep or because you could not see then. Similarly, preschool children were unable to understand even simple logical principles such as the law of transitivity. If they were told that stick A was longer than stick B and stick B than stick C, they might still deny that A was longer than C. Finally, these very young children showed little understanding of hierarchical relationships, such as class-inclusion. If you showed them an array of four red flowers and two white ones, they would report that there were more red flowers than flowers.

At about 6, children did begin to use causal and logical reasoning. These kinds of reasoning were, however, initially closely tied to the perceptual appearances of objects. They were ‘concrete operational’. The most famous examples of this involved ‘conservation’. In a conservation task the properties of objects remain the same in spite of transformations of the object’s appearance. In a classic experiment, Piaget showed children a tall, thin glass of water, poured the water into a short, wide glass and asked children whether there was the same amount of water, more, or less. Seven-year-olds consistently said that there was less water in the short glass, even after the water was poured back and forth from glass to glass. The children were unable to use information about relations among objects and transformations of objects to override perceptual information about the features of objects.

Piaget thought concrete operations were reflected in the child’s understanding of psychological states as well as physical objects. Just as school-age children were unable to coordinate different perceptual appearances, they were unable to coordinate their own experiences and those of others (see Mind, child’s theory of). They were ‘egocentric’. If 7-year-olds were shown a complex scene from one perspective, they could not project how the scene would look to another person at a different viewpoint. Similarly, in moral reasoning children calculated harm by looking at the actual amount of damage that was caused, without considering intention or motivation (see Moral development). Only at adolescence, in the stage of formal operations, did children become able to use logical and scientific reasoning in a way that was fully abstracted from the details of their own experience.

2 The mechanisms of development

Piaget rejected both the classical developmental mechanisms of nativist views, such as maturation, and those of empiricist views, such as association or reinforcement. Moreover, he also rejected, or at least underplayed, the influence of language and social interaction. Instead he proposed three very general mechanisms of development, all involving an interaction between the knowledge the child had already developed and new information from the outside world. Piaget called his overall view of development ‘constructivism’.

Assimilation. The child adapted and interpreted information from the world to fit his existing schemas. The manifestations of assimilation ran from a newborn who generalized his sucking reflex from a nipple to a rattle, to a preschool child who used blocks as dolls in her pretend play, to a school-age child in a conservation task who simply misreported counter-evidence to his claims about the water.

Accommodation. The opposite effect took place: the child was forced to adapt his schemas to fit new information from the world. Again these effects could vary from an infant who had to change his style of sucking to accommodate the unyielding rattle, to a preschool child who imitated her mother’s phone conversation in an initially uncomprehending way, to a child in a conservation task who at least temporarily admitted that the same water was in both glasses.

Equilibration. This really represented a kind of balance between assimilation and accommodation. When the child’s representations and the evidence from the world matched, the process of accommodation and assimilation would end and the child could at least temporarily settle on a particular kind of representation. Piaget saw cognitive development as a highly dynamic process, constantly balancing representations that had already been constructed with new input from the outside world.

Moreover, the child’s active attempts to interact with the world were the basic motor driving this dynamic process. Assimilation and accommodation could work only if the child were engaged with the world, usually by physically acting on it. Piaget sometimes illustrated the mechanisms with the biological example of an animal literally assimilating part of its environment by eating it, and literally accommodating the food by physically changing its body as a result.

3 Piaget’s influence

Much of Piaget’s most significant work was produced in the 1920s and 1930s in Geneva. But Piaget, like the Gestalt psychologists, remained largely unknown in the United States during the long reign of behaviourism (see Behaviourism, methodological and scientific; Gestalt psychology). However, a few Piagetians, like Gestaltists, came to America after the war, and kept the tradition alive in small enclaves in liberal arts colleges. In the 1960s Piaget was rediscovered in the United States and fully translated into English. His rediscovery was itself both a consequence and a cause of the ‘cognitive revolution’ in psychology. Piaget was one shining example of how you could construct an account of the mind that was mentalistic, but that also emphasized the biological foundations of psychology. Unlike earlier psychologists such as Brentano and Wundt, but like Chomsky and the early computationalists, he detached the idea of mentalistic explanation from phenomenology (see Mind, computational theories of; Unconscious mental states).

Moreover, Piaget’s work led to the recognition that developmental questions were of broad interest and importance in psychology (until the 1960s much developmental psychology was located in home economics departments). Piaget also had a strong influence on education, particularly on ‘progressive’ educational theory and practice.

4 After Piaget

Where does the theory stand now? Most of Piaget’s actual observations, often based only on pen and paper notes of a few children, have held up remarkably well. On the other hand, new techniques have given us a much broader additional database. Most often, the new data suggest that children are more competent and sophisticated in their understanding of the world than Piaget supposed. These new observations have led most cognitive developmentalists to reject the details of Piagetian theory (see Cognition, infant; Cognitive development).

In particular, the idea of broad-ranging stages of development has come under increasing attack. Instead, cognitive development appears to be quite specific to particular domains of knowledge. For example, the infant who fails to understand object permanence may show a sophisticated and clearly representational understanding of object movement or of human action. The same child who gives an animistic or pre-causal explanation of the fact that it gets dark at night will give an entirely accurate causal account of how their tricycle works. The preschool child who is egocentric in Piaget’s experiments can tell you that someone on the other side of a screen from them will not be able to see what they themselves see. Even newborn infants show a rich understanding of some domains.

Similarly, it appears that Piaget overestimated the importance of action in cognitive development, particularly in infancy. Very young infants show signs of reasoning and learning about objects, well before they can act on them. On the other hand, Piaget probably underestimated the importance of social interaction and language in cognitive development. Much of the new research suggests that children are extremely sensitive to social information and are tuned in to the social world from an early age. More generally, Piaget’s account of assimilation and accommodation as the basic mechanisms of ‘constructivism’ now seems too vague.

Some developmentalists have seen these problems as a reason for rejecting not only the detailed theory but the project of ‘constructivism’ – of a middle way between classical nativism and empiricism – altogether. Many have returned to one version or another of the classical philosophical alternatives. Modularity theories, for example, are a variant of classical rationalism (see Modularity of mind). Connectionist or dynamic systems theories, or some version of social constructivism, are a variant of classical empiricism (see Connectionism; Empiricism). However, most developmentalists would probably prefer to revise Piaget’s general view of development rather than to replace it. Perhaps the clearest contemporary theoretical legacy of Piaget is the idea that cognitive development is the result of the same mechanisms that lead to theory change in science (see Scientific method; Kuhn, T.). Testing or confirming the theory by experiment might be a modern version of assimilation, while revising the theory in the light of counter-evidence would be more like accommodation. Piaget’s most enduring legacy of all, however, was the idea that the grand questions of ‘genetic epistemology’, questions that date back to Socrates, could be answered by paying attention to the small details of the daily lives of our children.

Dezembro 9, 2008

Constantin Noica

Although Constantin Noica is one of the most representative Romanian philosophers, he is little known in the West. His most important writings have not yet been translated. In the early part of his life he wrote studies in the history of philosophy with particular focus on Descartes, Leibniz and Kant. He went on to contribute to the philosophy of culture, ontology and logic. All his works in these areas can be seen as steps towards the full articulation of his ontological vision. Noica was particularly interested in conceiving an ontology of his own, starting from an analysis of the resources of the Romanian language, in a manner reminiscent of Heidegger. At the same time, he provided Romanian culture with its first pædeutic model in philosophy.

1 Life

Constantin Noica was born on 25 July 1909 (12 July old style calendar), and died on 4 December 1987. He studied at the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy of the University of Bucharest from 1928 to 1931, graduating with a dissertation on The Problem of the Thing in Itself in Kant. After further studies in France (1938-9), he obtained the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Bucharest with the thesis Sketch for the History of `How Something New is Possible’ (Noica 1940). He translated and interpreted the works of Plato, Descartes, Kant and Hegel. In the inter-war period he sympathized with the Legionary Movement – a party of the extreme Right – placing his pen at the service of the movement between September 1940 and February 1941. From 1941 until 1944 he was lecturer in philosophy at the Romanian-German Institute in Berlin. After the Second World War, he suffered forced domicile at Cîmpulung Muscel from 1948 to 1959, and was detained as a political prisoner from 1958 to 1964. He was subsequently employed as a researcher in the Centre for Logic of the Romanian Academy. He spent the last twelve years of his life in the mountain resort of Păltiniş, where he devoted himself entirely to philosophy. This last period saw Noica become the most influential intellectual of post-war Romania, and he has been considered a symbol of intellectual independence ever since. Thanks to his writings, philosophy came to attract a level of interest unprecedented in the history of Romania.

2 Ontology

For Noica, ontology is the fundamental discipline of philosophy, all the other branches being its applications. His ontological work centres on two theories: the four-point thematic dialectic; and the ontological model. Both theories can be summed up in a single word, one which is specifically Romanian, and which is hard to grasp in all its senses even for a native speaker of Romanian. The word in question is the preposition întru, which combines the senses expressed in English by in and into, and is translated below as `in(to)’.

The thematic dialectic. Reformulating the Hegelian triadic dialectic- thesis-antithesis-synthesis – which cannot explain the world in its entirety, Noica proposes a tetradic or circular dialectic. The principle characteristic of this dialectic is the return to one of the stages (in the form theme-antitheme-thesis-theme). For example, being-becoming becoming into being-being. From an ontological point of view, this circularity means that in the end everything falls into the wide circle of being.

The ontological modelBeing, for Noica, is not simple, as Parmenides conceived it, but has a structure, which Noica termed the ontological model. This he sees, under evident Hegelian influence, as being composed of three terms: individual-determinations-general (I-D-G). Noica postulates that we may truly speak of being only where these three terms can be found together. Where the three terms are not together, we can no longer speak of the full being of a thing, but only of a rudiment of being, which he terms ontological precariousness. Each form of ontological precariousness is the result of the coupling of two of the three terms of the ontological model: I-D, D-G, I-G, D-I, G-D or G-I. Noica claims that the rule of the world is the precariousness of being and not its fullness; in other words, almost all human actions and achievements are precarious forms of being, and not its fulfilment (see Six Maladies of the Contemporary Mind 1978b).

3 Logic

To Noica, logic is not a formal science in its ordinary meaning. In keeping with his ontological vision, which cancels the distance between the topos of being and that of things, Noica proposes a logic capable of cancelling the dichotomy of the general and the individual: the so-called logic of the holomer, an indistinct general-individual in which the part is raised to the power of the whole. The logic of the holomer is a critical response to classical logic of the Aristotelian variety, whose forms (concept, judgement and syllogism) it reinterprets, seeing them as not only the forms of thought, but also the forms of the real. From the perspective of this new logic, the concept is a particular case of the holomer, judgement a particular case of the krinamen (the result of the dissociation of the holomer into an individual and a general), and the Aristotelian syllogism can be subsumed by the Noican synalethism. The logic of the holomer does not reach true formalism, but remains a preparatory step towards this, formally reflecting the ontological model I-D-G (see the six forms of logical precariousness, the new methods which correspond to each of them, the four-point thematic logic, etc.).

4 Conclusions

Although Constantin Noica’s interests extended into almost all branches of philosophy, his most important achievements are those in the field of ontology; more precisely, the conception of a structured being which admits ontological precariousness; the cancelling of the Greek dichotomy between the individual and the general, and thus the rehabilitation of the individual; and the redefinition of reason as `consciousness’ of `becoming in(to) being’. Noica also upheld the idea of a becoming which functions in a twofold manner: ontic (becoming in(to) becoming) and ontological (becoming in(to) being).

Dezembro 9, 2008

Carl Gustav Jung

Jung was among the leaders in the development of depth psychology at the beginning of the twentieth century. An early follower of Sigmund Freud, he broke with the founder of psychoanalysis in 1913 and established his own school of analytical psychology.

Jung’s theoretical development originated in his work on the word association test and the theory of feeling toned complexes. As he continued to explore the workings of the unconscious, he postulated the existence of instinctual patterns of cognition and behaviour which he termed ‘archetypes’. Archetypal patterns are, according to Jung, common throughout the human species and constitute an inherited ‘collective unconscious’.

Jung’s approach to psychology was eclectic. He accepted the psychological importance of any phenomenon, even if it conflicted with current thinking in other fields. This attitude led to a deep investigation of the psychological significance of occult phenomena and alchemy, which Jung viewed as expressions of the unconscious that anticipated modern psychology. Later in life, Jung turned increasingly to considerations of the contemporary cultural expressions of psychological forces, writing extensively on what he viewed to be a deepening spiritual crisis in Western civilization.

1 Early work and relationship with Freud

Jung’s father was a Protestant minister and Hebraist, while his paternal grandfather had been a distinguished physician and university reformer. On his mother’s side, Protestant theologians predominated. Given this milieu, Jung was exposed, from an early age, to the main currents of nineteenth-century theology and philosophy, most notably the works of Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Jung attended gymnasium in Basel and went on to medical school at the University of Basel. Following graduation, he undertook postgraduate training in psychiatry at the Burghölzli Hospital in Zurich, under the direction of Eugen Bleuler. At about the same time, Jung married Emma Rauschenbach, the daughter of a wealthy German industrialist. They had five children together. From 1906 to about 1913, Jung was deeply involved with Sigmund Freud in the development of psychoanalysis. Following their break, Jung undertook to develop his own theories about the workings of the psyche. The theory of archetypes and the collective unconscious, for which he is best known, prompted Jung to travel widely, after the First World War, in search of evidence to support his understanding of the commonality of psychological functioning throughout the species. In the 1930s, Jung was briefly in contact with figures connected to the National Socialist takeover of German medicine. He soon broke contact, however, and deeply regretted having had any relationship with them.

Jung was surrounded, throughout his adult life, by a large circle of students and admirers. Eventually, this circle developed into the C.G. Jung Institute at Kusnacht, outside Zurich, where Jung had his home.

Although Jung is best known for his theories of the archetypes of the collective unconscious, he first attracted international attention for his work on the word association test. The test was conducted by reading off a list of stimulus words and noting the characteristics of the responses on the part of the subject. Jung significantly refined the measurement of the anomalies in association, such as delayed response, cardiopulmonary function, and galvanic skin response. These refinements allowed for more precise interpretation of test responses. Out of this experimental work, but also under the influence of Pierre Janet in France and Théodore Flournoy in Switzerland, Jung developed the theory of ‘feeling toned complexes’, or affect-laden automatisms within the larger psychic structure of the individual. This theory formed the foundation for all subsequent developments in Jung’s system of psychology.

The refined word association test provided the first experimental evidence supporting Sigmund Freud’s theory of repression. In 1906, Jung wrote to Freud, sending copies of his most recent work on the test, only to learn that Freud already had the papers. Thus began one of the most famous and ill-fated collaborations in modern science.

Although a host of factors contributed to the eventual break between Jung and Freud, several points of theory distinguished the two from the beginning. Freud based his work on a definition of libido that was exclusively sexual in nature, and the conviction that psychopathology derived from infantile sexual conflicts. The task of psychoanalysis was to uncover the sexual etiology of the disorder and thereby dissipate its effect. Jung’s work with the association test, however, had convinced him that libido was not exclusively sexual and that not all complexes could be reduced to a single etiologic source.

Other points of theory further separated the two. Based on work done in his doctoral dissertation on a case of somnambulism or mediumship, Jung argued that at least some of the workings of the unconscious were motivated by the anticipated development of the individual. This teleological view of the unconscious prompted Jung to question the role of repression, which for Freud was the fundamental mechanism of psychodynamics, in the psychic economy. For Jung, projection of psychic contents from the unconscious, without prior repression, took on increasing significance. Finally, based on his extensive experience with dementia praecox (schizophrenia) at the Burghölzli hospital, Jung concluded that there were what he termed ‘psychological dominants’ at work in all individuals, and that these dominants were evolutionary in origin, and relatively consistent throughout the species. Although Freud believed that the Oedipus complex was common throughout humanity, he resisted the notion that there could be other complexes with equal status.

2 The theory of archetypes and personality theory

Following the break with Freud in 1913, Jung went into a period of self-analysis and theory building. At this time, Jung developed his method of active imagination which used the images presented in dreams and waking reveries to explore the individual psyche. Out of this work with the imagination he developed his characteristic vocabulary for the structure of the psyche, and his more refined understanding of the psychological dominants, now referred to as ‘archetypes’. The consciously presented personality was referred to as the ‘persona’, from the mask worn by actors in the ancient Greek theatre. Those parts of the personality that were not allowed into conscious presentation formed the individual’s ‘shadow’.

In addition to persona and shadow, Jung posited the existence of images of the counter-sexual in both men and women. These he referred to as ‘anima’ and ‘animus’, respectively. The images of the counter-sexual formed a bridge between the individual unconscious and the ‘collective unconscious’ which contained the archetypes. The term collective unconscious refers to the inherited instinctual substrate of human psychological functioning.

The theory of archetypes has been the subject of various interpretations, and Jung was not always precise in his application of the term to a psychological event. One common misconception, however, is that Jung thought of the archetypes in purely Platonic terms, as existing in some transcendent realm of ideas. Much of the confusion arises from a failure to recognize Jung’s distinction between archetypes and archetypal images. Although there are places where Jung appears to discuss the archetypes in transcendental terms, perhaps informed by his extensive reading of Kant, his most consistent position is that the archetypes are biologically inherited, instinctual patterns of cognition and behaviour. It is this level of shared cognitive and behavioural patterns that constitutes the collective unconscious.

‘Archetypal images’, on the other hand, are more or less conscious representations of the archetypal or instinctual structures. Thus, instinctual seeking of the breast in the new-born infant demonstrates an archetypal form of behaviour associated with the mother. The instinctual relationship to the mother, however, also drives the formation of individual fantasies and images representative of the infant’s experience of the mother, and the culture at large contributes to the further elaboration of these fantasies by means of myths, rituals, fairy tales and other forms of collective representation associated with the mother.

Jung was also at work on a theory of personality or ‘psychological types’. Jung posited two essential orientations toward the world, introversion and extroversion, to which were added the functions of thinking, feeling, intuiting and sensing. In essence, the extrovert focuses on the outside world for information and inspiration, while the introvert focuses on interior states. By the same token, the functions are paired in such a way that one operates consciously while the other works unconsciously. Thus a thinking type will have an unconscious feeling function that attaches itself to contents of the unconscious.

3 Occultism, alchemy and projection

Jung had a lifelong interest in occultism and esoteric traditions. He was by no means alone in this interest, as research on spiritualism was widespread at the time. Jung and Freud both met with William James during a trip to the USA in 1909, and James came away deeply impressed by Jung, in part, no doubt because of their shared interest in spiritualism. For his part, Jung considered James to be a profound influence on his development.

Interest in how causally unrelated events could be meaningfully connected, as when a series of numbers seem to repeat themselves several times during a single day, led Jung to develop his theory of synchronicity. As with many of Jung’s theories, it is difficult to distinguish empirical research from the formulation of a theory of psychological functioning. Thus, on its surface, the theory of synchronicity attempts to provide statistical measures of some paranormal phenomena. By and large, however, these measures are not significant. On the other hand, the role of projection in the formation of meaningful associations is clearly demonstrated. This understanding of the primacy of projection in psychic functioning laid the foundation for the development of such standard projective tests as the Rorschach and the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT).

Jung’s long-standing fascination with esoteric traditions, particularly Gnosticism (see Gnosticism), led him into an extensive study of alchemy. Alchemy was not, on Jung’s reading, a precursor to modern natural science. Rather, it was essentially a Western form of psychological and spiritual discipline resembling the great meditative traditions of India and East Asia. The operations of the alchemists in their work and writings were manifestations of psychic projection, and the search for a means to transform base metals into gold was a spiritual quest for self-perfection (see Alchemy).

The investigation of projection eventually led Jung to consider the epistemological implications of his system of psychology. To the extent that projection from the unconscious informed his interpretation of cognitive phenomena, it became increasingly difficult to maintain a purely empirical view of those phenomena. In the end, Jung spoke of a ‘psychoid world’ where the boundaries between psychic events and objective reality break down.

3 Occultism, alchemy and projection

Jung had a lifelong interest in occultism and esoteric traditions. He was by no means alone in this interest, as research on spiritualism was widespread at the time. Jung and Freud both met with William James during a trip to the USA in 1909, and James came away deeply impressed by Jung, in part, no doubt because of their shared interest in spiritualism. For his part, Jung considered James to be a profound influence on his development.

Interest in how causally unrelated events could be meaningfully connected, as when a series of numbers seem to repeat themselves several times during a single day, led Jung to develop his theory of synchronicity. As with many of Jung’s theories, it is difficult to distinguish empirical research from the formulation of a theory of psychological functioning. Thus, on its surface, the theory of synchronicity attempts to provide statistical measures of some paranormal phenomena. By and large, however, these measures are not significant. On the other hand, the role of projection in the formation of meaningful associations is clearly demonstrated. This understanding of the primacy of projection in psychic functioning laid the foundation for the development of such standard projective tests as the Rorschach and the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT).

Jung’s long-standing fascination with esoteric traditions, particularly Gnosticism (see Gnosticism), led him into an extensive study of alchemy. Alchemy was not, on Jung’s reading, a precursor to modern natural science. Rather, it was essentially a Western form of psychological and spiritual discipline resembling the great meditative traditions of India and East Asia. The operations of the alchemists in their work and writings were manifestations of psychic projection, and the search for a means to transform base metals into gold was a spiritual quest for self-perfection (see Alchemy).

The investigation of projection eventually led Jung to consider the epistemological implications of his system of psychology. To the extent that projection from the unconscious informed his interpretation of cognitive phenomena, it became increasingly difficult to maintain a purely empirical view of those phenomena. In the end, Jung spoke of a ‘psychoid world’ where the boundaries between psychic events and objective reality break down.

4 The critique of culture

While implicit in some aspects of his early work, Jung’s late work (1939–61) focused increasingly on what he saw as a crisis in Western civilization. In many respects, Jung’s critique resembles those of Husserl and Heidegger, although it focuses more on issues of spiritual collapse and renewal. Additionally, Jung thought that it was possible to assume a therapeutic stance in relation to the cultural crisis.

Jung focused his critique of culture, to a substantial degree, on the historical role of Christianity. He approached this problem from within the frame of his psychological theories, however, rather than from either a historical or theological standpoint. This meant that the body of historical and textual materials that make up the Christian tradition were treated, by Jung, much as he would treat the dreams and fantasies of a patient. Jung viewed the tradition as increasingly maladaptive, and therefore in need of therapy. At the same time, he viewed such doctrinal moves as the proclamation of the bodily assumption of the Virgin as attempts to overcome maladaptive aspects of dogmatic Christianity by incorporating previously denigrated aspects of human experience such as the female body.

Jung exercised an influence on the practice of psychotherapy and on fields ranging from literature to industrial psychology that far exceeds what is usually recognized. The circumstances surrounding his break with Freud, as well as his brief association with the Nazis, did considerable damage to his reputation. An idiosyncratic vocabulary added to his image as an undisciplined thinker. Nevertheless, his system of psychology, beginning as it does with the word association test, and emphasizing the biological foundations of cognition and behaviour, thereby anticipating more recent developments in cognitive theory and evolutionary psychology, rests on far stronger empirical foundations than most other depth psychologies.

Dezembro 9, 2008

Kurt Gödel

The greatest logician of the twentieth century, Gödel is renowned for his advocacy of mathematical Platonism and for three fundamental theorems in logic: the completeness of first-order logic; the incompleteness of formalized arithmetic; and the consistency of the axiom of choice and the continuum hypothesis with the axioms of ZermeloFraenkel set theory.

A Sudeten German born in Brno, Moravia, Gödel received his doctorate in 1930 at the University of Vienna. His dissertation, extending earlier work by Skolem, demonstrated that first-order predicate calculus is semantically complete, that is, that every logical truth is provable. His incompleteness paper (1931, subsequently his Habilitationsschrift) showed that every ω-consistent recursively axiomatizable formalization of Peano arithmetic yields statements that are formally undecidable (neither provable nor refutable) within the theory. Rosser later showed that ‘ω-consistent’ could be weakened to ‘consistent’. One of the undecidable sentences expresses the theory’s own consistency. Hilbert’s goal of reducing the consistency of arithmetic to that of weaker systems (see Hilbert’s programme and formalism) thus cannot be realized.

While Privatdozent at the University of Vienna (1933–9) Gödel published several papers bearing on the decision problem (see Proof theory) and the relation between classical and intuitionistic logic (see Intuitionism). He also attended some meetings of the Vienna Circle, but disagreed with its philosophy (see Logical positivism).

Gödel spent the academic year 1933–4 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Then, after recovering from an incapacitating bout of depression, he turned to set theory. In his address to the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1900, Hilbert had asked for a proof that every infinite set of real numbers is equinumerous either with the integers or the set of all reals (Cantor’s continuum hypothesis). Gödel showed in 1938 that that assumption cannot be disproved within ZermeloFraenkel set theory, since it and the axiom of choice hold within a particular model thereof (see Set theory).

In 1940 Gödel emigrated to the United States. He returned to the Princeton Institute and remained there until his death from malnutrition – the result of further psychiatric disturbance – in 1978.

After 1942, frustrated by his failure to prove that the negation of the continuum hypothesis is also consistent with the axioms of set theory (a result finally established by Paul Cohen in 1963 – see Cohen 1966), Gödel worked primarily in philosophy and cosmology. Among the philosophical works published during his lifetime his commentary on ‘Russell’s Mathematical Logic’ (1944) and his essay ‘What is Cantor’s Continuum Problem?’ (1947, revised 1964) are notable for their mathematical Platonism. In the former, Gödel maintained that ‘classes and concepts may…be conceived as real objects’ whose existence is as tenable as that of physical bodies; in the latter that ‘despite their remoteness from sense experience, we…have something like a perception also of the objects of set theory’, whose ‘axioms force themselves upon us as being true’. Posthumous philosophical works include a modal formalization of Leibniz’s ontological proof.

Dezembro 9, 2008

Jacques Maritain

Maritain was one of the most influential twentieth-century interpreters of the thought of Thomas Aquinas. His interests spanned many aspects of philosophy, including aesthetics, political theory, philosophy of science, metaphysics, education, liturgy and ecclesiology.

His acknowledged masterpiece is The Degrees of Knowledge (1932). In this work, Maritain expands on Thomistic thought and seeks to explain the links between philosophy, science and religion as branches of wisdom. Rather than being a close study of Thomism, this work expands on Thomistic ideas and puts them into the context of the modern world. In natural science, for example, he distinguishes between empirical knowledge of nature and philosophy of nature; the latter consists in the knowledge of essence, while the former is concerned with the knowledge of form.

In moral philosophy, Maritain expands on Aquinas, holding that no true conception of the human ultimate end is philosophically possible, and that moral philosophy therefore must be subordinated to moral theology. Later in his career, Maritain concentrated more strongly on theology, but throughout his life his Roman Catholic faith informed all of his works. He continues to be read widely today, with a worldwide reputation which is especially strong in France and North America.

1 Life

Jacques Maritain was one of the two or three most prominent Thomists during the long second phase of the revival of study of St Thomas Aquinas. It is difficult to think of an area of philosophy to which he did not devote himself. His first book appeared in 1906 and his last in the year he died. He lived through the period when Thomism was established throughout the Catholic world and survived into a post-conciliar period when that effort came under acute criticism.

Maritain was born in Paris in 1882. In 1900, while a student at the Sorbonne, he met Raissa Oumansov, a fellow-student; they were true soul mates, and were married in 1902. After their conversion to Catholicism, it was Raissa who first discovered St Thomas Aquinas. Their home in Versailles became a place where artists, authors, philosophers and theologians gathered. When they moved to Meudon in 1923, these meetings were formalized as the Cercle d’Études Thomistes. Maritain’s Prayer and Intelligence (1922) sets forth the complementarity of the spiritual and intellectual lives.

Maritain taught first at the Lycée Stanislas, then at the Institut Catholique, but his thought and writings were not driven by academic duties. He first visited North America in 1933, and returned there in 1938. Étienne Gilson had hoped to enlist Maritain as a permanent associate at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto, but Maritain proved elusive. He became a frequent lecturer at Chicago and Notre Dame, and was with his wife in the United States when France fell in 1940; they remained until 1944, when Jacques was named French Ambassador to the Vatican. Raissa’s two volumes of memoirs, We Have Been Friends Together and Adventures in Grace, acquainted a generation of Americans with their dramatic story, their friends, and the burgeoning Catholic culture of France.

Maritain served as the president of the French delegation to UNESCO during the drafting of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, but resigned as ambassador to accept an appointment at Princeton in 1948. The Maritains returned to France in 1960, where the ailing Raissa died. Jacques settled in Toulouse, where he taught philosophy and theology to the Little Brothers of Jesus. In 1965, at the close of the Second Vatican Council, Paul VI presented Maritain with a message addressed to intellectuals. Maritain divided his time between Toulouse and Kolbsheim near Strasbourg. In 1970, this quintessential layman entered the religious life as a Little Brother of Jesus. He died in 1973 and is buried with Raissa at Kolbsheim.

2 Thomism

In Aeterni Patris (1879), Leo XIII called for a renewal of Christian philosophy, particularly that of St Thomas Aquinas, as a way of combating modern errors. The response to the encyclical occurred in stages, eventually fanning out across the globe. Journals were founded, new institutes and associations were formed, conferences were held, and there was a flood of interpretations and prolongations of the thought of Aquinas. At first a largely clerical phenomenon, the Thomistic revival became, with Maritain and Étienne Gilson, a lay effort which more effectively related traditional Catholic thought to the wider culture.

Maritain, like so many of his generation, came under the influence of Henri Bergson, whom he examined in comparison with Aquinas in his first book, Bergsonian Philosophy (1913). Antimodern (1922) might suggest that Maritain saw Thomism simply as antithetical to contemporary thought, but that this was not his view is clear from Angelic Doctor (1929), as well as earlier works. However, the most comprehensive statement of his philosophical vision is given in The Degrees of Knowledge (1932).

The Degrees is Maritain’s masterwork. He adopts Aquinas’ distinction between philosophy and theology, whereby the latter is discourse whose principles are provided by divine revelation, and held by faith. One who does not hold the principles to be true will not hold as true the conclusions drawn from them. Theology, considered as a truth-seeking discipline, is thus an activity of believers. Philosophy, on the other hand, is discourse which proceeds from principles in the public domain, knowable by anyone; the philosopher must link his inferences to what everybody already knows.

This is obviously an Aristotelian view. Maritain sees Aquinas as an Aristotelian, and, accordingly, the Aristotelian division of philosophy into theoretical and speculative disciplines governs his thought. One of the interesting features of his work is the way he expands and reshapes that basic division to accommodate contemporary advances in thought.

Maritain’s aim in the Degrees is to lay before us a vast and connected and hierarchical panorama so that we see our quest for knowledge as a graded ascent to wisdom tout court. He first discusses the relation between philosophy and experimental science, goes on to a plea for critical realism, discusses philosophical knowledge of sensible reality and then sets forth his metaphysics. The second part treats the relation between philosophy and mystical experience, and argues that the culmination of the human quest for truth is that wisdom which is a gift of the Holy Spirit. Like Aquinas, Maritain seeks a comprehensiveness which finds unity beyond necessary distinctions.

In 1931, thanks to a taunt by Émile Bréhier (in the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale), a debate began on the nature of Christian philosophy. Was it possible for Christians to engage in philosophy or must their efforts be seen as the question-begging of believers? Maritain agreed that it would be nonsense to say that the Christian faith has no influence on the thinking of the believer. But the influence of faith has its analogue in the pre-philosophical assumptions of one ignorant of or hostile to the faith. Maritain distinguished between the act of philosophizing as a moral and human deed, and the product of such activity. With respect to the latter, believer and unbeliever, despite their differing existential starting points, must meet the same criteria for success. Maritain rejected the charge that Christian faith disqualifies one from philosophy; indeed, he considered it an aid and stimulus.

Few of Maritain’s writings are exegetical, that is, close studies and interpretations of texts of Aquinas. Rather, having absorbed Aquinas, Maritain was interested in making him intelligible to modern philosophers, creating a new synthesis continuous with Aquinas’ historical achievement. Étienne Gilson once wrote that he himself had spent his life seeking to know exactly what Aquinas meant, while Maritain was seeking to do in the present what Aquinas had done in the past.

3 Main arguments

Aesthetics. In 1920, Maritain published Art and Scholasticism, his second book. His wife was a poet, their friends were artists in various media – Rouault, Cocteau, Claudel, Péguy, Julien Green – and he felt a need to ask what the relation between art and philosophy is. The little book is a fascinating mélange of Aristotelian and Thomistic lore, but reveals as well Maritain’s wide knowledge of literature and art. Many artists welcomed the Aristotelian truism that art aims at the perfection of the thing made, not of the maker. A salient mark of Maritain’s aesthetics is his likening of poetic knowledge to the judgment of connaturality that Aquinas attributed to prudence. The Mellon Lectures, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (1953), bring to fruition Maritain’s thoughts over many decades. They emphasize the knowledge which is prior to and may be expressed in artistic production.

Philosophy of science. For Aquinas, philosophy of nature establishes the possibility of a science beyond itself. If natural change ultimately requires an uncaused cause, and thus one outside the realm of things that come to be (natural things), a science which treats of all being and not just natural beings suggests itself. Change involves matter; the changeless lacks matter, so to be and to be material are not identical. The development of modern science called into question the validity of Aristotelian physics, and this led some Thomists to seek to bypass it and begin with metaphysics. Maritain developed a distinction between experimental or empiriological (Maritain’s neologism) knowledge of nature and the philosophy of nature. The former, mathematical physics, falls short of knowledge of essence, the knowledge that characterizes philosophy of nature. This suggests that the matter/form analysis of sensible substance is ontological knowledge, profounder than the knowledge gained by the sciences. Developed in a number of books, Maritain’s position on this matter is also the first discussion in The Degrees of Knowledge.

Metaphysics. While Maritain’s position on metaphysics was initially similar to that of Aquinas, seeing the science of being as dependent for its very possibility on achievements in philosophy of nature, his approach changed, as is evident from Existence and the Existent (1947). There Maritain speaks of an intuition of being as the sine qua non of metaphysics. This intuition is not common to all, but is possessed only by a few. This development puts Maritain in the camp of those who feel that metaphysics can be undertaken without any prior science, philosophical or otherwise, of sensible reality. The ‘intuition of being’ seems to arise from the influence of existentialism. To some degree, it points to the need for a sense of wonder as the presupposition of philosophical questioning. Furthermore, it appears to be Maritain’s response to the interpretation of Gilson, who saw Aquinas’ use of esse as the key to his thought; the grasp of esse is part and parcel of the recognition that essence and existence are distinct, a recognition Gilson felt was missing from Aristotle.

Moral philosophy. It was in the area of moral philosophy that Maritain was most innovative. In Aquinas, we encounter the view that there are certain principles of action which are part of the natural repertoire of any human agent. Aristotle had articulated the ultimate end appropriate to the nature of the human agent, which end provides such limited happiness or fulfilment as is possible for humans. From the Christian point of view, Aristotle’s sense of the inadequacy of human happiness is just what is to be expected, since humans are destined for a higher happiness after their earthly existence. Aquinas thus spoke of imperfect and perfect beatitude, with ‘imperfect’ representing Aristotle’s own sense and not simply a Christian judgment. Maritain’s view is markedly different: he holds that no true conception of the ultimate end for humans is philosophically possible. Moral philosophy ‘adequately understood’ must be subordinated to moral theology, that is, must accept as true a conception of an ultimate end beyond our natural powers to discover. Critics accused Maritain of smudging the distinction between philosophy and theology and he was soon caught up in elaborate defences of his position (in, for example, Science and Wisdom (1935)).

Political philosophy. From involvement with the right-wing Action Française, condemned by the Catholic Church in 1926, Maritain moved leftward to the position of Integral Humanism (1936). Visits to the USA altered his critique of capitalism (see, for example, Reflections on America (1957)). The fall of France, and its wartime occupation, deeply affected him, and he became a champion of democracy and human rights. The role he played in the Universal Declaration on Human Rights of 1948 is evident in his Walgreen Lectures, which were published as Man and the State (1951). Here Maritain confronts the conflict between natural law and natural rights. He argues that the duties consequent on natural law and natural rights are two ends of the same thought.

A more timely problem arose from the fact that the signatories of the Universal Declaration held such radically different views of those rights. Maritain was incapable of a cynical explanation of this paradox, and he proposed a distinction between gnoseological and ontological natural law. Perhaps it would not simplify his point too much to say that the nature of the speakers and of the things spoken of in such situations provide an objective basis for agreement, whatever current misunderstandings obtain.

Theology. In the final phase of his career, Maritain’s writings became overtly theological, doubtless because they were occasioned by teaching the Little Brothers of Jesus in Toulouse. He and Raissa had written Liturgy and Contemplation in 1959, and in The Degrees of Knowledge he had ventured into mystical theology. On the Grace and Humanity of Jesus (1967) and On the Church of Christ (1970) and much of the posthumously published Approches sans entraves (1973) are purely theological. Among the surprises to be found in these late writings is a questioning of the eternity of the punishment of the damned even though they are forever incapable of the beatific vision.

4 Influence

From the time of his conversion in 1906, Maritain regarded his Catholicism as the most essential thing in his life. The Christian vocation, the call to respond to grace and to the gifts of the Holy Spirit, was from the outset the frame within which his intellectual work was carried out. His understanding of the concept of Christian philosophy, as well as the constitution he wrote for the Cercle d’Études Thomistes (see his Carnet de notes (1965)), display his sense of the profound union of the intellectual and spiritual lives. Both Raissa and Jacques strove for holiness, and the testimony of friends suggests that their efforts were not unrewarded. They were instrumental in the return to the faith or conversion of many. The published correspondence between Maritain and Julien Green gives some flavour of what will be found in other, unpublished, letters.

Maritain’s estimate of what was happening in the Church in the wake of Vatican II was not cheerful. The Peasant of the Garonne (1966) lamented the influence of Teilhard de Chardin and of phenomenology. He saw a resurgence of the modernism that had been condemned by Pius X in 1907. Some dismissed Maritain as out of date and grumpy.

As it happens, his influence continues and, indeed, increases. The Jacques Maritain Center at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, was founded in 1948, and soon such centres sprang up around the world. There are two international Maritain societies and many national societies. A fifteen-volume Oeuvres complètes was completed in 1994, and a twenty-volume English edition began to appear in 1995.

Dezembro 9, 2008

Ernst Cassirer

Cassirer is one of the major figures in the development of philosophical idealism in the first half of the twentieth century. He is known for his philosophy of culture based on his conception of ‘symbolic form’, for his historical studies of the problem of knowledge in the rise of modern philosophy and science and for his works on the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Cassirer expanded Kant’s critique of reason to a critique of culture by regarding the symbol as the common denominator of all forms of human thought, imagination and experience. He delineates symbolic forms of myth, religion, language, art, history and science and defines the human being as the ‘symbolizing animal’. All human experience occurs through systems of symbols. Language is only one such system; the images of myth, religion and art and the mathematical structures of science are others.

Being of Jewish faith, Cassirer left Germany in 1933 with the rise of Nazism, going first to Oxford, then to university positions in Sweden and the USA. In the last period of his career he applied his philosophy of culture generally and his conception of myth specifically to a critique of political myths and to the study of irrational forces in the state.

1 Life

Ernst Cassirer was born in the German city of Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland) on 28 July 1874; he died suddenly, of a heart attack, on the Columbia University campus in New York on 13 April 1945. His life was a personal and intellectual ‘odyssey’ that took him from Europe to the USA, and led him from the Marburg Neo-Kantianism of his teacher, Hermann Cohen, to his own broad vision of human culture and a critique of the modern state. Cassirer lectured as Privatdozent at the University of Berlin from 1906 until 1919, when he accepted a professorship at the newly founded University of Hamburg; he served as its rector in 1929–30.

After Hitler’s assumption of the chancellorship of Germany in January 1933, Cassirer left Germany. He taught from 1933 to 1935 at All Souls College, Oxford and then accepted a professorship at the University of Göteborg, Sweden. In 1941 he moved to Yale University in the USA, and then went to Columbia University for the academic year 1944–5. Cassirer published nearly 125 books, essays and reviews and left a number of unpublished papers.

2 Philosophy of symbolic forms

Cassirer published the major work of his philosophy, Philosophie der symbolischen Formen (The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: vol. 1, Language; vol. 2, Mythical Thought; vol. 3, The Phenomenology of Knowledge), from 1923 to 1929, but his conception of ‘symbolic form’ goes back to the philosophy of science he formed a decade earlier. Modern scientific thought, Cassirer holds, is based on the ‘functional concept’. As opposed to the Aristotelian theory of concept formation, in which a common substantial element is sought through a comparison of the similarities and differences of a class of particulars, the functional concept is formed by articulating a principle by which a set of particulars can be ordered as a series. This principle of serial arrangement of a group of particulars, unlike a substance, has no reality or meaning independent of the elements it orders, and these elements have meaning only in terms of the positions they each occupy in the series. Cassirer formulated this indissoluble bond between universal and particular of the functional concept as F (a, b, c, …). It suggested to him a model for how the mind forms experience in all spheres of human activity, cognitive and noncognitive.

The historical source for this insight is Kant’s idea of the ‘schema’, a conception of sensuous-intellectual form that is presupposed by all acts of human knowledge. What Kant delineates abstractly as one of the principles of his first Critique, Cassirer finds as a phenomenon within human experience: the symbol. The critique of reason becomes the critique of culture. Each area of human culture has its own way of bringing sensed particulars together in symbolic orders. Each area of culture has its own ‘inner form’ – its own formation of the object, its own causality, its own apprehensions of space, time and number. These various symbolic forms of culture differ from each other in their individual ‘tonality’, and human culture as a whole is ideally a harmony of these forms.

The symbolic forms are frequently thought of as a list, following the chapter titles of Cassirer’s An Essay on Man (1944): myth and religion, language, art, history and science. Cassirer also suggests the possibility of additional symbolic forms, such as economics, morality and technology. In The Phenomenology of Knowledge, the third volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923–9), Cassirer presents three symbolic forms as corresponding to the fundamental functions of the development of consciousness. He makes clear that he is using the term ‘phenomenology’ not in Husserl’s sense but in Hegel’s, that is, as developmental, not descriptive phenomenology. All knowledge and culture originates in the ‘phenomenon of expression’, the Ausdrucksfunktion of consciousness. At the level of ‘expression’, (Ausdruck) the object is ‘felt’ in its immediacy. Consciousness at this level takes the form of myth. Symbol and symbolized occupy the same level of reality. The dancer who dons the mask of the god is the god. The mythic image in its felt immediacy gives way to the logical powers inherent in language; this produces the ‘representational function’ (Darstellungsfunktion). This function builds a world of common-sense objects, of thing-attribute relationships and classes. Symbol and symbolized now are different orders of reality. Symbols refer to things. Beyond this is the purely ‘significative function’ (Bedeutungsfunktion) of scientific and theoretical thought. At this level the power of the symbol to generate ‘symbolic systems’ occurs. Here symbols can refer in fully determinate ways to other orders of symbols. The purest examples of this are mathematics and mathematical logic.

In a fourth volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, left incomplete in manuscript at his death, Cassirer considered ‘the metaphysics of symbolic forms’. He examined how the expressive function of consciousness is the most fundamental manifestation of spirit (Geist) and how spirit is a transformation of life (Leben). Cassirer discusses a number of conceptions of life in modern philosophy and is led to his own doctrine of ‘Basis-phenomena’ (Basisphänomene), the foremost of which, he claims, is life. Life is the ongoing flow of existence that is first formed by the human power of expression, out of which, as described above, arise all forms of human culture.

3 Historical studies

Cassirer did not approve of ‘hurling one’s ideas into empty space’ without showing their relation to the historical development of philosophy. Not only does he ground his original ideas in their historical sources and in the fields he discusses, he is the author of a large corpus of work in intellectual history. He wrote books and essays on Leibniz, Descartes, Kant and Rousseau, and edited a three-volume edition of Leibniz’s philosophical works as well as one of the standard editions of Kant’s works. Cassirer published essays on figures in humanist thought such as Hölderlin, Kleist, Humboldt, Schiller, Shaftesbury, Pico della Mirandola, Thomas Mann and Schweitzer. In the philosophy and history of science he wrote on Galileo, Newton, Einstein’s relativity and Bohr’s indeterminacy principle. Cassirer’s systematic interpretation of the history of philosophy is centred on two series of works: his four-volume history, Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neueren Zeit (The Problem of Knowledge in Philosophy and Science in the Modern Age) (1906, 1907, 1920) and his trilogy, Individuum und Kosmos in der Philosophie der Renaissance (The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy) (1927), Die Platonische Renaissance in England und die Schule von Cambridge (The Platonic Renaissance in England) (1932a) and Die Philosophie der Aufklärung (The Philosophy of the Enlightenment) (1932b). Cassirer began his study of the problem of knowledge intending to show how this problem develops in the simultaneous rise of modern philosophy and modern science, beginning with Nicholas of Cusa and culminating in Kant. Later he continued the theme in the post-Kantian systems through in Hegel, and much later, when in Sweden, he considered the shape of the contemporary sciences.

His trilogy of studies goes over some of the same ground as his earlier work, but in a more agile way and to a different purpose. He begins with Nicholas of Cusa, but his aim is to show how the Renaissance can be understood as a whole in terms of the problem of the individual and the cosmos. He then shows how the ideas of the Renaissance were transmitted via the Cambridge Platonists to culminate in the Enlightenment. Cassirer wishes to present a ‘phenomenology of philosophic spirit’. This is not a progression of problems of pure thought, but the generation of a philosophical point of view on the individual, the world and society, in which the problems of knowledge are tied to the whole of human activity (see Platonism, Renaissance; Renaissance philosophy).

It is not possible to understand the basis of Cassirer’s philosophy without an awareness of his debt to Goethe (see Goethe, J.W. von §3). Goethe’s understanding of organic form is important for Cassirer’s conception of the symbol, and his cosmopolitanism influences Cassirer’s conception of culture. Goethe is the source of Cassirer’s grasp of human creation as a process of self-liberation, a sentiment Cassirer extends to the whole of culture. He wrote on various aspects of Goethe’s thought, but he was influenced more by Goethe’s spirit and sense of life than by his interest in particular questions of interpretation.

4 Myth and the state

Cassirer does not have a political philosophy in the traditional sense. He has a critique of the modern state and a definite view of the relation of philosophy to politics. In his inaugural lecture at Göteborg in 1935, Cassirer recalled Kant’s distinction between a ‘scholastic’ conception of philosophy and a conception of ‘philosophy as related to the world’ (conceptus cosmicus). Cassirer said that he as well as others have been guilty of the former and he aligns himself with the latter. He quotes Schweitzer, his ethical hero, who calls philosophy a ‘watchman’ who slept in the hour of peril, and did not keep watch over us during the rise of totalitarianism. Cassirer holds that philosophy does not and cannot cause the events of political life, nor can it resolve them, but it has a duty to act as our conscience, to inform us of them by the use of its powers of reflection. In The Myth of the State (1946) and other writings of this period, Cassirer attacks Heidegger’s conception of ‘thrownness’ (Geworfenheit) as a conception of the human condition that puts philosophy in a position where it can no longer ‘do its duty’. This goes back to Cassirer’s debate with Heidegger in 1929 at Davos, Switzerland. Quoting Goethe, Cassirer sees human freedom as tied to the human project of spirit (Geist), of the creation of culture. Heidegger sees freedom as requiring a ‘breakthrough’ (Einbruch); freedom is not part of the human condition itself, but is contingent (zufällig) (see Heidegger, M. §5).

Cassirer’s philosophy of mythology is the most original part of his epistemology and phenomenology of knowledge. He shows that myth is not a collection of errors or a world of unchecked emotions but a total way of thinking and symbolizing, which exists at the beginning of human culture and is present as a phase in the development of any subsequent symbolic form. Myth is always present as the expressive moment in any act of cognition. In An Essay on Man, Cassirer claims that his philosophy of culture is an extension of the ancient ideal of self-knowledge and that human culture as a whole is the process of humanity’s ‘self-liberation’. The key to self-knowledge and culture is freedom from the immediacy of the object.

In The Myth of the State, Cassirer is able to apply the force of his entire philosophy of culture towards understanding the logic of modern political myths. They are a revival of the logic of the primordial forms of expressive consciousness. Modern political myths are not natural; they are manufactured products joined to the technology of mass communication. Such myths shape the life of the state and become the substitute for its rational principles. Cassirer sees this not only as true of Nazism, but also as a danger in the modern state itself. He claims that myth is impervious to argument, but that philosophy can warn us of it and allow us to understand it.