RELIGIOUS EXISTENTIALISM




Like Heidegger, other writers were also struck by the phenomenological method that placed human existence at the center of our investigation of reality. Several philosophical theologians saw interesting parallels between the existential descriptions of human nature and religious conceptions of our relation to divine reality. For example, several existentialist theologians saw a parallel between the fall of Adam in the Garden of Eden and Heidegger’s conception of inauthentic existence. Just as divine salvation is the solution to original sin, so, too, is authentic life the solution to inauthenticity. It is not just that these notions parallel each other. Instead, according to some theologians, the biblical themes of sin and salvation are simply mythological ways of expressing the distinction between inauthentic and authentic life. Foremost among the religious existentialists were Karl Barth (1886–1968), Emil Brunner (1889–1966), Martin Buber (1878–1965), Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976), Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973), Karl Jaspers (1883–1969), and Paul Tillich (1886–1965). We will look at the contributions of Jaspers and Marcel.

 

Jaspers’s Existence Philosophy

Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) was a professor in Heidelberg and, after World War II, in Basel. He wrote in several areas, including psychology, theology, and political thought. He was influenced by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Husserl, and his philosophical works develop phenomenological and existentialist themes. His main publication in existentialist thought is the three-volume Philosophie (1932).The human condition, he argues in this work, has deteriorated with the development of technology, the emergence of mass movements, and the loosening of the bonds of religion. Each of the sciences has carved out a special area for its subject matter, and each science has developed its own method. Just as each science functions within strict subject-matter limits, so, too, the aggregate of all the sciences is characterized by a limitation of coverage. Thus, each of the sciences is ill-equipped for dealing with the broader issue of total reality. We could not explain total reality any better if we attempted to bring together all of the sciences with their various perspectives. For the central approach to science is to access objective data, and total reality is not limited to objective data.

Jaspers’s quest is for the reality that underlies human life—a reality that he simply calls Existence (Existenz). We discover this component of our existence through philosophy, not through science. There are indeed various human sciences, such as psychology, sociology, and anthropology, but these deal with human nature on an incomplete and superficial level, viewing us only as objects. He writes, “Sociology, psychology and anthropology teach that man is to be regarded as an object concerning which something can be learnt that will make it possible to modify this object by deliberate organization.” Jaspers does recognize the value and usefulness of each of these sciences in the context of their respective narrow goals. His argument, though, is that the task of philosophy is not the same as that of science. Thus, when studying Existence, philosophers must not mimic the sciences by treating Existence as an object of thought; this would simply turn Existence into one among many beings. Thus, although Jaspers does not reject the technical knowledge of science, he insists that the “practice of life” requires that we bring to this knowledge some additional reality. All the principles and laws of science, he insists, are of no avail “unless individual human beings fulfill them with an effective and valuable reality.” The piling up of knowledge cannot by itself assure any particular outcome for us. He writes, “Decisive is a man’s inward attitude, the way in which he contemplates his world and grows aware of it, the essential value of his satisfactions—these things are the origin of what he does.” Philosophy, therefore, must be existence philosophy.

The main task of existence philosophy, then, is to deal with Existence, and to do this, philosophers must consider their own immediate inner and personal experiences. Under these assumptions philosophical thinking cannot set out “to raise philosophy to a science,” as Hegel had. Instead, philosophy must reaffirm that “truth is subjectivity” and that philosophizing means communicating not about objects or objective knowledge but about the content of personal awareness produced by the individual’s inner constitution. Existential thinking, Jaspers says, is “the philosophic practice of life.”

Jaspers does not offer any systematic definition of existence philosophy. Nevertheless, he gives some of its characteristics. Primarily, existence philosophy is the manner of thought through which we seek to become ourselves. It is a way of thought that does not restrict itself to knowing objects but rather “elucidates and makes actual the being of the thinker.” It does not discover solutions in analytic reflection but rather “becomes real” in the dialogue that proceeds from one person to another in genuine communication. Existence philosophy does not assume that human existence is a settled piece of knowledge, since that would make it not philosophy but, once again, anthropology, psychology, or sociology. There is the danger that existence philosophy may lapse into pure subjectivity, into a restrictive preoccupation with one’s own ego, into a justification for shamelessness. But Jaspers considers these possibilities as aberrations. Where it remains genuine, existence philosophy is uniquely effective in promoting all that makes us genuinely human. Each person is “completely irreplaceable. We are not merely cases of universal Being.” The concept of Being, for existence philosophy, arises only in the consciousness of each concrete human being.

 

If existence philosophy can be said to have a “function,” it is to make our minds receptive to what Jaspers calls the Transcendent. The human situation involves three stages. First, I gain knowledge of objects. Second, I recognize in myself the foundations of existence. Third, I become conscious of striving toward my genuine self. At this last stage I discover my finitude. There are certain “limiting situations” that I face, such as the possibility of my own death. However, when I become aware of my own finitude, I simultaneously become aware of the opposite, namely, Being as the Transcendent. This awareness of the Transcendent, which traditional theology calls God, is a purely personal experience incapable of specific delineation or proof. It is simply an awareness that everything, including myself and all objects, is grounded in Being. Central to my awareness of the Transcendent is my concurrent awareness of my own freedom. In my striving to fulfill my genuine self, I am free to affirm or deny my relationship to the Transcendent. Authentic existence, however, requires that I affirm it. I stand in the presence of a choice—an either-or—without the help of any scientific proof or even knowledge, only an awareness. In the end I must express a philosophical faith, which signifies a union with the depths of life.

 

Marcel’s Existentialism

Like Jaspers, Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973) centered his existentialist philosophy on the problem of Being, particularly the human question “What am I?” The central notion of Marcel’s thought is his distinction between a problem and a mystery. He argues that it is not possible to answer the question “What am I?” by reducing it to a problem, analyzing its parts, and then producing a solution. A problem implies that we lack some information or knowledge and that all we need to do is look for it, engage in “research,” and thereby overcome our temporary ignorance. A problem usually revolves around an object or a relationship between objects. Information regarding objects and their relationships can be gathered and calculated. But the question “What am I?” cannot be reduced to a problem, because the I is not an object or an it. Although I am some sort of object, since I do have a body, my being is a combination of subject and object. Because the subjective part of myself can never be eliminated, I cannot be reduced to a mere object, and therefore, the question about my existence is not merely a problem: It is a mystery. Mysteries, then, are certain kinds of experiences that are permanently incapable of being translated into objects “out there.” These experiences always include the subject and are, therefore, matters of mystery. Marcel believed that the element of mystery is virtually irreducible precisely because human existence is a combination of “being and having.” When we have things and ideas, we can express these in objective terms—for example, “I have a new car.” However, being is always a subjective matter.

In the end human existence derives its deepest meaning from the subjective affirmation of Being through fidelity. Marcel writes that “the essence of man is to be in a situation.” He means by this that a person’s relation to Being is different from a stone’s. For one thing, we are the only beings “who can make promises,” a phrase of Nietzsche’s that Marcel wanted to underscore. To be able to make a promise places us in a unique relationship with another person, a kind of relationship that could not possibly exist between two objects. This moral aspect of existence led Marcel to believe that the ultimate character of a person’s relationships involves the element of fidelity. Fidelity offers a clue to the nature of our existence, since it is through fidelity that we continue to shape our lives. We discover fidelity through friendship and love, which gives us the power to overcome the “objectivity” of other people and to produce a new level of intimacy. We commit ourselves to them, such as we do with our spouses. Making commitments, though, creates a new problem. The future is always uncertain, and we do not know for sure what other people might do. Our spouses, for example, might just pack up and leave some day. Should we then just naively go into these relationships? The way out of this problem is to put a higher and more absolute faith in a divine and mysterious order. This has a kind of trickle-down effect and supports our more routine faith commitments between people. Although Marcel was in no sense a traditional theologian, she nevertheless found in the Christian faith the basic spirit of his philosophy, and he converted to Roman Catholicism at the age of 39.

SARTRE

Sartre’s Life

Born in 1905, Jean-Paul Sartre was the son of Jean-Batiste, a naval officer, and Anne-Marie Schweitzer, a first cousin of the famous theologian and jungle doctor Albert Schweitzer. Sartre was educated at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, exhibiting at an early age his precocious gift for literary expression. While at the École Normale, he was attracted to philosophy by Henri Bergson, whose Time and Free Will (1889) left him “bowled over,” feeling that “philosophy is absolutely terrific, you can learn the truth through it.” He spent the years 1934 and 1935 at the Institut Français in Berlin, where he studied Husserl’s phenomenology. Sartre wrote his Transcendental Ego (1936) in Germany while at the institute, and, as he says, “I wrote it actually under the direct influence of Husserl.” It was in Berlin also that he worked on his novel Nausea, which he considered his best work even at the end of his career. In that novel Sartre deals with the pathological feeling we have upon experiencing through intuition the accidental and absurd nature of existence, the feeling that human existence is “contingent” and without explicit purpose. Because he could not find words adequate to describe this philosophical insight to the reader, “I had to garb it in a more romantic form, turn it into an adventure.”

During World War II, Sartre was active in the French Resistance movement and became a German prisoner of war. While in the prisoner-of-war camp, he read Heidegger and “three times a week I explained to my priest friends Heidegger’s philosophy.” The notes he took on Heidegger at this time influenced Sartre very strongly and were, he says, “full of observations which later found their way into Being and Nothingness.” For a brief period he taught at the lycée at Havre, the lycée Henry IV, and the lycée Cordorcet, afterwards resigning to devote himself exclusively to his writings, which ultimately numbered over thirty volumes. As a sequel to Being and Nothingness (1943), Sartre wrote another major work titled Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960). His last book was a three-volume work on Flaubert (The Idiot of the Family, 1971–1972). Although Sartre was influenced by Marxism and continued to be politically active, he was never a member of the Communist Party. While some commentators sought to moralize about Marxism, they were not very successful, Sartre says, “because it was pretty hard to find much in Marxism to moralize about.” His own criticism of Marxism was that it provided no explicit role for morality and freedom. Nor should we consider, Sartre says, “that morality is a simple superstructure, but rather that it exists at the very level of what is called infrastructure.” Because of his activism, he resisted personal acclaim, and when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1964, he refused to accept it on the grounds that he did not want to be “transformed into an institution.”

While a student at the elite École Normale Supérieure, he met a fellow student, Simone de Beauvoir, with whom he enjoyed a lifelong companionship. This was no ordinary relationship. Both were brilliant students. Although she was of immense assistance to Sartre in his prolific literary work, Beauvoir herself achieved great fame as a writer. Sartre never published anything without having Beauvoir read it critically and approve it. While Sartre was honored by the Nobel Prize Committee, Beauvoir similarly moved to first place among women of letters. At the time of Sartre’s death, she was considered France’s most celebrated living writer. Her novel The Mandarins won the Prix Goncourt. Her book The Second Sex, in which she wrote the oftenquoted words “one is not born a woman but becomes one,” won her recognition as a feminist. Her literary works gave her money, fame, and independence. Although Sartre and Beauvoir never married during their fifty-one years together, they had a strong relationship of loyalty and love. There were, however, complications along the way. In one of her memoirs, Beauvoir says, “I was vexed with Sartre for having created the situation with Olga.” This event became the theme of Beauvoir’s first novel, She Came to Stay, about the fictional character’s relation with another woman. This made Beauvoir say about her own situation, “From now on we will be a trio instead of a couple.” Sartre said earlier that Beauvoir was his “privileged,” but not his only, female companion. Sartre once said philosophically that “one can always be free”; Beauvoir asked, “What is the freedom of the women in a harem?” They were a rare couple—she was tall and strikingly beautiful while Sartre was short and homely. Together their fame reached around the world.

Sartre lived simply and with few possessions, finding fulfillment in political involvement and travel, and needing only a small apartment on the Left Bank in Paris. In declining health and virtually blind, he died on April 15, 1980, at the age of 74.

Existence Precedes Essence

Sartre’s name became identified with existentialism primarily because of the lucid, accessible manner in which he wrote. What appeared first in the heavy language of Husserl and Heidegger now came forth from Sartre’s pen in the open, captivating style of novels and short stories. His principal contribution to existentialism is undoubtedly his lengthy Being and Nothingness. However, for some time his views were best known from his brief lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism, published in 1946. Sartre later rejected this piece and defined existentialism in somewhat different terms. Nevertheless, in this lecture he presents his classic formulation of the basic principle of existentialism: Existence precedes essence.

What does it mean to say that existence precedes essence, and how does this formula bear on our understanding of human nature? Sartre argues that we cannot explain human nature in the same way that we describe a manufactured article. When we consider, for example, a knife, we know that it has been made by someone who had in his mind a conception of it, including what it would be used for and how it would be made. Thus, even before the knife is made, the knife maker already conceives it as having a definite purpose and as being the product of a definite process. If by the essence of the knife we mean the procedure by which it was made and the purposes for which it was produced, we can say that the knife’s essence precedes its existence. To look on a knife is to understand exactly what its useful purpose is. When we think about human nature, we tend to describe ourselves also as the product of a maker, of a creator, of God. We think of God most of the time, Sartre says, as a heavenly artisan, implying that when God creates, he knows precisely what he is creating. This would mean that in the mind of God the conception of human nature is comparable to the conception of the knife in the mind of the artisan. Each individual, on this view, is the fulfillment of a definite conception, which resides in God’s understanding.

Some philosophers of the eighteenth century, including Diderot, Voltaire, and Kant, either were atheists or suppressed the idea of God. Nevertheless, they retained the notion that people possess a “human nature”—a nature that is found in every person. Each person, they said, is a particular example of the universal conception of Humanity. Whether someone is a primitive native, in the state of nature, or in a highly civilized society, we all have the same fundamental qualities and are, therefore, all contained in the same definition or conception of Humanity. In short, we all possess the same essence, and our essence precedes our individual concrete or historical existence.

 Sartre turned all this around by taking atheism seriously. He believed that if there is no God, then there is no given human nature precisely because there is no God to have a conception of it. Human nature cannot be defined in advance because it is not completely thought out in advance. People as such merely exist, and only later do we become our essential selves. To say that existence precedes essence means, Sartre says, that people exist, confront themselves, emerge in the world, and define themselves afterward. First, we simply are, and then we are simply that which we make of ourselves.

Perhaps our initial reaction to this formulation of Sartre’s first principle of existentialism is that it is highly subjective—that we can presumably set out to make of ourselves anything we wish. However, his main point here is that a person has greater dignity than a stone or a table. What gives me dignity is possession of a subjective life, meaning I am something that moves myself toward a future and am conscious that I am doing so. The most important consequence of placing existence before essence in human nature is not only that we create ourselves but that responsibility for existence rests squarely on each individual. A stone cannot be responsible. And if human nature was already given and fixed, we could not be responsible for what we are.

 

Freedom and Responsibility

What began in Sartre’s analysis as an amoral subjectivism now turns out to be an ethics of strict accountability based on individual responsibility. If, that is, we are what we make of ourselves, we have no one to blame for what we are except ourselves. Moreover, when I choose in the process of making myself, I choose not only for myself but for all people. I am, therefore, responsible not only for my own individuality but, Sartre says, for all people. This last point seems to contradict the line of reasoning that Sartre has so far been developing. For, before I can choose a course of action, I must ask what would happen if everyone else acted so; this assumes a general human essence that makes my type of action relevant to all people. Sartre does in fact say that, even though we create our own values and thereby create ourselves, we nevertheless create at the same time an image of our human nature as we believe it ought to be. When we choose this or that way of acting, we affirm the value of what we have chosen, and nothing can be better for any one of us unless it is better for all. This all sounds very much like Kant’s categorical imperative. But Sartre does not wish to invoke any universal law to guide moral choice. Instead, he is calling attention to one of the clearest experiences of human beings. That is, all people must choose and make decisions, and although we have no authoritative guide, we must still choose and at the same time ask whether we would be willing for others to choose the same action. We cannot escape the disturbing thought that we would not want others to act as we do. To say that others will not so act is a case of self-deception. The act of choice, then, is one that all of us must accomplish with a deep sense of anguish, for in this act we are responsible not only for ourselves but also for each other. If I evade my responsibility through self-deception, I will not, Sartre argues, be at ease in my conscience.

Although Sartre’s moral language sounds at times very much like traditional moral discourse, his intent is to spell out the rigorous implications of atheism. He accepts Nietzsche’s announcement that “God is dead” and takes seriously Dostoyevsky’s notion that “if God did not exist, everything would be permitted.” In a Godless world our psychological condition is one of abandonment, a word Sartre takes from Heidegger. Abandonment means for Sartre that with the dismissal of God there also disappears every possibility of finding values in some sort of intelligible heaven. Again, there cannot now be any “good” prior to our choice since there is no infinite or perfect consciousness to think it. Our sense of abandonment is a curious consequence of the fact that everything is indeed permitted, and as a result we are forlorn, for we cannot find anything on which we can rely, either within or outside ourselves. We are without any excuses. Our existence precedes our essence. Apart from our existence there is nothingness. There is only the present. In his Nausea Sartre writes that the true nature of the present is revealed as what exists, that what is not present does not exist. Things are entirely what they appear to be, and apart from them there is nothing.

To say there is nothing besides the existing individual means for Sartre that there is no God, no objective system of values, no built-in essence, and, most importantly, no determinism. An individual, Sartre says, is free; a person is freedom. In a classic phrase he says that people are condemned to be free. We are condemned because we find ourselves thrown into the world, yet free because as soon as we are conscious of ourselves, we are responsible for everything we do.

Sartre rejects the notion that we are swept up by a torrent of passion and that such passion could be regarded as an excuse for our actions. He also rejects Freud’s view that human behavior is mechanically determined by unconscious and irrational desires; this provides us with an excuse to avoid responsibility. For Sartre we are responsible even for our passions, because even our feelings are formed by our deeds. Kierkegaard said that freedom is dizzying, and Sartre similarly says that freedom is appalling. This is precisely because there is nothing forcing us to behave in any given way, nor is there a precise pattern luring us into the future. Each of us is the only thing that exists. We are all free, Sartre says, so we must choose, that is, invent, because no rule of general morality can show us what we ought to do. There are no guidelines guaranteed to us in this world.

Nothingness and Bad Faith

There is an element of despair in human existence, which comes, Sartre says, from the realization that we are limited to what is within the scope of our own wills. We cannot expect more from our existence than the finite probabilities it possesses. Here Sartre believes that he is touching on the genuine theme of personal existence by emphasizing our finitude and our relation to nothingness. “Nothingness,” he says, “lies coiled in the heart of being, like a worm.” Heidegger located the cause of human anxiety in our awareness of our finitude when, for example, we confront death—not death in general but our own death. It is not only people who face nothingness, Heidegger says; all Being has this relation to nothingness. Human finitude is, therefore, not simply a matter of temporary ignorance or some shortcoming or even error. Finitude is the very structure of the human mind, and words such as guilt, loneliness, and despair describe the consequences of human finitude. The ultimate principle of Being, Heidegger says, is will. Sartre concurs by saying that only in action is there any reality. We are only a sum of our actions and purposes; besides our actual daily lives we are nothing. If I am a coward, I make myself a coward. It is not the result of my cowardly heart or lungs or cerebrum. I am a coward because I made myself into a coward by my actions.

Although there is no prior essence in all people, no human nature, there is nevertheless, Sartre says, a universal human condition. By discovering myself in the act of conscious thought, I discover the condition of all people. We are in a world of intersubjectivity. This is the kind of world in which I must live, choose, and decide. For this reason no purpose that I choose is ever wholly foreign to another person. This does not mean that every purpose defines me forever but only that we all may be striving against the same limitations in the same way. For this reason Sartre would not agree that it does not matter what we do or how we choose. I am always obliged to act in a situation— that is, in relation to other people—and consequently, my actions must not be capricious, since I must take responsibility for all my actions. Moreover, to say that I must make my essence, or invent my values, does not mean that I cannot judge human actions. It is still possible to say that my action was based on either error or self-deception, for if I hide behind the excuse of following my passions or espousing some theory of determinism, I deceive myself.

To invent values, Sartre says, means only that there is no meaning or sense in life prior to acts of will. Life cannot be anything until it is lived, but each individual must make sense of it. The value of life is nothing else but the sense each person fashions in it. To argue that we are the victims of fate, of mysterious forces within us, of some grand passion, or heredity, is to be guilty of bad faith (mauvaise foi) or self-deception, of inauthenticity. Suppose, Sartre says, that a woman who consents to go out with a particular man knows very well what the man’s cherished intentions are, and she knows that sooner or later she will have to make a decision. She does not want to admit the urgency of the matter, preferring to interpret all his actions as discreet and respectful. She is, Sartre says, in self-deception; her actions are inauthentic. All human beings are guilty, in principle, of similar inauthenticity—of acting in bad faith, of playing roles, and of trying to disguise their actual personality behind a facade. The conclusion of Sartre’s existentialism is, therefore, that if I express my genuine humanity in all my behavior, I will never deceive myself, and honesty will then become not my ideal but my very being.

Human Consciousness

Underlying Sartre’s popular formulation of existentialism is his technical analysis of existence. He argues that there are different ways of existing. First, there is being-in-itself (l’en-soi), which is the way that a stone is: It merely exists. In one respect: I am no different from any other kind of existing reality. I exist, just the same way anything else is, as simply being there. Second, there is being-for-itself (le pour-soi), which involves existing as a conscious subject, which is what people do and things like rocks cannot do. As a conscious subject I can relate to both the world of things and people in a variety of ways. At one level I am conscious of “the world,” which is everything that is beyond or other than myself and which, therefore, transcends me. At this level I experience the world simply as a solid, massive, undifferentiated, single something that is not yet separated into individual things. Sartre describes this type of consciousness in Nausea where the character Roquentin is sitting on a park bench. He looks at all the things before him in the park, and all at once he sees everything differently, everything as a single thing—“Suddenly existence had unveiled itself.” Words vanished, and the points of reference that people use to give meaning to things also vanished. What Roquentin saw was existence as “the very paste of things”: “The root [of the tree], the park gates, the bench, the sparse grass, all that had vanished: the diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses, all in disorder—naked.” Only later, when we reflect, does the world become our familiar one. But, Sartre says, “The world of explanations and reasons is not the world of existence.” At the level of Roquentin’s experience, the world is the unity of all the objects of consciousness.

Sartre agrees with Husserl that all consciousness is consciousness of something, which means that there is no consciousness without affirming the existence of an object that exists beyond, that is, transcends, our consciousness. As we have seen, the object of consciousness can be “the world” as simply “being there.” But in addition to the world as a single solid mass, we speak of specific objects like trees, benches, and tables. Whenever we identify a specific object, we do this by saying what it is not—we differentiate a thing from its background. When a chair appears as a chair, we give it that meaning by blacking out the background. What we call a chair is fashioned or drawn out of the solid context of the world by the activity of consciousness. The world of things appears as an intelligible system of separate and interrelated things only to consciousness. Without consciousness the world simply is, and as such it is without meaning. Consciousness constitutes the meaning of things in the world, though it does not constitute their being.

When we view the world as being-in-itself, as simply being there, Sartre says that “the essential point is contingency. I mean that by definition existence is not necessity. To exist is simply to be there.” Contingency means that when something exists, it does so by chance and not because it necessarily follows from something else: “Existences appear . . . but you cannot deduce them.” The world we experience is “uncreated, without reason for being, without any relation to another being; being-in-itself is gratuitous for all eternity.” The meaning anything will have in the world will depend, Sartre says, on the choices people make. Even a table will have alternative meanings depending on what a particular person chooses to use it for—for example, to serve dinner or to write a letter. A mountain valley will mean one thing to a farmer and something else to a camper. Here consciousness shifts us from being-in-itself (simply being there) to being-for-itself, where consciousness dramatically differentiates the objects of the world from the conscious self as subject.

The activity of consciousness is at this point twofold. First, consciousness defines specific things in the world and invests them with meaning. Second, consciousness puts a distance between itself and objects and, in that way, attains freedom from those objects. Because the conscious self has this freedom from the things in the world, it is within the power of consciousness to confer different or alternative meanings on things. The activity of consciousness is what is usually called “choice.” We choose to undertake this project or that project, and the meaning of things in the world will depend to a considerable extent on what project we choose. If I choose to be a farmer, then the mountains, the valley, and the impending storm will have special meanings for me. If I choose to be a camper in that valley, the surroundings and the storm will present different meanings.

Marxism and Freedom Revisited

Although Sartre believed that Marxism was the philosophy of his time, he was aware of a striking contradiction between his existentialism and Marxist dialectical materialism. Sartre’s existentialism strongly espouses human freedom. By contrast, Marxist dialectical materialism emphasizes that all the structures and organizations of society and the behavior and thinking of human beings are determined by prior events. On this view freedom of choice is an illusion, and we are simply vehicles through which the forces of history realize themselves. Whereas Sartre argued that it is human consciousness that “makes history” and confers meaning on the world, Marxism holds that the social and economic structures of history direct its own development. Rather than conferring meaning on the world, our minds, the Marxist says, discover this meaning within the historical context as a matter of scientific knowledge. One reason Sartre never became a member of the Communist Party is, he says, because “I would have had to turn my back on Being and Nothingness” and its emphasis on human freedom.

 

In his earlier writings Sartre focused primarily on the individual and freedom. Later, in his Critique of Dialectical Reason, he focused more on the historical and social context in which people find themselves and that has an effect on their behavior. He thought that Marx succeeded more than anyone else in describing how social and economic structures develop and how they bear on human decisions. Sartre accepted increasingly the limitations on human choice—the limitations of birth, status in society, and family background. Earlier, he sought to describe how individuals are capable of deceiving themselves by making excuses for their behavior, as if they were not free to have behaved otherwise—a form of self-deception. He never did depart from this emphasis on the freedom of the individual. But he did adjust his thinking under the influence of Marxism by facing the fact of people’s social existence, or their relationship to other people, especially as a member of a group—for example, a labor union. Acknowledging the influence of group structures on human behavior and consciousness, resulting particularly in labor’s sense of alienation, he revised his optimistic view of human freedom to some extent.

In 1945 Sartre wrote that “no matter what the situation might be, one is always free.” As an example, he states that “a worker is always free to join a union or not, as he is free to choose the kind of battle he wants to join, or not.” Recalling this statement some years later, in 1972, Sartre says that this “all strikes me as absurd today.” And he admits, “There is no question that there is some basic change in [my] concept of freedom.” In his lengthy work on Flaubert, he concludes that although Flaubert was free to become uniquely Flaubert, his family background and his status in society meant that “he did not have all that many possibilities of becoming something else . . . he had the possibility of becoming a mediocre doctor . . . and the possibility of being Flaubert.” This means, Sartre says, that social conditioning exists every minute of our lives. Nevertheless, he concludes that “I am still faithful to the notion of freedom.” It is true, he says, that “you become what you are in the context of what others have made of you”; nevertheless, within these limitations a person is still free and responsible. This is Sartre’s way of reconciling the fact that historical conditions affect human behavior with his intuitive certainty that human beings are also capable of shaping history. In doing this, Sartre sought to overcome with his existentialism what he considered the major flaw of Marxist philosophy, namely, its failure to recognize the individual as a “real person.”

MERLEAU-PONTY

Merleau-Ponty’s Life

Maurice Merleau-Ponty was born in 1908, and from 1926 to 1930, he studied at the École Normale Supérieure. The philosophy curriculum at that time was steeped in both rationalism and idealism. Merleau-Ponty says of his teacher, Leon Brunschvicg, that he “passed on to us the idealist heritage.  This philosophy consisted largely in reflexive effort . . . [which] sought to grasp external perception or scientific constructions as a result of mental activity.” Merleau-Ponty was one year behind Sartre, who also attended that school. An interesting interview between Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir describes the relation between the two at that time. Beauvoir: “You were standoffish with people you did not like. Merleau-Ponty, for example. You were on very bad terms with him, weren’t you?” Sartre: “Yes, but even so I once protected him from some men who wanted to beat him up.” Beauvoir: “You were singing obscene songs; and being pious, he wanted to stop you?” Sartre: “He went out. Some fellows ran after him there were two of them—and they were going to beat him up because they were furious. So I went out, too. I had a sort of liking for Merleau-Ponty. . . . [I said] Leave him alone, and let him go. So they didn’t do anything; they went off.”

In 1929 Merleau-Ponty came under the influence of Gustave Rodrigues, director of the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly where Merleau-Ponty was fulfilling his student teaching assignment. Merleau-Ponty, the young Catholic, found Rodrigues, an atheist, to have an “extraordinary character,” leading MerleauPonty to say that “an atheist resembles other men.” In 1936 he broke with Catholicism as he worked through his version of phenomenology in his fi rst work, The Structure of Behavior. He saw active duty during World War II, in 1939 and 1940. He taught at the Lycée Carnot in Paris during the German occupation and at this time composed his greatest philosophical work, The Phenomenology of Perception.

From their early days at École Normale Supérieure, the lives and careers of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty unfolded as a stormy relationship during which they would be alternately friends and enemies. With the help of Merleau-Ponty, Sartre organized a resistance network in the winter of 1941, called “Socialism and Liberty.” Their goal was to bring about a form of political society based on a harmony between a socialist economy and freedom for the individual. In a collaboration that lasted from 1945 to 1952, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty published Les Temps Moderne, a journal aimed at political commentary. While engaged in the journal, Merleau-Ponty taught at the University of Lyon and then the Sorbonne, and in 1952 he was appointed chair of philosophy at the Collège de France, a position that he held until his death. Merleau-Ponty’s political views were progressively becoming less sympathetic toward the former Soviet Union. In 1950 he wrote an editorial denouncing the labor camps there:

If there are ten million concentration camp inmates while at the other end of the Soviet hierarchy salaries and standard of living are fifteen to twenty times higher than those of the free workers—then . . . the whole system swerves and changes meaning; and in spite of the nationalization of the means of production, and even though private exploitation of man by man and unemployment are impossible in the U.S.S.R., we wonder what reasons we still have to speak of socialism in relation to it.

These labor camps, Merleau-Ponty said, were “still more criminal because they betray the revolution.” Around 1952, while Sartre was moving toward closer ties with the Communists, Merleau-Ponty left the editorship of Les Temps Moderne. A few years later, Merleau-Ponty wrote a book, Adventures of the Dialectic, in which he included a chapter analyzing in detail Sartre’s relationship with communism. The chapter “Sartre and Ultrabolshevism” ends with this critical sentence: “One cannot at the same time be both a free writer and a communist.” Actually, both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty ultimately became disenchanted with communism. As we saw earlier, Sartre never became a member of the Communist Party because that would have forced him to give up his strongly held position that people are free. With his philosophical work still far from complete, and at the height of his creativity, Merleau-Ponty died on May 4, 1961, at the age of 53.

The Primacy of Perception

In the Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty offers a theory of perception in reaction against both dualist and realist theories. Intellectualists (or dualists), such as Descartes, argued that not only are our minds distinct from our bodies but our mental concepts and processes have priority over the sensory data that we get from our bodies. Our minds interpret sensory information, fi ll in the gaps, and make it meaningful. Descartes vividly espouses this view here:

When looking from a window and saying I see men who pass in the street, I really do not see them, but infer that what I see is men. . . . And yet what do I see from the window but hats and coats which may cover automatic machines? Yet I judge these to be men. And similarly solely by the faculty of judgment which rests in my mind, I comprehend that which I believed I saw with my eyes.

Realists took the opposite view that we receive perceptions of the world exactly as it is and that our minds do not organize our perceptions any further. Merleau-Ponty strikes a middle ground: The perceptual nature of our bodies constructs and shapes sensory data; our higher mental functions play no such role. In fact, even our higher intellectual thought processes are grounded in the perceptual framework of our bodies. He writes, “All consciousness is perceptual, even the consciousness of ourselves.” The main theme of this theory, then, is the primacy of perception:

By the words, the ‘primacy of perception,’ we mean that the experience of perception is our presence at the moment when things, truths, values are constituted for us. . . . It is not a question of reducing human knowledge to sensation, but of assisting at the birth of this knowledge, to make it as sensible as the sensible, to recover the consciousness of rationality.

Merleau-Ponty was particularly influenced by the early-twentieth-century theory of Gestalt psychology, which held that our perceptual experiences are shaped by inherent forms and structures that give sense, meaning, and value to our experiences. For Merleau-Ponty these structures are embedded in bodily perception.

Merleau-Ponty encapsulates his position in the notion that “I am my body,” thus denying that I can somehow separate myself as a mental subject from myself as a bodily object. The two components of myself are united in my lived experience through my body. By identifying the self as a body, Merleau-Ponty is not espousing the materialist views in the tradition of Democritus and the atomists. According to traditional materialism, I am essentially a physical machine, and the mental components of my life are more or less explained away by the machinery of my body. Instead, for Merleau-Ponty, the mental aspects of me are embedded in my body; I am a body-subject, rather than a thoughtless and mechanical body.

The Relativity of Knowledge

Merleau-Ponty says that “in the final analysis every perception takes place within a certain horizon and ultimately in the ‘world.’”This follows from the fact that perception results from a person’s bodily presence in the world. A bodily presence already means that as a subject each of us is situated in the world at a certain time and with a unique perspective. The ideas we ultimately have reflect this partial view and our experience in time so that “the ideas to which we recur are valid for only a period of our lives.” The thing we perceive is not a complete thing or ideal unity possessed by the intellect, like a geometrical notion; “it is rather a totality open to a horizon of an indefinite number of perspectival views.” This means further that “the things which I see are things for me only under the condition that they always recede beyond their immediate given aspects.” For example, we never see all sides of a cube or a lamp or any other thing. Similarly, other observers will see things from their perspectives. Moreover, our perceptions occur during the ticking away of time, even though we are not aware of this sequence of the segments of time. At this point, Merleau-Ponty asks,

Can I seriously say that I will always hold the ideas I do at present—and mean it? Do I not know that in six months, in a year, even if I use more or less the same formulas to express my thoughts, they will have changed their meaning slightly? Do I not know that there is a life of ideas, as there is meaning of everything I experience, and that every one of my most convincing thoughts will need additions and then will be, not destroyed, but at least integrated into a new unity?

He concludes that “this is the only conception of knowledge that is scientific and not mythological.” It means, moreover, that “the idea of going straight to the essence of things is an inconsistent idea if one thinks about it.” The most we can get from our perception of the world is “a route, an experience which gradually clarifies itself, which gradually rectifies itself and proceeds by dialogue with itself and others.”

A dialogue with “others” assumes that everyone can in some way share a similar experience of the world. But can Merleau-Ponty’s theory, which concentrates on each subject’s internal experience of the world, explain how two people can have a coherent conversation? Perceptions are relative to each person as a result of our unique perspectives, since “our body . . . is our point of view of the world.” Merleau-Ponty tries to solve this problem by using the concept of an “a priori of the species.” As members of a single species, all human beings perceive certain forms in a like manner. He says that “as Gestalttheorie has shown there are for me preferred forms that are also preferred for all other persons.” I will, of course, “never know how you see red and you will never know how I see it. But our first reaction to this separation of our consciousnesses is to “believe in an undivided being between us.” As I perceive another person, “I find myself in relation with another ‘myself,’ who is, in principle, open to the same truths as I am.” Even though there are two of us looking at the world, it is not the case that because of our different perspectives there are “two numerically distinct worlds.” There is, Merleau-Ponty says, a demand that “what I see be seen by [you] also.”

Perception and Politics

We might think that Merleau-Ponty’s account of the relativity of perceptual knowledge would not be well suited to deal with the problems of political, social, and economic order. After all, these subjects call for permanent and stable notions of “justice” and “freedom,” which Plato’s or Kant’s theories might better explain. This would contradict the existentialist notion that there are no essential and timeless values, that there is no essential human nature to be fully realized, and that people must create their own values. Merleau-Ponty has an answer to this. Right off, he rejects the lofty claims of abstract theories of politics, justice, and morality. Although Plato and others claimed that such values are based on “timeless” notions of the human good, these values in fact are simply reflections of the present circumstances of a particular culture. So-called universal political values were imposed on us by people who themselves had not participated in creating those systems of government; as such, such values are not a blessing but represent the heavy hand of oppression. Invariably, the so-called universal values turned out to be to the advantage of special groups. This was one reason Merleau-Ponty found in Marxism a congenial type of thought. Marxism, while abstract up to a point, was nevertheless embodied in an actual system, the communism of the former Soviet Union.

Further, Merleau-Ponty argues that “things” are not all that we encounter through perception. Values are just as specifically perceived and have the same status as other aspects of the world. Values are significant, Merleau-Ponty says, “because they are apprehended with a certainty which, from the phenomenological viewpoint, is a final argument.” In addition, perception provides us with the important element of meaning. This is particularly significant when our perceptions encounter the actual ways people live among each other. From these actual living and working arrangements, Merleau-Ponty says, we can discover certain background meanings that reveal the changes and movements of specific groups of people. These changes are not simply facts, but they reveal the direction of history. This is another reason why Merleau-Ponty was attracted to communism, for here was a system and theory that could be observed concretely as the bearer of meaning located in the aspirations of the whole class of workers. Thus, in the absence of any viable abstract theories of justice, Merleau-Ponty looked to the only sure source of political knowledge, namely, perception. Here he felt that he discovered not the universality of an idea but the universality of the proletariat, which is the bearer of the meaning of history.

Both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty were drawn to communism after World War II for similar reasons. It represented the chief alternative to the status quo, and the turbulent events of the time called for a new philosophical basis for political action, which they felt existentialism and phenomenology could provide. But they did not always agree with Marxism or with each other’s views of Marxism. Their prolonged and heated disagreements ultimately led in 1952 to the termination of their friendship and affected their views on communism. As Sartre wrote in 1961, “Each of us was conditioned, but in opposite directions. Our slowly accumulated disgust made the one [Merleau-Ponty] discover, in an instant, the horror of Stalinism, and the other [Sartre] that of his own [bourgeois] class.”

Merleau-Ponty held that it is possible to perceive in actual society the developing consciousness of the working class. He saw a relationship here between the individual, the institutions of society, a scale of values, and reality. Most importantly, he thought he perceived that the developing consciousness of this class was the bearer of a rather specific meaning, a meaning that was growing steadily stronger and was shaping the direction of history. At the center of this overall perception was the urge on the part of this class to resolve the contradictions of the workers’ conditions and to organize a humane appropriation of nature. It also meant “as a universal class . . . to transcend national and social conflicts as well as the struggle between man and man.” This was the heart of the promise of communism, which Merleau-Ponty originally thought was corroborated by his own perceptions. But he was willing to admit that Marxism would be refuted if the proletariat could not overcome the strong structure of capitalism, if it could not eliminate violence, and if it could not bring about humane relationships among people. “It would mean,” Merleau-Ponty says, “that there is no history—if history means the advent of humanity and the mutual recognition of men as men.”

SUMMARY

Phenomenology avoids questions about the so-called objective nature of things and instead explores phenomena more subjectively from within one’s human experience. Existentialism adopts this phenomenological approach and further emphasizes the importance of making choices and personal commitments.

According to Husserl, philosophy in his day was in a state of crisis by adopting the naturalist view that physical nature envelops everything there is; this resulted in philosophy’s rejection of the realm of spirit (i.e., human culture). His solution to this crisis is phenomenology. Inspired by Descartes’s systematic doubting process, Husserl argued that we should disregard all our present knowledge and build a philosophy from our subjective experiences without any presuppositions. The foundation of the self’s subjective experience is intentionality: consciousness is always about something. Thus, any object of my subjective consciousness, such as a house or a person, is constructed by (or “intended” by) me. Our perceptions give us only fragments of reality, such as seeing a person’s profile, and our consciousness automatically constructs the person. This ability of the self to construct the world is what he calls “passive genesis.” In this process of constructing the world, I do not have access to any external things-in-themselves behind the world that my mind constructs.  The only thing I have access to is the phenomena as it is constructed and intended by my subjective consciousness. Thus, he argued, I must “bracket” or ignore questions about whether my experiences are grounded in an external world. In this way, my subjective self contains the world and is the center of reality. The realm of the daily world that I construct and experience, before it gets interpreted by science, is what he calls the “life-world.”

Inspired by Husserl, Heidegger argued that any study of the world requires that we first understand our human existence, which forms our conceptions of the world. He calls this fundamental human existence “Dasien,” which is German for “being there.” Our first and most primitive state of human existence is what he calls “being-in-the-world”: we encounter things in the world as utensils or tools that serve purposes, such as with a hammer. The different purposes of various objects overlap and interconnect and create a network of purposes. A second aspect of human existence is what he calls “concern”: we are concerned about many things. There are three components to this: (1) facticity, insofar as I have been thrown into the world without choice; (2) existentiality, where I have the freedom to transform my life; and (3) fallenness, where I lose sight of my unique and authentic character and fail to take responsibility for my actions. When acting inauthentically, I behave as expected, gossip, seek distractions, and deny the fact that I will someday die. This creates anxiety, which in turn awakens within me the need to live authentically. Religious existentialists held that religious themes of sin and salvation are only mythological ways of expressing Heidegger’s distinction between inauthentic and authentic life. Jaspers refers to our authentic and genuine life as “Existence.” We achieve this by becoming aware that everything is grounded in Transcendent Being (which is traditionally called God), and I affirm my relation to the Transcendent through an act of philosophical faith. Marcel argued that human existence derives its deepest meaning through acts of fidelity, which gives us a greater sense of Being.

According to Sartre, the basic principle of existentialism is that existence precedes essence. That is, human beings are not defined by a pre-established human nature (i.e., an essence), but instead we first act and exist within the world, and define ourselves from that. This gives each of us responsibility for who we are, and we cannot blame our human nature or circumstances for what we do. We make our choices with a sense of anguish since, if I act immorally, I cannot escape the disturbing thought that I would not want others to act as I do. I choose, then, not only for myself but for all people. Sartre argued that there is nothing besides the existing individual: no God, no objective system of values, and no built-in essence. There is also no determinism, which means people are “condemned” to be free because of the responsibility that this imposes on us. If I am a coward, I am such because of my own actions. All human beings are guilty of acting inauthentically in bad faith, by which we play roles and disguise our actual personalities behind a facade. Sartre distinguishes between two ways of existing. There is unconscious being-in-itself such as with the existence of a rock; it is simply there. Then, there is being-for-itself, which is the existence of humans whereby our consciousness (1) defines specific things in the world and gives them meaning, and (2) puts a distance between myself and objects, thereby giving me freedom from those objects. Later in his life Sartre adopted Marxism and its view that social conditions shape who people are; however, Sartre still maintained that people are free within those limitations.

Merleau-Ponty offered a theory of perception in reaction against both dualists thought, such as Descartes’s, and realist thinking, which holds that we perceive the world exactly as it is. There is, he argued, a “primacy of perception,” by which he meant that perceptual experiences are shaped by perceptual structures within our bodies. Knowledge is relative in that it results from a person’s bodily presence in the world at a particular point in time and space. Although we each see things from our own unique perspective, as members of the same species, we also perceive certain forms in the same manner; he calls this the “a priori of the species.” Merleau-Ponty argued that we perceive moral and political values the same way that we do other aspects of the world, specifically when we encounter social classes and the values they hold.

 

RECENT PHILOSOPHY

Philosophy has undergone dramatic changes since the mid-twentieth century. Foremost is the booming number of people writing in the field. Part of this owes to the remarkable increase in philosophy professors at colleges and universities around the world, which reflects both a spike in world population growth and a continually increasing percentage of people attending college. Not only are there more academically trained philosophers, but there also are increased expectations in universities for philosophers to write—publish or perish as the famous motto goes. Thus, perhaps five times as many philosophy books and journal articles appeared in the year 2000 as in 1950. A consequence of this literary productivity is that philosophy is now highly specialized. It is impossible for a single philosopher to have a full grasp of all the innovative ideas emerging in the different areas of philosophy. When philosophical output was more manageable, we might expect a great figure like Kant to singlehandedly alter the direction of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and the philosophy of religion. Now, the most creative philosophers focus on only one or two of these areas.

An influential writer in one area of philosophy may be a completely unknown figure to a specialist in another area. Paralleling other academic disciplines, philosophy now is driven less by the thoughts of great individual minds and more so by great issues and movements within the discipline. Some individual names certainly rise to the forefront in specific areas of philosophy, but the time may have passed to produce giants like Descartes, Hume, and Kant.

Philosophy is also more multicultural now than it has ever been. In past centuries leading philosophers in the Western world were white men who perpetuated a European tradition of thought. Most notable now is the presence of women in the discipline, who, in the United States, accounted for one-quarter of the academic philosophers by the beginning of the twenty-first century. This rising number of female philosophers sparked an interest in philosophical issues that directly address the concerns of women. Some of these discussions have a politically revolutionary tone and draw attention to the ways that male-centered culture has oppressed women. Other discussions explore how uniquely female ways of thinking impact traditional problems of philosophy, such as theories of knowledge, ethics, and aesthetics. Philosophy is also more multicultural in that it now recognizes the philosophical contributions of nonWestern cultures. This is particularly so with Asian philosophy, which has a history of philosophical writings as old as the Greek tradition is in the West. As specialized and culturally diverse as philosophy is today, at best only a sample of key issues and figures can be presented here.

THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM

The mind-body problem is one of the oldest and most explored areas of philosophy. We have seen that Democritus and other atomists attempted to reduce all human mental processes to the operations of material stuff, which strictly follow physical laws. Plato, by contrast, believed that our souls (and thereby our rational minds) are distinct from our bodies and cannot be reduced to material constituents. Developing Plato’s view, Descartes attempted to explain how our spiritual minds interact with our physical bodies. His solution was that messages pass between our spirits and bodies by way of the pineal gland within our brains—which acts as a type of metaphysical switchboard. Although Descartes’s specific theory created more problems than it solved, the tendency in philosophy after Descartes was nevertheless to accept his radical split between our spiritual minds and physical bodies. As biologists learned more about the human brain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Descartes’s mind-body dualism became more untenable—at least to a scientific way of thinking. For scientists the original contention held by the atomists seemed more correct, namely, that mental events are simply the result of physical brain activity. This position—most generally called materialism —is now the standard philosophical solution to the mind-body problem. Some philosophers within religious traditions still defend the spirit-body dualism of Descartes, but the majority of the writers on this subject are from nonreligious universities and have set Descartes’s solution aside. The dominant issue is not one of how our  spiritual minds interact with our physical brains. Instead, the concern is with how our mental experiences can be best explained in terms of brain activity. Assuming that I lack an immaterial spirit, it is difficult to see how my mental experiences are simply the result of biological machinery in my brain.

Ryle’s Ghost in the Machine

The inspiration for most discussions of the mind-body problem today is the book Concept of Mind (1949) by British philosopher Gilbert Ryle (1900–1976), who began teaching at Oxford University in 1924. Ryle contends that the “official doctrine” of mind is unsound and contradicts virtually everything we know about human mentality. In its simplest form the official doctrine holds that every human being has both a mind and a body, that these two are coordinated, but that upon the death of the body the mind may continue both to exist and exert its powers. Not only is this basic theory of mind-body incorrect, Ryle says, but it also leads to many other serious errors as we elaborate on the implications of the theory. One erroneous consequence of this theory is its implied view that each person has two parallel histories, one consisting of the events of the body and the other consisting of what transpires in the mind. Whereas human bodies are in space and are governed by mechanical physical laws, minds do not exist in space and are not subject to such laws. A person’s bodily life is publicly observable, while the activities of the mind are not accessible to external observers and so are private. This requires us to say that the workings of the body are external whereas the workings of the mind are internal. It is then a short step to say that the mind is in the body. This language describing the place of the mind may be metaphorical, since minds do not occupy space and thus could hardly be in any particular place. Nevertheless, Ryle argues, we often do take quite literally this contrast between the outer and inner realms. Psychologists, for example, assume that sensory stimuli come from outside and from far distances and generate mental responses inside the skull. All of this suggests some type of transaction between mind and body. However, no laboratory experiment can discover this relationship. This also suggests that what goes on inside my mind is a secret activity, which people on the outside do not have access to. For example, my mental acts of knowing, hoping, dreading, and intending are private events.

Because this traditional theory completely isolates the mind from the body, Ryle calls this view the “dogma of the Ghost in the Machine.” What Ryle finds wrong with this dogma is not that some details here and there are ambiguous but that the very principle on which the theory rests is false. It is not even a series of particular mistakes. It is, Ryle says, one big mistake of a unique kind, and this he calls a “category-mistake.” The big mistake consists of representing the facts of mental life as if they belong to one and the same logical category when in fact they belong to quite different and separate ones. The official theory is, therefore, a “myth,” and it is necessary to “rectify the logic of mental-conduct concepts.”

To illustrate this category-mistake, Ryle describes the imaginary visit of a foreigner to Oxford University for the first time. The visitor is shown the museums, scientific laboratories, and some of the colleges. Having seen these various places, the visitor asks, “But where is the university?” The question assumes that the university is yet another institution, or a counterpart to the colleges and laboratories, or another entity that can be seen in the same way as the others. Actually, the “university” is simply how all of these components are coordinated. Thus, the visitor’s mistake consists of the assumption that we can correctly speak of Oxford’s library, museum, and various other components, and the university as if the university was the same kind of member in the class to which the others belong. In short, the visitor mistakenly placed the university into the wrong category—a category in which it does not belong. In a similar illustration Ryle speaks of the mistake that a child makes when watching a military parade in which a division is marching by. Having been told that he is seeing battalions, batteries, and squadrons, the child wants to know when the division is going to appear. Again, the child assumes that the division is another unit similar to the others, not realizing that in seeing the battalions, batteries, and squadrons he has already seen the division. The mistake is in thinking it correct to speak of battalions, batteries, squadrons, and a division. He placed the division in the wrong category. These category-mistakes show an inability to use certain elements in the English language correctly. What is more significant, Ryle says, is that people who are perfectly capable of applying concepts are nevertheless liable in their abstract thinking to allocate these concepts to logical categories to which they do not belong.

Ryle believes that the Ghost in the Machine dogma makes a similar error and that “a family of radical category-mistakes is the source of the double-life theory.” Advocates of the dogma hold that a person’s feelings, thinking, and purposive activities cannot be described solely in terms of physics; because of this they conclude that mental activity must be described in a set of counterpart idioms. Moreover, because mental conduct differs so from bodily activities, advocates of the dogma hold that the mind has its own metaphysical status, made of a different stuff and having a different structure and its own complex organization. And so they hold that body and mind are separate fields of causes and effects, with the body being mechanical and the mind nonmechanical.

How did this category-mistake originate? Although Ryle designates Descartes as the major culprit, the mind-body dualism has a history extending much further back than the seventeenth century. Descartes’s specific version was inspired by the view that scientific methods are capable of providing a mechanical theory that applies to every occupant in space. From a strictly scientific point of view, Descartes was impressed with the mechanical description of nature. However, as a religious and moral person, he was reluctant to agree with the claim that human nature in its mental aspects differs only in degree of complexity from a machine. Consequently, Descartes and subsequent philosophers wrongly construed mental-conduct words to signify nonmechanical processes and concluded that nonmechanical laws must explain the nonspatial workings of minds. But what this explanation retained was the assumption that mind, though different from body, is nevertheless a member of the categories of “thing,” “stuff,” “state,” “process,” “cause,” and “effect.” Thus, just as the visitor expected Oxford University to be another, extra unit, so Descartes and his heirs treated minds as additional, though special, centers of the causal process. From these conclusions a host of theoretical difficulties arose. How are the mind and body related? How do they bring about effects in each other? If the mind is governed by strict laws analogous to the laws governing the body, does this not imply determinism, in which case such notions as responsibility, choice, merit, and freedom make no sense? Worst of all, only negative terms could be used to speak of the mind: Minds are not in space, have no motions, are not aspects of matter, and are not observable. For these and other reasons Ryle concludes that the entire argument of the Ghost in the Machine is “broken-backed.”

How, then, should we understand mental events such as acts of knowing, exercising intelligence, understanding, willing, feeling, and imagining? Ryle’s alternative to the Ghost in the Machine dogma is a view now called logical behaviorism, the theory that talk of mental events should be translated into talk about observable behavior. Virtually every assertion about the mind involves some relevant facts about bodily behavior: “When we characterize people by mental predicates, we are not making untestable inferences to any ghostly processes occurring in streams of consciousness which we are debarred from visiting; we are describing the ways in which those people conduct parts of their predominantly public behavior.” Mental terms, then, refer to the way that people do things, and not to private spiritual states. Ultimately, all of our mental states can be analyzed through our behavior, and Ryle denies that our mental states reflect anything more than a predictable way of acting. For instance, when I speak of human emotions, I do not infer the working of some interior and obscure mental forces. In favorable circumstances, Ryle says, “I find out your inclinations and your moods more directly than this. I hear and understand your conversational avowals, your interjections and your tones of voice; I see and understand your gestures and facial expressions.”

Identity Theory and Functionalism

Ryle’s theory of logical behaviorism has its critics. Even if we accept his critique of Cartesian dualism, there are problems with his solution that reduces mind to observable behavior. Ryle’s behaviorism presumes that we can explain everything there is about mental events by looking solely at sensory input and behavioral output. For example, I see a lion (input) and I exhibit fearful behaviors, such as trembling (output). For Ryle these inputs and outputs explain all that there is about my fear. This, however, seems simplistic. Hoping to avoid committing a category-mistake himself, Ryle ignores everything that takes place between the input and the output. But what about the most obvious source of my fear, namely, my brain? Even Descartes recognized that the human brain plays an important role in processing sensory data. And, for the past few decades, many physicians have defi ed death in terms of the cessation of brain activity. Addressing this problem, identity theory is the view that mental states are identical to brain activity. For example, if I wish to know something about my emotions when I see a lion, I need to look at the type of activity that takes place within my brain. My experience of fear, then, is explained by a series of neurological events, which occur in different parts of my brain. Identity theory attempts to bring the whole issue of human consciousness under the umbrella of science—specifically, neuroscience. Gone are the days when soothsayers, exorcists, theologians, or even metaphysicians could contribute anything meaningful to the subject by speculating about the nature of an immaterial human spirit.

The effort to identify human consciousness with brain activity is not unique. As noted, Democritus and other atomists suggested this view, and, more recently, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, some biologists offered somewhat crude theories of how brain functions elicit conscious thought. As theories of brain functions have become more sophisticated in recent decades, so, too, have theories of mind-brain identity. Two philosophers, J. J. C. Smart and David Armstrong, are associated with the current version of this theory. Perhaps the most common criticism of identity theory is that it fails a principle called Leibniz’s law. Leibniz argued that if two things are truly identical, then properties asserted about the one thing must also be asserted about the other. Thus, according to Leibniz’s law, if mental events and brain activity are really identical—as Smart and Armstrong contend—then all properties about mental events apply to brain activity, and vice versa. However, as the criticism goes, there are some things that we can say about mental events that do not seem to apply to brain activity, and vice versa. First, brain activities are localizable in space, and mental events do not seem to be. We can, for instance, point to a particular region of my brain in which neurons are firing. However, we cannot point to a part of my brain and say, “My idea of a tree is right there.” Second, brain activities are objectively observable in the sense that we can monitor them with scientific equipment, and mental events cannot be observed in that way. Finally, mental events have the distinct feature that they are directed at something—that is, they exhibit intentionality. For example, I have an idea of a tree, I wish for a new car, and I think about political turmoil around the world. By contrast, brain activities are not about anything. They simply are physical events.

Die-hard identity theorists are not bothered by any of these problems. In fact, they feel that the more we learn about brain activity, the more comfortable we will become with pointing to parts of a brain and saying “an intentional thought is occurring right there.” Nevertheless, identity theory faces another and somewhat different criticism. Specifically, it presumes that mental events, such as thoughts and emotions, must be activities of a biological brain. Why, though, cannot thoughts occur in nonbiological systems, such as silicon chips? According to a rival theory called functionalism, mental events depend primarily on the networks, pathways, and interconnections of mental processes, and not on the material stuff that the brain is composed of. Functionalists do not deny that human mental processes are a function of human brain activity. They simply throw open the criteria of mental activity to include computers, robots, or other human-made devices that exhibit the relevant processes.

The field of artificial intelligence attempts to realize the functionalist theory and duplicate human cognitive mental states in computing machinery. For some time scientists have tried to replicate human thought processes in some kind of mechanical form. The 1939 New York World’s Fair displayed a human-looking robot that mimicked some human activities. At the time the visual effect was convincing, and many spectators believed that scientists had produced a truly humanlike creature. However, at that stage of technology, the robot was little more than a wind-up toy, and it exhibited none of the internal processes that functionalists would associate with thinking. Computer technology of recent decades has provided the first viable opportunity for at least attempting to replicate human thought processes. In some ways the goal of artificial intelligence today is modest. Rather than attempting to replicate all human mental processes in machine form—such as emotions, willful activity, and artistic sensibility—advocates of artificial intelligence focus only on the thinking process—analyzing sensory data and making judgments about it. The claims of artificial intelligence advocates are as varied as are their techniques. Two approaches, though, are commonly distinguished. A weak version of artificial intelligence holds that suitably programmed machines can simulate human cognition. Strong artificial intelligence, by contrast, holds that suitably programmed machines are actually capable of cognitive mental states. The weak claim presents no serious philosophical problem, since a machine that merely simulates human cognition does not need to actually possess conscious mental states. The strong claim, though, is more philosophically controversial since it holds that a computer can have humanlike thoughts.

Searle’s Chinese Room Argument

The most well-known attack on strong artificial intelligence is by John Searle, a former student of John Austin’s at Oxford University and later professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Searle was bothered by grandiose claims of computer scientists that a computer program could interpret stories the way humans do. That is, the computer could read between the lines and draw inferences about events in the story that we as humans draw from our life experience. Proponents of strong artificial intelligence claimed that the program in question both understands stories and explains our human ability to understand stories—that is, it provides the sufficient conditions for “understanding.” Searle counters this view with a picturesque thought experiment. Suppose that I, or some other non-Chinese speaking person, am put in a room and given three sets of Chinese characters: (1) a large batch of Chinese writing constituting the structure of that language, (2) a story, and (3) questions about the story. I also receive a set of rules in English—kind of like a computer program—that allow me to correlate the three sets of characters with each other. Although I do not know the meaning of the Chinese symbols, I may get so good at manipulating the symbols that, from the outside, I answer all the questions correctly, and no one can tell if I am Chinese or not. According to Searle, it is quite obvious that “I do not understand a word of the Chinese stories. I have inputs and outputs that are indistinguishable from those of the native Chinese speaker, and I can have any formal program you like, but I still understand nothing.” For Searle this scenario goes against both of the above claims of strong artificial intelligence. That is, I do not understand the Chinese stories, and the process I am following does not fully explain the notion of “understanding.” In short, even if a computer program appears to meaningfully interpret nuances of a story, the program does not really understand the story.

Searle himself anticipated a variety of objections to his Chinese room argument. What if a computer program was embedded within a robot that acquired data by interacting with the real world, rather than simply being supplied with that data? The robot might ably interact by means of a video camera and motorized arms and legs. However, Searle argues, this would still only produce data very much like the data already embedded in the computer, and nothing significantly new would change in how the computer processes the information. But what if a computer program simulated a pattern of neurons firing, rather than simply the interrelations between words? Searle replies that we still only have a simulation, and not the real thing. According to Searle, then, a computer program—no matter how elaborate—is not capable of cognitive mental states. This is a feature reserved for biological and organic brains. Although Searle denies the extravagant claims of functionalists and advocates of artificial intelligence, he does not want to concede victory to either the pure identity theorist or the olden-day Cartesian dualists. He instead tries to forge a middle ground between the latter two theories, which he calls biological naturalism. Like the identity theorist, he believes that mental events are really biological in nature, specifically involving higher-level brain functions. So, when we investigate the nature of the human mind, we investigate the brain, and there is no mysterious spiritual component to our mental events. Like the dualist, though, Searle is swayed by Leibniz’s law and insists that our descriptions about brain activity (such as neurons firing) are fundamentally different from descriptions about mental events (for example, I wish for a new car). Accordingly, philosophical descriptions of human thinking will never be replaced with scientific descriptions of brain activity. Each is valid within its own territory.

RORTY

Ever since Plato, traditional philosophers have tried to discover the foundations of knowledge. They wanted to know exactly what is “out there”—outside the mind—to distinguish between mind and body and between appearance and reality, and to provide a grounding for absolutely certain truth. By contrast, analytic philosophers scaled down the enterprise of philosophy to the more modest objective of discovering the foundations of meaningful language. Sentences or propositions would be considered meaningful only if they corresponded to objective and verifiable facts. In this way philosophy would resemble the rigor of scientific knowledge. But did this shift in the concerns of philosophy represent a major revolution? To be sure, linguistic analysis clarified some philosophical problems by demonstrating the frequent misuse of language. More dramatically, several traditional issues were simply eliminated from the agenda of philosophy when analytic philosophers insisted that language must accurately represent facts. What “facts” could be “represented” by language when talking about the “good” or the “beautiful” or the “just” or “God”? If there were no such facts, philosophy could no longer speak meaningfully about ethics, aesthetics, religion, justice, and metaphysics. Surely, we might think, this represents a revolutionary departure from the traditional concerns of philosophy.

Rorty’s Analytic Philosophy

However, according to American philosopher Richard Rorty, analytic philosophy did not usher in a major change in the assumptions of philosophy. In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), Rorty argues that analytic philosophy is not something new but rather a variation of what Descartes and Kant did, namely, provide a “foundation” for knowledge. What is new in analytic philosophy, Rorty says, is the conviction that knowledge is represented by what is linguistic and not by what is mental. But to say this is to leave unchanged the assumption that as human beings we possess by our very nature some framework within which the activity of inquiry takes place. We still have in analytic philosophy, (1) a “knowing subject,” (2) a “reality out there,” and (3) a “theory of representation” that describes how reality is represented to the knowing subject. The old account of how we know is still the same, namely, that the mind is like a great mirror containing representations of nature, some accurate and some inaccurate, which we then study by pure “rational” methods. Analytic philosophy does not remove the assumption that the mind is like a mirror. It simply tries to increase the accuracy of the representations captured by the mind, as Rorty says, by “inspecting, repairing and polishing the mirror.” Moreover, to engage in repairing and polishing the mirror implies the presence of another old assumption, namely, that there is some reality that is eternally “out there” but that for some reason is inaccurately represented to the mind. For these reasons Rorty believes that a truly revolutionary move in philosophy would require the final rejection of several assumptions. We must first abandon the traditional mirror imagery—the assumption that human beings are equipped with a structural framework that dictates how our inquiries must proceed. We must also abandon the assumption that even before there is thinking or history there is an “essence” to reality, which to know is to know the truth.

 Rorty was himself an analytic philosopher as a young professor at Princeton University. He was born in 1931 and raised in New York City as an only child whose parents were freelance journalists and whose maternal grandfather, Walter Raschenbusch, was an eminent liberal Protestant theologian. At age 14 Rorty entered the University of Chicago and later completed his graduate studies in philosophy at Yale University. After a brief teaching assignment at Wellesley College, he joined the faculty at Princeton, whose philosophy department at that time was strongly oriented toward analytic philosophy. For a few years Rorty immersed himself in “doing” analytic philosophy but finally grew dissatisfied with the piecemeal task of unraveling linguistic and logical puzzles. After a brief period of professional crisis during the early 1970s and to the considerable surprise of his colleagues, Rorty chose a new direction for his studies, toward the pragmatism of John Dewey.

The Influence of Pragmatism

In 1909, on the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), Dewey delivered a lecture titled “The Influence of Darwinism on Philosophy.” The influence it had, Dewey said, was that it introduced a new type of thinking—a type that influenced Dewey himself. The theory of biological evolution, Dewey said, emphasized that change is fundamental to everything that exists. This change represents not only simple rearrangements of bits of matter but the presence of “organic systems” and their creativity with respect to the environment. This meant that knowledge could no longer aim at realities lying behind any notion of the mathematical order of nature or any vestige of Platonic “eternality.” There is no “givenness” about the world. Philosophy would no longer enquire about absolute origins and absolute final ends, as in Hegel’s gradual realization of the idea of freedom or Marx’s final phase of human society. Philosophy would no longer seek to prove that our lives necessarily must have certain qualities or values as a result of an earlier cause, such as creation, or a specific goal. The world, on this view, is not described as reflecting an eternal pattern, out there, abstractly.

Instead, according to Dewey, philosophical thinking should begin with our immediate, concrete life experiences. We would then see human life as Aristotle did. That is, although we are a part of nature and behave in certain mechanical ways as described by science, we are nevertheless human. And although we have some characteristics of other animals, we are nevertheless unique. What makes us unique is that we are aware of the processes of nature and we can know how we function. We know where some forms of behavior lead and what values or ends they support or frustrate. Experience tells us what things are “necessary for,” or “better for,” or “worse for” other things. We can evaluate things not in terms of some remote and abstract standards but in terms of some more obvious “ends” built into the very natural functions of organisms. Human life on this view reveals a close relationship between the functions of human nature and the various simultaneous functions of the larger natural environment, which provides wide choices of ends and values. It is easy to see how the new Darwinian approach to knowledge influenced Dewey in the direction of pragmatism. Instead of pursuing a single ultimate truth about reality, his emphasis shifted to a pluralism of truths, many truths, and the characteristic that these ideas or notions are true because they “work.”

Rorty was drawn to Dewey’s pragmatism for these and several other reasons. For one thing, it gave him an avenue of escape from the severe limitations that linguistic analysis placed on the scope of his philosophical activity. Pragmatism provided him with a basis for fi nally rejecting the traditional view that the mind is a reliable mirror reflecting reality, a notion that assumed that only those thoughts and language are true which faithfully represent the real world. Since there is no way to be absolutely certain that a thought or statement accurately corresponds to reality, it is, he thought, better to think that a statement is true if it leads to successful behavior—that is, if it “works.” We should look upon statements as “tools” whose truth is based on their usefulness. Since there are several types of statements, there are correspondingly several kinds of truths. To view truth in this manner is to bring back to philosophy the subject matter of many fi elds. From this point of view, science has no special claim on truth since it is only one among many areas of practical human concern, along with politics, ethics, art, literature, history, and religion. Scientific methods cannot, therefore, provide the sole criterion for truth since there are several particular kinds of truth.

What especially attracted Rorty to pragmatism was that its pluralistic view of truth opened up wide areas of legitimate philosophical discussion. In addition to the analysis of language, it now became philosophically useful to study novels and poetry to find insights into human problems that philosophy virtually abandoned. Moreover, Anglo-American philosophers could more comfortably engage in discourse with their counterparts in Continental Europe, where the darker themes of dread, angst, and solitude permeate the works of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. Rorty discovered that while analytic philosophy isolated itself from some of the deepest concerns of life, it is possible to overcome this isolation by expanding the range and type of literature considered worthy of study. Following this insight, Rorty left the Department of Philosophy at Princeton and, in 1983, became university professor of humanities at the University of Virginia. Here, his approach to philosophy relied heavily on literary and cultural criticism and acknowledged the morally illuminating power of novelists and poets. Rorty had no interest in, nor did he think it useful to engage in, “systematic” philosophy. More and more, he believed, the emphasis would be on “edifying” philosophy, whose practitioners would be concerned with culture and self-transformation.

The Contingency of Language

 If there is one theme that captures Rorty’s philosophical point of view, it is his conviction that there are no eternal “essences.” For example, there is no “human nature,” “true nature of the self,” or “universal moral law,” discoverable by human reason. Instead of a timeless and stable structure in reality, what we find, Rorty says, is that everywhere we are confronted with “contingency,” by the ever-presence of “chance.” If everything is “contingent,” how can there be any meaning to life? If there is no timeless truth, how can we know whether our lives fall short of their intended purpose or value? Rorty is aware of these consequences of his pragmatism. But instead of being intimidated by this bewildering world of chance, he sees in it opportunities for overcoming contingency by constant self-transformation or self-creation. Still, he insists that it is philosophically important to recognize that contingency and chance characterize such fundamental aspects of our experience as our language, our idea of our selfhood, and our conception of human society or community.

We normally think of language as a means by which our vocabulary represents reality to our minds. How can a vocabulary represent or be the medium of something “out there”? One way is to use the metaphor of a jigsaw puzzle. By the use of words, it is assumed that we can describe various pieces of the puzzle so that as the vocabulary changes and evolves, our language will come closer and closer to what exists out there. But this assumes that out there are to be found fixed and stable realities capable of being described.

Take, for example, the language of science. Galileo created a new vocabulary when he described the behavior of the earth and the sun in relation to each other. What does this history of the change in scientific language illustrate? Does it show that Galileo’s new description represents a deeper insight into the intrinsic nature of the natural world? Rorty does not think so. “We must,” he says, “resist the temptation to think that the re-descriptions of reality offered by contemporary physical or biological sciences are somehow closer to ‘the things themselves.’” It is not as though the new language has filled in more of the jigsaw puzzle. Rather, we should use the metaphor of language as a “tool” so that the new vocabulary of science will simply enable those who create the new language to accomplish new objectives. There is no necessary line of development in language any more than there is a necessary line of evolution in nature. We cannot return to the way nature and its purposes were thought about before the time of Darwin. Contingency and chance—that is, the more or less random behavior of things—explain the changes in nature and in language. Physical evolution did not have to occur precisely as it did. Was it necessary or only by chance that orchids came upon the scene? And did not Mendel “let us see mind as something which just happened rather than as something which was the whole point of the process”? To say the opposite—namely, that the world has an intrinsic nature that the physicist or poet has glimpsed—is, Rorty says, “a remnant of the idea that the world is a divine creation, the work of someone who had something in mind, who Himself spoke some language in which He described His own project.”

Because our language is the product of random choices made by those who sought to describe the world, there is no reason now to be bound by that inherited language. The language of the past certainly has influenced the way we think. However, we should create our own new vocabulary if that would be more useful in solving our problems. “It is essential to my view,” Rorty writes, “that we have no pre-linguistic consciousness to which language needs to be adequate, no deep sense of how things are which it is the duty of philosophers to spell out in language.” Truth, Rorty says, is no more than what Nietzsche called “a mobile army of metaphors.”

The Contingency of Selfhood

 Plato gave us the metaphor of two worlds: (1) the world of time, appearance, and change and (2) the world of enduring, changeless truth. Our lives involve an attempt to escape from the distractions of the flesh and the dominant opinions of a particular time and place in order to enter the real world of reason and contemplation. With this vocabulary Plato created a language designed to describe the essence of human nature, implying that there is only one true description of our human situation. As we face the contingent events of our lives, we are to control our affections by the use and power of our reason and thereby achieve moral and intellectual virtue. Theologians offered basically this same metaphor, urging human beings to strive toward our “true nature.” Similarly, Kant described the difference between our daily experiences with their local influences on our choices, on the one hand, and our internal moral consciousness, which reveals for all human beings our timeless and universal moral laws, on the other. These versions of the two worlds that we encounter represent the true world as compared with the deceptive world that we must try to escape.

Rorty believed that Plato, the theologians, and Kant imposed labels and descriptions of “the self” on our consciousness as if these were absolutely true descriptions. There are, after all, alternative ways of defining the self. If, for example, Nietzsche says that “God is dead,” he implies that there is nothing more to reality than the flow of events, and the flux of chance. Nor is there any universal moral law or “true self.” This skepticism leaves the question of how to provide a meaning for human life. There is no other choice, Nietzsche said, to which Rorty agrees, than for each of us to give meaning to our own life by writing our own language and describing our own objectives. In a real sense, each of us must be involved in transforming our “self,” not by seeking the truth but by overcoming the old self and by choosing and willing a new self. According to Rorty, “we create ourselves by telling our own story.” Plato tried to describe human nature in specific detail when he spoke of the tripartite aspect of the self, including the physical body, the passions and affections, and, highest of all, the mind. He assumed that our minds had a clear shot at the truth and could overcome the contingent events encountered in daily life. But Rorty finds that quite different descriptions of consciousness have been offered without assuming a realm of eternal truth. On the contrary, he finds in the writings of Freud a tripartite description of the self as nothing but the product of contingent events. The sense of guilt is explained not by an innate knowledge of the moral law. Rather, as Freud says, “a regressive degrading of the libido takes place, the super-ego becomes exceptionally severe and unkind, and the ego, in obedience to the super-ego, produces strong reaction formations in the shape of conscientiousness, pity and cleanliness.” It may be that the metaphor of the two worlds has been too powerful to overcome. But Freud replies that,

 if one considers chance to be unworthy of determining our fate, it is simply a relapse into the pious view of the universe which Leonardo himself was on the way of overcoming when he wrote that the sun does not move . . . we are all too ready to forget that in fact everything to do with our life is chance, from our origin out of the meeting of spermatozoon and ovum onwards. . . . Everyone of us human beings corresponds to one of the countless experiments in which [the countless causes] of nature force their way into experience.

The Contingency of Community

How can human beings live together? That is, how can human beings achieve solidarity and community? Here, again, Plato drew a tight connection between “the essential human nature” and the social and political arrangement of the community. Plato thought that the three classes of society were necessary extensions of the three parts of the human soul or self. The artisans embody the physical element of the person, the guardians express the spirited passions, and the rulers are the incarnation of the mind, or reason. Plato also argued that there must first be a harmony among the three parts of the private individual if the collective harmony of the community is to be achieved. All the elements of the self must be subject to and governed by the highest faculty, that is, by reason. Similarly, all the classes of society must be subordinate to the ruler. This whole arrangement is dictated by the structure of human nature.

Rorty disagrees with this notion that our public life must be based on the antecedent facts of human nature. Theologians have also offered their versions of the Platonic account of the origin and justification of political authority, especially in their theory of the divine rights of kings, while Marx drew from his description of history, and from the relation of human beings to the material order of nature, a theory of a classless society. These various vocabularies or languages describing the good society are contingent on the special perspectives of each author. Each account focuses on a different concept of “ultimate reality” and a different view of essential human nature. It is not surprising, then, Rorty says, that there can be no single concept of community that is required by some true description of human nature.

For his part Rorty holds that since there is no absolutely true account available of human nature, there is no point in looking in that direction for some moral basis of society. The contingency of language and the contingency of the self mean that there is no reliable objective information that can lead to the right kind of community. There is no theory of knowledge that can guarantee the just society—neither “rationality, the love of God, [nor] the love of truth.” Instead, Rorty agrees with the insights of Dewey as reflected by John Rawls in his Dewey Lectures:

What justifies a conception of justice is not its being true to an order antecedent and given to us, but its congruence with our deeper understanding of ourselves and our aspirations, and our realization that, given our history and the traditions embedded in our public life, it is the most reasonable theory for us.

The central values on which to build a community are the values of freedom and equality, which are the ideals of liberal democracy. It is not helpful, Rorty says, to ask at this point, “How do you know that freedom is the chief goal of social organization?” any more than it is to ask, “How do you know that Jones is worthy of your friendship?” The preference for freedom and equality and the desire to eliminate suffering are discovered not by reason but by chance. These values were not always obvious, nor were they always chosen. They were not always options, for example, for the Egyptians, nor can they be defended rationally against those who refuse to accept them. The social glue that holds a liberal society together consists in a consensus, Rorty says, in which everybody has an opportunity at self-creation to the extent of their abilities. From the point of view of his pragmatism, Rorty says that what matters most is the widely shared conviction that “what we call ‘good’ or ‘true’ [is] whatever is the outcome of free discussion,” for if we take care of political freedom, “truth and goodness will take care of themselves.”

VIRTUE THEORY REVISITED

For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, moral philosophers were waging a war between two camps. On the one side were empiricists who believed that morality is determined solely by looking at the consequences of our conduct. If an action produces a greater balance of happiness or benefit, then it is morally good. If it produces a greater balance of unhappiness or disbenefit, then it is morally bad. A representative from this camp is the utilitarian Jeremy Bentham, who argued that we can very mechanically calculate the balance of happiness and unhappiness that results from our actions. On the other side of the dispute were rationalists who believed that humans are naturally implanted with moral intuitions, similar to other rational concepts, such as the principle of cause and effect. On this view, an act is morally good if we can rationally assess that it is consistent with our moral intuitions. If inconsistent, then it is morally bad. Kant is a representative of this camp. Moral empiricists argued that, contrary to the rationalists, we simply have no rational moral intuitions, and the rationalist approach is wishful thinking aimed at discovering a universal and unchanging standard of morality. Moral rationalists, on the other hand, charged that the empirical approach ignores our truly rational nature and reduces morality to the whims of social groups. Defenders of each side continually modifi ed and strengthened their theories in response to attacks from their opponents. In recent decades, though, several philosophers have argued that the entire dispute between these two camps is misguided. On this view, moral philosophy went astray in the eighteenth century when it set aside the central notion of ethics, namely, virtue, especially as developed by Aristotle. Virtues, for Aristotle, are habits that regulate our more animalistic desires. When we cultivate these virtuous habits, our actions refl ect our natural purpose as rational and social creatures. The fi rst such recent defense of virtue theory was by British philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe (1919–2001).

Anscombe’s Defense

Anscombe was a student of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and, inspired by her teacher’s views of the philosophy of mind, she made considerable contributions to that fi eld as well. Her conception of virtue theory appears in her essay “Modern Moral Philosophy” (1958). Anscombe notes here that we commonly use several ethically loaded words in our moral vocabulary. I say that you ought, must, or are obligated to do certain things. These terms express a kind of moral edict or command. For example, if I say that “you ought not steal,” then I imply that thieves violate some universal moral law and are accordingly morally guilty and punishable. Where does this notion of moral edict come from? She argues that Christian philosophers in the Middle Ages introduced it. Preoccupied with the concept of divine law, medieval philosophers believed that God was the ultimate authority behind proper conduct. Actions such as stealing are sinful, and God demands that we avoid these actions. Ultimately, for medieval philosophers, all morality involved obedience to God’s laws or edicts. In more recent centuries philosophers such as Hume and Kant offered secular accounts of the origin of morality. Hume in particular was committed to offering a theory of morality that made no reference to divine authority, but instead was grounded in feelings and other psychological features of human nature. The problem, though, is that Hume and others retained the medieval notions of ought and moral law while at the same time casting off the idea of God as moral lawgiver. Put most simply, according to Anscombe, the notion of “law” requires a lawgiver, and it makes no sense to keep talking about obligations to moral laws once we abandon the notion of God as moral lawgiver. However—and this is Anscombe’s key concern—philosophers from Hume until the present day discuss notions of ought and moral law anyway. Anscombe writes, “It is as if the notion ‘criminal’ were to remain when criminal law and criminal courts had been abolished and forgotten.” Some philosophers offer questionable explanations of the foundation of moral obligation, and others concede that the concept of ought has no real content. Nevertheless, the concepts of ought and moral law are central to current ethical theories. In fact, such moral edicts are so embedded in contemporary moral theories that the theories would collapse without them.

There is more at stake here than simply a theoretical dispute among academic philosophers about the notions of ought or moral law and the groundless edicts that emerge from contemporary moral theories. According to Anscombe, some of the moral theories after Hume have contributed to a dangerous kind of moral reasoning in real life. One such theory is consequentialism —a revision of utilitarianism that Anscombe associates with nineteenth-century British moral philosopher Henry Sidgwick. On this theory right actions are those that bring about the best consequences that we can foresee. For Anscombe the problem with this approach is that it fails to distinguish between two completely different types of consequences. First, there are consequences that involve intrinsic goods, such as telling the truth and not killing. Second, there are more indirect consequences in which we might say that the ends justify the means—such as stealing a loaf of bread to feed one’s starving family. True morality, according to Anscombe, should focus on intrinsic goods, without attempting to counterbalance these against the second and more indirect type of consequences. In another essay she provides a vivid example of how people sometimes blur these two consequences with disastrous results. According to Anscombe, at the close of World War II, President Harry Truman used consequentialist reasoning when deciding to drop atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On one side of the balance, Truman placed the negative consequence of killing tens of thousands of innocent Japanese civilians; Anscombe contends that avoiding such killing would have been a fundamentally good thing to do. On the other side of the balance, Truman considered that the bombs would bring a quick end to the war, and thus serve as a useful means to an end. Believing that the latter reasoning was more weighty, he decided to drop the bombs—a decision that Anscombe believes was murderous. Thus, consequentialism is not only fl awed but even hazardous when applied to decisions like this. And, in turn, the misguided force of consequentialism rests on the misguided conception of moral edicts embedded in concepts like ought and moral law.

What is the solution to this problem surrounding moral edicts? Anscombe herself is a secular moral theorist and would not recommend reviving medieval Christian conceptions of divine law. That is, she would not advise reinstating God as giver of the moral law. Instead, she recommends that we simply reject all talk about moral law and obligation and look to Aristotle for inspiration. Aristotle did not speak of divine legislators or moral edicts. Instead, he described virtues— habits that regulate our behavior in response to our animalistic appetites. People are bad, not because they violate moral laws, but because they fail to acquire virtues and instead develop vices such as cowardice, untruthfulness, unchasteness, or unjustness. If we adopt Aristotle’s approach, not only will we abandon the notions of ought and moral law, but we will also abandon all the notions in moral psychology that philosophers since Hume have relied on, such as “action,” “intention,” “pleasure,” and “wanting.” This amounts to “laying aside” the whole discipline of moral philosophy until we have more adequate notions of moral psychology that are consistent with Aristotle’s notion of virtue. In the decades after the appearance of her essay, several philosophers took Anscombe’s challenge to heart by rejecting consequentialism and other traditional conceptions of moral obligation that involved moral edicts. These new virtue theorists also explore the psychological underpinnings of moral virtues, attempting to supplement Aristotle’s discussion with more current accounts of human nature.

Noddings’s Defense

One recent defender of virtue theory is Nel Noddings, who in her essay “Ethics from the Standpoint of Women” (1990) sees virtues as a way of articulating a uniquely female conception of morality. Noddings and other feminist writers argue that much of our intellectual heritage was not only formed by men but reflects a male way of looking at the world. There is some controversy surrounding possible differences between male and female ways of thinking. Male approaches, though, tend to emphasize following rules, devising strict laws, and finding subtle logical distinctions according to which we can categorize people and things. Female ways of thinking, by contrast, emphasize a capacity for nurturing and caring for others. We see this distinction when comparing vocations that tend to be male-dominated—such as engineering and mathematics—with those that are female-dominated—such as social work and education. Much of philosophy has been driven by male ways of thinking and, perhaps in some ways, contaminated by it. Ethics, Noddings argues, is a case in point. Kant, for example, argued that morality is grounded in cold rational duty, even to the point that “acts done out of love do not qualify as moral acts.” Nietzsche’s model of morality is that of a warrior who casts aside traditional values and forges new ones. His theory is “overtly and proudly masculine, and much of it depends directly on the devaluation of women and all that is associated with the feminine.” Some of these moral philosophers even blatantly make sexist statements, devaluing the rational capacity of women and belittling female sentimentalism.

According to Noddings, the solution to the problem caused by maleoriented ethical theories is to replace them with ones that are female-oriented. Why, though, not just make ethics gender-neutral? After all, moral theories aim at universalization, that is, applying to all people. Focusing on only one gender undermines this. For Noddings, though, “to construct an ethic free of gendered views may be impossible in a thoroughly gendered society.” At minimum, femaleoriented theories need to be proposed to counterbalance male theories, and perhaps at some future time we can transcend them both with gender-neutral approaches. A critic might still argue that the traditional activities and attitudes of women have nothing to do with ethics and cannot serve as a basis for developing any meaningful moral theory. Examples of tasks commonly imposed on women are child rearing, cooking, cleaning, and homemaking. These all tend to be menial, and even exploitive when imposed on women at the expense of more meaningful and challenging life activities. Not only do men avoid these tasks and the effeminacy associated with them, but many contemporary women also denounce them as oppressive. Nevertheless, Noddings believes that even within these traditional women’s activities we can fi nd a foundation for female ethics. The theme that underlies all of these activities is care, or the capacity to nurture other people. Even if contemporary women abandon these tasks completely, the most oppressive of these activities still reflects an orientation toward caring for others.

Noddings believes that the ethical emphasis on care fi ts neatly into virtue theory. The caring attitude itself is a habit that we cultivate, similar to other virtues such as courage and temperance. Further, virtue theory and the caring attitude are both resistant to the harsh rules of traditional moral theories. There is a spontaneity to both virtuous and caring conduct that involves unique responses to unique situations. This, though, does not mean that we should simply adopt Aristotle’s theory of virtue just as it is. Aristotle’s account rests on an elitist and male-dominated conception of society in which the lifestyles of women and slaves were of no concern:

Aristotle’s identifi cation of virtues depended almost entirely on the establishment of exclusive classes and the activities appropriate to each. The virtues of women and of slaves were not those of educated citizens. He made no attempt to identify virtues in one class that might be cultivated in others by extending the range of privilege or sharing the array of common tasks. If he had made such an attempt, it would surely have moved in only one direction. One might try to inculcate the virtues of the highest class into lower classes, but one would never try to develop, say, feminine virtues in men.

We must, then, expand Aristotle’s list of virtues by adding ones that refl ect the lifestyles of exploited groups, particularly women.

Feminists might still question whether women should identify themselves so boldly with a caring attitude. Just as nurturing women in the past were exploited, perhaps caring women today may make themselves vulnerable to the same kind of oppression. They may fi nd themselves “dependent on men or on welfare in order to care for their children, and are sometimes physically abused.” Noddings agrees that if only women adopted the ethics of caring then, indeed, oppression toward women would continue. What, though, if the attitude of caring was instilled in men, too? This would force us to recognize that all humans are interdependent, regardless of gender. With the right kind of moral education, we could instill in people a virtue of care that contains proper limits and prevents people from taking advantage of nurturers.

Virtue Epistemology

While interest in virtue theory has been revived in the area of ethics, it has also expanded into a different, seemingly unlikely arena of philosophy, namely, epistemology. Epistemology —the study of knowledge—focuses on the ways that we acquire knowledge and the standards that we use for maintaining that we know things, such as when I say, “I know that the car in front of me is white.” The typical way of investigating knowledge claims is to examine the critical properties of a belief, such as the evidence supporting my belief that there is a white car in front of me. Virtue epistemology, though, shifts the emphasis from the properties of my belief to the properties of me the person. What are the specific mental qualities or “virtues” that are behind my knowledge claims such as this one about the white car? One group of virtue epistemologists, known as virtue reliabilists, maintains that genuine knowledge is grounded in special mental faculties that allow us to arrive at the truth of things in a reliable way. These epistemologically virtuous faculties include perception, memory, introspection, and logical reasoning. For example, for me to reliably know that the car in front of me is white, I need to have a good perceptual faculty of vision when I look at the car and a good memory about what the color “white” looks like. Ernest Sosa, one of the early leaders of virtue reliabilism, describes epistemological virtues as stable and reliable mental faculties that are “bound to help maximize one’s surplus of truth over error.”

But a bolder version of virtue epistemology, known as virtue responsibilism, maintains that the mental abilities that are truly important for knowledge are good intellectual character traits, such as inquisitiveness, thoroughness, fairmindedness, open-mindedness, carefulness, and tenacity. Not only are these traits central to our gaining knowledge, but they are character traits that a responsible knower should possess. Inquisitiveness, for example, is a good thing for responsible inquirers to have, since it prompts us to expand our knowledge of the world. Thoroughness is good since it has us pursue explanations of phenomena further than we would otherwise. Open-mindedness is good since it has us consider alternative explanations of things that we might otherwise initially reject. By possessing these virtues of inquisitiveness, thoroughness, and open-mindedness, I might not be satisfied with the explanation that mice simply spontaneously generate from old rags in my barn. Accordingly, I might set up an experiment in which I closely monitor a pile of rags and see if a plump adult female mouse shows up and delivers babies.

This conception of epistemological virtues parallels more closely the traditional notion of moral virtues forged by Aristotle. First, just as Aristotle maintained about moral virtues, these epistemological virtues are acquired through practice and eventually become habits of thinking. Linda Zagzebski, a leading proponent of this approach, writes that “the stages of learning the intellectual virtues are exactly parallel to the stages of learning the moral virtues as described by Aristotle. They begin with the imitation of virtuous persons, [and] require practice which develops certain habits of feeling and acting.” Second, each of these intellectual virtues has a distinctly underlying moral component. Zagzebski writes,

When people call others shortsighted or pigheaded, their criticism is as much like moral criticism as when they call them offensive or obnoxious; in fact, what is obnoxious about a person can sometimes be limited to a certain pattern of thinking. The same point can be made, in differing degrees, of a variety of other names people are called for defects that are mostly cognitive: mulish, stiff-necked, pertinacious, recalcitrant, or obstinate, wrongheaded, vacuous, shallow, witless, dull, muddleheaded, thickskulled, or obtuse.

According to Zagzebski, two features are present when we act upon epistemological virtues. One is our virtuous motivation: Other intellectually virtuous people would perform the same act in similar circumstances. The other feature is reliable success: Through our virtuous conduct we arrive at truth.

There is a major difference between how virtue reliabilists and virtue responsibilists envision the task of epistemological virtues. For reliabilists such as Sosa, epistemological virtues are cognitive faculties that humans typically possess naturally. However, for responsibilists such as Zagzebski, we must work hard at acquiring intellectual character traits, just as we do moral character traits. More importantly, reliabilists and responsibilists differ regarding the general task of gaining knowledge. By focusing on cognitive faculties like perception and memory, reliabilists emphasize knowledge of our immediate surroundings, such as knowledge that a car is white. However, if we wish to push the bounds of knowledge in more interesting ways, such as discovering new scientific or historical truths, we need to possess the intellectual character traits that responsibilists list. For example, Galileo’s great scientific achievements in astronomy were the result of more than just having good eyesight, memory, or even logical reasoning. He needed open-mindedness to consider options that were taboo at the time and tenacity to invent new ways of exploring the possibilities.

CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY

By the mid-twentieth century, a rift had developed between Anglo-American philosophers of the analytic tradition and Continental European philosophers of the phenomenological and existentialist tradition. The two groups differed in methodology, with analytic philosophers emphasizing logic and language, and Continental philosophers emphasizing ontological concerns of human nature and action. They also sought inspiration from different major philosophers— Hume, Russell, and Wittgenstein for analytic philosophers, and Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre for Continental ones. In recent decades the gulf between the two has narrowed. Analytic philosophy is now taught in European universities, and Continental philosophy has made its way into British and American educational institutions, particularly within English and literature departments. Recent Continental philosophy is associated with several “isms” that overlap each other, including structuralism, post-structuralism, and postmodernism. We will look at these.

Structuralism

Structuralism began in the early 1900s as a theory explaining the nature of language. Its champion, Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), was bothered by standard nineteenth-century linguistic theories that presumed to find some commonality between various foreign languages. As tempting as this approach might seem, Saussure believed it was fundamentally mistaken. Each language, he argued, is a closed formal system—an entity unto itself—with no significant connection to other languages or even to the physical objects to which the words presumably refer. A given language, such as English, consists of an arbitrary system of words whose meanings are based solely on conventional structures or patterns of use. A single word is like the thread of a fabric, whose function is determined only in relation to the surrounding weave of threads; by itself the thread has no function. For example, a toddler just learning how to pronounce words might be hungry and say “muck”; by itself this word means nothing and certainly is not what an adult means by it. An astute parent, though, will understand the larger context of the toddler’s language abilities and behavior, and recognize that the toddler means “milk.” Language, in short, is an arbitrary social institution, and all the pieces of a language derive their meaning from that larger system of social structures.

Saussure realized that his theory had implications beyond language and in fact could apply to other systems of social convention. Following his lead, several writers pushed the structuralist agenda into the fi elds of anthropology, psychology, intellectual history, and political theory. The unifying theme of this movement was that any cultural object or concept gets its meaning from its surrounding cultural structures. French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (b. 1908) argued further that the surrounding cultural structures will typically involve a pair of opposites, such as male/female, odd/even, or light/dark. These paired opposites give systems a stable logical structure. For example, the Hindu caste system involves a hierarchy of social classes that are based on the paired opposites of purity and impurity: The higher castes are more pure and the lower castes are more impure. The two key components of the structuralist movement, then, are (1) the meaning of a thing is defi ned by its surrounding cultural structures, and (2) the system has a coherent structure that is reflected in paired opposites. Suppose, I want to understand the meaning of a wedding ring. It would be futile for me to investigate my own wedding ring in isolation from everything else in my culture. Instead, I should try to understand the internal structures of various wedding rings, such as whether they are fl ashy or modest (paired opposites), and the meanings that these features convey in our culture. I should also try to understand how wedding rings play a role in the larger system of cultural structures, such as what signals wedding rings send to others and how wearing a wedding ring might differ from wearing a high school ring.

Although structuralism was not initially developed as a philosophy per se, its philosophical implications soon became apparent, and it quickly emerged in reaction against Sartre’s existentialism. Sartre believed that individual people create their own natures through free choices, and people are not predefined by their social surroundings. Lévi-Strauss and other structuralists rejected this emphasis on individual people and the subjectivism that existentialism implies. Just as wedding rings are defi ned by larger social structures, so, too, are people, and we cannot view ourselves as free, independent agents stripped of our social context. We must always use other people as a basis for understanding ourselves. By the 1960s structuralism overshadowed existentialism as France’s most popular philosophy.

Post-Structuralism

Post-structuralism—which appeared in the 1970s—is both an expansion on and refutation of structuralism. Like structuralism, post-structuralism has branched out into several disciplines, perhaps most notably in the fi eld of literary criticism. Consider, for example, what structuralists might say about interpreting a novel such as Gone with the Wind. We might be tempted to see this book as a somewhat historical discussion of the U.S. Civil War. However, structuralists would argue that the meaning of particular passages in the book rests mainly on the structures within the book itself, which is a closed system. Further, the structures in the book involve paired opposites of war/peace, wealth/poverty, and love/strife. Post-structuralism pushes the matter further. First, if Gone with the Wind is truly a closed system, then I must exclude any fact or consideration outside of that novel, such as what I might find in a history book on the Civil War. I must even set aside the author’s intentions, which also rest outside of the novel, such as what I might fi nd in a biography of the author. Whatever meaning the book has depends on what I the reader think about the book as I enter into that closed system. Since each reader will likely have a different interpretation of the book, the book will have no definitive meaning. Second, post-structuralists will argue that if we look carefully for so-called paired opposites within Gone with the Wind, we will find this to be an oversimplification. For example, although the book does contain elements of love and strife, we also see indifference: “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,” as Clark Gable expresses it in the movie. Similarly, we don’t see only wealth and poverty, but middle-level income as well. Structuralists believed that paired opposites provided logical coherence to closed systems. But once we reject this notion of paired opposites—as post-structuralists recommend—then we are left without any internal logical structure of the book. Each reader, then, will play with the book, bringing his or her own meaning to it.

In philosophy, post-structuralism is most associated with French philosopher Jacques Derrida (b. 1930). Unlike other post-structuralists who focus on literary criticism, Derrida targets philosophy books. He argues that throughout the history of Western thought philosophers have built their theories around key opposing concepts, such as appearance/reality, opinion/knowledge, spirit/matter, and truth/falsehood. On face value these opposing concepts might support the structuralist theory that philosophical systems have a coherent structure, which is reflected in paired opposites. However, just as we should reject paired opposites in novels, Derrida believes that these philosophical concepts are also suspect. Through a technique that he calls deconstruction, he attempts to show that all of these paired opposites in philosophy are in fact self-refuting. For example, Husserl emphasizes a distinction between what is present to our consciousness (phenomena) and what is absent from it (whether the world exists). But when Husserl himself explores what is actually present to our consciousness, he fi nds that the “present” principally includes memories of what happened in the past and anticipation of what will occur in the future. The problem now is that neither the past nor the future are really “present” to our consciousness. Thus, Husserl’s initial distinction between presence and absence collapses: The two concepts are in fact intertwined. Derrida believes that we can similarly deconstruct all of the standard paired opposites in philosophy. For example, with the appearance/reality dichotomy, when attempting to describe reality, my descriptions seem to be based solely on appearances, such as what appears to my senses. Similarly, with the matter/spirit dichotomy, when attempting to say something about spirits—my own spirit or a divine being—my descriptions are all grounded in some material reality. Because the internal logic of such philosophical systems is fl awed, no such system offers an adequate description of the world.

According to Derrida, one of the more central dichotomies underlying philosophical discourse is that between speech and writing. Rousseau drew this distinction most clearly. Speech, Rousseau argued, is our natural form of communicating feelings, and as such it conveys what is real and certain. Writing, by contrast, is a degraded copy of speech. Because writing only indirectly conveys our feelings, it relies on a series of conventional devices that ultimately distort truth and are the source of illusion. However, Derrida argues, both speech and writing involve basic elements of language, such as conventional use of symbols and strict rules of grammar. In fact, we might argue that writing is a better vehicle of language than speech because established conventions are so central to language, and, on Rousseau’s reasoning, writing relies on conventions more than speech.

Postmodernism

Post-structuralism and the specific technique of deconstruction make quite skeptical pronouncements about the success of traditional philosophical systems. Post-structuralists also cast doubt on the possibility of finding meaning to the world beyond what we as individual observers impose on things. It seems that the whole historical enterprise of finding a unified meaning of things is fatally flawed. In Western civilization the problem started during the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods—the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries—when scientists and philosophers ushered in a new and modern way of viewing the world. Scientists hoped to find a unified system of physical laws that govern the natural world around us. As an addendum to this scientific plan, philosophers described the mechanisms of human thought, thereby explaining Philosophy how human beings and human culture fit into the larger natural machinery. The philosophical theories of humanism, rationalism, empiricism, and idealism all reflect the basic assumption that the world is one and a single explanatory system governs everything. All beliefs and values that we form are grounded in this unifying system. This modern conception of things was passed on through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, right down to the present time. The modern notion of a unified world system is a nice fairy tale, but a fairy tale nonetheless. We need to step beyond this modern conception of things into a postmodern frame of mind.

Postmodernism is not a single philosophical theory; to be so would be self-defeating. Instead, it is an umbrella movement that covers a variety of critiques of the modern conception of things. Post-structuralism is perhaps the most dominant of these, and for this reason the terms postmodern and post-structural are often used interchangeably. However, much of recent philosophy targets modernism and thus would also count as postmodern. Rorty rejected the standard conception that there are “essences” to things, such as human nature. Anscombe challenged the “lawgiver” assumption behind modern moral theories. Feminist philosophers reject the largely maleoriented manner of imposing rigid schemes on things. We even find hints of postmodernist attitudes in earlier times, such as with Nietzsche, who rejected traditional value structures of the masses. Even American pragmatists such as Dewey rejected fixed solutions to standard philosophical issues and argued that there is no “givenness” about the world. Much of postmodernist discussion extends well beyond the discipline of philosophy, which is only one manifestation of modern culture. Literature, music, art, theater, film, and architecture are also under the sway of modernist attitudes of unified order, symmetry, and harmony. Postmodernist writers, musicians, and artists thus attempt to break the traditional molds of their respective genres.

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

Some major developments within recent political philosophy have involved enlarging on well-established theories of the past, rather than the construction of all-new theories. Two cases in point are the theories of John Rawls (1921–2002) and Robert Nozick (1938–2002), whose views are both firmly grounded in traditional social contract theory, while, at the same time, pushing the concept in diametrically opposite directions.

Rawls: Justice as Fairness

Rawls was a philosophy professor at Harvard University for nearly 40 years, and among his various writings, the most influential is A Theory of Justice (1971). In this work he argues that social policies should be grounded in the notion of fairness. We create a fair set of guidelines through a process whereby we ignore our actual economic position within society and thus make decisions impartially. The guidelines we arrive at will guarantee equal rights and duties for all, and also regulate wealth in a way that would benefit both rich and poor. This view permits governments to restrict an individual’s accumulation of property for the betterment of others. The heart of Rawls’s view is a version of social contract theory that he devised as an answer to what he saw as inadequacies with utilitarian social theory. The key problem with utilitarianism, for Rawls, is that an individual’s rights may be violated if the consequences of doing so benefit society as a whole. For example, we could conceive of a situation in which enslaving a minority group of people would bring about the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Rawls believes a theory of justice that is grounded in fairness avoids this problem, since the rules of justice would be agreed to in an initial contractual situation which is fair for all people involved, including the minority group in question. He titles his view “justice as fairness.”

For Rawls, the starting point of forming a just society is what he calls “the original position,” which is a hypothetical community of people who are rational, equal, and self-interested. These people are not trying to start a new social system, but, instead, seeking to establish a mutually beneficial set of principles that will reform and regulate all rights and duties within their system. They are, he argues, “the principles that free and rational persons concerned to further their own interests would accept in an initial position of equality as defining the fundamental terms of their association.” In establishing this foundational guideline, the people see themselves behind a veil of ignorance. That is, they assume to be ignorant about their actual position in society, such as how rich or powerful they are. He writes, “I shall even assume that the parties do not know their conceptions of the good or their special psychological propensities.” This assures that they will not create a foundational guideline that gives them special benefits.

The original position, then, is a state of impartiality and equality. It is impartial since, behind the veil of ignorance, there is no special consideration given to one’s natural assets, such as one’s personal education and wealth. “For example, if someone knew that he was wealthy, he might find it rational to advance the principle that various taxes for welfare measures be counted unjust. On the other hand, if he knew that he was poor, he would most likely propose the contrary principle.

To represent the desired restrictions, one imagines a situation in which everyone is deprived of this sort of information.” It is also a state of equality, since all have the same right in determining the foundational principle of justice. These, then, are the basic parameters of the original position, and it should be left up to the negotiators themselves to stipulate more specifically what things they should presume to be ignorant about. For example, Rawls feels that our society has already reached agreement about religious tolerance and racial injustice, so we may not need to place these behind the veil of ignorance. However, “we have much less assurance as to what is the correct distribution of wealth and authority,” and, thus, knowledge of our actual wealth and power is something that we would place behind the veil of ignorance.

The aim of the original position is to arrive at precise rules of justice that are most acceptable to everyone. As we set up the parameters of the original position—exactly what we should place behind the veil of ignorance—we will be able to evaluate proposed principles of justice according to our common moral intuitions. We can then adjust the circumstances of the original position so that it gives rise to the notion of justice that conforms with our intuitions. This “going back and forth” from the original position to one’s actual intuitions on justice is called reflective equilibrium. However, Rawls argues that this does not involve an appeal to self-evident moral truths about justice as intuitionist philosophers in the past have done. Rather, “its justification is a matter of the mutual support of many considerations, of everything fitting together into one coherent view.”

 Behind the veil of ignorance, Rawls argues, the negotiators would adopt two specific rules of justice: one that assures equal rights and duties for all, and a second that regulates power and wealth. They are these:

• Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others.

• Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) reasonably expected to be to everyone’s advantage, and (b) attached to positions and offices open to all.

The first principle generates specific rights and duties, such as those regarding speech, assembly, conscience, thought, property, arbitrary arrest, and political liberties of voting and holding office.  Every rational and self-interested person would want these to the fullest extent possible. The second principle regulates the fair distribution of wealth and power. To understand how these principles work, Rawls suggests that we start with the assumption that all rights, duties, wealth, and power should be equally distributed among all members of society. But, if certain inequalities would then make everyone better off, then these inequalities are permissible according to the second rule above. For example, it is cumbersome for each citizen to have equal political control. Everyone benefits if political power is concentrated in the hands of a few, as with representative democracies. Thus, “the general conception of justice imposes no restrictions on what sort of inequalities are permissible; it only requires that everyone’s position be improved.” Any equality may be permitted, perhaps even slavery, so long as each person benefits from that inequality, including the slave. According to Rawls, this is the point that makes his theory of “justice as fairness” superior to utilitarianism. For, under utilitarianism, an individual slave’s unhappiness does not matter, so long as general happiness is served by that inequality. “Injustice, then, is simply inequalities that are not to the benefit of all.”

Rawls recognizes that Part A of the second principle is the most controversial aspect of his account. He calls this the “difference principle,” and it has two implications. First, people with fewer natural assets, such as education and wealth, deserve special considerations. Differences in natural assets are the result of what is sometimes called the natural lottery. The natural lottery is arbitrary, and therefore the principle of redress dictates that we should compensate those with fewer natural assets. For example, he suggests, “greater resources might be spent on the education of the less rather than the more intelligent, at least over a certain time of life, say the earlier years of school.” It would be unrealistic to attempt to eliminate such natural distinctions altogether, but there are ways of structuring society so that these differences work for the good of the less fortunate as well as for the more fortunate. Second, Rawls argues that even rich people should agree to give up some wealth for the poor, since in the end they gain simply by being in a society of mutual cooperation. For, “it is clear that the well-being of each depends on a scheme of social cooperation without which no one could have a satisfactory life.”

On the political spectrum from conservative to liberal, Rawls’s theory falls on the liberal side, and is often classified as “welfare liberalism.” What makes it liberal in character is that wealthier people in society need to give up some of their wealth to the less fortunate members to help redress the unfairness of the natural lottery. Behind the veil of ignorance, we would recognize this as the fair thing to do. Further, behind the veil of ignorance, I would want to enact such liberal social policies as a kind of insurance policy to protect me personally since, once the veil of ignorance is removed, it may turn out that I am one of society’s less fortunate people who could benefit from a redistribution of society’s wealth.

Nozick: Minimalist Government

Shortly after the appearance of Rawls’s Theory of Justice, Harvard University philosophy professor Robert Nozick published his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), which was quickly seen as a conservative answer to Rawls. Nozick argued that the role of governments should be minimal and limited to securing our rights—especially the right to property. Governments are not justified in taking away private property against our wills, even when it is for a good cause such as helping needy people. Nozick’s theory is often classified as “libertarian” in the sense that it aims to preserve as much of our individual liberty as possible—especially economic liberty, even if that means that there will be a wide gap in society between the wealthy and the poor.

For Nozick, only a government with very minimal responsibilities is justified, and anything beyond that would violate our rights. There are some anarchist political philosophers who believe that no government is justifiable since they all are coercive and restrictive by their very nature. But Nozick does not go quite that far. There is a natural justification for minimalist governments with a very narrowly defi ned role of protecting its citizens. In the state of nature, he argues, each person is entitled to protect himself against others. Being on guard to protect one’s home twenty-four hours a day is a daunting task, and the first significant development beyond private attempts at self-defense would be the creation of mutual-protection associations. To make our lives more manageable, “groups of individuals may form mutual-protection associations: all will answer the call of any member for defense or for the enforcement of his rights.” These would be something like private security companies, which would protect their members’ property and punish violators. While different protection associations might develop different mechanisms for resolving conflicts, “most persons will want to join associations that follow some procedure to find out which claimant is correct.”

Once I become a member of a mutual-protection association, the association would limit my right to individual retaliation, thus eliminating the confusion that would arise from one vigilante retaliating against another, and then another against another, and so on. To make the protection process more efficient, each protection association would develop procedures for handling conflicts with clients of other protection associations. Conflicts between different associations would soon lead to the development of a common system that judges between competing claims. In time, it would be natural for smaller associations to join together and create a dominant protective association, and, in turn, these would eventually develop into minimal states. From the formation of tiny, private protection associations to bare-bones minimal states, each stage in its advancement is justified and unavoidable: “Out of anarchy, pressed by spontaneous groupings, mutual-protection associations, division of labor, market pressures, economies of scale, and rational self-interest there arises something very much resembling a minimal state or a group of geographically distinct minimal states.”

Nozick argues that “The minimal state is the most extensive state that can be justified. Any state more extensive violates people’s rights.” It is reasonable for governments to acquire the power to protect and punish offenders, but it is not justifi able when governments force us to give up some of our property to pay for other projects, such as welfare programs. The philosophical term for the reallocation of society’s resources is called distributive justice, and Nozick argues that the term itself is a biased one since it presumes that the redistribution of private wealth should even take place. Thus, distributive justice is not justice at all, and, Nozick says, the only theory of property ownership that is consistent with the concept of a minimal state is the theory of entitlement. Entitlement has two main components. The fi rst is the principle of justice in acquisition whereby we initially acquire property by just means, such as making an object from raw materials that no one owns. The second is the principle of justice in transfer whereby we voluntarily transfer that property to another person by just means, such as through a gift or sales contract. If the world were completely just, the following three points would “exhaustively cover the subject of justice in holdings”:

1. A person who acquires a holding in accordance with the principle of justice in acquisition is entitled to that holding.

2. A person who acquires a holding in accordance with the principle of justice in transfer from someone else entitled to the holding, is entitled to the holding.

3. No one is entitled to a holding except by (repeated) applications of 1 and 2.

Any other mechanism for reassigning property will violate our rights. When, for example, the government taxes us to improve the conditions of the poor, this is really just forced labor since I will be working for the benefit of others without any choice or reward.

Nozick says that his entitlement theory follows what he calls an historic principle for distributing wealth, that is, it considers how we came to acquire our property. While this, he argues, is the only just way of considering the distribution of wealth, other theories disregard historical ownership. They focus instead on only the current distribution of ownership as it appears right now in the current-time-slice. For example, utilitarianism holds to a current-timeslice position since it advocates distributing wealth based on the greatest good for the greatest number right now, without considering how we arrived at our wealth. Similarly, governmental welfare programs consider only the currenttime-slice by focusing on how much money people have right now, and then take from the wealthy to help the poor. What is wrong with current-time-slice approaches is that they consider only some end result —such as utility, or social welfare, or the elimination of poverty—and not the historical back story. For Nozick, most people reject current-time-slice approaches since “they think it relevant in assessing the justice of a situation to consider not only the distribution it embodies, but also how that distribution came about.”

In addition to offering a conservative libertarian vision of social justice that is distinct from Rawls’s welfare liberalism, Nozick also criticizes specific components of Rawls’s view. In particular he questions the rules of justice that Rawls derives from the original position since, Nozick believes, they unfairly benefit the poor at the expense of the rich. Nozick theoretically grants Rawls’s account of the original position—many critics of Rawls would not grant even that much. His objection is that people in the original position will not accept Rawls’s second rule of justice that requires that the rich make sacrifices for the poor. We have seen that, according to Rawls, the rich sacrifice something to benefit the poor, but, in exchange, the rich also receive a greater gain by being in a society of mutual cooperation. This is sometimes called the minimax principle: a minimum loss produces a maximum gain. Nozick objects, though, that it is not clear how much the rich gain from mutual cooperation. The rich might prefer a principle of justice that would cost them much less, even if it has less cooperative benefit.

Further, Nozick considers these to rival proposals from the poor and rich respectively:

“Look, better endowed: you gain by cooperating with us. If you want our cooperation, you’ll have to accept reasonable terms. We suggest these terms: We’ll cooperate with you only if we get as much as possible . . .”

“Look, worse endowed: you gain by cooperating with us. If you want our cooperation, you’ll have to accept reasonable terms. We propose these terms: We’ll cooperate with you so long as we get as much as possible. . .”

 Based on how Rawls develops the original position, it is no more outrageous to establish an agreement that produces a higher benefit for the rich, than one that produces a higher benefit for the poor. Thus, for Nozick, Rawls’s endorsement of the difference principle is arbitrary. Nozick also criticizes Rawls for ignoring the manner in which natural assets are acquired. We noted above that, for Rawls, all natural assets are arbitrary, such as people who become rich through inheritance. But Nozick responds that people are entitled to their natural assets if they were acquired legitimately. Consider, for example, that a group of students take an exam, do not know how they did, and must decide on a procedure for assigning grades. They consider several procedures. An equity principle would have the result that all students receive the same grade. An historical entitlement principle would have the result that grades would be based on the number of correct answers given, and this, in turn, would hinge on how much a student studied. A strange reverse entitlement position would have the result that the highest historical entitlement scores are swapped with the lowest historical entitlement scores. Even stranger is that, in the eyes of the students, the historical entitlement and reverse entitlement principles might be on equal footing, since the students do not yet know how they performed on the test. Nozick’s point is that Rawls’s veil of ignorance locks us into a position where we can only consider a principle of wealth distribution if it is not based on historical entitlement—how we came by it. That is, the veil of ignorance will only allow for end-result principles of distribution, such as equality, that are not historically linked to how we came by our wealth. The problem, according to Nozick, is that we should accept end result (nonhistorical) explanations only if all historical entitlement principles fail first. True entitlement assumes that the past history of the property owner is central to the legitimacy of his claim to ownership. The veil of ignorance, though, strips us of any knowledge of our history, and, thus, the principles of distributive justice that we arrive at will rest on end-result principles.

 

 SUMMARY

Recent philosophy is driven more by a diversity of movements than by individual authors who single-handedly reshape the discipline. One prominent issue is the materialist approach to the mind-body problem. According to Ryle, the traditional dualist conception of the relation between mind and body was that of a “ghost in a machine”: human bodies are in space and are governed by mechanical physical laws, while minds do not exist in space and are not subject to such laws. The problem with this view, Ryle argued, is that it commits a category mistake: it assumes that there is some thing or substance called “mind” over and above a person’s various behavioral dispositions. Ryle’s view, now called logical behaviorism, is that talk of mental events should be translated into talk about predictable and observable behavior. Ryle’s position, though, ignored the important fact that our brains are the source of our behavior, and a rival view called identity theory addressed this oversight by maintaining that mental states are identical to brain activity, but are just viewed from two different perspectives.

Although identity theory confines mental states to biological brains, an alternative theory called functionalism allows for other complex physical structures such as computers to also have mental states. What matters is the network of connections that generate mental states, not the specific physical stuff of which those connections are composed. An important type of functionalist theory is that of artificial intelligence. Weak artificial intelligence is the view that suitably programmed machines can simulate human cognition, whereas strong artificial intelligence maintains that suitably programmed machines are actually capable of cognitive mental states. Using his now famous Chinese Room argument, Searle criticized the possibility of strong artificial intelligence: even if a computer program appears to meaningfully interpret nuances of a story, the program does not really understand the story the way that the human mind does. For Searle, biological brains are required for human minds, yet, at the same time, mental states cannot be understood merely in the language of brain activity.

Rorty argued that contemporary analytic philosophy has not fundamentally changed the direction of philosophy, since, like Descartes or Kant, it also assumes that the mind is like a great mirror containing representations of nature. That is, there is (1) a “knowing subject,” (2) a “reality out there,” and (3) a “theory of representation” that describes how reality is represented to the knowing subject. According to Rorty, the entire philosophical metaphor of the mind as a mirror must be rejected. Drawing from Dewey’s pragmatism, Rorty argued that there is no fixed external nature that the mind must mirror. Rather, everything we encounter in our experience is contingent and subject to change. Language is contingent in that it is the result of random choices made by people before us who sought to describe the world. The self is contingent in that we each transform our “self” by overcoming the old self and choosing a new self. The community is contingent in that there is no reliable objective information that can lead to the right kind of community. New versions of virtue theory have been of particular interest among women philosophers. Anscombe argued that the secular modern moral theories of consequentialism and Kantianism are fl awed in that they rely on an empty concept of the moral law. The notion of “law” requires a lawgiver, and it makes no sense to keep talking about obligations to moral laws once we abandon the notion of God as moral lawgiver. Virtue theory, according to Anscombe, offers a better approach since it advocates the development of virtuous habits without relying on concepts of the moral law. Noddings argued that Aristotle’s list of virtues needs to be expanded to include those that are relevant to the female experience, particularly the virtue of caring for others. Virtue epistemologists argue that the concept of a “virtue” applies to theories of knowledge just as it does to moral theory. Traditional epistemology emphasizes that knowledge is grounded in specific properties of belief, specifically that my belief is true and justifiable. Virtue epistemology maintains instead that knowledge is grounded in having appropriate mental qualities or “virtues,” such as inquisitiveness, thoroughness, and fair-mindedness. In contemporary continental philosophy, Saussure’s theory of structuralism maintained that language is an arbitrary social institution, and all the pieces of a language derive their meaning from that larger system of social structures. Lévi-Strauss argued further that cultural structures will typically involve a pair of opposites, such as male/female, odd/even, or light/dark. Post-structuralists, who reject the assumptions of structualists, often focus on literary criticism and hold that each reader of a particular book will likely have a different interpretation of it, and the book will have no definitive meaning. Derrida applied this approach to philosophy. Past philosophers, he argued, built their theories around concepts of paired opposites, such as appearance-reality, which might imply some coherent structure. But through the technique of deconstruction we discover that all such paired opposites are self-refuting. Post-structuralism is part of a larger movement called post-modernism, which disputes the modern assumption forged during the Enlightenment that the world is a single explanatory system that governs everything. Two dominant writers in contemporary political philosophy are Rawls and Nozick. Rawls argued that social justice is a matter of fairness, and we address problems of unfairness in a social contract situation. Negotiators step behind a veil of ignorance that prevents each from knowing his or her actual status in society. Since each negotiator must face the possibility that he or she is poor and in need of help, each then adopts rules of justice that require some redistribution of wealth. Nozick argued the opposite position that in a social contract situation we would opt for a minimal government with no redistribution of wealth. Negotiators would recognize the benefit of paying for private protection agencies that would guard one’s property and punish offenders. These would naturally expand to small governments, which have only policing responsibilities. But beyond this, Nozick argued, governments have no authority to tax their citizens for welfare or social programs.