NATURE, WE OURSELVES INTRODUCE.”
Critique of Pure Reason, A 125
SEE ALSO 왘 Mind-dependence (pp.82–99) • Does God exist? (pp.140–9) • What should I do? (pp.102–3)
A PARADIGM SHIFT
The astronomer and mathematician Copernicus (1473–1543) recognized that the movement of the stars and planets cannot be explained by them revolving around the
observer; rather, the observer must be revolving. In the same way, Kant argued that we cannot discover
what it is possible for us to know by focusing on the
world. Rather, we must place the structure of our cognitive capacities and the way in which they shape the world we experience at the center of our inquiries.
Copernicus rationalized the galaxy with a new model in which the sun, like Kant’s self, became the center around which all revolved.
LIFE AND WORKS
KEY IDEAS
SEE ALSO Negative freedom (pp.162) • The social contract (p.165) • Marx (pp.311–2)
ESSENTIAL TEXTS Theory of the Moral Sentiments; Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.
Smith was baptized in July 1723 in Kirkcaldy. He studied at the University of Glasgow and then at Oxford, before returning to Scotland in 1748. For a time he lectured in Edinburgh, where he became close friends with Hume (see pp.290–1) and began to develop the ideas that would form the Wealth of Nations. In 1751 Smith obtained the Chair in Logic at Glasgow, and published the
Theory of the Moral Sentiments in 1759.
He left the university in 1763 to tutor a Scottish nobleman, with whom he toured France and met many of the philosophes.
He returned to Kirkcaldy and, in 1776, published his most famous work.
Smith’s Wealth of Nations is important principally for establishing economics as an independent discipline. From it developed both classical and modern economic theory. Smith’s main argument
is that free trade is the route to economic success on the grounds that a free market, of its own accord, will tend to produce a healthy range of goods while securing the correct levels of production.
Any shortage will boost demand, leading to an increase in prices. This will, in turn, increase production as producers take advantage of lucrative profi t margins. On the other hand, any surplus will naturally lead to a decrease in price, thereby reducing the producers’ interest in marketing the product. So, although the players involved are self-interested, a capitalist system will tend to keep prices low and ensure that there is an incentive for meeting a range of human needs, and so it should serve the interests of all without the need for state interference.
Although he was embraced by libertarian thinkers, Smith himself recognized the limitations of the market and allowed for public services and education of the poor to be paid for out of general taxation.
An “invisible hand” controls the market, according to Smith; demand dictates the price of goods and governments can adopt a “laissez-faire” approach.
Adam Smith
b 1723–1790 n Scotland
Best known as an economist, Smith was also a notable moral philosopher. His Wealth of Nations defends free-trade capitalism and was the fi rst systematic study of the workings of commerce. His belief in the free market makes him, for many, the father of modern libertarianism.
Burke joined Parliament in 1765 as a member of the governing Whig party, who lost power in 1783.
He remained in Opposition until he retired in 1794.
WHO’S WHO IN PHILOSOPHY 299
LIFE AND WORKS
KEY IDEAS
SEE ALSO Political Philosophy (pp.160–77)
• Rousseau (pp.292–3) ESSENTIAL TEXTS Philosophical Enquiry into the
Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful;
Reflections on the Revolution in France.
Born when Ireland was part of the British Empire, Burke was raised an Anglican. After graduating from Trinity College, Dublin, he traveled to London in 1750 to study law, but gave up to tour Europe. A Vindication of Natural Society, in which Burke defends an anarchistic political position, appeared anonymously in 1756, but he disavowed the work after becoming a politician, claiming it was a satire. His Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful infl uenced Kant’s thinking.
Burke’s writings are characterized by the fl oridity of their rhetoric, rather than the careful reasoning of their arguments. In the political arena, he was primarily a practical thinker, concerned to infl uence policy rather than to lay down an abstract political philosophy. On joining the House of Commons, Burke became involved in efforts to dilute the power of the monarch, George III, and to defend the claims of the American colonies against British Imperial authority.
However, his Refl ections on the Revolution in France in 1790 reveals another side to his political character. Here he discusses the connections between the Revolution and Rousseau’s philosophy and predicts that, by tearing up the fabric of society, revolution opens the door to terror and tyranny. Burke was suspicious of the rise of atheism in France and viewed the
Revolution as an illegitimate usurpation of power, rather than an assertion of democratic rights. He attacked Rousseau and other French intellectuals—the philosophes—for believing that through theoretical speculation, divorced from tradition and political practicalities, a perfect design for society might be discovered. He argued that feelings of instinctive kinship are far more
signifi cant in maintaining social cohesion than abstract reason, emphasizing the importance of established social structures and inherited rights in securing political order. Burke’s theory was vindicated as France’s revolutionary ideals gave way to the Reign of Terror and the autocracy of Napoleon’s regime.
Edmund Burke
b 1729–1797 n Ireland
Burke is remembered for supporting the American colonies’
fi ght for independence from Britain, and for his opposition to the French Revolution: an apparent inconsistency that has bedeviled his reputation. A conservative thinker, he defended reforms grounded in existing traditions.
LIFE AND WORKS
KEY IDEAS
SEE ALSO 왘 Normative ethics (pp.102–11) • Mill (pp.308–9)
ESSENTIAL TEXTS Fragment on Government; An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation.
Bentham studied law at Oxford and qualifi ed at Lincoln’s Inn. However, he became so disillusioned with the state of English law that he never practiced, working instead for its reform. He came to fame as a critic of the conservative political theorist Blackstone with his Fragment on Government and founded the Westminster Review, a radical quarterly later edited by John Stuart Mill, through which he pursued his lifelong campaign for political and social reform.
He was made an honorary citizen of the French
Bentham believed that “Nature has [given us] two sovereign masters, pleasure and pain”—in other words, that the search for pleasure and avoidance of pain are the sole motivating forces for humans.
On this basis, he argued that the morality of an action is a function of its tendency to promote pleasure or pain.
This he termed the principle of utility.
Thus the morally right thing to do, and, signifi cantly, the morally proper social or legal policy to adopt, is always whatever offers the greatest balance of pleasure over pain for the population as a whole.
Bentham’s ambition was to establish the perfect legal system and so make human beings virtuous. To this end, his reform agenda required that legislation
be framed exclusively in terms of the utility principle. To give legislators a yardstick for measuring the aggregate of pleasure produced by policies, he devised a “hedonic” calculus. This took into account the duration, intensity, and so on of pleasures or pains, providing a scientifi c basis for making social policy.
The utilitarians had great infl uence over reforms in Britain with a supposedly rational basis for determining legislation as contrasted with fi ctions such as natural rights, or appeals to religious authority.
Bentham’s infl uence is still evident in any cost-benefi t analysis for policy decisions.
Jeremy Bentham
b 1748–1832 n England
Bentham wrote on ethics, politics, economics, and the law, and is best known as the founder of utilitarianism, the view that what is morally good is whatever maximizes happiness for most people. He argued for political and legal reforms that would benefi t the population as a whole.
Republic in 1792 in recognition of his powerful critiques of traditional arguments adduced in support of established injustices, despite his rejection of the Déclaration des droits de l’homme as metaphysical nonsense.
Before he died, Bentham arranged to have his body preserved as an “auto- icon,” which may be viewed in London’s University College to this day.
Bentham’s embalmed corpse (with wax head) on display at University College London, which he founded.
WHO’S WHO IN PHILOSOPHY 301
LIFE AND WORKS
KEY IDEAS
SEE ALSO 왘 God and the mind (pp.86–89) • Kant (pp.294–7)
ESSENTIAL TEXTS Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation; Science of Knowledge; Science of Rights; The Way to the Blessed Life of the Doctrine of Religion.
Fichte’s fi rst work, Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation, was published anonymously and, given its Kantian fl avor, mistaken for a work of the great man. This earned Fichte his reputation and a professorship at the University of Jena in 1793. Fichte was forthright in his unorthodox views on the nature of God, which were taken as tantamount to atheism; this, and his support for the French Revolution, forced
him from his post in 1799. Kant disowned his disciple but Fichte moved to a post at Berlin University, associated with the Romantic circle, where he gave his celebrated Addresses to the German Nation.
At root a Kantian thinker, Fichte continued Kant’s project but with certain key adjustments. Kant argued that we can only have knowledge of a world of appearances: that things in themselves lie beyond human understanding. In arguing that the knowing subject must posit the existence of such a world, Kant should, according to Fichte, have recognized that the thing in itself exists for consciousness.
The process by which the ego becomes aware of itself necessarily involves contrasting itself with what it is not, the non-self. And insofar as it is a condition of self-knowledge that we project the existence of a thing-in-itself, its existence
is posited in order to be contrasted with the self. This effectively means the self constitutes the whole of reality, and so the ego is identifi ed with the ultimate reality. In order to avoid collapsing into a form of idealism in which objectivity becomes impossible, Fichte looks to the idea of self-legislating rules, and picks up on Kant’s idea of the self as the legislator of moral law. The ego’s recognition of its activity as producing objectivity is characterized as the “absolute,” making Fichte the fi rst absolute idealist.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
b 1762–1814 n Germany
The fi rst philosopher to pick up on the Kantian revolution and the fi rst of a group of thinkers known as the German Idealists, Fichte called for a moral reawakening in Germany after the defeats by Napoleon. His lectures are cited among the foundations of German nationalistic totalitarianism.
Fichte claimed that knowledge of the self becomes possible only by contrasting it with that which it is not—the world of the non-self.
Born into a Protestant family, the young Hegel had ambitions to be a clergyman and enrolled at a seminary in Tübingen, where he met Schelling (see p.306) and the poet Hửlderlin. After receiving his doctorate, he pursued an academic career in philosophy, taking up a lecturing post at Jena University where Schelling also taught, and they collaborated on the Critical Journal of Philosophy. In 1805, as Napoleon prepared for the battle of Jena, Hegel fi nished his fi rst major work, The Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel’s sympathies lay with Napoleon as the harbinger of the principles of a new world order and he later edited a Napoleonic newspaper. In 1816, after the appearance of Science of Logic, he obtained the Chair of Philosophy at Heidelberg and, later, Berlin. In 1831 he was decorated by Friedrich Wilhelm III but died four months later of cholera.
ESSENTIAL TEXTS The Phenomenology of Spirit; The Science of Logic; The Philosophy of Right.
Hegel took a holistic and organic view of reality as a spiritual process, aimed at an ultimate goal or purpose. The nature of this process is fully amenable to rational investigation, its meaning and purpose discernible through an investigation of history, which will reveal to us our nature and place in the world. Hegel uses the term Geist to refer to this world process within which individual minds are unimportant, mere pawns in a dynamic driven by its own inexorable logic.
THE DIALECTIC
The logic of the march of history is what Hegel terms the “dialectic.” Any given situation contains tensions that make it inherently unstable, so fueling historical change. Hegel shows how the same dialectical logic, a movement from
“thesis” to its “antithesis” and on to
“synthesis,” applies to the development of social, economic, and political history;
and also to the development of religious and philosophical ideas. Since confl ict is KEY IDEAS
An artist imagines Hegel, an admirer of Napoleon, greeting the victorious Emperor as he tours the streets of Jena during the French occupation.
Georg Hegel
b 1770–1831 n Germany
Hegel became the foremost German philosopher in his own lifetime, his project encompassing the whole of history, reality, and thought in one philosophical system. Reality is constituted by Geist (“mind” or “spirit”), a dynamic force that directs the process of history toward its ultimate goal.
LIFE AND WORKS
the engine of change, overcoming confl icts and achieving harmony will mean an end to history. In social terms, this means the realization of a state that has overcome internal strife. In terms of ideas, tensions cease when Geist reaches self-realization, that is to say when it comes to know itself, recognizing that it is the ultimate reality. In other words, Mind has become self-aware and recognizes the truth of Hegel’s absolute idealism in which there is nothing—no thing in itself—that is opposed to consciousness. Since this fi nal transformation is achieved in Hegel’s own philosophy, it represents the culmination of the historical process.
HEGEL AND FREEDOM
In the political arena, the end of history means human liberation. But Hegel’s notion of freedom is very different from the liberal account as found in Mill, which defi nes it in terms of the absence of constraints, since this ignores the
forces that determine the choices we make and which lie outside our control.
Hegel is alive to how history determines our nature and the choices of which we are capable, and so for him true freedom can only occur once we take control of these forces. This cannot happen so long as society is treated as an atomized collection of individuals, each pursuing his or her own objectives, but only once the individual’s will is absorbed into that of the collective and recognized by reason to be shared by all. Then it will no longer be something from which we feel alienated, and we will recognize our social duty as being in our own interest.
Rid of confl ict in a rational, harmonious community, we will become self- legislating and, thereby, fi nally free.
SEE ALSO The liberal ideal (p.162) • John Stuart Mill (pp.308–9) • Marx (pp.311–2)
Hegel seemed to believe that the
constitutional monarchy of the Prussia of his own day represented the culmination of history, a position for which he was accused by Schopenhauer (see overleaf) of selling out to his patron, the King, and which served as a basis for the Prussian nationalism of the Right Hegelians. However, the Left Hegelians, among whom the young Karl Marx was counted, recognized the fl aws in contemporary Prussia as the fuel for a new dialectical movement, this time of a revolutionary nature.
A DIVIDED LEGACY