The Thinkers : Modern

"At a department store, a woman was waiting for the payment process, using her credit card," Swara then began after greeting with Basmalah and Salaam. "The clerk then said, 'I’ll have to ask you to identify yourself.'

The customer took a small mirror from her handbag, looked into it keenly, slightly tilted her face, smiled, raised her two fingers—symbolizing 'victory'—closer to her face, and pronounced, 'Yes. That’s definitely me.'"

Swara then carried on, "The period of history which is commonly called 'modern' has a mental outlook which differs from that of the medieval period in many ways. Of these—according to Bertrand Russel—two are the most important: the diminishing authority of the Church, and the increasing authority of science. With these two, others are connected. The culture of modern times is more lay than clerical. States increasingly replace the Church as the governmental authority that controls culture. The government of nations is, at first, mainly in the hands of kings; then, as in ancient Greece, the kings are gradually replaced by democracies or tyrants. The power of the national State, and the functions that it performs, grow steadily throughout the whole period (apart from some minor fluctuations); but at most times the State has less influence on the opinions of philosophers than the Church had in the Middle Ages. The feudal aristocracy, which, north of the Alps, had been able, till the fifteenth century, to hold its own against central governments, loses first its political and then its economic importance. It is replaced by the king in alliance with rich merchants; these two share power in different proportions in different countries. There is a tendency for the rich merchants to become absorbed into the aristocracy. From the time of the American and French Revolutions onwards, democracy, in the modern sense, becomes an important political force. Socialism, as opposed to democracy based on private property, first acquires governmental power in 1917. This form of government, however, if it spreads, must obviously bring with it a new form of culture; the culture with which we shall be concerned is in the main 'liberal', that is to say, of the kind most naturally associated with commerce. To this there are important exceptions, especially in Germany; Fichte and Hegel, to take two examples, have an outlook which is totally unconnected with commerce. But such exceptions are not typical of their age.

The rejection of ecclesiastical authority, according to Russel, which is the negative characteristic of the modern age, begins earlier than the positive characteristic, which is the acceptance of scientific authority. In the Italian renaissance, science played a very small part; the opposition to the Church, in men's thoughts, was connected with antiquity, and looked still to the past, but to a more distant past than that of the early Church and the Middle Ages. The first serious irruption of science was the publication of the Copernican theory in 1543; but this theory did not become influential until it was taken up and improved by Kepler and Galileo in the seventeenth century. Then began the long fight between science and dogma, in which traditionalists fought a losing battle against new knowledge.

The authority of science, which is recognized by most philosophers of the modern epoch, is a very different thing from the authority of the Church, since it is intellectual, not governmental. No penalties fall upon those who reject it; no prudential arguments influence those who accept it. It prevails solely by its intrinsic appeal to reason. It is, moreover, a piecemeal and partial authority; it does not, like the body of Catholic dogma, lay down a complete system, covering human morality, human hopes, and the past and future history of the universe. It pronounces only on whatever, at the time, appears to have been scientifically ascertained, which is a small island in an ocean of nescience. There is yet another difference from ecclesiastical authority, which declares its pronouncements to be absolutely certain and eternally unalterable: the pronouncements of science are made tentatively, on a basis of probability, and are regarded as liable to modification. This produces a temper of mind very different from that of the medieval dogmatist.

Practical science, which is an attempt to change the world, has been important from Theoretical science, which is an attempt to understand the world, and has continually increased in importance, until it has almost ousted theoretical science from men's thoughts. The practical importance of science was first recognized in connection with war; Galileo and Leonardo obtained government employment by their claim to improve artillery and the art of fortification. From their time onwards, the part of men of science in war has steadily grown greater. Their part in developing machine production, and accustoming the population to the use, first of steam, then of electricity, came later, and did not begin to have important political effects until near the end of the nineteenth century. The triumph of science has been mainly due to its practical utility, and there has been an attempt to divorce this aspect from that of theory, thus making science more and more a technique, and less and less a doctrine as to the nature of the world. The penetration of this point of view to the philosophers is very recent.

Emancipation from the authority of the Church, still according to Russel, led to the growth of individualism, even to the point of anarchy [a society without a government. It may also refer to a society or group of people that entirely rejects a set hierarchy. Anarchy was first used in English in 1539, meaning 'an absence of government.' As a political philosophy, anarchism advocates self-governed societies based on voluntary institutions. These are often described as stateless societies, although several authors have defined them more specifically as institutions based on non-hierarchical free associations. Anarchism holds the state to be undesirable, unnecessary, or harmful. Anarchism and violence have been linked together by events in anarchist history such as violent revolution, terrorism, assassination attempts and propaganda of the deed. Propaganda of the deed, or attentát, was espoused by leading anarchists in the late 19th century and was associated with a number of incidents of political violence. Anarchist thought, however, is quite diverse on the question of violence. Where some anarchists have opposed coercive means on the basis of coherence, others have supported acts of violent revolution as a path toward anarchy. Anarcho-pacifism is a school of thought within anarchism which rejects all violence.]. Discipline, intellectual, moral, and political, was associated in the minds of the men of the Renaissance with the scholastic philosophy and ecclesiastical government. The Aristotelian logic of the Schoolmen [Scholasticism was a medieval school of philosophy that employed a critical organic method of philosophical analysis predicated upon the Aristotelian 10 Categories. Christian scholasticism emerged within the monastic schools that translated scholastic Judeo-Islamic philosophies, and thereby 'rediscovered' the collected works of Aristotle] was narrow, but afforded a training in a certain kind of accuracy. When this school of logic became unfashionable, it was not, at first, succeeded by something better, but only by an eclectic imitation of ancient models. Until the seventeenth century, there was nothing of importance in philosophy. The moral and political anarchy of fifteenth-century Italy was appalling, and gave rise to the doctrines of Machiavelli. At the same time, the freedom from mental shackles led to an astonishing display of genius in art and literature. But such a society is unstable. The Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, combined with the subjection of Italy to Spain, put an end to both the good and the bad of the Italian Renaissance. When the movement spread north of the Alps, it had not the same anarchic character.

Now, let's see some philosophers in the perspective of our contributor. Lots of names can be mentioned as Philosophers in Modern Era: David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, Edmund Burke, Jeremy Bentham, Mary Wollstonecraft, J.W. von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Georg Hegel, Friedrich Schlegel, Ram Mohan Roy, Arthur Schopenhauer, Auguste Comte, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ludwig Feuerbach, John Stuart Mill, Søren Kierkegaard, Henry David Thoreau, Karl Marx, William James, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Because there are pretty much names, we will only briefly describe them, by focusing on the background 'why' their ideas and concepts are formed.

David Hume, 1711–1776, was denied the academic career he had hoped for because of his barely disguised skepticism of religion, but his philosophical and historical writings made him a leading figure in the Scottish Enlightenment. The foremost British philosopher of the 18th century, David Hume was better known by the public in his lifetime as a historian. However, his philosophical works were appreciated by his peers, most notably Immanuel Kant, who said that Hume had woken him from his 'dogmatic slumber.'

Needing more time for reflection and contemplation, and so in 1734, he took himself to La Flèche, on the Loir in France. In the peaceful atmosphere there, and with the opportunity of conversation with the Jesuits in the local monastery, he began to organize his philosophical thoughts. For the following 3 years, he worked on A Treatise of Human Nature, which was published in two volumes in 1739–1740. In 1741, Hume published the first volume of Essays, Moral, and Political, which found a more appreciative readership than his first book. Hume’s Treatise, which he published anonymously, was an attempt to devise a system of thought by which to appraise the basis of human nature. He argued against the rationalism of his day, that passion rather than reason moderated human behavior.

Although regarded as a major work of philosophy today, and much admired for its clarity of style and often witty elegance, the Treatise was not well received at the time. Hume was disappointed but not deterred; he felt, looking back later, that it was by no means perfect, and reworked it in a more accessible style as An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) and An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751). He wrote his six-volume History of England (more of a history of Great Britain), published between 1754 and 1761, which became a bestseller. The publisher was threatened with legal action, forcing Hume to rewrite the offending essay, 'The Natural History of Religion,' and to remove 'Of Suicide' and 'Of the Immortality of the Soul.' The collection, Four Dissertations, emerged in 1757, but Hume heeded the advice of friends not to publish another of his works from this period. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion accordingly appeared posthumously in 1779.

Although his life had not turned out exactly as he intended, Hume was never bitter and could look back on a varied and successful career and a place as the leading philosopher of his generation. In 1776, he died of a stomach complaint, possibly cancer, aged 65. He is buried in a tomb designed by his friend, the renowned architect Robert Adam, in Calton Cemetery, Edinburgh. In his 'Treatise,' Hume left a message, 'Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.'

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1712–1778, was a Swiss thinker and writer whose radical ideas brought him into conflict with the authority of Church and State. He valued emotion over reason, nature over culture, and equality over social hierarchy. During the French Revolution, which began in 1789, Rousseau’s ideas were cited in support of direct democracy and the overthrow of the monarchy. The Cult of the Supreme Being, introduced by the revolutionaries to replace Catholicism in 1794, to some degree reflected Rousseau’s belief in a 'natural religion.' The execution of alleged enemies of the revolution in the Reign of Terror was justified by reference to Rousseau’s belief that individuals could have no rights in opposition to the popular will.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born in Geneva in 1712, the son of a poor watchmaker. The experiences of his youth left him emotionally deprived and rootless. Gifted in music, Rousseau went to Paris in the 1740s, hoping to make his fortune with an unusual idea for a new system of musical notation. Rousseau’s breakthrough came in 1750, when the Academy of Dijon offered a prize for the best essay on the question of whether the sciences or the arts had contributed more to the moral advancement of humankind. By Rousseau’s account, his decision to enter this competition was taken while walking from Paris to the fortress of Vincennes, where he was to visit Diderot, who had been imprisoned for criticizing religion. The Enlightenment thinker Denis Diderot (1713–1784) turned his back on religion. In the 1750s, he became the leading figure in a project to publish a multivolume Encyclopédie, intended to present a complete compendium of knowledge from a rational and scientific point of view. Diderot’s subversive views on the Church and the monarchy caused the Encyclopédie to be banned in 1759, and the later volumes were produced clandestinely. Some of Diderot’s most famous works such as the satires Jacques the Fatalist and Rameau’s Nephew—were not published until long after his death.

During the walk, Rousseau had a vision of man as naturally good but corrupted by society. This fundamental idea was to underlie all his subsequent works. Expressed in the 'Discours sur les sciences et les arts [Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts] (1750),' it won him the prize and established his reputation as a thinker. His follow-up essay, Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes [the 'Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality] (1754),' confirmed his originality and the challenge he posed to established authority.

Rousseau’s treatise Du contrat social [the Social Contract], published in 1762, has remained a controversial work to the present day. Rousseau declined the patronage of the French king Louis XV. Louis was angered by the slight, declaring, 'It might please me to send Monsieur Rousseau to the Bicêtre prison.' Rousseau fled France to escape imprisonment, eventually finding refuge in England, where he was a guest of the philosopher David Hume.

In the last decade of his life, Rousseau devoted himself chiefly to works of autobiography and introspection, including Les Confessions [the Confessions], he boldly claimed 'to have entered on an enterprise that is without precedent … to show my fellows a man as nature made him ….'

Whether Rousseau’s honesty matched his ambition has been long debated, and the issue is unresolved. In 1776, he was knocked down by a large dog in a Parisian street and suffered a concussion, from which his health never fully recovered. He died 2 years later as a guest at Château d’Ermenonville in the Oise district of northern France. Rousseau’s grave at Ermenonville became a place of pilgrimage for a generation that had been inspired by the sentimental excesses of La Nouvelle Héloïse. During the French Revolution in 1794, the republicans, who claimed him as their precursor, moved his body to the Pantheon in Paris, where it now lies. In his 'Discourse,' Rousseau left some words, 'Nature made man happy and good … but society depraves him and makes him miserable.'

Adam Smith, 1723–1790, his best-known work, The Wealth of Nations, is regarded as the first book on modern economic theory, but Smith considered himself primarily a philosopher, deriving his 'political economy' from his moral philosophy. Along with his friend, David Hume, Smith was a member of a group of Scottish intellectuals who met to socialize and debate philosophical issues in what became known as the Scottish Enlightenment. The pair shared an interest in moral philosophy—in particular, the idea of moral sense as a feature of human nature—which informed their work and resulted in some of the most influential philosophical books in English of the period.

Hutcheson (1694–1746), often referred to as the 'Father of the Scottish Enlightenment,' was a Presbyterian minister, as well as a philosopher, whose theories of human nature and moral sense were a significant influence on Adam Smith and David Hume. After teaching in Dublin, where he wrote An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue and An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections (1725), he was appointed professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow in 1729. In keeping with his down-to-earth approach to philosophy, he made a radical break with tradition by giving his lectures in English rather than in Latin.

Smith graduated from Glasgow in 1740, and then earned a scholarship to continue his studies at Balliol College, Oxford. Since early childhood, Smith had always been something of a loner, awkward in company, and with a habit of talking to himself. His experience at Oxford further eroded his confidence. As he grew up, he became a rather eccentric character: absent-minded, obsessive, given to hypochondria, and with an idiosyncratic way of speaking. He was also self-conscious, especially about his appearance (in later life, he said that 'I am a beau in nothing but my books'), and he became known for his often distant smiling expression and his distinctive gait.

In 1759, he published his first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. This work was influenced by both Hutcheson and Hume and their ideas of a moral sense based on sentiment or emotion rather than pure rationality, but Smith went on to argue that human morality, and altruism in particular, has its roots in what he called 'mutual sympathy of sentiments'—the empathy between the individual actor and wider society. He considered the book to be his major achievement, and the theory outlined in it underpins all of his philosophical thinking, including the political economy described in the later The Wealth of Nations (1776).

His trip to Paris, turned out to be inspirational, as it brought him into contact with some of the great thinkers on the continent, including Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin, and Jean D’Alembert. But it was the philosopher François Quesnay who impressed Smith most and prompted his interest in political economy. Quesnay was the leader of the physiocratic school, which was challenging the prevailing mercantilist economic theory and instead advocating a policy of 'laissezfaire'—a system of free trade. The French phrase laissez faire literally means 'allow to do,' with the idea being 'let people do as they choose.' The origins of laissez-faire are associated with the Physiocrats, a group of 18th-century French economists who believed that government policy should not interfere with the operation of natural economic laws. The term laissez-faire likely originated in a meeting that took place around 1681 between powerful French Controller-General of Finances Jean-Baptiste Colbert and a group of French businessmen headed by M. Le Gendre. When the eager mercantilist minister asked how the French state could be of service to the merchants and help promote their commerce, Le Gendre replied simply, 'Laissez-nous faire' (Leave it to us).

From the start of the Renaissance, economic theory was dominated by mercantilism, the view that a nation should aim for a positive balance of trade to accumulate wealth and to increase international influence in competition with rival states. This could be achieved by government regulation of imports and a maximization of exports. The idea was enthusiastically followed by states such as Venice, and later by England and France. In the 18th century, however, economists such as Smith questioned the effectiveness of mercantilism, advocating instead a system of free trade, the international equivalent of the free market.

Smith never married, and the death of his friend Hume in 1776 was a heavy blow. After dealing with Hume’s affairs as his executor, he found himself alone, and in 1778, he moved in with his mother at her home in Edinburgh, where he lived for the rest of his life. In his final years, he took a job as commissioner with the Scottish customs service and effectively rested on his laurels, gaining several honorary academic appointments but producing little in the way of philosophical writings. His mother died in 1784, just 6 years before his own death on July 17, 1790, aged 67. Smith left his mark on the Wealth of Nation, 'Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog.'

Immanuel Kant, 1724–1804, the great German reconciler of Enlightenment thought, seeking a synthesis between Descartes’ rationalism and the empiricists’ emphasis on experience. He was also heavily influenced by Newtonian physics. Kant showed a keen interest in the sciences throughout his life, but they were of particular importance to him during his early years. At the age of 24—after having studied Newtonian physics as a student at the University of Königsberg—he wrote his Principiorum primorum cognitionis metaphysicae nova dilucidatio [General Natural History and Theory of the Celestial Bodies], which was not published until 1755. In this work, he outlined the theory that suns and planets form from clouds of dispersed matter that are gravitationally attracted according to their differing specific densities and masses. Kant’s nebular hypothesis of star formation is still generally accepted today.

Immanuel Kant—born in 1724 into an impoverished family, both of his parents were Lutherans, in what was then the East Prussian city of Königsberg; today it is Kaliningrad, the capital of the Baltic enclave of the same name that is administratively part of Russia—was a hugely influential figure in the history of philosophy and the prototype of a new breed of professional philosopher. For much of his life, he earned his living as a professor of logic and metaphysics but, remarkably for a man of learning, never traveled more than 60miles (100km) from his place of birth.

Kant’s work on ethics is most famously summed up in his concept

of 'the categorical imperative,' which he formulated as, 'Act only on that maxim through which you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.' The imperative is the requirement to behave in accordance with reason, from which all moral obligations arise. 'Categorical' takes that duty out of the subjective realm, giving it the status of a universal law of nature that the person doing the act would wish all other people to obey—or, in layperson’s terms, 'Do as you would be done by.'

The 1780s are referred to as Kant’s 'critical' period—literally so, because during the decade, he also produced two other influential 'critiques.' The first, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft [the Critique of Practical Reason], appeared in 1788. In it, he switched his attention to ethics, employing the same structure of a 'Doctrine,' an 'Analytic,' and a 'Dialectic,' followed by a 'Methodology,' to approach the subject. This work, which spelled out his concept of the categorical imperative, set up a distinction between human inclination and moral reason. No such distinction would exist in a hypothetical 'holy will,' which would always act as it ought to and so would not require the concepts of duty and obligation, which are the expression of reason.

Kritik der Urteilskraft [The Critique of Judgment] followed 2 years later, addressing aesthetics. Kant wanted to know why we consider some objects beautiful but not others, and also why this judgment is often shared. He found the answer again in a joint mental process: the imagination delights in something; understanding then transfers this sensation to the cognitive faculties, which are shared with others, moving the response outside the sphere of the subjective.

Kant died in 1804, during the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815); his last words are said to have been 'Es ist gut,' [It is good]. After his death, his influence continued to spread, and the Kantian legacy remained a significant element in philosophy well into the 20th century. In his 'Kritik', Kant wrote, 'Knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.'

Edmund Burke, 1729–1797, an Irish, is often described as the father of modern conservatism. Most famous for his denunciation of the French Revolution, he argued for continuity and tradition, rejecting change based on abstract reasoning. In 1757, he married a doctor’s daughter, Jane Nugent, and published his first notable work, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Burke’s only excursion into aesthetics, it anticipated the Romantic movement, contrasting the classical rationalist view of art based on clarity and proportion with the awe inspired by limitless grandeur.

Burke took up a political career in 1765, becoming a member of parliament and private secretary to a powerful figure in the Whig party [a political faction and then a political party in the Parliaments of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom. Between the 1680s and the 1850s, the Whigs contested power with their rivals, the Tories. The Whigs merged into the Liberal Party with the Peelites and Radicals in the 1850s. Many Whigs left the Liberal Party in 1886 to form the Liberal Unionist Party, which merged into the Conservative Party in 1912], the marquess of Rockingham. Burke’s friend and political ally Charles Watson-Wentworth, the marquess of Rockingham, served two terms as the prime minister of Great Britain.

Burke’s final years were clouded by the death of his only son and his estrangement from his former colleagues. He died on his estate at Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire. His track record reads, 'When bad men combine, the good must associates; else they will fall one by one …'

Jeremy Bentham, 1748–1832, born in London, England, the son of a wealthy attorney. In his voluminous writings, Bentham analyzed legal, educational, and constitutional matters, advocating a range of social and political reforms. However, he is chiefly remembered as the founder of Utilitarianism.

Bentham’s first major publication was Fragment on Government. Bentham’s Comment turned out to be so long and unwieldy that he never finished it to his own satisfaction, and even those parts that were complete remained unpublished until 1928.

Bentham’s greatest achievement was the philosophical and ethical framework that lay at the root of his reforms. He is hailed as the founder of utilitarianism, the doctrine that he outlined in his most important work, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. Human behavior, he said, was governed by both pleasure and pain. The key to promoting one and avoiding the other was his 'principle of utility,' which he defined as 'that property [which] … tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness.' The desirability of this 'utility' could be reinforced by embedding it into the most fundamental notions of morality and the law. When applied to society at large, it inspired the mantra of utilitarianism—namely that the morally correct action was that which produced ]the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.'

Bentham’s central argument was gloriously simple, but the devil lay in the details. He produced many acres of print trying to create an objective and comprehensive assessment of the diverse forms of happiness. He even devised a 'felicific calculus' (happiness calculator) to measure their relative importance. This aspect of his work was more controversial, and many of his ideas were later challenged by the other great champion of utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill.

Bentham died on 6 June 1832, aged 84, at his residence in Queen Square Place in Westminster, London. He had continued to write up to a month before his death, and had made careful preparations for the dissection of his body after death and its preservation. Bentham's auto-icon displayed in a case at University College London's Student Centre in 2020. One of his preserved words are, 'Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure.'

Mary Wollstonecraft, 1759–1797, born in Spitalfields, London, England, to a middle-class family, became a pioneering thinker of the British Enlightenment, producing a landmark text of feminist philosophy that paved the way for the suffragette and women’s movements. Wollstonecraft was one of the leading thinkers of the mid to late 18thcentury European movement known as the Enlightenment (also called the Age of Reason). It challenged the dogma of the Church and the power of the monarchy, and thereby paved the way for revolutionary movements in France and elsewhere. Rationalism and objectivity—together with a focus on equality, tolerance, and intellectual endeavor—were among the key principles of the Enlightenment, which presented a major threat to the established order.

In 1792, aged just 33, she published her most important text, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. In this political manifesto, Wollstonecraft suggested that women should be treated as equal citizens—a direct attack on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s advice in Emile (1792) that girls should be educated differently than boys.

Wollstonecraft’s life was cut tragically short at the age of 38, when she died giving birth to a daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, who went on to become the author of Frankenstein, a classic work of English literature.

From the early 20th century, Wollstonecraft’s work began to receive the attention it deserved and since then has continued to inspire the global struggle for women’s legal, social, and political rights. In her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft wrote, 'I do not wish them [women] to have power over men; but over themselves.'

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749–1832, born in Frankfurt, a self governing city in the Holy Roman Empire, where his father was a legal official. A towering figure in German cultural history, Goethe was a polymath whose works ranged from poetry to physics and biology. Although he was not a systematic philosopher, his thought had extensive influence. In 1774, Goethe published Die Leiden des jungen Werthers [The Sorrows of Young Werther], a novel of doomed love and suicide that became a bestseller. Goethe published Zur Farbenlehre [Theory of Colours] in 1810, an attempt to refute Isaac Newton’s work on light, and On Morphology in 1817, a presentation of his views on botany and anatomy. Although loosely influenced by Spinoza, Goethe’s mature thought centered on the concept of organic development and of God as realized in nature, rather than standing outside it.

The main preoccupation of Goethe’s final years was the completion of his tragic play Faust, the first fragment of which had been published in 1790, but which was not finished until 1831. He died in Weimar, where he had lived most of his life, in 1832.

In his novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, he wrote, 'The human race is a monotonous affair. Most people spend the greatest part of their time working in order to live, and what little freedom remains so fills them with fear that they seek out any and every means to be rid of it.'

Friedrich Schiller, 1759–1805, born in Württemberg, Germany. Although most famous as a dramatist and poet, Schiller was also a noted philosophical thinker. His reflections on aesthetics, ethics, and politics, constitute a profound meditation on human freedom and moral idealism. In 1773, he was sent to an elite military school in Stuttgart. During seven unhappy years at this institution, he discovered the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and J. W. von Goethe and began to write poetry and drama. His first play, Die Räuber [The Robbers], caused a sensation when staged in Mannheim in 1780. Its violent action, emotional extremism, and criticism of social injustice enthused the public and outraged the authorities.

Schiller abandoned a career as an army doctor and for a while led an itinerant life. His writings from this period include the historical drama Don Carlos, notable for its impassioned appeal for freedom of conscience, and 'An die Freude' [Ode to Joy], a hymn to human brotherhood that was later set to music by Beethoven, Symphony No. 9.

Schiller married Charlotte von Lengefeld in 1790, fathering four children. Occupying the chair at Jena, he produced his major texts on philosophy, including Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen [On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters] (1794). Developed through a critique of the works of Immanuel Kant, his philosophical ideas were also influenced by the descent of the 1789 French Revolution into a reign of terror. This led him to focus his hopes for freedom and the perfectibility of man on moral and spiritual progress rather than on political revolt.

In dramatic works such as the Wallenstein trilogy (1799), Mary Stuart (1800), Die Jungfrau von Orleans [The Maid of Orleans] (1801), and William Tell (1804), Schiller explored themes of freedom, fate, and the 'sublime'—self-sacrifice for an ideal. His life was tragically cut short when he succumbed to tuberculosis in 1805, dying at the age of 45. A quotation from Schiller is, 'The joke loses everything when the joker laughs himself.'

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1770–1831, was born in Stuttgart, where his father was a tax official. His life was largely uneventful. With his belief in the centrality of Geist—'mind' or 'spirit'—and his view of history as driven by a dialectical process of conflict and change, Hegel is arguably the most influential thinker of the past two centuries.

In 1807, Hegel published his first major work, Phänomenologie des Geistes [The Phenomenology of Spirit], at a time when his fortunes were at a low ebb, thanks to the loss of his professorship. He then produced the three parts of his Wissenschaft der Logik [Science of Logic] (1812–1816), a work that secured his academic reputation and earned him professorships at Heidelberg (1816) and then Berlin (1818). Move to Berlin was significant for Hegel’s career. His lectures there brought him a wide audience, which he also addressed via the publication of Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts [Elements of the Philosophy of Right] (1821), in which he spelled out his thinking on political issues and the question of human rights and obligations.

In his thinking, Hegel was very much a proponent of mind over matter. Central to all his ideas was Geist, meaning, alternatively, 'mind' or 'spirit.' For him, how we experience the world is mediated through the mind. And what we experience is inevitably determined by the context in which we conceive it, which in itself is always changing. So reality is organic and subject to a process of historical development.

Hegel was an internationally known and highly respected figure when revolution struck his home city of Berlin in 1830. The prospect of civil disorder and mob rule profoundly affected him. In the following year, cholera broke out in the city. Returning from a summer retreat in the suburb of Kreuzberg for the beginning of the university’s winter term, Hegel contracted the disease in a particularly virulent form. He died peacefully in his sleep the following day, aged 61. In his Phänomenologie des Geistes, he wrote, 'Of the Absolute, it must be said that it is essentially a result, that only in the end is it what it truly is.'

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, 1772–1829, was one of the inspirational forces behind the German Romantic movement. In a varied career, he became a poet, philosopher, critic, philologist, and—ultimately—a journalist and diplomat. Born in Hanover, Friedrich Schlegel came from a literary background. His father—a Lutheran pastor—wrote poems and hymns for a weekly magazine, and his brother, August, was a distinguished poet and critic. . He began his studies at Göttingen reading law, but his interest soon shifted to literature, and he avidly consumed the works of Shakespeare and Dante and of the philosophers Immanuel Kant and Johann Herder. In 1791, he moved to Leipzig, this time to study ancient languages, but he began to run up gambling debts, prompting his brother to rescue him and move him to Jena.

Moved to Berlin, Schlegel embarked on an affair with a married woman, Dorothea Veit, daughter of the intellectual Moses Mendelssohn. Moving to Berlin, Schlegel and Dorothea eventually married. Schlegel continued to write and lecture and pursued his studies in Sanskrit and other Eastern languages. These resulted in the book, now regarded as his most important work—Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier [On the Language and Wisdom of India]—which contained his radical theories concerning the links between Indian and European languages. Published in 1808, the book coincided with a dramatic shift in Schlegel’s career path. The following year, when he moved with his wife to Vienna, he entered the service of the diplomat Prince Metternich. In his later years, the writer, who had started out as a youthful radical, turned into a conservative supporter of a reactionary politician. One quotation from Schlegel is, 'Ideas are infinite, original, and lively divine thoughts.'

Ram Mohan Roy, 1772–1833, was an Indian social reformer and philosopher who founded the movement now known as the Bengali Renaissance. The Bengali Renaissance encompassed not only philosophy, but also jurisprudence, political theory, science, and the arts. Based on a commitment to reason, progressive social change, and intellectual inquiry, the movement aimed to recover and renew Indian traditions of thought. One of the most famous thinkers and writers who is associated with the Bengali Renaissance is Rabindranath Tagore, who won the Nobel Prize in 1913.

Ram Mohan Roy's work brought together Western philosophy and ancient Hindu traditions. He was not only one of the most important thinkers of the 19th-century Bengali Renaissance, but also a significant figure on the world stage. He was born into a wealthy Bengali family, the son of a landowner, or zamindar, which gave him the opportunity to travel widely at an early age. He became proficient in several languages, including Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabic, in addition to his native Bengali.

Ram Mohan Roy synthesized Western philosophical traditions with Hindu concepts drawn from the ancient texts the Vedas, the Upanishads, and the Bhagavad Gita. His philosophy is rooted in Advaita Vedanta, a tradition associated in particular with the 8th century philosopher and theologian Adi Shankara, who consolidated the doctrine of Advaita Vedanta, unifying the principal streams of thought in Hinduism.

One of its central claims is that the soul, or atman, is ultimately the same as brahman, the highest principle of reality (Advaita literally means 'not-two'); liberation is said to come from recognizing this fundamental identity. Roy attempted to reinstate Advaita Vedanta, claiming it was the philosophical underpinning of all Indian traditions. In 1828, he formed the organization that became Brahmo Samaj, a reformist movement that emphasized reason and monotheism.

Arthur Schopenhauer, 1788–1860, is now regarded as one of the most important and influential 19th-century German Idealists; however, he achieved only modest recognition in his own lifetime. An irascible misanthrope, he did not endear himself to the philosophical establishment. Nevertheless, he made a name for his ideas, for the clarity of his arguments, and for his readable literary style that—despite his gloom—is infused with dry wit.

Building on Kant’s idealism, Schopenhauer proposed a more pessimistic metaphysics in Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung [the World as Will and Representation], which influenced generations of philosophers, writers, and scientists. The book also focused on the absolute futility of seeking personal satisfaction in a world driven by a dispassionate and unassailable universal will—an attitude similar to that of the Indian philosophical texts he was studying at that time.

Schopenhauer died of heart failure peacefully on his couch, with his cat on his lap, in September 1860, aged 72. One of his quotation, 'This world of what is knowable, in which we are and which is in us, remains both the material and the limit of our consideration.'

Auguste Comte, 1798–1857, hailed as the first philosopher of science, although deeply eccentric and plagued by a tempestuous domestic life, mental illness, and megalomania. Comte was a French influential antiimperialist and the founder of positivism and sociology. Isidore Marie Auguste François Xavier Comte was born in Montpellier into a strict Catholic, monarchist family. He was later estranged from them, owing to political and religious differences arising from his obsession with building a society based on republicanism and science.

Between 1830 and 1842, he published his most important work: the six-volume Cours de Philosophie Positive [The Course of Positive Philosophy]. Here, he identified three stages in human evolution: a religious stage, a metaphysical stage, and finally, a scientific or 'positive' stage—the age in which he was writing. He termed his system 'positivism.' Based on a belief that the only authentic knowledge is that based on actual sense experience and the application of the scientific method, his system attracted many disciples, including the British economist and philosopher John Stuart Mill.

In 1842, separated from his wife and was fired from his long-standing teaching post at the Ecole Polytechnic, following the death of the object of his obsessive love—Clotilde de Vaux—he again reached the edge of sanity. His four-volume Système de politique positive [System of Positive Polity] appeared between 1851 and 1854, but he died from stomach cancer in 1857, isolated and impoverished.

Comte’s scientific approach to the study of society, established sociology as a distinct discipline and had a lasting impact on social and political thought. He was also a notable and influential anti imperialist and conducted a sustained critique of empire for many years. One of his quote, 'Positivism is a theory of knowledge according to which the only kind of sound knowledge available to human kind is that if science grounded in observation.'

Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803–1882, an American poet, lecturer, essayist, Orientalist, and a major figure in the Transcendentalist movement, Emerson urged a distinctively new American way of thinking that influenced an entire generation. Transcendentalism grew out of Unitarianism, a rationalistic, intellectual Christian sect popular around Boston, Massachusetts. The Transcendentalists, led by Emerson, sought to balance Unitarian rationality with an intense, personal spirituality, based in nature, that transcended the material world. Their sources included German Romanticism and ancient Indian and Chinese texts. Important Transcendentalists included Henry David Thoreau and the early feminist Margaret Fuller, who edited the movement’s magazine, The Dial (1840–1844), with Emerson. Believing that humans were innately good but easily corrupted by society, they recommended self-reliance and independence. The Transcendentalists were leaders in a number of reform movements, such as feminism and the anti-slavery campaign.

Emerson was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to devout parents. His father, a Unitarian minister.

In 1832, he left the Church. He spent almost a year traveling in Europe and met with such thinkers as John Stuart Mill and Thomas Carlyle. In his first published work, Nature, Emerson set out his ideas about the interconnectedness of humans and nature, envisioning a 'universal soul' and extolling a personal experience of the divine through nature. Eastern philosophies, together with European Romanticism, influenced ideas such as the human capacity to transcend the material world and become one with an all-pervading spirit of the universe. An exploration of these various concepts, formed the basis of most of the rest of Emerson’s work.

In 1837, Emerson gave the famous speech 'The American Scholar' to Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa Society, in which he exhorted US scholars to forge a new, genuinely American cultural identity. The speech was a huge success, but less than a year later, an address to Harvard Divinity School caused outrage, as his views on the failures of 'historical Christianity' were perceived as far too radical for the time.

In the 1840s, Emerson published two volumes of essays, which contained some of his most famous works, including 'Self-Reliance,' 'The Over-Soul,' and 'Experience,' a critique of utopianism. In 1847–1848, he traveled around Britain, a tour that resulted in the book English Traits (1856). He also campaigned for the abolition of slavery; and in his 1860 collection of essays, The Conduct of Life, published on the eve of the Civil War, he contemplated civil war as a means of national rebirth.

In his last decade, Emerson continued to lecture and write, but as his memory began to fail, he withdrew from public life. He died of pneumonia in 1882. One of his quote, 'Freedom is not the right to do as you please, but the liberty to do as you should.'

Ludwig Feuerbach, 1804–1872, played a pivotal role in German philosophy, influencing the shift from the idealism of Kant and Hegel to the materialism of later 19th-century philosophers. Feuerbach was not entirely satisfied with Hegel’s ideas, and with other like-minded young philosophers formed a group known as the Young Hegelians or Left Hegelians (Hegel and his followers, sometimes referred to as the Old Hegelians). Hegel and his followers argued that the progress of history had culminated in the world as it is today, the Young Hegelians maintained that contemporary institutions, such as Christianity and the political status quo, were themselves only a stage in the development of society. Among them were Feuerbach, David Strauss (author of the controversially influential Life of Jesus Critically Examined), anda young Karl Marx.

One of Feuerbach quotes, 'The power of miracle is the power of imagination.'

John Stuart Mill, 1806–1873, a philosopher, social reformer, and political economist, was the preeminent British liberal thinker of the 19th century. An advocate of Utilitarianism, he examined the relationship of society to the individual. The young Mill’s education was rigorous: he was schooled at home by his father with the intention of creating a genius who could further the movement of 'Philosophic Radicals,' of which Mill and Jeremy Bentham, were active leaders.

Through the 1830s and 1840s, Mill continued to meditate on morality, social reform, and political economy. He wrote prolifically, contributing essays to numerous periodicals, and also edited the London Review in 1835–1840. In 1843, he published A System of Logic, a work concerned with scientific methodology in which he outlined his theory of inductive reasoning and attempted to apply the logic of causal explanation to social and moral phenomena. Principles of Political Economy followed in 1848, in which an exploration of the moral impacts of industrialization led Mill to advocate a form of not-quitesocialism incorporating 'industrial co operatives.' The work included analyses of economic theory and was a key text in British universities until the early 20th century.

Mill’s philosophy was always tied to practical politics; in Considerations on Representative Government (1859), he asserted that the proper object of government was to promote 'the virtue and intelligence of the human beings composing the community,' and concluded the ideal type of government to be representative democracy. However, Mill was also a defender of British imperialism, arguing in works such as A Few Words on Non-Intervention (1859) that there was a clear distinction between civilized and barbarous peoples, and that the latter benefited from a benevolent despotism.

Mill entered politics, standing as a Member of Parliament (MP) for Westminster for the Liberals in 1865. During his time as an MP, he spoke on a range of more or less radical issues, including birth control, land rights in Ireland, the abolition of slavery in the United States, and various reforms of government. He was the first person to speak in Parliament in support of women’s suffrage, and in 1869, he published The Subjection of Women, arguing for perfect equality between men and women.

On his defeat at the 1868 general election, Mill retired to his French home and lived quietly with his stepdaughter, Helen Taylor. He died in 1873 and was buried in Avignon next to his beloved Harriet Taylor, a British philosopher and early women’s rights advocate who is now largely remembered for her influence on Mill. In his 'On Liberty', Mill wrote, 'There is always hope when people are forced to listen to both sides.'

Søren Aabye Kierkegaard ,1813–1855, is often described as the founder of modern existentialism. Grounded in his personal spiritual quest, his complex works express a belief in subjective truth and the value of the individual. In Kierkegaard’s day, the Danish capital was a small but densely packed town with a population of around 100,000 living within its centuries-old ramparts. A resident of the city from birth, Kierkegaard was a well-known figure there and regarded 'as one great social gathering.' He liked to walk Copenhagen’s narrow streets, stopping to chat to passersby of all classes and to listen to gossip. He deliberately chose to write in Danish, preferring to address his fellow citizens rather than a wider European audience. He traveled away from his native city only four times in his life, for quite brief periods.

Kierkegaard was born in Copenhagen, Denmark. His father, a strict Protestant, had been raised in poverty in rural Denmark but had risen to considerable wealth as a textile dealer with the benevolent assistance of a rich uncle. The early 19th century was disastrous for Denmark. The capital, Copenhagen, was bombarded by the British during the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815); the Danes had to give up control of Norway; and the state went bankrupt in 1813. Yet these disasters heralded a period of intellectual and artistic flowering, whose products included Kierkegaard’s writing in philosophy, the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen, the sculpture of Bertel Thorvaldsen, the painting of Christoffer Eckersberg (who established a 'Danish School of Art'), the architecture of Christian Frederik Hansen, and, in science, the work of Hans Christian Orsted on electricity and magnetism. The period from about 1820 to 1860 is known as the Danish Golden Age; drawing for inspiration on Danish history, landscape, and mythology, it marked birth of a new national identity.

Sent to an elite private school, Kierkegaard was a physically weak, ungainly loner who defended himself against bullying by cultivating an acid wit. At 17, he enrolled at the University of Copenhagen to study for a degree in theology. He soon lost interest in lectures that repeated accepted ideas and arguments, and in revolt against his family’s puritanism, he explored the pleasures of drinking, theaters, and parties while also embarking upon intensive personal reading and reflection in pursuit of what he called 'a truth that is truth for me.' Rejecting the lofty abstractions of the dominant Hegelian philosophy of his time, he sought to ground thought in the subjective reality of an individual spiritual life. By 1835, he was already arguing that the search for truth should be both a passionate and a personal quest.

By the end of 1840, he had taken his degree in theology, published his first book—a critique of Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen. In the early 1840s, Kierkegaard wrote a series of major works of outstanding originality. The prelude to this burst of creativity was the dissertation he presented for his Master’s degree, entitled Om Begrebet Ironi med stadigt Hensyn til Socrates [On the Concept of Irony with Constant Reference to Socrates] (1841). By the end of 1840, he had taken his degree in theology, published his first book—a critique of Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen. In the early 1840s, Kierkegaard wrote a series of major works of outstanding originality. The prelude to this burst of creativity was the dissertation he presented for his Master’s degree, entitled Om Begrebet Ironi med stadigt Hensyn til Socrates [On the Concept of Irony with Constant Reference to Socrates] (1841). Published as Enten-Eller [Either/Or] in 1843, Kierkegaard’s book consisted of anecdotes, aphorisms, musical and literary criticism, a fictional diary, and essays, all allegedly collected by a pseudonymous editor. Enten-Eller made Kierkegaard an intellectual celebrity in Denmark, but fame in the wider world would have to wait until after his death. Over the following 2 years, he wrote with furious energy, once publishing three books on the same day. In works such as Frygt og Bæven [Fear and Trembling] (1843) and Begrebet Angest [The Concept of Anxiety] (1844), he expanded his thought from consideration of the aesthetic and ethical ways of life, to the religious sphere. Kierkegaard never used the exact phrase 'a leap of faith,' which is often attributed to him, but he did describe true religious belief. He died in 1855, aged 42, after collapsing in the street. The cause of death is unknown.

Kierkegaard’s works were first translated into German in the 1860s. His international reputation then continued to grow into the 20th century, when he was recognized as a major figure in European thought. In his Enten-Eller, he wrote, 'What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music.... And people flock around the poet and say, 'Sing again soon'—that is, 'May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful.'

Henry David Thoreau, 1817–1862, practical philosopher, essayist, poet, and naturalist, Thoreau influenced many civil rights campaigners with his call to nonviolent action, and his nature writings foreshadowed environmentalism and ecology. David Henry Thoreau (he later inverted his forenames) was born in Concord, Massachusetts, where he was raised with his three siblings. His father was a pencil manufacturer. While at Harvard, Thoreau met Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was 14 years his senior and had just published his seminal essay Nature. Emerson introduced him to his circle of writers and encouraged him to keep a journal. Thoreau found that Emerson’s Transcendentalism echoed his own interest in nature and individualism, and he published his first essays and poems in the Transcendentalist magazine, The Dial.

Thoreau’s Walden; Or, Life in the Woods (1854) was a mix of practical description, personal reflection, and acute, lyrically detailed nature observations. Although it initially made little impact, the book became an enduring classic. In 1846, Thoreau spent a night in jail for refusing to pay a poll tax because of his opposition to the Mexican American war and slavery. This led to the essay 'Civil Disobedience' (first published as 'Resistance to Civil Government'), which advocates nonviolent resistance to unjust government and served as a model to later activists, notably Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

Aa a fervent abolitionist, he helped escaped slaves flee north and spoke out against slavery, famously in 'A Plea for Captain John Brown.' In 1859, John Brown, a radical abolitionist who believed that armed revolt was the only way to end slavery, led 21 men in a raid on the US Armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in an attempt to initiate an armed insurrection. The planned uprising never materialized, and Brown was hanged for treason. Initial reaction to Brown’s actions from abolitionists was disapproval, but after Thoreau vigorously defended him in a heartfelt speech, 'A Plea for Captain John Brown' (later published in essay form), Brown was acclaimed as a hero and martyr.

Thoreau lived modestly for the rest of his life and continued to write essays on the natural world and accounts of trips that he made. He died from tuberculosis at the age of 44. In his Walden, he wrote, 'Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.'

Karl Heinrich Marx, 1818–1883, a leading thinker of the modern age, Marx was a philosopher, journalist, economist, and activist. He dedicated his life to the overthrow of the existing social order and the capitalist economic system. Karl Marx was born in the Rhineland city of Trier, which was then ruled by Prussia. His father, Heinrich, was a prosperous lawyer who subscribed to the liberal ideas of the Enlightenment. Heinrich was Jewish and his ancestors included a succession of rabbis, but he pragmatically adopted the Protestant faith to avoid anti-Semitism. Unexceptional at school, Marx was sent to study law, first in Bonn and then at the University of Berlin. Initially a dissolute Romantic student given to poetry and drinking, at university he developed the dedicated interest in philosophy and politics that was to last a lifetime. In Berlin, Marx became associated with the 'Young Hegelians,' who were looked on with suspicion by the authorities. Marx was awarded a doctorate in philosophy in 1841, but found himself barred from an academic career because of his views on religion. Needing to make a living, he turned to journalism.

He also met Friedrich Engels, who was to become his close ally and collaborator for the rest of his life. Temperamentally disobedient, Marx would at some time break off relations violently with every other colleague, but never with Engels. Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) was the son of a German industrialist. He was a hedonist with expensive tastes, but was moved by the poverty he witnessed working at his father’s factory in Manchester, described in his 1845 book Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England [The Condition of the Working Class in England]. During the 1848 revolutions, he fought on the barricades in Germany. In his close association with Marx, he accepted the role of second fiddle, providing moral and financial support. After Marx’s death, Engels edited and published the last two volumes of Capital. He also wrote on the historical origins of the family and the subjugation of women.

By the mid-1840s, Marx had fashioned most of the intellectual system later known as 'Marxism.' Expounded in largely unpublished manuscripts, Marx’s thought developed through an extensive critical study of German philosophy, French Utopian socialism, and the work of British economists. Marx’s most original contribution to philosophy was perhaps his attack on the traditional role of the philosopher as a detached observer in search of absolute truth. He argued that the philosopher’s role was not to contemplate the world, but to engage with it—because only by engagement could it be understood. In 1847, his desire to change the world brought him into contact with the League of the Just, a clandestine international network of working-class would-be revolutionaries based in London. In February 1848, Marx wrote a pamphlet setting out the beliefs and program of the League. Known as The Communist Manifesto, it became one of the most widely read texts ever written.

In 1848, popular uprisings took place in many European countries, including France, Germany, Austria, and Italy. In France, the monarchy was overthrown and a republic established. In Germany, which was then divided into several different states, a national parliament met. There were, however, fatal divides between middle-class radicals seeking individual freedoms, the working classes pursuing economic goals, and a conservative peasantry. Exploiting these divisions, kings and emperors were able to reimpose their authority. In France, the republic finally gave way to the authoritarian Second Empire under LouisNapoleon. The failed revolutions were followed by an era of economic growth and declining radicalism.

The failure of the 1848 revolutions posed an intellectual challenge that dominated the next two decades of Marx’s life. Marx reentered politics in 1864 as a dominant figure in the International Working Men’s Association, commonly known as the First International. He guided this mild collection of trade unionists and humanistic socialists toward a commitment to the seizure of power by the working class. Despite gaining many adherents across Europe, the International played no part in the genesis of the continent’s next violent upheaval. In 1871, as a reaction to French capitulation in the Franco-Prussian War, Paris was taken over by the revolutionary Commune. Marx remained a passive observer of this uprising, which was suppressed with heavy loss of life. The Civil War in France, his pamphlet analyzing the events, gained a large readership and it became an accepted fact that Marx’s International had been responsible for the uprising. For the first time, Marx was famous and had a wide audience.

The First International collapsed in the early 1870s as a result of irresolvable conflict between Marx and the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. Marx’s influence, however, continued to spread. As new socialist parties developed in Germany and Russia in the 1870s and 1880s, the question to what degree they should accept Marx’s ideas became a crucial subject of debate. Marx intervened to criticize the program of the nascent German Social Democratic Party in 1876, arguing against the possibility of a peaceful transition to socialism and emphasizing the need for a 'dictatorship of the proletariat' after the revolution. In the last decade of his life, Marx was plagued by ill health; he died of bronchitis in March 1883, 13 months after the death of his wife and 2 months after the death of his eldest daughter. He was buried in Highgate Cemetery, London, in the section reserved for atheists. Only his family and a few close friends, including Engels, attended the funeral. In his Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie [Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right], Marx wrote, 'Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world … It is the opium of the people.' I pondered it and asked, 'Is it? For whom it is intended for?'

William James, 1842–1910, was an American pioneer in the scientific study of psychology and one of the founders of the Pragmatic school of philosophy. His readiness to tackle big topics in clear, robust language made him an influential figure. He was born in New York, of Irish Protestant descent, his wealthy family belonged to 19thcentury America’s small, cultured elite. His father, Henry James Sr., was an idiosyncratic thinker and writer who failed to achieve the recognition he felt he deserved. A man who never worked for money, he saw the purpose of existence as the cultivation of the spiritual life and despised all careers and mercenary effort. William would rebel against his father’s lack of engagement with the material world, but never shook off traces of his belief in a higher spiritual reality.

James’s interest in psychology was partly stimulated by his own mental struggles. By his own account, these were resolved in the early 1870s as a result of a philosophical revelation. He became convinced that it was within anyone’s power to change their life by acts of will. 'My first act of free will,' he wrote, 'shall be to believe in free will.' Armed with faith in his 'individual reality and creative power,' he took on the future with a fresh determination.

In 1890, James published a massive textbook, The Principles of Psychology, which summed up his knowledge of the field. Its most fruitful innovation was the idea of the 'stream of consciousness' as a way of describing our moment-by-moment experience, a concept that was to be widely adopted by Modernist writers in the 20th century. After this work he felt free to devote himself to the philosophical questions that had long fascinated him. As early as 1872, he had participated in a philosophical discussion group in Boston called the Metaphysical Club, whose members included scientist Charles Sanders Peirce. It is Peirce who is credited with developing the approach to philosophy known as 'Pragmatism,' although James was the first to use the term in print and it became primarily associated with his name. Pragmatists argued that concepts and beliefs were developed to solve problems or advance knowledge. If ideas made no difference to the world, then they were meaningless. Thought was constantly on the move, not establishing eternal truths but tackling ever-changing dilemmas. James did not hold the simplistic view that a belief was true if it worked, but he often sounded as if that was what he was saying.

James wrote on the issue of religion in works such as The Will to Believe and The Varieties of Religious Experience. He took a modern scientific approach to the subject, but reassuringly for many, left the door open to belief in some spiritual reality to which humans might have access. Even though he rejected religious dogma, James argued that people should not allow the skeptical fear of error to shut their minds off completely from the possibility of religious experiences, which as experiences were undoubtedly real and might change people’s lives for the better.

In the last decade of his life, James became critical of the US’s drift toward militarism and what he called 'the exclusive worship of the bitch goddess Success.' He was at work on an introduction to philosophy when he died of heart disease at his home at Chocorua, New Hampshire, in August 1910. Much of William James' advices may be useful, including,

'To change one’s life: Start immediately; Do it flamboyantly; No exceptions.'

'Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.'

'The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook.'

'We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep.'

'Whenever two people meet, there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is.'

'The greatest discovery of any generation is that a human can alter his life by altering his attitude.'

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, 1844–1900, born into a Lutheran family, he turned his back on faith and challenged the morality associated with it. He advocated living life in search of our full potential and according to our own individual standards. Nietzsche had a complex relationship with his mother, Franziska. In his youth, she had called him 'little pastor,' but to her great dismay, he rejected her values and faith as he grew up.

Industrialization and urbanization came later to Germany than they had to Britain and France. As the country sought to catch up with its neighbors (it had become the largest economy in Europe by 1900), profound changes occurred very rapidly in German society, and particularly in its institutions. For centuries, the Church had been at the heart of every rural German community, but during the 19th century, it became increasingly marginalized. Religious observance began to change from a community obligation or convention to a question of individual choice.

Nietzsche was born in the small village of Röcken bei Lützen in the Prussian province of Saxony. His father, Carl Ludwig, was the minister of the local Lutheran church, and both of his parents came from families of Protestant clergymen. Nietzsche’s childhood was marred by tragedy. His father suffered from a painfully debilitating brain disease and died shortly before Friedrich’s fifth birthday. Six months later, his 2-year-old brother, Ludwig, also died. He was offered a scholarship at a prestigious boarding school, Schulpforta, thanks to being an orphan of a state employee. Here, he received a solid, if conservative, education in classical and modern languages and the sciences. However, Nietzsche also showed an interest in poetry, especially the philosophical poems of Friedrich Hölderlin, and organized a literary and musical club in Naumburg, through which he was introduced to the music of Richard Wagner. More significantly, his curiosity for ideas beyond the school’s curriculum also led him to seek out and absorb iconoclastic works.

Nietzsche interrupted his studies in 1867 to undertake military service and returned to his studies in Leipzig, then completed his degree in 1868. At about this time, he befriended Hermann Brockhaus, an Orientalist scholar whose special interest was in Sanskrit and Persian writings, including the texts of Zoroastrianism. During the 1870s, Nietzsche often visited Wagner and his wife Cosima, and they developed a relationship of mutual admiration. His first book, Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik [The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music] (1872), was praised by Wagner but received a cool reception from his fellow academics.

Encouraged by Wagner, he spent the next few years working on a series of essays critiquing German culture and promoting the ideas of Schopenhauer. They were published in 1876 as Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen [Untimely Meditations]. Thanks to his friendship with the philosopher Paul Rée, Nietzsche was persuaded to embark on a new, less pessimistic course in his next book. Menschliches, Allzumenschliches: Ein Buch für freie Geister [Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits] was published in 1878. This significant change may have been made for more than merely aesthetic reasons: Nietzsche’s health was deteriorating dramatically, and he suffered from digestive problems and blinding headaches, as well as failing eyesight, all of which made it difficult for him to write for protracted periods and badly degraded the legibility of his manuscripts. From this time, his writing became imbued with a sense of urgency that suggests he adopted the style in order to get his thoughts down on paper as quickly as possible.

Nietzsche’s poor health began to affect his work at the university, and in 1879, he resigned from his post. In the following decade, he traveled extensively in Italy and southern France, hoping to benefit from the warmer climate, and returned to Switzerland in the summer. This was the most productive period of his career, in which he affirmed his rejection of Christianity, and in fact all religion, and developed his idea of morality in a godless world. In Die fröhliche Wissenschaft [sometimes translated as The Joyful Wisdom or The Joyous Science or The Gay Science] (1882), which Nietzsche himself described as 'perhaps my most personal book,' he famously asserted that 'Gott ist tot [God is dead],' and suggested that as a consequence, conventional ideas of morality were no longer relevant and should be replaced with an ethos that is life-affirming rather than prohibitive.

He elaborated this theme in his later works: Also sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen [Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None] (1883–1885), he introduced the idea of the Übermensch ('Superman')—the man who could create his own morality and purpose to become dedicated to the betterment of humanity; and in Jenseits von Gut und Böse: Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft [Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future] (1886) and Zur Genealogie der Moral: Eine Streitschrift [On the Genealogy of Morality: A Polemic] (1887), he expounded upon the concept of 'will to power'—a drive to exert an influence over other things (including the self) that he considered fundamental to human existence.

By the mid-1880s, after a rift with his sister over her marriage to Bernhard Förster, Nietzsche felt increasingly isolated and became reliant on opium and other drugs. Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth (1846–

1935) is widely blamed for the misinterpretation of his philosophy as advocating totalitarian dictatorship, especially by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime. Elisabeth and her brother, became estranged after her marriage to Bernhard Förster, whose anti-Semitic nationalism was anathema to Friedrich. The couple attempted to found an Aryan colony, Nueva Germania, in Paraguay in 1887, but when it failed 2 years later, Bernhard committed suicide. In 1893, Elisabeth returned to Germany, where she later became Nietzsche’s carer, editing—and possibly rewriting—her brother’s unpublished work to reflect her own prejudices, and promoting them as curator of the Nietzsche Archive after his death. She was a Nazi sympathizer, and her funeral in 1935 was attended by Hitler.

Nietzsche suffered a number of strokes over the next years, becoming totally reliant on his sister. Because of his illness, he was unaware that his work had at last been recognized, and never had the chance to enjoy his celebrity. He died of pneumonia on August 25, 1900, and in a cruel twist for such an avowed atheist, was given a Christian funeral and buried next to his father in the graveyard in Röcken. In his Also sprach Zarathustra, Nietzsche wrote, 'I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my cypresses.'

There are many names that can be mentioned, including: Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, a prominent figure in the French Enlightenment; Dai Zhen, a critic of the neo-Confucian tradition in Chinese thought; Gotthold Lessing, a German dramatist, critic, and philosopher; Moses Mendelssohn, a German Jewish philosopher; Motoori Norinaga, the key figure in the Kokugaku (National Learning) revival of traditional Japanese culture; Joseph de Maistre, the leading philosopher of the royalist Catholic reaction against the 1789 French Revolution; Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the founder of German idealist philosophy; Germaine de Staël, a prominent thinker on literature, politics, and society, as well as a gifted novelist; Early Romantic philosopher and poet Friedrich von Hardenberg, more often known by his pen name Novalis; Idealist philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling; A philosopher much admired by her British contemporaries, Lady Mary Shepherd; An important figure in the New England Transcendentalist movement, Amos Bronson Alcott; An influential thinker in philosophy and psychology, Franz Clemens Brentano; One of the founders of pragmatism in philosophy, Charles Sanders Peirce; One of the founders of modern logic and analytical philosophy, Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege; and Philosopher and historian, Josiah Royce.

Let's finish this session and continue with the next session about the thinkers in the 20th century, biidhnillah. We'll close this with a joke, 'Attending a wedding for the first time, a little girl, noticed the bride in a white dress, and the groom in a black suit, then whispered to her mother, 'Why is the bride dressed in white?'

'Because white is the color of happiness,' her mother explained, 'and today is the happiest day in her life.'

The child thought for a moment and then asked, 'So why is the groom wearing black?'"

It's time to go, Swara left with a chant,

Hai, pagi yang baru menjelang

[Hey, new morning which is just approaching]

Pulangkan imanku yang sudah hilang

[Give me back my lost faith]

Berikan daku cinta dan hasrat

[Give me love and passion]

Supaya aku boleh mendarat

[So that I can land]

Kulihat terang, meski tak benderang

[I see the light, though not so bright]

Sehingga gelap lambat laun 'kan lenyap

[So that the darkness will gradually disappear]

Datanglah, cahaya di hati

[Come, a ray in the heart]

Bawalah imanku kembali *)

[Bring my faith back]

"And Allah knows best."

Citations & References:
- DK London, Philosophers - Their Lives and Works, Cobaltid
- Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, Routledge
- Roger Scruton, A Short History of Modern Philosophy From Descartes to Wittgenstein, Routledge
*) "Kupinta Lagi" written by Cornel Simanjuntak

[The 20th Century Thinkers]

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