Philosophy in the Modern World - Chapter Three Synopsis

This post is a combination of notes from the reading and my own thoughts and opinions.

Introduction:

• In the 19th century Kant and Hegel were massively influential in British Universities.
• British empiricism was found attractive by radical thinkers on the continent.
• By the middle of the 20th century Continental and Anglophone philosophers went their separate ways.
• in Britain and America analytic philosophy was dominant in academic circles.
• In continental Europe existentialism was popular, led by Jean Paul Sartre in France, and Martin Heidegger in Germany.

Freud and Psychoanalysis:

• Freud is a topic I covered in great detail on my blog last semester. To read my notes on Freud, follow the links below:

http://poppygradwell.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/hcj-lecture-2-notes-sigmund-freud.html

http://poppygradwell.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/philosophy-in-modern-world-chapter-8.html

http://poppygradwell.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/seminar-paper-freud.html

Husserl's Philosophy:

• Husserl was three years younger than Freud.
• His initial studies were in maths and astronomy - not medicine.
• He was inspired by Franz Brentano.
• Brentano make the distinction of the data of consciousness to be physical and mental phenomena.
• Physical phenomena = colours and smells, etc.
• Mental phenomena = thoughts; characterised by having a content or immanent object.
• Husserl initially continued to focus on maths and in 1891 his book 'Philosophy of Arithmetics' was published.
• The book sought to explain our numerical concepts by identifying the mental acts that were their psychological origin.
• He denied that 0 and 1 were numbers.
• A criticism of his book was that there was confusion between imagination and thought.
• Husserl yielded to criticism and abandoned his early psychologism.
• In 1900 his book Logical Investigations was published.
• Like Frege, Husserl maintained a sharp distinction between logic and psychology.
• He believed that logic cannot be derived from psychology - any attempt to do so much involve a vicious circle since it will have to appeal to logic in the course of its deduction.
• He took from Bentano the notion of intentionality - what is characteristic of mental, as opposed to physical, phenomena is that they are directed to objects.
• Two things are essential to a thought - that is should have a content and a possessor.
• In Logical Investigations, concepts are defined on the basis of psychological items.

Phenomenology:

• Husserl drew a line between psychology and epistemology by a reinvention of psychology as a new discipline of phenomenology.
• Phenomenology was developed during the first decade of the 20th century.
• The aim of phenomenology was the study of immediate data of consciousness, without reference to anything that consciousness might tell us about the extra-mental world.
• Kenny uses the example: When I think of a phoenix, the intentionality of my thought is exactly the same as whether or not there are any phoenixes in reality
• We have infallible immediate knowledge of the objects in our own consciousness.
• We have only inferential and conjectural information about the external world.
• Immanent perception = self evident
• Transcendent perception = fallible - physical things/events and the content of other people's minds.

The Existentialism of Heidegger:

• Heidegger was a pupil of Husserl.
• He thought that phenomenology had been too half-hearted.
• He believed that the first of phenomenology was to study the concept of being (sein).
• He introduced the term Dasein
• Dasein is the kind of being that is capable of asking philosophical questions.
• Although initially similar, Heidegger's concept of Dasein differs to Decartes' 'ego'
• Descartes' ego was essentially a thinking thing.
• The primitive element of Dasein is being-in-the-world - and thinking is only one way of engaging with the world.
• Dasein is not a thinking thing (res cogitans) but a caring thing (res curans) - you only ask if you care.

I think that Heidegger's concept of Dasein is extremely interesting. I like the idea that Dasein is a caring thing because I think that essentially it is true that a primitive part of human nature is that we only want to ask about things that we care about.

I think that this part of us has been altered by the society in which we live, for example we ask questions to be polite or because we think that we need to, not because we care about the answer. For example, if someone I don't particularly like and don't have the time to talk to was to ask me how I am, I would answer and then ask them the same to be polite, not because I care. On the other hand I suppose I would try to be polite because I cared enough to not want to hurt the person's feelings.

Similarly, at school we often ask questions so that we can retain the answers and use them to pass exams and achieve our academic goals, not because we honestly care about what we are learning. Is this taking us away from our Dasein? Or does it prove that we ask because we care about progressing in life, even if we do not necessarily care about the individual answers. Are we being true to our Dasein if we do things we don't care about in order to work towards something that we do care about?

• Concepts and judgements can be thought of as instruments for coping with the world.
• Temporal nature of Dasein - we should not think of it as a substance, but as the unfolding of a life.
• Our life is not a self-contained, self developing entity - from the outset we find ourselves thrown into a physical, cultural and historical context.

I agree with Heidegger in the sense that from the very moment we are born we are not self-contained, we become a part of something much bigger than ourselves. This may be in the sense that we are all registered statistics of a recorded world, or it could be because it would be impossible, in our culture, to go through life as completely self-contained beings.

For example, we are not responsible for our own existence, so before we are even born we are reliant on our parents. It is not possible for us to be self-contained as throughout life we will always be reliant on other people. For example, I could live in a house by myself, work by self and grow my own food to try and be a self contained individual - but I would still be reliant on the person who built my house, the person who provides my work and the person who provides the seeds for my food.

It could be argued that by nature we are social creatures - we live in groups of thousands in any one area. However is this through a natural instinct or is this through necessity? There are billions of people in the world, and so through necessity we live in massive groups. If there were only 100 people in the world, would they be happier living alone and coming together only a few times a year, as some animals do? Or do we instinctively have no desire to be self contained beings?

• Individual achievements and potentialities are all terminated in death - not completed in death.
• Any view of life as a whole must take into account the differences between what we will be and what we might have been; hence guilt and anxiety.

I completely agree with the concept that a life is measured by what we are and what we might be. I also think that we all measure ourselves by what we are and what we think we can be; that is certainly true in my case. I have found throughout my life that the only constant that I use to measure my life is if I am working towards what I think I can be. My problem is that I am continually working towards what I can be with no concept of what I want to be.

Is it healthy to measure our lives on whether we have measured up to our potential? I certainly don't think so. The expectations we have put on us as well as the ones that we set for ourselves are not necessarily unachievable, but more often than not lead to anxiety about whether we will reach those goals and guilt if we fall short of them. Living this way also means that we often do not live in the present, we only acknowledge the present in terms of whether it is better than the past, and if we can improve upon it in the future.

I am not saying that it is a bad thing to set goals for yourself, I am suggesting that to measure your life by whether you are on track to achieve those goals is a dangerous way to live.

• From the outset we are elements of the world - always already being-in-the-world
• We are beings among beings - acting upon and reacting to them.
• Our actions and reactions need not be guided by consciousness.
• Only when our spontaneous actions misfire in some way that we become conscious of what we are doing.

I think that Heidegger raises another interesting point here - that for the most part we are going through life without really being aware of what we are doing, and we only take notice when something goes wrong. I think that this is probably true for most people.

For example, if you try and recall everything you did every single day of the past year I don't think you would be able to do it. You would be much more likely to be able to recall days on which something went wrong, or when something went really well. But on the days where you just went through the motions of your life you would probably not be able to remember exactly what you did. Perhaps this is proof that Heidegger's belief that our actions and reactions are not guided by consciousness is an accurate one.

• Dasein has three fundamental aspects:

1. Attunement - the situations into which we are thrown manifest themselves as attractive, or alarming, or boring, etc
2. Discursive - it operates within a world of discourses among entities that are articulated and interpreted for us by the language and culture we share.
3. Understanding - its activities are directed (not necessarily consciously) towards a goal which will make sense of a whole life within its cultural context.

The idea that we are moving towards an end goal, consciously or not, is one that has been proposed by philosophers before. For example, it is the basis of teleological theories, and was the basis of Marx's theory. I think that it is interesting that Heidegger seems to develop on this idea by suggesting that our Dasein directs us towards a goal that makes sense of our lives in a cultural context - we are not necessarily all moving towards the same goal.

For example, the end goal in our culture will be extremely different to the culture of Native American Indians. This could help to explain why different cultures have such different values - or the very opposite could be suggested in the sense that the Dasein moves towards a goal that is cultural dependent because of pre-existing values. It is almost a chicken and egg scenario.

• According to Heidegger the essence of Dasein is its existence.
• It was this belief that labelled him the Father of Existentialism.
• Individuals are not merely members of a species and are not determined by universal laws - What I essentially am, is what I freely take myself to be.
• To be authentic I must make my own life in full awareness that there is no ground, either in human nature or divine command, for the choices I make and that no choice is going to bring any transcendent meaningfulness to my life

The above extracts from chapter three of PMW are extremely controversial. Essentially this belief is one which suggests that any belief that we make decisions based on our nature, or a belief in a higher power is valid, and that our choices are not going to be meaningful to our lives.

There are many religions, including Christianity, which suggest that decisions should be made in accordance with our nature and the wishes of a divine power. If Heidegger's theory is correct then these religious beliefs become null and void.

I think it is very dangerous to suggest that the choices we make are simply choices with no meaning. This could lead to anarchy if people start to believe that it is meaningless whether or not they decide to work, to be active members in the community, to look after their children, or even to follow laws.

I think that people, whether they have religious beliefs or not, need to believe that the choices they make can bring meaning to their lives. If we cannot achieve meaning in our own life then what is the point in living at all?

The Existentialism of Sartre:

• Sartre was briefly a student of Heidegger.
• Like Heidegger, he believed that Husserl had not take phenomenological reduction far enough.
• He attacked the notion that in imagination we are surveying the contents of an interior mental world.
• Sartre maintained that imagining relates us to extra-mental objects, not to internal images - it does no less than perception but in a different mode.
• Emotion is a certain manner of apprehending - "a magical transformation".
• Being is what precedes and underlies all the different kinds and aspects of things that we encounter in consciousness.
• If we strip off all the distinctions that consciousness has made, we are left with pure being.
• Sartre accepts that objectification of nothing and attempts to give it an important significance: red can be distinguished by things that are not red. When identifying chairs and tables we define a chair and not a table.
• Sartre believed that the life of an individual is not determined in advance, not by a creator, nor absolute moral laws.
• We cannot escape the necessity to choose.
• Human freedom is absolute but scary and so we impose morality/society/laws/etc.
• Sartre believed that we are aware of our own freedom while striving to reduce ourselves to mere objects - he called this bad faith.
• The other attitude is to accept our freedom and accept our own choices and actions.
• Being-for-others; how we are presented and observed by others - we become objects for them.

I think that Sartre's idea of bad faith is an interesting one, and I agree with it. I think that it would be possible for us to become overwhelmed by our freedom, and we innately feel more comfortable when we have limitations on our freedom. For example, I have the freedom to kill someone if I choose to, but the law limits my freedom to kill someone because I have to take into account the consequences of my actions.

Our freedom is not absolute because it has physical limitations. For example, I could choose to fly out of the window, but physical laws mean that I am unable to do so. But, with the exceptions of things like that, we have the freedom to do anything we want, and to be anything we want. We are even starting to expand our freedoms beyond the limitations of the physical world - for example we now have the freedom to change our gender if we want to. 

By creating societies with moral values and laws, we limit our own freedom and seem perfectly comfortable in doing so. This may be because it means that we do not become overwhelmed by the possibilities of our lives, but can also act as a safety mechanism so that we don't have to fear how other's will use their freedom. If murder, for example, was not illegal then we may be continually in fear that other people will use their freedom to choose to murder us at any given moment without warning or reason. Whilst people still have the freedom to do this, the laws stating the consequences of using this freedom is enough to allow us to go about our daily lives without fearing that everyone we meet might murder us.

I think that Sartre is absolutely right in suggesting that we are all aware of our freedom, but prefer to limit it.

J.L Austin:

• In 1946 Austin made a distinction between two kinds of speech:

1. Constative - speech that is matter of fact, for example 'it is raining'
2. Performative - speech that changes things, not reports on them, for example 'I promise to meet you at 10 o'clock'

• Austin proposed that there are three elements of speech:

1. Locutionary - in the phrase "SHOOT HER", the locutionary speech would be defined by the sense of 'shoot' and the reference of 'her'
2. Illocutionary - in the same phrase, the illocutionary speech would be the act of ordering, urging, etc
3. Perlocutionary - act takes place only if illocutionary act had been achieved, for example 'he made me shoot her'

Jaques Derrida:

• Derrida's methos is quite different to Austin.
• He made a distinction between spoken words and written words, where as Austin didn't.
• Derrida deconstructed the opposition of speech and the written word.
• He gave preference to the written word because he claimed that it gave less control to the author because it was open to diverse interpretations.
• This is a parallel to Wittgenstein's demolition of the notion of private language.

I think that Derrida was right to suggest that the written word gives less control to its author. I think that this is particularly true in today's society, where people communicate more frequently through texting or email than ever before. The words in an email or text message are open to interpretation by anyone who reads them, and this often leads to a great deal of misunderstanding and miscommunication.

I think the fact that the written word doesn't allow the author to have control of it, it a huge factor in the growth of cyber bullying in our society. People are able to write whatever they want, safe in the knowledge that they will be anonymous, and if they are discovered it would not be difficult to suggest that the victim had misinterpreted what had been written.

• Kenny states that Derrida's philosophical weapons are the pun, the bawdy, the sneer and the snigger.