ITS FALL AND THE VICTORY OF THE PROLETARIAT ARE EQUALLY INEVITABLE.”
Manifesto of the Communist Party 6: 496
WHO’S WHO IN PHILOSOPHY 313
James’s fi rst major work, the Principles of Psychology (1890), is best known for the idea of the “stream of consciousness,”
which opposed the traditional empiricist notion of discrete items of experience in favor of a continuous fl ow, where both the immediate past and immediate future color the quality of the present moment.
In 1902 James explored mysticism and religious experiences in Varieties of Religious Experience (see also pp.150–1) before taking up Peirce’s “pragmatism” (above). This he developed from a theory of meaning to a theory of truth, proposing (in Pragmatism, 1907), that the truth of a statement is defi ned not by the fact that it agrees with reality, but rather in terms of the practical use to which it can be put—it can be
“true,” for example, if it accurately predicts experience.
William James came from a wealthy cosmopolitan New York family, which included his brother, the novelist Henry James, on the left in this picture.
William James
b 1842–1910 n US
William James spent his entire career at Harvard, starting out in medicine before moving on to psychology and then to philosophy. An early paper,
“The Will to Believe” (1897), reveals his lifelong attraction to religious belief, arguing that belief in God can be justifi ed by something other than evidence.
Peirce was primarily a professional scientist rather than a philosopher, and his laboratory experience remained a key infl uence on his thought. Against the modern tradition in philosophy, he held that the way to acquire knowledge was not as a lone investigator in search of certainty, but via the experimental approach of a community of scientifi c inquirers examining uncertainties within a system of accepted beliefs.
Peirce’s reading of Kant (see pp.294–7) was his principal philosophical infl uence, and he saw himself as continuing Kant’s
Charles Sanders Peirce
b 1839–1914 n US
Best known as one of the founders of the distinctively American philosophical approach called “pragmatism,”
C. S. Peirce was infl uenced by Kant and acted as a key infl uence on his close friend William James (below).
project in the light of modern advances in logic, many his own. According to Peirce’s pragmatism, the meaning of a term is exhausted by the practical effects it has on our actions and the way we conduct inquiry, and so is defi nable in terms of its rational usefulness.
Peirce remained relatively unknown during his lifetime and failed to hold any academic post in philosophy for more than a few years. Nonetheless he produced a vast corpus of papers (Philosophical Papers, 1931–5) that helped to establish his importance.
philosophical movement—pragmatism—emerged.
Harvard’s department of philosophy, home to the pragmatists C. S. Peirce and William James, was considered by many to be the fi nest in the world.
The son of a Lutheran pastor, the young Nietzsche was a brilliant scholar and his early academic career in philology advanced meteorically, culminating in his appointment to the Chair of Classics at the University of Basel aged just 24.
The defi ning moment in Nietzsche’s intellectual development came in 1865 when he accidentally discovered Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation (1818). The infl uence of the composer Wagner, whom Nietzsche befriended as a student, is also evidenced in his early works. However, he fell out with Wagner over his opera Parsifal, which Nietzsche considered to be too Christian. In 1879, due to deteriorating
health, Nietzsche abandoned his academic career and embarked on several years of traveling around Alpine towns. During this period he published various collections of aphorisms and produced the literary-philosophical masterpiece Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
He continued to write and publish at a phenomenal rate despite deteriorating health until he suffered a collapse on a street in Turin in 1889, having witnessed a man beat a horse. Nietzsche never recovered his sanity but his renown gathered pace around Europe.
ESSENTIAL TEXTS The Birth of Tragedy; Human, All Too Human; Beyond Good and Evil; On the Genealogy of Morals; Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
KEY IDEAS
Nietzsche’s earliest philosophical concerns were the fruit of his engagement with Schopenhauer’s atheistic vision of a world governed by irrational forces and characterized by striving and suffering (see pp.304–5). But while
Nietzsche applauded the elimination of any spiritual dimension to the human condition, he rejected Schopenhauer’s pessimistic reaction to it. In a Europe that had lost faith in the divine order that underpinned its traditional value system, the proper response was not to sink into nihilism, but to rise to the challenge to forge new values for a new age.
Nietzsche’s whole philosophical project may be seen as his attempt to blaze a trail out of the malaise brought on by the death of God. It is in Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morals that
Nietzsche develops his best- known critiques of the Judeo-Christian values that he hoped to overcome.
According to his analyses, what we normally consider as “good” is really a valorization of the condition of the weak.
The Christian denial of the differences between human
Christian morality is the morality of the herd, condemning as “evil”
those noble types who stand out from the crowd, asserted Nietzsche.
Friedrich Nietzsche
b 1844–1900 n Germany
Largely overlooked during his own lifetime, Nietzsche correctly predicted that the time for his philosophy was yet to come. Indeed his infl uence has burgeoned since the second half of the 20th century through movements such as existentialism, post-structuralism, and postmodernism.
LIFE AND WORKS
The direct approach taken by dogmatic philosophers has inevitably failed to discover the truth.
Nietzsche suggests that truth might instead have to be beguiled or seduced.
NIETZSCHE 317
beings, its pretended humility, its universal love, its rejection of bodily passions and of a sinful world, all issue from a resentful rejection of the life- affi rming values of a noble, higher type of human being. The attempt of this slave morality to tame the beast within us is to be resisted so that noble values, with their bold expression of strength and
power, might be revitalized. From this appears Nietzsche’s great challenge to humanity, and the great remedy to nihilism: his vision of the “Superman” – a new breed of human who would transform established values.
PERSPECTIVISM
Nietzsche’s critical fi re is also directed against the philosopher’s will to truth.
Knowledge, he suggests, can never be grasped, since it is impossible to arrive at an objective conception of the world independent of some interpretation.
This is not to say that Nietzsche rejects the idea of truth per se, for he allows that from within interpretations, views can be true. But it does mean that different interpretations must be judged in terms of the values that they express. One implication of his “perspectivism” is that confl ict must be integral to philosophical
discourse, and Nietzsche’s aphoristic style can be seen as an attempt
to multiply perspectives in order to open up new avenues of thought and fashion the armory for the philosophy of the future.