Modern Philosophy
MODERN PHILOSOPHY: A FRAMEWORK
Modern philosophy is a type of philosophy which originated in Western Europe in the 17th century, and is now common worldwide. It is not a specific doctrine or school, and so should not be confused with Modernism. There are certain assumptions and topics found in modern philosophy which help to distinguish it from earlier philosophy. Some of the major sub-sections of modern philosophy include:
1.1 Rationalism
1.2 Empiricism
1.3 Political philosophy
1.4 Idealism
1.5 Existentialism
1.6 Phenomenology
1.7 Pragmatism
1.8 Analytic philosophy
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The 17th and early 21st centuries roughly mark the beginning and the end of modern philosophy. How much if any of the Renaissance, that cultural movement which spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Florence in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe---which should be included is a matter for dispute. In a similar sense modernity may or may not have ended in the twentieth century and many have been replaced by postmodernity. How one decides these questions will determine the scope of one's use of "modern philosophy". The convention, however, is to refer to the philosophy of the Renaissance(1300-1600) prior to René Descartes(1596-1650) as "Early Modern Philosophy." Twentieth-century philosophy, or sometimes just philosophy since Wittgenstein(1889-1951), is often referred to as "contemporary philosophy." This is the framework I use for my focus on the history of modern philosophy. It begins with Descartes and goes through to the early twentieth century ending with Ludwig Wittgenstein. Contemporary philosophy is the philosophy of the last six decades: 1951 to 2011.
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MAJOR FIGURES IN MODERN PHILOSOPHY: two groups
The major figures in the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and metaphysics during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the period from 1600 to 1800, are roughly divided into two main groups. The "Rationalists," mostly in France and Germany, assumed that all knowledge must begin from certain innate ideas in the mind. Major rationalists were Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Leibniz, and Nicolas Malebranche. The "Empiricists," by contrast, held that knowledge must begin with sensory experience. Major figures in this line of thought were John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume. The philosopher Immanuel Kant(1724-1804) established these two categories. Ethics and political philosophy are usually not subsumed under these categories, though all these philosophers dealt with ethics in their own distinctive styles. Other important figures in political philosophy from this period include Thomas Hobbes(1588-1679) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau(1712-1788).
KANT
In the late eighteenth century Immanuel Kant set forth a groundbreaking philosophical system which claimed to bring unity to rationalism and empiricism. Whether or not he was right, he did not entirely succeed in ending philosophical dispute. Kant sparked a storm of philosophical work in Germany in the early nineteenth century, beginning with German idealism. The characteristic theme of idealism was that the world and the mind equally must be understood according to the same categories; it culminated in the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel(1770-1831), who among many other things said that "The real is rational; the rational is real."
Kant(1724-1804) argued that there was an inexorable process in history which would very gradually bring about an increasing enlightenment and a cosmopolitan world federation. It was not something humanity could finally resist. Thus, in effect, he was claiming history was on his side, no matter what we do. However, as rational beings we have a moral obligation to assist this historical process "to make the state of public right actual." One might want to cite environmental awareness as one rational point which history is forcing us to acknowledge, whether we approve of it or not.
It is worth nothing that the inevitable progression of history has very ancient roots in the Old Testament notion that God is on Israel's side and that He has a covenant with the faithful. God would lead them to the promised land. God's providence, acting through history, will resolve issues eventually; however, that does not release the individual Israelite from the religious obligation to follow the rules, to contribute to the progress of history. Kant has, of course, thoroughly secularized this notion--seeing perpetual peace as the end goal and a rational idea working itself out in history as the engine of progress. But we should alert ourselves as to the extent to which Kant's ethics and his view of history has roots in some of the most deeply held and ancient convictions of Western civilization, particularly the Protestant version of those beliefs. For an excellent context for Kant's views go to the following links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_peace
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_philosophy_of_Immanuel_Kant
http://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/introser/kant.htm
HEGEL MARX KIERKEGAARD SCHOPENHAUER AND NIETZSCHE
Hegel's work was carried in many directions by his followers and critics. Karl Marx appropriated both Hegel's philosophy of history and the empirical ethics dominant in Britain. In the process Hegel's ideas were transformed into a strictly materialist philosophy, setting the grounds for the development of a science of society. Søren Kierkegaard dismissed all systematic philosophy as an inadequate guide to life and meaning. For Kierkegaard, life is meant to be lived, not a mystery to be solved. Arthur Schopenhauer took idealism to the conclusion that the world was nothing but the futile endless interplay of images and desires, and advocated atheism and pessimism. Schopenhauer's ideas were taken up and transformed by Nietzsche, who seized upon their various dismissals of the world to proclaim "God is dead" and to reject all systematic philosophy and all striving for a fixed truth transcending the individual. Nietzsche found in this not grounds for pessimism, but the possibility of a new kind of freedom.
RUSSELL MOORE AND FREGE
19th-century British philosophy came increasingly to be dominated by strands of neo-Hegelian thought, and as a reaction against this, figures such as Bertrand Russell and George Edward Moore began moving the direction of analytic philosophy, which was essentially an updating of traditional empiricism to accommodate the new developments in logic of the German mathematician Gottlob Frege.(1)
(1) For a detailed overview of "Modern Philosophy" go to Wikipedia or the link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_philosophy
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DEFINING THE WHOLE BUSINESS
Life is a dangerous bridegroom and to survive we need to approach each day as if we were going to war. We must take our battle to the very centre of the earth and defeat the right and left wings of the hosts of all the countries. We must be faithful to our principles. In these three sentences I have drawn on John Cowper Powys, ‘Abdu’l-Baha and Carl Von Clausewitz in an attempt to synthesize their attitude to life insofar as it is a struggle, as it is a war.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, December 15, 1996.
John Cowper Powys wrote a book
that came out in that Holy Year(1)
with a beautiful articulation of much
that is a Baha’i philosophy about:
driving off the evil of self-worship,
being a good companion to ourselves
accepting our loneliness, the power of
belief and wishful thinking, never getting
angry, laughing at life and at ourselves,
travelling lightly and simply, keeping our
spirit up, as far as possible, drawing on
poetry to deal with those slings & arrows
of outrageous fortune. And as a natural
gesture of both defiance and enjoyment,
but still we must all decide what is this
whole business that we call life itself!!
Ron Price
15 December 1996 to 10 September 2011
(1) He finished the book in 1952 and it was published in 1953---In Spite Of: A Philosophy for Everyone. That Holy Year spanned November 1952 to November 1953
Some sites at which readers will find some of my thoughts, my writing and the writing of others, on philosophy:
http://www.comedy.co.uk/forums/thread
http://www.edpsycinteractive.org/anisa/overview/jordanstreets
http://www.ephilosopher.com/community/profile/4039-ronprice/
http://www.actnow.com.au/Members/RonPrice.aspx
http://www.volconvo.com/forums/philosophy-religion/15370-apologetics.html
MATTHEW ARNOLD
Confused Alarms of Struggle and Flight
I went for my daily constitutional-walk a little earlier today in mid-afternoon in this the early evening of my life. I dropped-in on a colleague, an old-school principal now retired, had an early dinner of home-made soup with a hot-salami sandwich. I then settled-down for my daily sleep. On waking, putting in my false-teeth and going downstairs, I saw the closing ceremonies of the 31st Australian Masters. They were played at the Victoria Golf Club from 11 to 14 November 2010. I have no interest in golf, although I like golf’s quiet sound-over, the gentle voices and all the green on the television screen. I also like my wife of more than 35 years.
My wife enjoys watching golf and I enjoy watching her, at least most of the time. Familiarity, as we all know breeds, or can breed, many things. After about five minutes of the golf’s closing ceremonies my wife pressed the remote button and up popped ABC1 and its A Poet’s Guide to Britain.1 It was the content of this program which has led to this prose-poem.-Ron Price with thanks to ABC1 TV, A Poet’s Guide to Britain: Matthew Arnold, 5:00-5:30 p.m., 14 November 2010.
I first came across your work, Matthew,
back in 1960 when my life had scarcely
begun, when I had begun to fall in love
with girls who never knew my feelings,
when I was also in love with baseball &
getting as high a set of marks as I could
at high school. Poetry was the last thing
on my mind, that’s for sure, except that
I had to understand the poems for those
essays and exams, if I wanted to get into
university, and avoid all those tedious &
boring jobs which people got who didn’t
go to university. I had no interest in the
practical subjects like woodwork & that
metalwork, the art and crafts & all those
extra-curricular activities kids took-part
in way back then. I must say, Matthew,
that I came to your work so slowly over
these last fifty-plus years and the focus.....
on Dover Beach which this TV program
was all about in some ways has become
one of my favourites. Its eternal note of
sadness which you struck; Oxford’s 1st
Professor of Poetry in 1857, the first who
was not a cleric also struck a note, a sign
of much that was to come in my world and
our world today, Matthew. That sea of faith
has gone, as you say. You could only hear..
its long & melancholy withdrawing roar and
it has been withdrawing for these last 16....
decades at least in some of its forms.....(1)
We are still, like you, Matthew: Swept with
confused alarms of struggle and flight......
Where ignorant armies clash by night.(2 & 3)
(1) Fundamentalism, of course, and a pervasive secular spirituality have become very dominant forms of religious influence in our global world.
(2) These are the last two lines of Arnold’s famous poem Dover Beach.
(3) See Matthew Arnold, ed. M. Allott and R. Super, Oxford UP, 1986. It was in this book that I came across the words of Goethe: (1) “Thinking is easy, acting is difficult, and to put one's thoughts into action is the most difficult thing in the world;” and (2) "To act is easy; to think is hard."
Ron Price
14 November 2010 to 6 May 2011
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ISAIAH BERLIN
1953: A VERY BIG YEAR
In 1953 Isaiah Berlin(1909-1997) published a book called The Hedgehog and the Fox. Foxes, he wrote, are people who know many things; hedgehogs know one big thing. It was in part a study of Berlin's literary hero, Leo Tolstoy(1828-1910), whom he described as a fox who wished at times that he was a hedgehog. Isaiah Berlin was perhaps also a fox, intrigued by many ideas, unendingly curious, open-minded and pleading above all for tolerance. Hedgehogs view the world through the lens of a single defining idea; for example: Plato, Lucretius, Dante, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, and Proust. Foxes draw on a wide variety of experiences and they do not boil down the intellectual world to a single idea. Such foxes include: Herodotus, Aristotle, Erasmus, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce, Anderson).-Ron Price with thanks to several internet sites especially Wikipedia on the topic of Isaiah Berlin.
There is little doubt that I am both
hedgehog and fox. And, like Berlin,
I find solemnity & public seriousness
to be fatal qualities after many years
of life in Australia…..In academic and
private life my thoughts go deeper &
richer and more sacred. Although I do
relate everything to a single & central
vision, still I pursue many ends, often
unrelated and contradictory ones so
prepared as I am now to fight against
whatever odds & whatever the threat
might be with swords made of words
that are sharper than blades of steel
and hotter than summer heat...........
Such is my aim. My view of myself as
well as the view taken by others appears
to be strangely dissimilar. For all of this
I thank Isaiah Berlin, his short runs, and(1)
1953, a very big year for both Berlin & the
vision-the realization of the vision that has
been at the centre of my life all these days.(2)
1 Quotations from Isaiah Berlin on the Internet.
2 The completion of a Divine Ediface in Chicago, the Baha’i temple, and the coextensive appearance of a “most wonderful and thrilling motion in the world of existence.”-Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By, Wilmette, 1957, p.351.
Ron Price
10 September 2011
IDEE FIXE
In his introduction to The Journals of Kierkegaard(1834-1854) Alexander Dru writes that at the age of 33, from 1846 on, the whole significance of what Kierkegaard had written “suddenly dawned on him.” “His gifts and talents,” Dru went on, were to be his vocation. He had understood his mission.” It was a mission implicit in the work he had written. In 1846 he began a series of what he called his “proper” Note-books a continuation of his previously haphazard ones. Dru says that the reader can see Kierkegaard’s extraordinary destiny taking shape in these Notebooks, a destiny in the service of an idea, an idee fixe, a destiny linked to an “idea for which he could live and die.”-Ron Price with thanks to Alexander Dru, Introduction to The Journals of Kierkegaard, Fontana, 4th impression 1967, Oxford UP, 1938, pp.7-10.
Your posterity your confidant
by means of your journal,
your most trusted confidant:
"The thing is to find a truth
which is true for me, to find
the idea for which I can live
and for which I can die......1
My posterity my confidant
as I leave behind all these
words--after I found a truth
which was true for me and
for which I have lived, found
a mission, a destiny, a service
to an idea, an idee fixe whose
time had come in this dark
heart of an age of transition
and gradually unfolded by
stages to array my life with
the fruits of consecrated joy.
1 This was written in Kierkegaard’s Journal on August 1, 1835. The entire collection of his Danish journals has been edited and published in 13 volumes which consist of 25 separate bindings including indices. The first English edition of his Journals was edited by Alexander Dru in 1938. A third official translation contained 55 volumes and was completed in 2009.
2 “Were I to die now the effect of my life would be exceptional,” Kierkegaard wrote, “much of what I have simply jotted down carelessly in the Journals would become of great importance and have a great effect.” --Journals, December 1849.
Ron Price
4 July 2007 to 11 September 2011
SORTING THINGS OUT IN HOT SUMMERS
In the early years of my pioneering life, beginning perhaps as early as 1964 living in Hamilton Ontario at the far west end of Lake Ontario, until my second or third year in Ballarat Victoria in 1977-8, I read every book written by Eric Fromm. He was a theorist that brought other theories together: Freud, Adler, Horney, Marx. He was part humanist, part Marxist, part Freudian, a large part existentialist. I read at least seven of his books, perhaps more, during these years. I remember trying to connect the Baha’i teachings to the ideas of this eclectic, synthesizing psychologist who argued that, among other things, one’s identity and rootedness come from one’s religion, one’s development as a person comes from a religious framework and philosophy, one’s choices not one’s memories block one's development and the aim of one’s life is to live intensely.
I read and reread this stimulating psychoanalyst. He seemed to be saying so many things that my religion espoused in different ways with different words; things like: (a) the psyche adapts to the dominant sociopolitical structure of society, (b) character is the result of our solution to and our resolution of existential needs for survival, relatedness, expression and meaning; (c) character shapes instincts, and (d) we need hope as well as spiritual teachers. -Ron Price with thanks to Michael Maccoby, "The Two Voices of Erich Fromm: The Prophetic and the Analytic," Society, July/August, 2001, Internet, 25 November 2001, pp. 1-16.
We have the inverse of Christianity
here: not the individual changing
society, but society changing the
individual. I knew Fromm was on
to something; it was just too good
to be true and I was still so young.
The messianic view of history was here;
many words about liberation, the paradox
was kept before our eyes: that we were
the most important thing in the universe
but powerlessness and humility was our
reality before that utterly Unknowable....
Essence which the wisdom of the wise
and the learning of the learned would
never ever comprehend: Mystery with
a capital 'M'.
There was a great split between
the ideal and the actual in life,
much of which we had to accept.
There was a dialogue with Fromm,
with the Central Figures of my Faith
for a dozen years in hot Canadian
summers and the hotter Australian
summers as I tried to sort out those
dynamics, the intellectual parameters,
the paradigmatic shifts and bases of
a new religion which was emerging
slowly from its chrysalis, from its
obscurity into the glaring light of
a vast-complete public recognition.
Ron Price
26 November 2001 to 10 September 2011
BIOGRAPHY: A BRIEF and PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS
In writing biography and autobiography one is confronted with a number of questions: what is its place in history? Is it simply a sort of sophisticated entertainment, a bedside companion better handed over to novelists? Is it a scholarly pursuit in itself? Is it a generator of cases to help us explain, in this case, aspects of the psychology, sociology or philosophy of religion? Is it a window through which we can learn to tackle existential questions in life, through which we can identify ourselves with others, come to understand ourselves emotionally and intellectually and help change and create ourselves?
The approach I take to both autobiography and biography is that these genres can help us reorient ourselves, our familiar ways of looking at things in unfamiliar terms, by the power of a certain strangeness. The exercise may also help us to become the new human beings we would like to be. There is, as the philosopher Michael Polanyi emphasizes, a private, tacit passion at the root of much in life. It is a passion that is difficult to explore in an individual’s life, is tinged with the personal, keeps the world at a distance and can often be seen chiefly only in the written works of the person. The ‘real individual’, the unique self, the argument goes, can only be seen in what he or she writes.
James Wood, a literary critic, essayist, novelist, Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine. writes in The Guardian(1) about English writer Martin Amis’s book Experience: “it is an escape from memoir; indeed, an escape into privacy.” Although the book seems at first glance to be exhibitionistic in reality, Wood emphasizes, it is a retreat into the provinces of himself." And so is this true of my work, or so it seems to me. My work is also an escape, although I'm not so sure escape is the right word, into analysis and social commentary, into serious reflection on life: my life, the life of my society and my values, beliefs and attitudes---in a word---my religion. My work does not vibrate with an atmosphere of wounded privacy as much autobiography does. I like to think that my work vibrates in a certain way, in a way that the American philosopher Henry David Thoreau once expressed it: "If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."
Some analysts of the written word argue that it is of no help to the reader to understand the state of mind, the personal life, of the writer concerned. Still others see the individual only in a socio-historical context, as the product of their times, as part of a sociological discourse or matrix, a rich contextualization, a historical situatedness. The German historian, psychologist, sociologist and hermeneutic philosopher,Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) saw it the other way around: individuals construct their own society and, therefore, each person, each writer, lives in a different society even if, ostensibly, in reality, they occupy the same territorial space.(1) James Wood, “Experience: Martin Amis,” The Guardian, 20 May, 2000.
The implications of the post-structuralist thinking and the deconstructionists(large words for complex aspects of modern philosophy) is that the subject matter, the person, is a product of language, a language construct, a product of the text and its incarnated vocabularies. Any attempt at a unitary identity, at any definition of a self, is a simple error since the self is constantly shaped by forces of ideology, changing its representation with each situation it faces. This view of the self makes the view of the coherence of the person---a myth. In reality the self is a discontinuity, beyond documentation, essentially unknowable in its many variations, unrecoverable. The best thing to do is to avoid trying to construct a narrative line, a central focus. Given the slipperiness of language, language's need to create non-referential figures to construct the self, no real, individual 'face' is possible.(1)
Of course, this was not the view of Virginia Woolf who argued in her Collected Essays, Vol.4 that the age of biography had just begun. Woolf wrote this at the start of the Formative Age in Baha’i history in the 1920s aware as she was of the writings of famous historians and biographers like Plutarch and Thucydides in previous ages. Woolf would have agreed with Ira Nadel, a Professor of English at the University of British Columbia, that “the recreation of a life in words is one of the most beautiful and difficult tasks a literary artist can perform.”(1) Part of this beauty and part of this difficulty is the fact that these qualities are rooted in individual difference and idiosyncrasy, as A.L. Rowse emphasizes in his study of Matthew Arnold.(2)-Ron Price with thanks to (1) Helen M. Buss, Canadian Women's Autobiography in English: And Introductory Guide for Researchers and Teachers, CRIAW, Ottawa, 1991 and Ira Nadel, Biography: Fiction, Fact and Form, St. Martin’s Press, NY, 1984, p.152 and (2) A.L. Rowse, Matthew Arnold: Poet and Prophet, Thames and Hudson, London, 1976, p.160.