THE EROSION OF PHILOSOPHY

IN 19^TH AND EARLY 20^TH CENTURY THOUGHT

    The charge of the quote above is a serious one, and threatening because this sort of construction of order against reason stinks of cowardice and intellectual bankruptcy. The problem is expressed well in this statement, as it stood for those at the end of the last century and as it still stands: our intellectual understanding of who we are, what we know and what we can speak about has become completely alien to our everyday assumptions. If we are to accept the work of intellectuals in this era, we find ourselves adrift with nothing familiar to live by, if we can even find anything at all. The statement is well supported by the texts we have studied by Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Stein, and it also provides us with a good key to understanding the relationships between the different authors' ideas.

    The Colossus standing at the gateway of modern thought is undoubtedly Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Starting from an Enlightenment-influenced framework, Hegel set about seeing the entire field of knowledge as a unified whole. The Encyclopædia Britannica names him "the last of the great philosophical-system builders of modern times" (20:487). With his new system of metaphysics, grounded in his a priori idea of the dialectic Spirit or Geist, Hegel proposed an entirely new worldview, calmly explaining everything, for he had seen "the whole" (12). This privileged position of seer in command of the whole knowledge of world history enabled him, despite all his claims to "Logic" and "Philosophy", to create a worldview ex nihilo. One major theme of the Enlightenment discourse was the capacity of human beings to know, the one consolation of the Copernican revolution which saw us deposed from our place in the center of the universe. Another was the need for scientific, empirical and historical explanations for all knowledge. Hegel sought to unite both of these themes and provide a framework for understanding everything.

    Hegel found this unity in a triumphantly grand and optimistic system-- grand because of its all-inclusiveness, and optimistic because of its affirmation of universal progress. Elucidating his system of "philosophical history," Hegel maintained that human history was the manifestation of a universal History, the unfolding evolution of the World Spirit or Idea to the Freedom of self-consciousness through a dialectical process of self-alienation and self-transcendence. At each of the points in the process the Idea looks at itself (thesis) with its growing self-understanding and objectifies its own opposite (antithesis), dividing itself from what it is not. This process of opposition then becomes the basis for a synthesis in which the Idea overcomes itself and realizes itself more fully. Hegel explains that Logic shows that the Spirit "determines itself, posits its own determinations and in turn abolishes them (transcending itself), and by this very process of abolition and transcending gains an affirmative, ever richer and more concretely determined form" (79).

    All of nature, then, is a part of the process of the Spirit's self-determination. Hegel saw the most concrete expression of the Spirit in the human geopolitical state. The Spirit uses "world-historical" individuals to construct and destroy states, which are manifestations of the universal and individual "spirits of the age". These spirits, though universal to the states, are instantiations and particulars of the World Spirit, the true universal. Human beings are tool and fodder for the Spirit, which works with their passions for its own end of self-realization. Hegel's system, while denying the importance of individual human actions, saw an epic scheme in which human states grow up and destroy each other as manifestations of the great Spirit. All of nature is a creation arising from the Spirit's dialectical maturation, and human beings have meaning according to the part which they play in its growth toward perfect Freedom. And, since Spirit is equated with Idea and Reason in Hegel's system, we get the bold assertion, "to him who looks at the world rationally the world looks rationally back" (13).

    It is important to note that in his profession of an all-encompassing rationalistic system, Hegel created a complete and innovative worldview that, where it was accepted, entirely supplanted a traditional worldview based on Greek and Christian thought. As a result, after Hegel's thorough redefining of history and philosophy had found wide influence, a discerning observer might have made the middle part of our lovely statement: "our lives, our desires and wishes, and even our sense of history remain adjusted to a world which no longer exists." Hegel introduced a methodology and metaphysical ground radically different from the methodology of antithesis and the personal God of Christian theism. However, the content of his system was so much the same that the change was not noticed much; readers of Hegel could continue their lives with basically the same moral practices, the same desires and wishes that they had previously held. The changes were undoubtedly noticed, but the sense of being off-balance was only temporary because as Hegel's doctrine and especially his methodology became more pervasive, his followers began to bring their lives, desires and wishes into consistency with their new worldview.

    Hegel's view is representative of many thinkers of his day, who built upon Enlightenment principles to develop Positivism, which preached human progress towards ultimate goals in morality, economy and government. A good example of Positivist thought is the moral utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill and others, which maintained that if humans can establish what is best for society as a whole, they will do it. One of the reactions to this giddy outlook came from the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, especially in his Notes from Underground. The Underground Man stands as an ungrateful rebel, stupidly fighting for his own will and independence in the face of the determinism inherent in the Positivist assumption that he should and would always do what is in his own "best and normal interests" (ch. 7[1] ), providing that he knew what they were. In this work Dostoevsky succeeded in tearing down the primacy of reason and progress, and in his characterization of man as sinful and irrational echoed Kierkegaard's Christian existentialism and foreshadowed the neo-orthodoxy of the theologian Karl Barth.

    In revolt against this, he declared his independence by making consciously bad choices, delighting in fully-conscious self-destruction. By deliberately acting contrary to what he knew to be his own best interests, he sought to authenticate himself and avoid the mechanistic lifelessness he saw in Positivism. He argued that human nature is willful, not rational, and characterized humans as bloodthirsty, stupid, vengeful and supremely ungrateful. In his memoirs he went on to show examples of how he lived up to this nature. The Underground Man insisted that even if man finds himself at the apex of Positivist progress, munching on gingerbread in his utopian palace of crystal,

"He will jeopardize his very gingerbread and deliberately will the most pernicious rubbish, the most uneconomic nonsenses, simply and solely to alloy all this positive rationality with the element of his own pernicious fancy. It is precisely his most fantastic daydreams, his vulgarest foolishness, that he wants to cling to, just so that he can assert (as if it were absolutely essential) that people are still people and not piano-keys, as which they would be exposed to the threat of being so played upon, even if it was by the laws of nature with their own hands, that they could not so much as want anything that was not tabulated in the almanacs. More than that: if men really turned out to be piano-keys, and if it was proved to them by science and mathematics, even then they would not see reason, but on the contrary would deliberately do something out of sheer ingratitude in order, in fact, to have their own way" (part 1, ch. 8).

This can also be seen as a rebellion against man's status in the Hegelian system as a pawn for the use and manipulation of the World Spirit. Frustrated at his lack of real meaning, the Underground Man rebels and acts contrary to reason out of spite, in a paradoxical effort to passionately make illogical and inconsistent choices so that the cruel Spirit cannot gain any advantage from the passion and reason of its ungrateful creation.

    Dostoevsky was a committed Christian, and his intention in Notes from Underground seems to be to attack Positivism from a standpoint of Christian orthodoxy, especially the doctrine of sinful man. This doctrine characterized man as predominantly sinful rather than predominantly rational, and believed man's reason to be crippled and polluted by sin. Positivism, with its reliance on human reason and its emphasis on empiricism, threatened Christianity and threw out Christian doubt about the power of finite man to know. In Notes from Underground the Underground Man sees himself and mankind as predominantly ungrateful, willful, rebellious beings, through his unusual and perhaps morbid self-consciousness. He has a heightened sensitivity for "bookishness", the difference between what he sees as the reality of man's depravity and his idealistic generalizations about himself, even realizing his own perversity when he puts on what he knows to be a bookish facade. Without redemption, he lives conscious of his irrational sinfulness and wallows in it, conscious of himself even in his yearning away from reality and into the idealism of books. The Underground Man sees himself as the Christian would say he really is, and in living in accordance with his willful, sinful nature; he declares authenticity and holds it against the weak and unauthentic loathing of the Positivists for `real life.' In the conclusion of his writing, the Underground Man writes:

". . . after all I have only carried to a logical conclusion in my life what you yourselves didn't dare take more than half-way; and you supposed your cowardice was common sense, and comforted yourselves with the self-deception. So perhaps I turn out to be more alive than you. Look harder! After all, we don't even know where `real life' is lived nowadays, or what it is, what name it goes by. . ." (part 2, ch. 10).

Notes from Underground, then, can be read as a challenge from a Christian thinker to the Positivists to open their eyes, realize what they really are and stop puffing about with grandiose notions of how man will redeem himself without God.

    To this end, the Underground Man succeeded in calling Hegelian and Positivist ideas about progress on their faults and maintaining man's sinful, willful nature in the face of determinism. In the process, the Positivist ideal of a unified rationalistic system was severely damaged, and some began to question whether their ideas about the order of the world really corresponded to their feelings, desires and wishes. Naturalists had to examine their implicit determinism and question their belief in progress. Furthermore, the challenge to rationalism found thinkers less established than they had assumed, increasing the tension between their practical assumptions about and intellectual understanding of reality.

    Notes from Underground represents the beginning of the destruction of rationalism's assumptions about the world and the seeds for the increasing alienation of the intellectuals' understanding of the world from their practical assumptions. But the greatest destruction and alienation came a few years later with Nietzsche. Nietzsche was the first to take the naturalistic presuppositions to their logical ends, and his enforcement of logical consistency had several results. It began with the thorough death of God in intellectual discourse. Secondly, it saw the deconstruction and disintegration of morality and thirdly, the annihilation of optimistic rationalism and its replacement with perspectivism. His genealogical analysis and deconstruction of accepted ideas of morality, religion and the ascetic ideal left intellectuals with nothing of the old and paved the way for existentialist thinkers.

    In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche argues that Christian morality proceeds from the weakness of man; originally morality was the subjective pronouncement of good or bad, (favorable or infavorable) by the noble, but man has forgotten the original, egoistic grounds of morality and fallen for the deception of slave morality, branding strong oppressors evil and valuing weak qualities of submission and humility. Furthermore, the feelings of bad conscience and guilt so intrinsic to Christian morality stem not from a God-given innate sense of morality but from the perverse turning-inward of man's natural desire to inflict pain on others. He offers an elaborate history of the conscience from its conception in trade relationships to its present form of asceticism, and explains God as a construct in this evolution, invented to serve as a witness of suffering and a mechanism to support promise-keeping. He then goes on to attack the ascetic ideal of religion and philosophy with his historical-psychological knives, rendering it another fiction of impotent man and a denial of life. When he is finished he has provided an explanation of morality as an illusion and fabrication of weakness. But, amongst the devastation he sees a hope: he dares the thinking world to throw morality away, to stop denying the will to power, violence, and domination that is essential to the strong man's nature. He writes concerning Genealogy of Morals, "In the end, in the midst of perfectly gruesome detonations, a new truth becomes visible every time among thick clouds" (312). Nietzsche sought to clear the landscape of the cowardly and artificial ideals that had persisted through the centuries out of sheer inertia and erect a new order in their stead; he had visions of a great and glorious future where fearless men realized their power and freedom and gained true wisdom, becoming true to their bestial nature and facing unflinchingly an unremitting cycle of destruction and creation.

    Central to Nietzsche's thought is the death of God which he so vehemently and prophetically proclaimed. As self-appointed mortician and murderer of God, he writes in The Gay Science, "God is dead: but given the way men are, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown.--And we--we still have to vanquish his shadow, too" (191). Nietzsche himself had always been an atheist-- in Ecce Homo he confesses, "'God,' `immortality of the soul,' `redemption,' `beyond'--without exception, concepts to which I never devoted any attention, or time; not even as a child. Perhaps I have never been childlike enough for them?" (236). His atheism was nothing original, but the lengths to which he took it created enormous repercussions; his crusade for complete eradication of the falsities of theism from the consciousness of intelligent man led him to carry the hunt far further than atheists before or since have felt comfortable with. His dismantling of morality, the conscience, objectivism and the ascetic ideal stemmed from his relentless campaign for truth in consistency with his presupposition of atheism. Nietzsche was especially hostile to Christianity, and he could be dubbed both anti-Christian and Antichristian in his vilifying accusations and defamations. On the Genealogy of Morals represents an attack on the elements of Christianity, specifically morality, that still persisted among the predominantly atheistic scientific and philosophical community of his day.

    Nietzsche also attacked the quest for objectivity that rationalism had cherished for so long. He maintained that the notion of objective knowledge was as incoherent as an eye that saw things from no particular vantage point. "There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective `knowing'; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more complete will our `concept' of this thing, our `objectivity,' be" (119). This position is hard to reconcile with Nietzsche's proclamation of what he seemed to consider objective truths, such as his history of the evolution of morality. However, it fits well with the rest of his thought, representing a freedom from the confining self-denial of asceticism and Christianity and an embrace of a reality that is wild, mocking, constantly shifting, Dionysian.

    The impact of Nietzsche and his contribution to the destruction and alienation of the remnants of Christian thought in secular philosophy is enormous. He writes at the end of his last book, Ecce Homo:

"The lightning bolt of truth struck precisely what was highest so far: let whoever comprehends what has here been destroyed see whether anything is left in his hands. Everything that has hitherto been called `truth' has been recognized as the most harmful, insidious, and subterranean form of lie; the holy pretext of `improving' mankind, as the ruse for sucking the blood of life itself. Morality as vampirism.

    Whoever uncovers morality also uncovers the disvalue of all values that are and have been believed. . ." (333-334).

The importance of Nietzsche's thought in demolishing the reigning philosophical assumptions cannot be overestimated. More than anyone else, he broadened the chasm between the intellectual's understanding of the world and his practical understanding of it, leaving us adjusted to "a world which no longer exists." His was the biggest part of the movement, but traces of major writers, including Hegel and Dostoevsky as well as writers who were to come are found throughout his work.

    Undoubtedly familiar with Nietzsche but proceeding more along the lines of formal logic, Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus during World War I. His goal was originally to prove the validity of the correspondance theory of language, which insisted that words really do represent ideas which represent actual things, and that meaning is conveyed through the propositions and definitions of language. He sought release from other theories that saw language as only capable of describing empirical data or unable to transcend the paradigm of the speaker. However, perhaps because of the influence of Nietzsche, who wrote, "As if all words were not pockets into which now this and now that has been put, and now many things at once!" (180), Wittgenstein despaired of communicating meaning and fell back on empiricism. He sums up his conclusions thus:

"The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural science--i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy--and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions. Although it would not be satisfying to the other person--he would not have the feeling that we were teacyhing him philosophy--this method would be the only strictly correct one. . .

    What we cannot speak about we must consign to silence" (6.53, 7).

Just as Nietzsche rang the bell declaring the death of God, Wittgenstein proclaimed the death of language, at least as a means of conveying metaphysical meaning. The problem of existence became even more divided between theoretical understanding and practical living for those who accepted Wittgenstein's conclusions, as all religious language, art, music, and literature were rendered futile. It is interesting to note, however, that Wittgenstein turned away from his early work later in his life.

    The havoc wrought by philosophers slowly permeated all areas of society, but it was especially evident in art and literature. The late 19th century saw the birth of Impressionism, which represented a change in the way painters saw the world and the medium of painting. Art became increasingly conscious of itself. Brushstrokes showed; where abstraction had previously been used for storytelling purposes only (as in Medieval manuscript illustration), artists now found they no longer had any story to tell and began to experiment with more abstract representations of real subject matter. The medium became as important as the subject, the background as important as the foreground, and the Cubists experimented with conveying different perspectives (a la Nietzsche?) in their two dimensional works.

    In literature, Gertrude Stein anticipated Wittgenstein, who would write a few years later, by using language to show rather than say, breaking with conventional usage of words and experimenting with syntax. A friend of Cézanne and Picasso, she used language as the cubists used paint, becoming conscious of the medium as well as the subject matter and treating foreground and background equally. And, just as the cubists tried to escape the two-dimensionality of their canvases by drawing from several perspectives at once, Stein explored the limits of the linear organization of language. This is well demonstrated in Three Lives, in which she tells the life stories of three women from a varied and non-linear perspective. Further exploration of language and its limitations came with e.e. cummings, who published his first work in 1922, the year after Wittgenstein's Tractatus. cummings explored the use of letters and punctuation, departing from English syntax and spelling. Painting had seen a shift from a photorealistic/narrative method where the painter sought transparency in order that the viewer might clearly see the objects or the story to a technique that stressed the process of painting as much or more than the subject matter. Literature likewise, especially poetry, became conscious of itself and began to rely less on describing or telling a story.

    From the all-seeing totality described by Hegel to the gibberish of Stein's Tender Buttons, intellectual thought came a long way. The texts we have discussed represent the old order in Hegel, the beginning of its destruction in Dostoevsky, tremendous devastation at the hands of Nietzsche, further havoc from Wittgenstein, and finally application in Stein. It is easy to see how our beginning statement held true for those who tried to work in the aftermath of 19th and early 20th century thinkers. As Nietzsche predicted, the shadow of God has lived on, hiding itself in the pragmatic assumptions of men and women about morality and language even today. Thinking people found the rational basis for these assumptions swept out from under them and were forced to illogically suspend their disbelief and proceed `by faith'-- the very thing the Enlightenment had rejected orthodox Christianity for. [1] I have cited the chapter rather than the page because I have a different translation from the rest of the class.