| | In 1640, Rene Descarte sat at his desk and meditated on what, if anything, he could be certain. He could doubt his perception and much of his reasoning, but he could not doubt that he was doubting. To even wonder about his existence, he thought to himself, he had to exist. "I think, therefore I am." he said.
Descarte admitted that the rest of his conclusions were not as solid as the apparently logical proof for his existence. He said that if he could be certain of his existence, then there must be a God. This God, he decided, would not fool him about the existence of bodies. He existed as a thinking thing, a mind or soul, and he apparently had a material thing called a body.
He had a problem with the relationship between the soul and the body. The body is solid, tangible. It takes up space and has a location. Does the soul have these same characteristics? If not, how does the soul interact with the body? If the soul is not a physical thing, then how does it cause the body to move?
Benedict Spinoza, 1632-1677, tried to solve the soul-body problem by saying they are both the same. Like Thales, he thought God is in everything. Mind and matter are attributes of the same substance. When one is affected, the other is also.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, 1644-1716, tried to solve the soul-body problem in another way. He said innumerable atom-like beings, called Monads, are active in substances and give the appearance of interaction. The Monads of the mind and the Monads of the body, each acting according to their prescribed nature, function in unison to give the outward appearance of interaction.
John Locke, 1632-1704, contended that the human mind is, at birth, a blank tablet which, through the perception of sensations, develops ideas. This contrasted with Descarte who thought some knowledge was inate.
Locke did not know, however, if there was anything more to substance than those qualities which are experienced. What is a red ball, for example, other than its shape, color, weight, and texture? He claimed anything more is unknowable.
George Berkeley, 1685-1753, went even further than Locke. He said any qualities which cannot be experienced, do not exist. Mental images, he said, are all we have, and independent matter, therefore does not exist. This would evolve into a position known as Solipism, the belief of an individual that he or she alone exists while everything else is in his or her imagination, but Berkeley decided we are all part of the mental experience of God.
David Hume, 1711-1776, went even further than Berkeley. He attacked all knowledge by saying we are directly aware of perceptions only. We cannot perceive God, mind, laws of science, or laws of causation. Therefore, all these things cannot be proven to exist.
So much for the soul-body problem.
Immanuel Kant, 1724-1804, seems to have saved science and religion from Hume's attack and brought together two divergent views about the source of knowledge. Rationalism is, very generally, the view that a primary source of knowledge is reasoning, like when Descarte searched his mind for knowledge unattached to experience. Empiricism focuses on knowledge from experience, on sensations and perceptions. Kant said both are needed. They work together. Experience is like the raw material which becomes finished when processed through the machinery of reason. A rational understanding of our sensations is knowledge.
What Kant did seems comparable to what Plato did when he reconciled the theories of Heraclitus and Parmenides. Kant's transcendental realities, in fact, resemble the ideal forms of Plato's construction.
This new idealism influenced another German philosopher, Friedrich Hegel, 1770-1831, to come up with a process for arriving at truth. It combines "thesis" with "antithesis" to form "synthesis."
Hegel inspired Karl Marx in the construction of his Dialectical Materialism, but he aslo provoked several people, like Friedrich Nietzsche and Soren Kierkegaard, to rebel against his systematic approach. Heideggar and Sartre soon followed.
Although there are many differences among the philosophers who rebelled against Hegel, other than the analytical philosophers, they share certain things in common which has classified them, in textbooks, as Existentialists. All Existentialists share the view that reality is not as rational as Hegel and Kant and Leibniz believe. There are no absolutes, they say, but this is okay because it means we can be free and responsible.
The systematic philosophies are, say the Existentialists, like the beautiful homes one observes in magazines. They are nice to look at, but nobody can actually live in them. It seems the foundations of some intricate structures crumble when people need them most. When we meet someone in the street, all the fancy furnishings of systematic philosophies are of little value. We must deal with life.
It is left to Nick Otani to attempt the impossible and combine elements of existentialism with a systematic philosophy called objectivism.
|
|
