Modern Philosophy Research Paper

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Beginning with Rene Descartes (1596– 1650), modern philosophers in the West began to reexamine ancient questions about whether the foundation of knowledge is in the mind or the senses—that is, in reason or experience— sometimes by drawing on scientific, mathematical, and analytic approaches. Despite radically differing opinions, these modern thinkers gave primacy to the rational mind, and especially consciousness, as the starting point for philosophical reflection.

Philosophy is a form of rational inquiry into the nature of reality. Though there is no decisive date that marks the beginning of modern philosophy, Rene Descartes (1596–1650) is generally considered the first modern philosopher. The fact that philosophers often work on problems raised by much earlier philosophers, however, makes it hard to divide sharply between periods. Because modern philosophers disagree radically on the nature of philosophy, it is also difficult to define what is unique about modern philosophy. Nevertheless, in contrast with ancient and medieval philosophy, one distinguishing feature of modern philosophy is the primacy it gives to the human mind, and especially consciousness, as the starting point for philosophical reflection. Though by no means uncontested, this concern for the subjective primacy of rational inquiry played an important role in helping to articulate the distinctively Western experience of modernity.

From Descartes to Kant

Rene Descartes was a veteran of the seventeenth-century wars of religion that ravaged Europe, and his desire to a find a secular foundation for knowledge that would escape entanglement in religious disputes had an enduring influence on the shape of modern philosophy. Striving to imitate the precision of mathematics, Descartes proposed to show how the human mind can reliably know things by describing cognition from within. This involved carefully distinguishing between what the mind could know as “clear and distinct,” and the potentially deceptive impressions of the senses. Though himself not a skeptic, Descartes has been accused of encouraging skepticism by thus radically separating mind and body. His own solution to this “Cartesian dualism” was to insist on the reality and benevolence of God as guarantor of clear and distinct knowledge.

Following Descartes, philosophy came to be divided into what historians of philosophy call rationalism and empiricism. Rationalists follow Descartes’s insistence on the unreliability of sense perception, and respond by treating the components of thought (intuitions, ideas, etc.) as primary data for understanding the true nature of reality. They also follow Descartes by holding that the connections between physical and spiritual reality lie, ultimately, in the essence of God, who is characterized less as a personal deity than a logical necessity to explain reality. Leading rationalists include Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716). Empiricists, on the other hand, reject the notion that the mind knows only itself. They stress the immediate encounter with sensory impressions as the proper starting point for philosophical reflection, and warn against the potential of unchecked speculation to muddy the otherwise clear presentation of reality in the senses. Though often seen as an antidote to the skepticism resulting from rationalism, extreme empiricism can also undermine certainty about knowledge. David Hume (1711–1776), for instance, observed that there was nothing in the sensory perception of causal events, like one billiard ball striking and moving another, which explained how the mind perceived such events as necessary.

The Konigsberg philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) proposed to resolve the dilemma Hume raised by establishing the limits of reason, and understanding how within those limits, the mind was able to have certain knowledge. In his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant argued that the necessity one experienced when perceiving causality was an effect of the way the mind organized the experience. It was, properly speaking, “synthetic a priori” knowledge: synthetic, because it required experience of the event, a priori, because the necessity supplied in and by cognition was itself logically prior to any experience. Any attempt to thus radically prioritize either reason or experience in the manner of extreme rationalism or empiricism, was thus doomed to failure. Instead, according to Kant, philosophy must begin with a wholesale “critique” of the conditions for the possibility of any knowledge. This drive to make philosophy both systematic and critical played a major role in shaping the great philosophical systems of the nineteenth century. It was also, in part, what motivated dissenting voices to join in the broadly artistic, but also philosophical, movement known as Romanticism. Drawing on the philosophy of Jean- Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), who stressed society’s corrupting influence on the natural goodness of individuals, Romanticism sought to rehabilitate the importance of the natural and nonrational dimensions of human life.

Kant’s critical philosophy was a major achievement, but did not satisfactorily bridge the gap left by Cartesian dualism. Indeed, Kant himself seemed, to many, to have reinforced the problem by steadfastly denying that the phenomena of perception could tell us anything about “things in themselves.” Kant’s critical philosophy thus led to a truncated conception of experience in which, as with the rationalism he claimed to overcome, the mind only really knew itself. What distinguished Kant from Descartes, however, was Kant’s analysis of a “transcendental” realm of categories that, while not part of the empirical world, were also not reducible to human psychology. This transcendental realm was especially important for the evolution of absolute idealism in the nineteenth century.

Great Systems of the Nineteenth Century

Associated with figures like Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) and the early work of Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854), absolute idealism went beyond the notion that reality was only knowable through the mind to the proposition that reality was fundamentally identifiable with mind. For Fichte, and subsequently for Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), looking for the nature of reality by supposing the activity of the material world on human perception was a dogma that Kant had inherited from the empiricists. The transcendental deduction of categories showed, on the contrary, that reality itself was fundamentally immaterial, or “spiritual.” The task for philosophy therefore was not to understand how thought conformed to the physical world, but to understand how spirit manifested itself as reality. Hegel solved this question by analyzing the course of world history, claiming to show how the unfolding of concrete concepts and forms of thought was nothing but a dialectic through which spirit came to know itself by negating and superseding previous thoughts. According to Hegel, the goal of history to realize World Spirit in self-consciousness expressed as freedom; he devoted his philosophical career to elaborating a comprehensive system devoted to showing this progression in all aspects of world history.

Though discredited in the eyes of philosophers today, Hegel’s attempt to explain systematically the course of world history inspired a generation of philosophical followers. The most famous of these so-called young Hegelians was the philosopher and political economist, Karl Marx (1818–1883). Marx advanced an inversion of Hegelian philosophy that he called “dialectical materialism.” Where Hegel saw the movement of history in terms of a dialectical movement of spirit, Marx held that the dialectic of material conditions was the primary mover of history. This dialectic manifested itself in concrete terms in the class struggle, but was equally at work in forms of thought, like religion and philosophy, that Marx exposed as ideology. Though this led Marx to abandon philosophy in favor of political economy and history, his early philosophical work manifests a deep concern for the underpinnings of human freedom that is revived in the twentieth century as a kind of Marxist humanism. This turn from philosophy to political economy finds an important parallel in the “positivism” of Auguste Comte (1798–1857). Like Hegel, Comte sought to understand systematically the unfolding of world history, but argued that rigorous empirical science and not philosophy was the pinnacle of human knowledge.

Phenomenology

By the end of the nineteenth century, modern philosophy felt decisively overshadowed by the rise of the natural and social sciences alike. The catastrophic destruction of World War I also prompted many to question some of the more pretentious claims of philosophy, and Western civilization as a whole. In this context, Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) sought to rejuvenate philosophy by putting it on a scientific footing. For Husserl, one needed to distinguish precisely between the contents of consciousness and the means by which consciousness grasped these specific contents. By thus “bracketing” the contents of consciousness, one could then isolate the “eidetic essences” by means of which consciousness comprehended the great variety of particulars in experience. Such essences were not, as in Plato, meant to imply the existence of real universals, but served instead as working postulates for discriminating necessary from accidental features of acts of consciousness. Though criticized by some as “psychologism,” apprehending the acts of consciousness with an almost empirical rigor convinced Husserl that he had established the subjective basis for pure logic. Phenomenology exerted a strong appeal both inside and outside of philosophy, and has been influential in areas such as sociology and hermeneutics. One important legacy of phenomenology is the concept of life-world, which draws attention to the links between science and other formalized modes of thought and the conditions of everyday life.

Existentialism

One of the most influential students of phenomenology was Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). Though his philosophical work is often considered suspect because of his support of the Nazi movement in Germany, Heidegger achieved a substantial reorientation in philosophy by recalling the original Greek concern for the question of being. This original metaphysics cannot and should not be subjected to scientific inquiry, because it precedes it as the basic question about human existence as such. Indeed, for Heidegger, humanity is defined precisely as the being for whom being is a matter of concern, and this led him to stress the decisive importance of death as the end toward which being knows itself to be moving. Based on his refusal to subject the question of being to analysis by mundane scientific tools, the later Heidegger defended the thesis that language and even poetry were better suited to what he called the “task of thinking.” He developed increasingly complex modes of expression as a result, and this linguistic esotericism has influenced the evolution of postmodern philosophy.

Though Heidegger is usually taken to have inaugurated the “existential” turn in philosophy, one should not overlook the strongly existential dimension of earlier thinkers such as Soren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). A critic of Hegel, Kierkegaard held that key personal decisions in life, such as love and faith, could never be subsumed philosophically in a system. Throughout his many writings, he drew attention to irresolvable contradictions as a means of heightening consciousness of oneself as the arbiter of existence. Similarly, Nietzsche sought to expose the lifeless herd-mentality of modern existence by means of a relentless critique of middle-class norms. To realize its full potential, humanity had to embrace its fundamentally creative mission, and this meant reversing, or “transvaluing,” values in order to accept the fact that destruction was a necessary part of creation. Although Nietzsche’s writing betrays a distinct pessimism, reflected in his depiction of the “super-man” as the only one able to break through conformity, the will to power represents a philosophical claim about the nature of culture as ideology, not a celebration of egoism at all costs.

Analytic Philosophy

Rooted in earlier traditions of empiricism, analytic philosophy emerged in the twentieth century to become the dominant form of professional philosophy. Sometimes misnamed as “Anglo-American” philosophy, analytic philosophy has important roots in the Vienna Circle and in a number of other German-language thinkers, such as c (1848–1925) and Franz Brentano (1838–1917). Its various manifestations also make it impossible to speak of anything more than a shared spirit of philosophical inquiry. The basic orientation of analytic philosophy is the conviction that philosophy is restricted to analyzing the basic truth or falsity of propositions about states of affairs. For analytic philosophers, the mistake of much previous philosophy was to confuse such propositions with the poetic or emotive uses of language. Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), a logician and mathematician, strongly influenced the development of analytic philosophy with his view that reality could be explained according to the atomic structures of perception and the logical inferences binding them together into wholes. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) reinforced logical atomism in his earlier work, but shifted in his later philosophy to a repudiation of the view that language was reducible to propositions. This paralleled some of what Heidegger was saying, and opened analytic philosophy to a better appreciation of the importance of ordinary life as the mainspring of language use.

The search for a rational kernel that might guide human affairs has been at the core of modern philosophy, since at least Descartes. But the presumption that this kernel rests in consciousness has been subject to challenge on a variety of fronts, including: the growing interest in the neural and biological bases for thought, and the unmasking of philosophy as a tool underwriting social order. While not undermining the basis of philosophy as such, these new perspectives have done much to expose the history of philosophy’s distinctly Western presuppositions and prejudices.

Bibliography:

Critchley, S. (2001). Continental philosophy. A very short introduction. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press.
Dummett, Michael. (1993). Origins of analytical philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Kenny, Anthony. (2006). A new history of western philosophy, vol. 3: The rise of modern philosophy. Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press.
Habermas, Jurgen. (1987). The philosophical discourse of modernity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lowith, Karl. (1964). From Hegel to Nietzsche: The revolution in nineteenth-century thought. New York: Columbia University Press.
Passmore, John. (1968). A hundred years of philosophy. Middlesex: Penguin.
Spiegelberg, Herbert. (1969). The phenomenological movement: A historical introduction. The Hague, The Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff.

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