The Thinkers : 20th Century (2)

"A rookie police officer was assigned to ride in a cruiser with an experienced partner. A call came over the radio telling them to break up a group of people loitering. The officers then drove to the street and observed a small crowd standing on a corner. The rookie rolled down his window and said, 'People, move of this corner!'

No one moved, so he yelled, 'Get of this corner now!'

Intimidated, the group of people began to leave, looking puzzled. Proud of his first official act, the young policeman turned to his partner and asked, 'Okay, how did I do?'

'Not too bad,' replied the veteran, noding and smiled, 'especially since this is a BUS STOP.'"

"And then," said Swara, "Baggini writes, 'If we want to understand why people believe the things they do, it is essential to start by asking what sources of knowledge the philosophical traditions they grew up in take to be valid.'

According to Baggini, 'It is perhaps no coincidence that insight as a source of knowledge is stressed most in the traditions the West finds least philosophical. Western philosophy’s self-image has largely been constructed by distancing itself from ideas of the philosopher as a sage or guru who penetrates the deep mysteries of the universe like some kind of seer. This distancing has blinded it to the obvious truth that all good philosophy requires some kind of insight. There are innumerable very clever, very scholarly philosophers who can pick apart an argument better than anyone but who don’t have anything worthwhile to contribute to their discipline. What they lack is not an ability to be even more systematic in their analysis, but an ability to spot what is at stake, what matters. Insight without analysis and critique is just intuition taken on faith. But analysis without insight is empty intellectual game-playing. The world’s philosophies offer not just insights but ideas about how to achieve them, and we would profit by sympathetically but critically engaging with both.'

Another source, says Baggini, 'The pinnacles of objective knowledge are found in maths and science, since these are ways of understanding the world that do not depend on which language you speak, where you live or even which of your senses are fully functioning. Even this kind of knowledge is not completely objective. We do not know whether extraterrestrials would be able to make sense of our science, or us of theirs. Nor can we ever know whether there is some fundamental limitation of human cognition that prevents us from achieving an even more objective understanding. Nonetheless, in science and maths we do reach very high degrees of objectivity, ways of understanding that transcend particular perspectives. This objective knowledge, however, requires concepts and language. Far from being obstacles to objective truth, they are enablers of it.

There is still value in the traditions that seek to get beyond words and symbols, in cultivating ways of relating to the world that are more rooted in direct experience, that set aside conceptual categories. At the very least, it is surely useful to remind ourselves that the way we currently experience the world might not exhaust all the possibilities that such a world has to offer. And there may be ways of knowing that can’t be expressed in linguistic propositions. Anglophone philosophy tends to distinguish between know-how and knowing-that, arguing that only the latter generates real knowledge. But this seems to be an arbitrary stipulation. To deny that the wheelwright Slab has knowledge because he can’t set it down on paper looks like moving the epistemological goalposts to fix the philosophical result.

Interestingly, in the early twentieth century, that most analytical of philosophers Bertrand Russell, no fan of the ineffable, distinguished between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description. I know Bristol, the city I live in, by acquaintance, but I know Trieste only from descriptions I’ve read of it. Russell also claimed that all knowledge by description is rooted in knowledge by acquaintance, that experience of the world is primary. The people whose descriptions of Trieste I read are (hopefully) actually acquainted with the city. However, only propositions can be true or false, so although these descriptions of Trieste can be true or false, we cannot talk of their experiences of Trieste as being true or false. But what if some experiences cannot be adequately translated into language? We would then have knowledge by acquaintance without any associated knowledge by description. Could we not call that knowledge ineffable? Russell didn’t consider this possibility, but it seems to me that this small twist makes a very Western philosophy suddenly look almost eastern. Some acquaintance with other traditions creates the possibility to redescribe our own in fruitful and fascinating ways.'

The next source, Baggini writes, 'For those schooled in secular philosophy, it’s a challenge to respond to other traditions in ways that fully acknowledge both their philosophical value and their religious or spiritual dimensions. Somehow, however, we must find a way to do this if we are to have an open dialogue across traditions. We must acknowledge that the strict secularisation of philosophy is itself a philosophical position that requires justification. To simply stipulate that faith separates you from philosophy is as deeply unphilosophical as stipulating that a sacred text must have the last word. Both positions need to be argued for as part of a shared philosophical enterprise.'

About 'Logic', Baggini responds, 'The French Revolution of 1789–99 was fought in the name of liberté, égalité and fraternité. Standing unnamed alongside them—or perhaps supporting them from underneath–was the general of the campaign: raison. The new society the revolutionaries hoped to create would be a better one because it would be established on rational grounds.

This was evident in the manner in which they set about their work. After their victory, their priorities were not simply giving power to the people and removing the heads of the ancien régime. With revolutionary zeal they sought to rid society of its illogical quirks, without considering how these measures affected the plight of the ordinary citizen. Decimalisation was more important than nationalisation. ‘The metric system is for all the people for all the time,’ said the philosopher Condorcet, with a rhetoric more in keeping with social than mensural reform.

In 1795, out went the livre, the unit of currency for over 1,000 years, with its illogical subdivision into twenty sous (or sols), each of twelve deniers. In came the decimal franc, more pleasingly comprised of ten décimes or 100 centimes. In the same year, five decimal units of measurement were created: the mètre for length, the are for area, the stère for volumes of dry goods, the litre for volumes of liquid and the gramme for mass. These units could be magnified or shrunk by the addition of prefixes such as kilo (1,000), hecta (100), deci (a tenth) or centi (a hundredth). They were adopted nationally in 1795.

More radical but less enduring was a new calendar. Its weeks of ten days were divided into twenty hours of 100 decimal minutes, each comprising 100 decimal seconds. Introduced in 1793, the revolutionary calendar was used for only twelve years, and most gave up on revolutionary time after two.

These reforms reflected the importance revolutionaries placed on reason in general and logic in particular. The Encyclopédie, the defining text of the French Enlightenment, which was edited and largely written by Denis Diderot and Jean-Baptiste le Rond d’Alembert between 1751 and 1772, had the ambitious purpose to ‘collect knowledge disseminated around the globe; to set forth its general system to the men with whom we live, and transmit it to those who will come after us’.

Faith in the power of logic and reason was perhaps never as strong as it was during the French Enlightenment and Revolution. Arguably, however, the stress on logic has been the most distinctive feature of Western philosophy throughout its history and has shaped the entire culture. Logic is founded on the idea that reasoning should proceed by strict deductive steps, giving argument a kind of quasi-mathematical rigour. Aristotle first set out the basic principles of logic, and his rules would be followed until the emergence of symbolic logic in the nineteenth century. Defenders of Western philosophy argue that its emphasis on logic has given it a unique robustness, while critics say it has trapped the Western mind in crude, inflexible, dichotomous either/or ways of thinking. '

'The Western self-image is coming under threat,' says Baggini. 'Many psychologists have argued that we are not usually as rational in our behaviour as we think we are. Far from being rational and autonomous, we are intuitive, emotional and heavily influenced by others and our environment. The best way to defend the importance of rationality is not to deny these findings but to look again at what it means to be rational. Comparative philosophy can help the West see that its conception of reason leans more heavily on logic than it needs to. It should hardly come as a surprise when psychologists point out that we do not behave like logical computers. But if we assume reason and logic are more or less synonymous, then that truism becomes a threat to our rationality. If reason uses a broader toolkit of cognitive tools, perhaps including insight and subtle perception, we might find that we are essentially rational after all.'

For the time being, we conclude that, in Baggini's perspective, the philosophical traditions influenced by, as we have discussed, are Insight, the Effable and Ineffable, Theology, and reason. logic and rasionality. There are three more things I haven't told you yet. And now, we'll proceed to the 20th century thinkers according to our contributor.

José Ortega y Gasset, 1883–1955, was Spain’s most prominent liberal intellectual of the 20th century. A champion of elitism and creative individualism, he decried the rise of mass culture and the political populism that led to dictatorship. Ortega’s highbrow journal Revista de Occidente (Magazine of the West) was first published in July 1923. It championed avant-garde artistic and literary work in 1920s Spain. Ortega’s thinking on art and culture, especially in his essay La deshumanización del Arte e Ideas sobre la novela (1925), was an influence on the gifted young writers and artists who emerged in Spain in the 1920s. Often loosely referred to as the Generation of ’27, these included the poet Federico García Lorca and the artist Salvador Dalí. Ortega was supportive of their iconoclastic work, which he saw as aiming at a Modernist transformation of society and culture. Lorca was murdered in the early days of the Civil War because of his association with left-wing and liberal ideas.

Ortega was born in Madrid in 1883. His family were wealthy members of the urban elite and publishers of a prominent liberal newspaper. His works of the 1920s, España invertebrada (Invertebrate Spain) (1921) and La rebelión de las masas (The Revolt of the Masses) (1929), focused on politics and society and made Ortega internationally famous. The Revolt of the Masses was principally a reflection on the rise of fascism and communism. It argued that modern society’s empowerment of the common man had undermined the cultured elite who upheld European liberal civilization. Incapable of sustaining the complex principles that allowed such a civilization to flourish, the rule of the masses resulted in cultural decline and populist dictatorships. He died in Madrid, aged 72.

Karl Theodor Jaspers, 1883–1969, was a german psychiatrist and philosopher and a major figure in Phenomenology and existentialism. He also had a keen interest in philosophical traditions beyond Europe and the West. One contemporary idea that is particularly associated with Karl

Jaspers is that of the Axial Age (in German, Achsenzeit), or 'pivotal age.' This is a term that he coined to describe the period of ancient history between the 8th and 3rd centuries bce. This was a time of cultural and philosophical change from China to the West. The Axial Age witnessed the establishment of many important religious and philosophical systems, including Buddhism, that continue to shape our lives in the modern world. Jaspers referred to the Axial Age as 'a deep breath bringing the most lucid consciousness.'

He was born in Oldenburg, Germany. He developed a keen interest in Phenomenology, which led to the publication of his book Psychologie der Weltanschauungen, as well as to a teaching post in philosophy at Heidelberg University. He accepted a chair in philosophy in 1922, and the following year published his three-volume book, Philosophy.

Jaspers’ work explores the limits and possibilities of human experience. Jaspers says that human experience takes place within das Umgreifende, 'the encompassing,' or 'that which always makes its presence known, which does not appear itself, but from which everything comes to us.' He died of a stroke in Basel, Switzerland, aged 86.

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein, 1889–1951, was an enigmatic Austrian thinker who became hugely influential in the mid-20th century. His gnomic aphorisms and striking personality made him an iconic figure, much referenced in modern culture. Wittgenstein had four significant loves in his life: three homosexual and one a Swiss woman, Marguerite Respinger, whom at one point he planned to marry. He was born in Vienna to a very wealthy family that was largely of Jewish descent. The family played a prominent role in the city’s cultural life, patronizing famous artists and musicians.

In 1908, after studying engineering in Berlin, Wittgenstein moved to the UK, pursuing research in aeronautics at Manchester University. It was while working on the mathematics associated with propeller design that he discovered an obsessive interest in the logical foundations of mathematics. Torn between intellectual excitement and self-doubt, he took his thoughts on the subject to the leaders in the field, Gottlob Frege in Jena and Bertrand Russell in Cambridge. However, Wittgenstein never completed his university studies. He disliked the company of academic philosophers and read little of the work of the great philosophers of the past, dismissing most of their thinking as 'stupid and dishonest.'

By 1921, he had finished the book that made him famous: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus—expressed his early views on logic, language, and the world. When Nazi Germany took over Austria in the Anschluss of 1938, Wittgenstein took British nationality. After the outbreak of World War II, he came increasingly to regard the practice of philosophy as useless, and in 1941, found a manual job as a porter at Guy’s Hospital in blitzed London. After the war, he resigned from the University of Cambridge and moved to a village in Ireland. Intermittently in love with young men throughout his life, in his final years, he experienced both the pleasures and the pains of love with an undergraduate, Ben Richards.

Ideas continued to flow despite declining health: he began work on only his second book of philosophy, the Philosophical Investigations, and on a refutation of skepticism, On Certainty. Both were unfinished when he died of cancer in Cambridge in 1951. He was given a Catholic burial, although he could probably be properly described as an agnostic. Posthumous publication of the Philosophical Investigations and material from his notebooks and lectures continued to enhance his reputation long after his death.

Martin Heidegger, 1889–1976, a major figure in the fields of phenomenology and existentialism, but his outstanding contribution to philosophy has been overshadowed by controversy over his membership in the Nazi Party. He was born in Messkirch, a small rural town in Saxony, southwest Germany. In 1906, he moved to Freiburg to complete his schooling. It was there that his interest in philosophy was sparked when he read Franz Brentano’s On the Manifold Meaning of Being According to Aristotle (1862), a book that inspired the focus of his own philosophical inquiry—the meaning of Being.

A poet and philosopher, Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) played a key role in the development of both the Romantic movement and German Idealism. His poetry, and the novel Hyperion, influenced his philosopher contemporaries Hegel, Schelling, and Fichte—whom he counted among his friends—and much later, were picked up by Martin Heidegger. Hölderlin had a troubled life, always struggling for recognition, and was plagued by mental illness.

In 1915, Heidegger completed his thesis, Duns Scotus’ (Doctrine of Categories and Meaning), and was appointed as an unsalaried lecturer. The next year, he worked alongside Husserl when he became a professor at Freiburg. Heidegger had not only changed the course of his career from theology to philosophy, but had also begun to question his allegiance to Catholicism. This was further confirmed in 1917. Sein un Zeit (Being and Time) was published in 1927, it secured his reputation as one of the foremost thinkers of the 20th century.

Herbert Marcuse, 1898–1979, was a German-American activist and philosopher who reinterpreted the works of Marx and Freud, made major contributions to 'critical theory,' and produced radical critiques of capitalist society. Born in Berlin to a prosperous Jewish family. He completed a PhD in German literature in 1922 at the University of Freiburg. In the late 1960s, Marcuse became a hero of the student anti-war movement. Throughout his life, he remained fascinated by the revolutionary potential of the arts for social transformation. Marcuse’s most influential work was One-Dimensional Man (1964). Here, he argues that mass culture reinforces political oppression, pointing to the 'democratic un-freedom' that persists in 'totally administered' advanced industrial capitalist societies. The culture industry insinuates individuals into networks of production and consumption, creating 'false needs' through advertising and the mass media that obscure the real needs for social change. By the mid-1960s, Marcuse, to his horror, had been branded the father of the New Left and soared to superstardom as a voguish social theorist and political activist. His popularity declined from the late 1970s, when his work was eclipsed by postmodernism, but has reemerged in recent times as issues surrounding consumerism, technology, and new media become increasingly pertinent.

Gilbert Ryle, 1900–1976, spent most of his life at the University of Oxford, and achieved wider fame for his book The Concept of Mind, a refutation of mind–body dualism, which he called 'the dogma of the ghost in the machine.' Ryle used Rodin’s sculpture as a departure point for the question 'What does thinking consist of?' He failed to find a satisfactory answer. Born in Brighton, Sussex, England, Gilbert Ryle was a classic product of the liberal English middle class. His father was a family doctor with intellectual interests.

The book that made his name, The Concept of Mind, was published in 1949. Lucid and witty, it did not use jargon or opaque logical notation, yet its analyses of perception, thought, choice, and meaning were profoundly subtle and complex. Most attention focused on Ryle’s

catchy phrase 'the ghost in the machine,' referring to the Cartesian model of a disembodied mind existing inside the physical body. Ryle called this a 'category mistake'—the assumption that because the body was a material object, the word 'mind' must also correspond to an object, this time an immaterial one. Because of this skepticism about mind, the book was misinterpreted as supporting the Behaviorist school of psychology.

Ryle never married, living with his twin sister in an Oxfordshire village. He was much liked as a tolerant and encouraging tutor. One of his last lectures was titled 'What is Le Penseur Doing?', a reflection on Rodin’s famous sculpture of a thinking man. It is typical of Ryle that he found the idea of thinking—something that had consumed his whole life—to be puzzling. He retired in 1968 and died 8 years later.

Hans-Georg Gadamer, 1900–2002, despite his association with the controversial philosopher Heidegger, Gadamer emerged as a pivotal figure in reestablishing the reputation of German philosophy in the wake of World War II. He gained widespread international recognition only after his retirement from academia. He continued to write, give lectures, and deliver courses in Europe and the US, working until well after his hundredth birthday. He was born in Marburg, Germany, butthe family moved to Breslau, 2 years later when his father became a professor of chemistry at the university there.

During his doctoral research, he came across the writings of the young Martin Heidegger, and after gaining his doctorate in 1922, moved to Freiburg University to study with Edmund Husserl and Heidegger himself—a rising star of the time.

In the 1950s, while teaching at Heidelberg, he worked on his magnum opus, Wahrheit und Methode (Truth and Method) (1960), which established his academic reputation, especially after the translation into English appeared in 1975. In it, he set out his theory of philosophical hermeneutics, arguing that Being and consciousness should be interpreted in terms not of history and culture, but of language: language is essential to human understanding, in that if people do not have the language to express something, it does not exist.

Karl Popper, 1902–1994. In the 1930s, Popper made a major contribution to the understanding of scientific method. In his later political philosophy, he argued against utopian ideological projects and in favor of a freely evolving 'open society.' He was born in Vienna. His parents, prosperous members of the Viennese upper middle class, were Jews who had converted to Protestantism and adopted the empire’s dominant German culture. They raised their children in a belief in social progress based upon rationalist principles and regarded national and ethnic identities as outdated barriers to human development.

Physicist Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, proposed in 1915, challenged the theories of Isaac Newton, which had been considered scientific truth since the 17th century. Einstein’s theory made a number of predictions: among them was that gravity was a warp in the geometry of space-time, and that massive objects could therefore bend light beams. On May 29, 1919, astronomical observations of a total eclipse of the Sun that were conducted in Brazil and on the island of Principe off West Africa confirmed this prediction. The Newtonian version of the universe had to be revised. Popper was impressed that such a venerable theory as Newton’s, apparently confirmed by experiments and observations over centuries, could still be tested and found wanting.

It was in 1930, after leaving the university and while employed as a teacher, that Popper worked out his ideas on science in detail in his first book, Die beiden Grundprobleme der Erkenntnistheorie (The Two Fundamental Problems of the Theory of Knowledge). He argued that the mark of a true scientific proposition or theory was not that evidence could be accumulated to prove it, but that evidence could potentially be produced to falsify it—to prove it wrong.

According to Popper’s ideas, a knowledge of natural laws allows scientists to predict events such as eclipses, but it does not follow that social scientists can formulate historical laws to predict events such as political change. Popper retired from academic life in 1969, but continued to work at philosophy. His final book, The Self and Its Brain, was a bold attempt to resolve the age-old problems of free will and of the relation between the mind and the body in a scientific evolutionary perspective. Popper died in Surrey, aged 92.

Theodor Adorno, 1903–1969, is associated with the theoretical approach known as 'critical theory.' As well as a cultural critic, he was also a composer and musician with a strong interest in aesthetics. He was born in Frankfurt am Main. His mother, an excellent singer, was a Catholic from Corsica, and his father made a living as a wine exporter and was a Jewish convert to Protestantism. Adorno’s family background was comfortable and relatively affluent.

The German Jewish philosopher and sociologist Max Horkheimer (1895–1975) collaborated with Adorno on several major projects, including the development of 'critical theory,' which he outlined in his 1937 paper 'Traditional and Critical Theory.' With Adorno, Habermas, Marcuse, and Benjamin, he shared a fundamental concern with Marxist critiques of capitalist societies. He was most famous for his work at the Frankfurt School and for Dialektik der Aufklärung (Dialectic of Enlightenment) (1944, with Adorno).

Adorno has had an immense influence on the development of 20th century philosophy and cultural theory. His arguments about the darker side of the Enlightenment remain important. However, he was also a controversial figure, and his writing has often been criticized for being overly complex.

For Adorno, this complexity is not accidental: in writing, as in music, he insists that difficulty has an important role to play because it requires us to actively engage with thinking rather than to be passive consumers, a claim that has laid him open to charges of elitism and intellectualism. He was, for example, famously disapproving of jazz, which he saw as a part of the mass culture that he critiqued so fiercely. However, it has often been argued that far from being conformist, jazz is frequently 'tremor-inducing' and disruptive: not necessarily the disruption of Adorno’s high seriousness, but of generating irrepressible energy and joy in the face of forces that seek to repress joy.

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