Kant

Hume’s skepticism was the explicit point of departure for the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), who acknowledged that it was Hume who had awakened him from his “dogmatic slumber.” Although Kant’s subsequent “critical” philosophy emphasized the limitations of human reason, it did so in a manner that ultimately vindicated the claims to knowledge that more-traditional philosophers had made on its behalf.

Following the French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes (1596–1650), Kant insisted that any investigation of the scope of human knowledge must begin with an examination of the cognitive faculties through which it is acquired. This general approach became characteristic of later German idealism and has exerted an enormous influence on continental philosophy in the 19th and 20th centuries. In his Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 1787), Kant presciently observed that “the critical path alone is open,” meaning that any approach to the problem of knowledge that failed to respect the limitations that he had laid down risked falling into the metaphysical dogmatism of old.

The problem of knowledge, according to Kant, is to explain how some judgments about the world can be necessarily true and therefore knowable “a priori,” or independently of experience (see a posteriori knowledge). Until Kant’s time, all empirical judgments were regarded as vulnerable to skeptical doubt, because human experience is inherently fallible. On the other hand, all a priori judgments, such as “All bachelors are unmarried,” were regarded as empty of content, because they did not present any information that was not already contained in the concepts with which they were composed (being unmarried is part of what it is to be a bachelor). If human knowledge of the world was to be possible, therefore, there would have to be judgments that were both empirical and a priori.

The genius and originality of Kant’s philosophy lay in the means by which he made room for such judgments. In what he described, in the preface to the second edition (1787) of the Critique of Pure Reason, as his “Copernican” revolution, he proposed that knowledge should not depend on the conformity of a judgment to an object in experience; rather, the existence of an object in experience should depend on its conformity to human knowledge.

Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects. But all attempts to extend our knowledge of objects by establishing something in regard to them a priori, by means of concepts, have, on this assumption, ended in failure. We must therefore make trial whether we may not have more success in the tasks of metaphysics, if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge.

That is to say, a thing can be an “object of possible experience” for human beings only if it conforms to human knowledge in certain respects. This is because the faculty of intuition—which receives the appearances (“phenomena”) of experience—is structured by the concepts of space and time, and because the faculty of understanding—which orders the phenomena received through intuition—is structured by concepts grouped under the general headings of quantity, quality, relation, and modality. The fact that space and time are forms of possible experience, rather than generalizations derived from experience, explains how the judgments of geometry, for example, can be both empirical (about experience) and knowable a priori. Similarly, a judgment such as “Every event has a cause,” is both empirical and a priori, because causality (under the heading “relation”) is one of the concepts imposed on experience by the understanding, not a generalization derived by the understanding from experience.

Behind the phenomena of experience, according to Kant, there is a realm of “noumena,” e.g., “things in themselves,” that is in principle unknowable. The mistake of traditional philosophers had been to assume that reason could use a priori principles to derive metaphysical knowledge of things outside or beyond any possible experience. In this respect the skeptical philosophers had been right to criticize the traditional proofs of the existence of God or of the immortality of the soul as so much empty dogmatism.

Not surprisingly, neither of Kant’s chief philosophical antagonists was satisfied with the new critical philosophy. For the skeptics, Kant’s distinction between phenomena and noumena was redolent of earlier metaphysics. If knowledge of the noumenal realm is impossible, on what basis could Kant claim that it exists? Why refer to it at all? For the dogmatists, conversely, Kant’s supposed defense of the powers of reason ceded far too much ground to the antimetaphysical camp.

Kant’s moral philosophy, as elaborated in the Critique of Practical Reason (1788) and the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), also proved extremely influential. In these works his central concern was human freedom, or the autonomy of the will, just as the autonomy of reason had been the focus of the first critique (see free will). The immediate problem for Kant was to reconcile the idea of freedom with the evident causal determinism operative in the phenomenal world, a determinism that the first critique itself had endorsed.

Against the champions of determinism, Kant insisted on the autonomous capacities of the human will: by universalizing one’s maxims (or reasons) for action in accordance with the categorical imperative—“Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law”—one acts freely, or autonomously. By following universal imperatives, the will escapes the contingencies and determinism of the phenomenal or empirical realm. Thereby, its actions obtain an ethical dignity or moral purity that approximates the sublimity of what Kant called the “kingdom of ends”: a noumenal realm of pure morality, unaffected by the vagaries of experience. In Kant’s ethical theory, the kingdom of ends possesses the sublimity of an idea of pure reason, inasmuch as it is free of empirical taint. Kant’s formula for autonomy is thus opposed to utilitarianism, the view that actions are right or wrong by virtue of their consequences. Whereas utilitarian moral theories suggest that morally right actions are properly motivated by desires or interests—e.g., to maximize consequences that are good, such as pleasure or happiness—Kant’s brand of moral rigorism is predicated on reason alone.

Yet, Kant openly admitted that, according to the letter of his approach, human freedom possesses a merely “formal” or “noumenal” character. Once one tries to act freely in a phenomenal world dominated by the principle of causality, or to act morally in a world in which human action is always motivated by interests, “rational” or “free” outcomes cannot be guaranteed. Thus, Kant’s practical philosophy is beset by the antinomy (contradiction) between freedom and necessity: human beings are inwardly free but outwardly subject to the laws of causality. This Pyrrhic vindication of freedom left many of Kant’s heirs dissatisfied and striving vigorously to transcend the oppositions and limitations his philosophy had bequeathed.

Fichte

One such successor was the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814). Taking Kant’s second critique as his starting point, Fichte declared that all being is posited by the ego, which posits itself. As Fichte states in The Science of Ethics as Based on the Science of Knowledge (1794), “That whose being (essence) consists merely in the fact that it posits itself as existent is the ego as absolute subject. As it posits itself, so it is; and as it is, so it posits itself.” In Fichte’s view, if the ego is in reality the basis of all experience, then it qualifies as “unconditioned”: it is free of empirical taint; it is no longer subject to the limitations of causality emanating from the external world. In this way, Kant’s antithesis or opposition between the noumenal and phenomenal realms disappears.

Fichte gave a practical or voluntarist cast to the formula cogito, ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”), which Descartes had proposed as the bedrock of certainty on which the edifice of human knowledge could be constructed. As Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) would remark, in a Fichtean spirit, in Faust (1808): “In the beginning was the deed.” However, on the whole Fichte’s heirs remained unsatisfied with his voluntaristic resolution of the tension between subject and object, will and experience. They perceived his claims as little more than an abstract declaration rather than a substantive resolution or authentic working through of the problem. Subsequent thinkers also wondered whether his elevation of the subject to the position of an absolute did not result in an impoverishment of experience.

Hegel

Kant’s most important successor, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), attempted to transcend systematically all the antinomies of Kantian thought—noumenon and phenomenon, freedom and necessity, subject and object. Whereas Kant had claimed that humans could aspire only to knowledge of phenomena, Hegel set out to prove that, as in the metaphysics of old, reason was in fact capable of an “absolute knowledge” that penetrated into essences, or things-in-themselves. For Kant the ideas of pure reason possessed merely a noumenal status: they could serve as regulative ideals for human thought or achievement, yet, insofar as they transcended the bounds of experience, they could never be verified or redeemed by the understanding.

In Hegel’s thought the limitations to knowledge repeatedly stressed by Kant had become nothing less than a scandal to Reason. As Hegel declared polemically in the Science of Logic (1812; 1816): “The Kantian philosophy becomes a pillow for intellectual sloth, which soothes itself with the idea that everything has been already proved and done with.” Hegel’s major works, including, in addition to the Science of Logic, the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) and Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1821), all contain detailed and powerful rejoinders to Kantian conceptions of knowledge, truth, and freedom.

For Hegel the challenge was to articulate a philosophy that went beyond Kant without regressing behind him, without relapsing into dogmatic metaphysics. In the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel undertook a genuinely novel approach to the problem of knowledge, tracing the immanent movement of the “shapes of consciousness”—the different historical conceptions of knowledge—from “sense certainty” through “perception,” “force,” “consciousness,” “self-consciousness,” “reason,” “spirit,” and finally “absolute knowing.” At the final stage, “otherness” has been eliminated, and consciousness has reached the plane of unconditional truth. At this point a conception of knowledge is obtained—which Hegel called the Begriff, or idea—that is free of the aforementioned Kantian oppositions and thus suitable for producing a “first philosophy”: a doctrine of essences that accurately captures the rational structure of reality. No longer limited, as with Kant, to knowledge of appearances, consciousness is at last able to obtain genuine knowledge of the way things truly are.

Announcing his philosophical program in the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel declared that “substance must become subject.” This terse formula characterized one of his main philosophical goals: to reconcile classical and modern philosophy. In Hegel’s view, Greek philosophy had attained an adequate notion of substance yet for historical reasons had fallen short of the modern concept of subjectivity. Conversely, modern philosophy, beginning with Descartes, appreciated the value of subjectivity as a philosophical starting point but failed to develop an adequate notion of objective truth. Hegel’s philosophy sought to combine the virtues of both approaches by linking ontology (the philosophical study of being, or existence) and epistemology (the philosophical study of knowledge).

At the same time, Hegel believed that by embracing subjectivity Kant and other modern philosophers had prematurely abandoned the claims of ontology. By making truth inordinately dependent on the standpoint of the knowing subject, they failed to give “essence,” or the intrinsic nature of objective reality, its due. Consequently, their philosophies were tainted by “subjectivism.” In Kant’s case, this defect was evident not only in his conclusion that phenomena are the only possible objects of knowledge but also in the solipsistic implications of his moral doctrine, which posited mutually isolated subjects who formulate universal laws valid for all moral agents. The Kantian moral subject, which prized autonomy above all else, radically devalued habit, custom, and tradition—what Hegel described as substantial ethical life, or Sittlichkeit. In Hegel’s view, these modern approaches placed a burden on the idea of subjectivity that was more than the concept could bear. In this regard as well, Hegel sought a compromise between modernity’s extreme devaluation of tradition and the elements of rootedness and continuity that it could provide, thereby preventing the autonomous subject from spinning out of control as it were.

Hegel thought that he discerned the disastrous consequences of such willfulness in the rise of bourgeois society—which he perceived, following Thomas Hobbes, as a competitive “war of all against all”—and in the despotic outcome of the French Revolution. Because bourgeois society, whose doctrine of “rights” had elevated the modern subject to a virtual absolute, gave unfettered rein to individual liberty, it invited anarchy, with tyranny as the only stopgap. Hegel held Kant’s philosophy to be the consummate expression of this modern standpoint, with all its debilities and risks. Consequently, in his political philosophy Hegel argued that substantial ethical life resided in the state. In his view, the state alone was capable of reconciling the antagonisms and contradictions of bourgeois society. The quietistic (if not reactionary) implications of his political thought were epitomized by his famous declaration in the Philosophy of Right that “what is rational is actual, and what is actual is rational.”

Moreover, it became increasingly difficult for Hegel’s followers to defend his later philosophy against the charge of having regressed to a pre-Kantian metaphysical dogmatism. In the Science of Logic, Hegel presumptuously claimed that his treatise contained “the thoughts of God before He created the world.” Later critics would strongly object to his “pan-logism”—his a priori assumption that the categories of reason necessarily underlay the whole of reality, or being. Although Hegel optimistically proclaimed that history demonstrated “progress in the consciousness of freedom,” his doctrine of the “cunning of reason”— according to which the aims of the World Spirit are willy-nilly realized behind the backs of individual actors—appeared to justify misery and injustice in the world as part of a larger plan visible only to Hegel himself (see problem of evil). “History,” he observed unapologetically, is “the slaughter-bench on which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of states, and the virtue of individuals have been sacrificed.”

Schelling

Following Hegel’s death in 1831, disenchantment with his philosophy, as well as with the speculative orientation of German philosophy as a whole, was rapid and widespread. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854), Hegel’s successor at the University of Berlin, emphatically rejected the idea that reason was capable of grasping reality. He insisted that thought and being belonged to two entirely separate ontological categories. In the System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), an early work that was profoundly influenced by Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790) as well as by the aesthetic writings of Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), Schelling recommended that philosophy “flow back…into the universal ocean of poetry.” He simultaneously prophesied the advent of “a new mythology…which shall be the creation, not of some individual author, but of a new race.” Schelling’s summons, and his insistence on the superiority of the aesthetic faculty to cognition or intellection, found a sympathetic reception among his German romantic contemporaries. In Schelling’s view, knowledge could not be obtained by recourse to logic. Instead, it was an affair of a quasi-mystical “intellectual intuition”—only thereby could one grasp the absolute, or the ultimate reality of things, as the primordial “one” or “world-soul.” The retreat from reason was in full swing.

Kierkegaard

A young Dane named Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55) attended Schelling’s lectures during the 1830s. He was soon disappointed by what he considered the residual Hegelianism of Schelling’s absolute idealism. For Kierkegaard, speculative philosophy remained at odds with the demands of “existence”—the particular qualities and requirements of an individual life. It was this dimension of individuality, Kierkegaard argued, that remained alien to the generalizing character of abstract thought. Kierkegaard found Hegel’s influence in particular to be baneful and irresponsible; it seemed characteristic of German idealism in its Hegelian form to care more about perfecting lifeless and convoluted ideational systems than about the details of human existence. Renouncing the metaphysical quest for certainty or Hegelian absolute knowledge, Kierkegaard became a self-avowed advocate of subjectivity. As he remarked in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments (1846)—whose very title is a jibe at the Hegelian ideal of philosophy as science—“The task of the subjective thinker is to transform himself into that which clearly and definitely expresses in existence whatever is essentially human.”

Kierkegaard frequently wrote pseudonymously and ironically, self-consciously adopted a literary rather than a scientific idiom, and, in works such as Attack upon Christendom (1854–55), mercilessly indicted his contemporaries for their faithlessness and ethical conformity. As a Protestant thinker, Kierkegaard believed that he was returning to the concerns of Pauline Christianity, and he viewed the Confessions of St. Augustine (354–430) as an important literary precedent. Only by probing the recesses of his own inner self or subjectivity can the individual accede to truth. In one of his best-known works, Fear and Trembling (1843), he reconstructed the biblical tale of Abraham, praising the protagonist’s “teleological suspension of the ethical” for his willingness to sacrifice his only son on the basis of his unshakable faith. Kierkegaard’s stress on the forlornness of the human condition, as well as on the absence of certainty concerning the possibility of salvation, made him an important forerunner of 20th-century existentialism.

Schopenhauer

A further example of the revolt against the rationalist ethos of German idealism was the “philosophy of will” developed by Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860). Schopenhauer, too, felt that Hegel had prematurely proclaimed the finality of his own system, and, like Schelling, he believed that life’s most important truths defied comprehension by reason.

Schopenhauer’s philosophy returned to the Kantian distinction between appearances and things-in-themselves, or between phenomena and noumena, in order to stress the limitations of reason. In his major philosophical work, The World as Will and Representation (1819), Schopenhauer reiterated Kant’s claim that, given the structure of human cognition, knowledge of things as they really are is impossible; the best that can be obtained are comparatively superficial representations of things.

But the most influential aspect of Schopenhauer’s philosophy was his recasting of the concept of the will. He viewed the will as a quasi-mystical life force that underlay all of reality: “This word [will] indicates that which is the being-in-itself of everything in the world, and is the sole kernel of every phenomenon.” Although the will remained inaccessible to ideas or concepts, its nature could be fathomed or glimpsed through nonrational aesthetic experience—an insight that was clearly indebted to Schelling’s philosophy as well as to the romantic concept of “genius.”

Although The World as Will and Representation had little impact when it was first published, Schopenhauer’s pessimism—his devaluation of the capacities of the intellect and his corresponding conviction that reality is ultimately unknowable—became a virtual credo for a subsequent generation of European intellectuals whose hopes for democratic reform across the continent were dashed by the failure of the Revolutions of 1848. His belief in the ability of art, particularly music, to afford metaphysical insight profoundly influenced the aesthetic theories of the German composer Richard Wagner. And his philosophy of the will, as well as his stark view of reason as incapable of grasping the true nature of reality, had a considerable impact on the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche.

Marx

In the 1840s a subsequent generation of Hegelians—the so-called “left” or “young” Hegelians—became disillusioned with Hegel’s philosophy as a result of the philosopher’s open flirtation with political reaction in the Philosophy of Right and other texts. They came to regard Hegelian idealism as merely the philosophical window dressing of Prussian authoritarianism. From a similar point of view, Karl Marx (1818–83) famously criticized his fellow Germans for achieving in thought what other peoples—notably the French—had accomplished in reality. It seemed unlikely that a philosophy such as Hegel’s could ever serve progressive political ends.

The Young Hegelians—especially Bruno Bauer (1809–82) and David Friedrich Strauss (1808–74)—vigorously criticized Hegel’s complacent defense of state religion and his monarchism, and they emphatically endorsed the ideal of a secular constitutional republic. In The Essence of Christianity and other works, Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72), another Young Hegelian, tried to substitute an “anthropological humanism” for Hegel’s speculative dialectic. Whereas Hegel’s philosophy claimed primacy for the “idea,” Feuerbach tried to show, in an Enlightenment spirit, how thinking was a derivative or second-order activity with regard to human existence. Whereas German idealism claimed that concepts form the basis of existence or actually constitute reality, Feuerbach, stressing the materialist dimension of philosophy in a manner reminiscent of high Enlightenment materialism, reversed this claim. Instead, he contended that concrete human existence is fundamental. Ideas themselves are an outgrowth or efflux of man’s nature as a sensuous, anthropological being. Feuerbach’s method of “transformative criticism,” which replaced the Hegelian “idea” with the notion of “man,” had a significant impact on the development of Marx’s philosophy.

Although a Young Hegelian during his student days, Marx soon developed significant philosophical and political differences with other members of the group. Already in his early, Rousseau-inspired work On the Jewish Question, Marx had emphasized that, in the constitutional state desired by his fellow Left Hegelians, political problems would merely shift to another plane. Religion and bourgeois self-absorption, Marx argued, would merely be transposed to the private sphere of civil society. Society, moreover, would still be riven by the separation between bourgeois and citizen. Still under Hegel’s influence, Marx believed that all such instances of separation or alienation must be transcended in order for human emancipation—as opposed to mere political emancipation—to be achieved.

Although the young Marx wished to supplant idealist dialectics with a sociohistorical approach, his initial deduction of the world-historical role of the proletariat was reminiscent of Hegel in its decidedly speculative and philosophical character:

A class must be formed which has radical chains, a class in civil society which is not a class of civil society, a class which is the dissolution of all classes, a sphere of society which has a universal character because its sufferings are universal, and which does not claim a particular redress because the wrong which is done to it is not a particular wrong but wrong in general.

The philosophical project of German idealism, a reconciliation of idea and reality, thought and being, remained for Marx a primary inspiration. Nevertheless, Marx believed that Hegel, because of his speculative biases, had failed to provide an adequate grounding in reality for this utopian goal; Marx’s concept of the proletariat would reveal how, practically speaking, this ideal could become reality. In 1843–44, Marx described communism in Hegelian terms as a dialectical transcendence of “alienation,” an ultimate union between subject and object:

[Communism] is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man—the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.

Thereafter, Marx became convinced that communism had less to do with “realizing philosophy” than with the laws of capitalist development. Correspondingly, traces of his early Hegelianism became less visible in his later work.

Nietzsche

As a youthful disciple of Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was influenced by the older philosopher’s critique of reason and by his suggestion that art, as an expression of genius, afforded a glimpse of being-in-itself. Trained as a classicist, Nietzsche’s encounter with Attic tragedy led him to a reevaluation of Greek culture that would have a momentous impact on modern thought and literature. In a pathbreaking dissertation that was ultimately published in 1872 as The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, Nietzsche claimed that the dramas of Aeschylus and Sophocles represented the high point of Greek culture, whereas the philosophy of Plato and Platonism constituted a decline. Nietzsche’s study culminated in a withering critique of Socrates and the Western philosophical tradition engendered by his method of logical analysis and argumentation—elenchos, or dialectic. “Our whole modern world,” Nietzsche laments, “is caught in the net of Alexandrian [Hellenistic] culture and recognizes as its ideal the man of theory, equipped with the highest cognitive powers, working in the service of science, and whose archetype and progenitor is Socrates.”

Nietzsche was disturbed by the Enlightenment’s unswerving allegiance to the concept of scientific truth. In a brilliant early text, On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense (1873), he offered a number of insightful observations about the vocation of philosophy that would ultimately find their way into his mature thought of the 1880s. The will to philosophy, with its pretensions to objectivity, should not be taken at face value, suggests Nietzsche, for its veil of impartiality conceals an array of specific biological functions. The intellect is a practical instrument employed by the human species to master a complex and hostile environment. Despite pious insistences to the contrary by philosophers, there is nothing sacrosanct about their vocation. “What is a word?” Nietzsche asks. “It is the copy in sound of a nerve stimulus.” Like other biological phenomena, thought stands in the service of life as a means of self-preservation. “As a means for the preserving of the individual, the intellect unfolds its principle powers in dissimulation, which is the means by which weaker, less robust individuals preserve themselves,” Nietzsche observes.

Nietzsche couples these criticisms with a number of astute observations concerning the relationship between philosophy and language. For centuries philosophers have claimed that they possess access to absolute truth. Yet such pretensions belie the extent to which philosophical discourse, like all human communication, is mediated by the rhetorical and representational contingencies of language. With language as an instrument or intermediary apparatus, human conceptual access to the “in-itself,” or real being, of objects is unavoidably mediated, hence never direct or pristine. Without the rhetorical approximations of metaphor, trope, and figuration, the philosophical enterprise would languish and wither. Truth, regarded by the philosophers’ guild as something magical and sacred, is, claims Nietzsche, merely a series of metaphors, or imprecise rhetorical approximations, mobilized to achieve a certain effect or a set of desired ends. It is

a movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and blind. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions.

Ultimately, and contrary to what philosophers have perennially contended, the relationship between concepts and the things they designate, far from being necessary or intrinsic, is merely a matter of convention and habit. Truth does not yield a “view from nowhere.” As Nietzsche insinuates, it inevitably involves an “anthropomorphic” dimension: it is both a reflection of custom and a projection of human need. Nietzsche’s later doctrine of the “will to power”—which characterizes philosophy, like all human undertakings, as a quest for world mastery—systematized many of these early insights concerning the finite and conditioned nature of truth. His emphasis on truth’s inescapable linguistic and rhetorical components would, a century later, profoundly influence post-structuralist theories of truth, such as those of Foucault and Derrida.

Despite his questioning of traditional philosophical concepts such as truth, Nietzsche remained committed to the goals of serious philosophical inquiry. Indeed, his prodigious philosophical musings are informed by two precepts handed down by Socrates: (1) the unexamined life is not worth living; and (2) virtue is a kind of knowledge (that is, being virtuous consists of knowing what virtue is in general and what the virtues are in particular). Although Nietzsche emphatically rejected Plato’s theory of Ideas, according to which all earthly objects are merely imperfect copies of abstract, celestial Forms, he remained convinced that wisdom, and therefore possession of the truth, was the key to human flourishing. Nor did his later “perspectivism”—the idea that all knowledge is situated and partial—amount to a shallow relativism (see moral relativism). Instead, Nietzsche intended his “transvaluation of all values”—his reversal or inversion of all received conceptions of truth—as a way station on the path to a set of higher, more-robust and affirmative ethical ideals. The same impassioned concern for the welfare of the soul that one finds in Socrates and Plato one also discovers in Nietzsche. Moreover, Nietzsche’s philosophy was motivated at every turn by Aristotle’s distinction between mere life and the “good life”—a life lived in accordance with virtue.

Not only did Nietzsche never relinquish his interest in “first philosophy,” but he approached metaphysical problems in a manner that was remarkably consistent and rigorous. To be sure, his aphoristic and fragmentary style of writing makes it difficult to develop a systematic interpretation of his thought. It is clear, however, that Nietzsche embraced the fundamental questions of metaphysics and sought to provide them with compelling and original answers. After all, were not his doctrines of the will to power and “eternal recurrence”—the idea that life must be lived emphatically, as if one might be condemned in perpetuity to repeat a given action—in essence attempts to come to grips with the essential nature of being and, as such, metaphysics at its purest? What was his theory of the “Superman” (Übermensch)—of a superior being or nature who transcends the timidity and foibles of the merely human—if not an earnest attempt to redefine virtue or the good life in an era in which cultural philistinism seemed to have gained the upper hand? And what motivated Nietzsche’s perspectivism if not a desire to arrive at a less-limited, more-robust understanding of the nature of truth in all its richness and multiplicity?

In The Gay Science, Nietzsche proclaims that

it is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in knowledge rests—that even we knowers today, we godless anti-metaphysicians still take our fire from the flame lit by a faith that is thousands of years old, that Christian faith which was also the faith of Plato, that God is truth, that truth is divine.

This passage could hardly have been written by someone who was not a “lover of wisdom”—i.e., a philosopher.

Dilthey and Bergson

Nietzsche’s skepticism about the capacities of reason, as well as his belief in the inherent limitations of a predominantly scientific culture, was shared by many late 19th-century thinkers and writers. One consequence of his wide-ranging influence was the popularity of the concept of “life” as an antidote to the rise of positivism, a movement that sought to reconstruct humanistic studies, including philosophy itself, along the broad model of the natural sciences.

In Germany an early opponent of this trend, the philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911), argued that, whereas the natural sciences aimed to explain all of physical reality in terms of unchanging, general laws, the “human sciences” (Geisteswissenschaften), such as history, sought to capture unique individuals or events from the past. The latter undertaking, therefore, required a different epistemological approach. Dilthey distinguished between the styles of explanation characteristic of the natural sciences and the human sciences, the one seeking objective, impersonal, causal knowledge, the other seeking “understanding” (Verstehen), which is ultimately based on the motivations and intentions of historical actors. “Understanding always has as its object something individual,” argued Dilthey in The Structure of the Historical World in the Human Sciences (1910).

A similar movement was afoot in France under the inspiration of Henri Bergson (1859–1941), whose philosophy of vitalism sought to contrast the subjective notion of “duration” with the objective conception of time proper to the natural sciences. As he remarked in Creative Evolution (1907): “Anticipated time is not mathematical time…. It coincides with duration, which is not subject to being prolonged or retracted at will. It is no longer something thought but something lived.” In France Bergson’s views made few inroads among more-traditional philosophers, in part because of the mechanistic orientation of Cartesianism and in part because of a general sympathy toward science inherited from the Enlightenment. Instead, his influence was greatest among novelists (e.g., Marcel Proust) and political theorists (e.g., Charles Péguy and Georges Sorel).

In Germany the corresponding school, known as Lebensphilosophie (“philosophy of life”), began to take on aspects of a political ideology in the years immediately preceding World War I. The work of Hans Driesch and Ludwig Klages, for example, openly condemned the superficial intellectualism of Western civilization. In associating “reason” with the shortcomings of “civilization” and “the West,” Lebensphilosophie spurred many German thinkers to reject intellection in favour of the irrational forces of blood and life. In the words of Herbert Schnädelbach, at this point “philosophy of life tendentiously abolished the traditional difference between nature and culture and thus facilitated the success of the general biologism in the theory of culture, which culminated in National Socialist racism.”

Husserl

In Logical Investigations (1900-01), Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology (1913), and other works, the German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–1939) attempted to reestablish first philosophy—though as a “rigorous science” rather than as metaphysics. He began with a critique of psychologism, the view that ideas, knowledge, and human mental life generally are properly treated as purely psychological phenomena. Like the neo-Kantians, Husserl aimed to defend the independence of what he called “principles” (including logic, mathematics, and ethics, or values) against the positivist assumption that they are amenable to study by natural science. Thus, in Ideas, Husserl contended that “to refer to [a number] as a mental construct is an absurdity, an offense against the perfectly clear meaning of arithmetic discourse, which can at any time be perceived as valid.”

Husserl is generally recognized as the father of phenomenology, which he characterized as the “science of the essential structure of pure consciousness.” In a manner reminiscent of Kant, phenomenology sought to clarify the preconditions of a type of pure, presuppositionless experience of entities or things (see Presupposition). By means of a technique called epoche, or phenomenological reduction, Husserl thought that the prejudices and preconceptions of everyday consciousness could be “bracketed” in a way that would allow for a pure “intuition of essence.” In The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1935), Husserl described phenomenological reduction as a type of life-transforming rite of passage. The phenomenological standpoint is attainable, he wrote, “only through a total change of the natural attitude, such that we no longer live, as heretofore, as human beings within natural existence; we must constantly deny ourselves this.” Yet his contention in Cartesian Meditations and other works that the transcendental ego, or thinking subject, “constitutes” objects exposed him to the charge of radical subjectivism.

Heidegger

During the early 1920s Husserl’s assistant at the University of Freiburg was Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). Husserl clearly regarded Heidegger not only as his best pupil but also as his philosophical heir; he once remarked, “Phenomenology: that’s Heidegger and me.” But Heidegger, a former seminary student who had written a habilitation study on the scholastic philosopher John Duns Scotus (1266–1308), took phenomenology in an entirely new direction, in the process transforming it from the study of consciousness to the philosophical investigation into the nature of existence, or being.

The publication in 1927 of Heidegger’s Being and Time permanently altered the course of philosophy in continental Europe. Characterizing his approach as “fundamental ontology,” Heidegger began the work by posing the Seinsfrage, or question of being: what is the meaning of “being”? Yet, curiously, after the Seinsfrage (question of being) is initially posed, ontological questions are set aside in order to address a variety of concerns pertaining to the “being for which its own being is an issue”—the human subject, which Heidegger calls “Dasein” (literally, “being there”) in order to stress subjectivity’s worldly and existential features. Heidegger contends, in a manner reminiscent of Kant’s transcendental philosophy, that an examination of the nature of Dasein is a necessary precondition for answering the Seinsfrage. Accordingly, Division I of Being and Time, the portion of the work in which this examination is undertaken, is called by Heidegger the “existential analytic,” or the “analytic of Dasein.”

One of Heidegger’s enduring achievements in this work was to challenge the pervasive assumption, inherited from Descartes, that the fundamental perspective from which the problems of epistemology must be approached is that of the individual subject, or ego—the res cogitans (“thinking thing”). According to Heidegger, the conception of human beings as isolated, reasoning subjects is derivative rather than primary, an interpretation rather than an expression of essence. Logically (or ontologically) speaking, human beings are involved in myriad relations with things in the world well before they are, or can be, reasoning subjects. Indeed, the everyday being-in-the-world of Dasein is more often characterized by indeterminate “moods” than by self-conscious ratiocination. Moreover, being-in-the-world encompasses structures of social conformity, including what Heidegger calls “curiosity,” “ambiguity,” and “idle talk.” In Heidegger’s view, these three modalities of being-in-the-world reveal Dasein’s lack of resolve or decisiveness. Alluding to the biblical expulsion from the Garden of Eden, he characterizes these structures as modes of “Falling,” stressing the irredeemable sinfulness of the human condition.

Heidegger’s theme changes dramatically in Division II of Being and Time, which is concerned with the modes of “authenticity,” the German word for which (Eigentlichkeit) suggests an embrace of one’s own (eigen) existential condition or fate. Via the “call of conscience,” Dasein is inexplicably summoned away from its immersion in worldliness and everydayness and realizes or fulfills its potential for being a “self.” One of the key aspects of Dasein’s self-awareness concerns its confrontation with finitude, or “being-toward-death.” Embracing Nietzsche’s proclamation concerning the “death of God”—a metaphor for the disappearance of everything that is necessary, certain, unconditioned, universal, and eternal—Heidegger describes being-in-the-world as a type of existential free fall. The pervasiveness of “Angst” reflects the utter groundlessness of human existence, the absence of any metaphysical or moral certainties with which to confront the abyss of nothingness that faces every Dasein.

Being and Time concludes with a discussion of “historicity,” the authentic historical life of a people, or Volk. Although Heidegger indicated that he would return to the question of being in a second volume of Being and Time, the projected work was never written. After publishing a number of essays in the late 1920s and early ’30s—including What Is Metaphysics? (1929) and Plato’s Doctrine of Truth (1931–32)—Heidegger apparently concluded that the framework of his earlier thought had been excessively Dasein-centred, or anthropocentric. In subsequent works, the concept of Dasein virtually disappeared, having been replaced by a standpoint that focused on the “history of being.” It is therefore customary to speak of a “turn” (Kehre) in Heidegger’s thought from the Dasein-centred analysis of Being and Time to a more purely ontological approach. The significance of the Kehre is indicated in Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism (1947), in which he is at pains to distinguish the earlier and later phases of his work. In a later work, Recollection in Metaphysics(1961), he declared:

The history of being is neither the history of man and of humanity, nor the history of the human relation to beings and to being. The history of being is being itself and only being.

Gadamer

Heidegger had many gifted followers, including Hannah Arendt (1906–75), Karl Löwith (1897–1973), and Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979). Perhaps his most talented student, however, was Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002). Trained as a classicist, Gadamer never shared his mentor’s philosophical radicalism. To the contrary, he always insisted on the virtues of tradition, and his major work, Truth and Method (1960), even contains an impassioned defense of “prejudice,” in polemical opposition to the Enlightenment-rationalist view that all irrational belief should be dissolved. Known chiefly for his sophisticated development of the theory of hermeneutics (the philosophical study of interpretation, broadly construed), Gadamer stressed the inevitable historical situatedness of the interpretive process; he therefore rejected the ideal of an objective, or universally valid, interpretation grounded in allegedly universal principles of rationality or logic. He insisted instead that questions of interpretation always involve a relationship of “dialogue” between interpreter and interpreted and a “fusion of horizons” between present and past. Hence, the task of interpretation or understanding becomes in principle infinite, without any final goal.

Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) studied the philosophies of Husserl and Heidegger while a student at the French Academy in Berlin in 1933–34. His philosophical novel Nausea (1938), which won him wide literary acclaim, was accompanied in the same period by a number of minor philosophical studies, including Transcendence of the Ego (1936–37), The Emotions: Outline of a Theory (1939), and The Psychology of Imagination (1940). In 1943 Sartre published his first major philosophical work, Being and Nothingness, which immediately established his reputation as the leading representative of existential phenomenology, or existentialism, in France.

Sartre conceived existentialism as a philosophy of radical freedom. He recognized two primary modes of being: consciousness, which he called the “For-itself,” and the world of inert matter or things, which he called the “In-itself,” or “facticity.” For Sartre, the In-itself is first and foremost an obstacle to the For-itself’s drive toward self-actualization—as indeed are all other selves, which he called the “Other.” From a phenomenological point of view, the For-itself is radically “free,” insofar as its relationship to objects purportedly constitutes the objective world. Some of Sartre’s affirmations of human freedom, however, were extreme to the point of absurdity, as when he claimed that “even the red-hot pincers of the executioner do not exempt us from being free.” Like Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations, Being and Nothingness struck some critics as straying dangerously close to radical subjectivism or even solipsism.

For Sartre, the paradoxical futility of human existence lies in the fact that the For-itself, wishing to escape the radical responsibility that necessarily follows from its radical freedom, vainly attempts to become like the In-itself—like a thing. However, by conceiving itself in this way—as a thing that does not act but is acted upon by forces outside itself—the For-itself is guilty of a kind of dishonesty, which Sartre calls “bad faith.” Little wonder that Sartre concluded Being and Nothingness by declaring that “human reality…is by nature an unhappy consciousness,” and “man is a useless passion.”

Reflecting in the 1950s on the realities of the war and the German occupation of his country, Sartre came to view his prewar philosophy of freedom as naive and untenable. It was necessary, he concluded, for existentialism to come to terms with history. Accordingly, in his major philosophical work of the postwar period, The Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), he attempted to combine an existentialist doctrine of individual freedom with a Marxist philosophy of history. Predictably, however, the French communist intelligentsia showed little sympathy for his project, which they dismissed as an individualist, petty bourgeois deformation. Near the end of his life, Sartre returned to work on The Family Idiot, his monumental four-volume biographical study of Gustave Flaubert.

de Beauvoir

Sartre concluded Being and Nothingness by suggesting the need for an ethics, which he had failed to include. This void was partly filled by the philosopher and novelist Simone de Beauvoir (1908–86), Sartre’s lifelong companion. In The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), de Beauvoir argued that ethics is inherently situational and therefore refractory to attempts (such as Kant’s) at formalization in terms of general principles or laws. But de Beauvoir undoubtedly achieved her greatest renown as a feminist philosopher. In 1949 she published her major work, The Second Sex, in which she masterfully exposed the way in which prevailing conceptions of femininity were defined by male interests. Employing the existential approach she had developed with Sartre, de Beauvoir further argued that neither biology nor tradition implies that there is anything fixed or eternal about women’s nature. Instead, biology and tradition must be seen as points of departure for women’s autonomous self-realization. Emancipation is never something given once and for all, but a verité à faire—a truth to be made.

French Nietzscheanism

Under the Nazi dictatorship (1933–45), philosophy in Germany was effectively stifled. Even Heidegger, who was a prolific writer, published very little during these years. (Heidegger joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and never renounced his membership.) In the years immediately after the war, French philosophy was marked by an enthusiasm for German thinkers, including Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, and, above all, Nietzsche. As many commentators have pointed out, it is ironic that in this period Germany enjoyed a hegemony in French intellectual life that it had failed to achieve in the political sphere during the war.

In Paris during the 1930s, the Russian émigré philosopher Alexandre Kojève (1902–68) held a series of seminars on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit that were attended by the most eminent figures in French intellectual society. Kojève’s idiosyncratic reading of Hegel probably had a greater impact on novelists and poets than on philosophers, though it did exert a profound influence on Sartre’s view of intersubjectivity as inherently conflict-laden: the “Other” exists primarily as an obstacle to or a limitation on the subject’s freedom. Perhaps Kojève’s only genuine philosophical heir was Jean Hyppolite (1907–68), who published the first French translation of the Phenomenology of Spirit in 1939 and an influential commentary, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, in 1946.

Foucault

The Hegel renaissance in France was short-lived, however. Indeed, by the late 1950s and early ’60s, Hegelianism had become an object of scorn among many French philosophers, who regarded it as a paradigm of what contemporary philosophy needed to overcome or negate—namely, subjectivism (the theoretical emphasis on subjective experience), metaphysics, and reason. Influenced by new developments in the social sciences (especially linguistics and anthropology) and by the antimetaphysical doctrines of Nietzsche and the later Heidegger, a new generation of philosophers set out to overthrow Sartrean existential humanism—in their view, the most recent incarnation of subjectivist and metaphysical excess.

In 1945 Sartre published an influential pamphlet, Existentialism Is a Humanism. For the young generation of French philosophers after Sartre, however, humanism—which they understood as the 19th-century celebration of “man” originating with Auguste Comte—was an antiquated concept that merited consignment to history’s dustbin. An important precedent for the debate that began in the early 1960s had been set by Heidegger’s 1947 Letter on Humanism, which the German philosopher intended as a rejoinder to French existential humanism as represented by Sartre. Whereas Sartre stressed the dignity of human existence as embodied in the For-itself, Heidegger emphasized the primacy of being—and thus, by implication, the derivative or subaltern status of human being. Hence, whereas Sartre had observed that the current historical situation was one in which “there are only human beings,” Heidegger insisted that “we are precisely in a situation where there is principally being.” It was in this new spirit of philosophical antihumanism that Michel Foucault (1926–84) triumphantly declared, in The Order of Things (1965), that “man is only a recent invention…[that] will disappear again as soon as our knowledge has discovered a new form.”

This momentous reappraisal of the French humanist tradition was propelled by larger historical and intellectual developments. As an aspect of the intellectual culture of the Third Republic, humanism suffered from its association with the ignominious surrender of France to Hitler and Nazism in 1940. Its reputation also was tarnished by the role historically played by Western philosophy in the legitimation of imperialism. In addition, the structuralist movement in cultural anthropology, which conceived cultures as systematic reflections of human mental structures, stimulated a new appreciation for non-Western cultures and values and a corresponding skepticism vis-à-vis Western ones. As pioneered by Claude Lévi-Strauss, structural anthropology helped to inspire critical reflection on European culture itself: its legacy of two devastating world wars, as well as the ever-present risk of nuclear annihilation, led many scholars to view it with suspicion and mistrust. Last, both anthropological and linguistic structuralism exhibited a scientific rigour that made the humanistic disciplines—including philosophy—seem both unrigorous and mired in the past.

Many of these critical themes were implicit in Foucault’s early works Madness and Civilization (1961) and The Order of Things (1966). In the former, he attempted to show how the notion of reason in Western philosophy and science had been defined and applied in terms of the beings—the “other”—it was thought to exclude. In this respect, reason lent itself to the mistreatment and oppression of whomever society happened to classify as “devoid of reason” (the insane) in prisonlike asylums and later, in the 20th century, in tortuous psychological treatments. Madness and Civilization appropriately concluded with an homage to “the sovereign enterprise of unreason…forever irreducible to those alienations that can be cured, resisting by [its] own strength that gigantic moral imprisonment which we are in the habit of calling…the liberation of the insane.”

Foucault began The Order of Things by memorably citing an ancient Chinese scheme of classification, which Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) had used in his essay The Analytical Language of John Wilkins(1941):

Animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.

The epistemological implications of this amusing parable seemed clear enough to Foucault: the conceptual schemes of Western philosophy and science, which generations of thinkers had laboured to create and justify, were no less arbitrary, no more “true.” The schemes of any age, what Foucault called “epistemes” or “discursive regimes,” strictly determine the extent of what can be said and what can be thought. Escape from their iron-clad rule is possible only in literature, or “writing” (écriture), and only during the brief periods, or “interstices,” when one set of epistemes shifts or gives way to another. (During his structuralist phase, Foucault frequently employed geological metaphors.) The shift, at about the turn of the 19th century, from the episteme of “representation” to the episteme of “man” was one such period. At these times, a “pure” kind of writing, unsullied by governing conceptual schemes, is possible, resulting in the well-known intellectual breakthroughs of figures such as the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814), Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–98), Nietzsche, Antonin Artaud (1896–1948), and others.

Eventually, Foucault came to recognize that the structuralism by which he was influenced imposed its own conceptual constraints. According to the standard account, in his later work he shifted the focus of his analysis from language to power. In fact, however, he concentrated on a dual concept of his own devising, “power-knowledge” (pouvoir-savoir), by which he meant to indicate the myriad ways in which, in any age, structures of social power and governing epistemes reinforce and legitimate each other. (The integral relationship between psychiatry and mental asylums is one example of such mutual legitimation; the relationship between surveillance or discipline and the organization of prisons is another.) Foucault came to accept Nietzsche’s skeptical claim that “truth is the kind of error without which a certain species of life could not live.” But this ready embrace of Nietzsche’s cynicism naturally raised questions about the status of Foucault’s own discourse: in what sense could one say that his analysis of pouvoir-savoir was not simply one more discursive regime in the service of power? The problem of “peformative contradiction”—of a discourse that, while denying the existence of truth, implicitly claims truth for itself—was the basis of later critiques of post-structuralism (also called postmodernism) in philosophy by Jürgen Habermas and his followers (see Critical Theory).

Derrida

The other major representative of philosophical post-structuralism is Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), who burst onto the philosophical scene in 1967 with three important publications: Speech and Phenomena, Writing and Difference, and Of Grammatology. Unlike Foucault, who was chiefly concerned with the relationship between the humanistic disciplines and power, Derrida concentrated on the history of philosophy. Finding inspiration in Heidegger’s program of a “destruction of the history of ontology,” Derrida engaged in what he called a deconstruction of Western metaphysics.

Derrida criticized the Western “metaphysics of presence” for its systematic tendency to emphasize or favour (“privilege”) concepts such as unity, identity, and totality over otherness, difference, and marginality. Especially pernicious was the tendency to conceive of linguistic truth as the “presence” of that which is spoken of through its representation in words. To the contrary, the ungrounded nature of meaning—the fact that meanings are not given by any natural connection with things in the world but only by their systematic relations with each other—ensures that the spoken-of is never fully “present” but instead endlessly mediated through an infinite chain of meanings. The Western conception of truth as presence, therefore, is impossible. Derrida’s concepts of différance—a neologism meaning both a difference (in space) and a deferring (in time)—and “dissemination” characterize the infinite character of meaning and the futility of attempts on the part of metaphysics to reach a point of finality or closure.

One of the principal goals of deconstruction was to unravel the conceptual dualities, or “binary oppositions,” that had been endemic in Western metaphysics, according to Derrida, since the time of the ancient Greeks. Among them were mind versus body (or matter), nature versus culture, intelligible versus sensible, internal versus external, present versus absent, literal versus metaphorical (or figurative), and speech versus writing. In each of these oppositions, one member of the pair is assumed to be primary or fundamental, the other secondary or derivative. To deconstruct an opposition is to show how this assumption of primacy is contradicted or undermined by various aspects of the meaning of the text in which the opposition appears—and particularly by aspects of meaning that depend on figurative or performative uses of language. Thus it is commonly assumed that the opposition between “nature” and “culture” is absolute. But in reality it is a distinction that possesses meaning only within culture itself.

Derrida cautioned that a mere reversal of the relation of primacy within the opposition would solve little, since it was the opposition itself that was problematic—the inversion of a metaphysical opposition is still a metaphysical opposition. Moreover, he insisted, the result of deconstruction is not an end to metaphysics, since there is no alternative set of nonmetaphysical concepts with which it could be replaced. As Derrida remarks in Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences (1966), “The passage beyond philosophy does not consist in turning the page of philosophy…but in continuing to read philosophers in a certain way.”

In Signature, Event, Context (1971), Derrida recommended a program of “displacing” (rather than reversing) the binary oppositions of metaphysics and then reconstituting or “reinscribing” them. Yet the details of this process of reinscription were never clarified. Like Foucault’s critique of pouvoir-savoir, deconstruction, in the end, left its practitioners empty-handed and directionless: once metaphysics’s pernicious influence had been condemned, it was by no means clear along what lines philosophy should proceed—or even why it should continue at all, since the metaphysical tendencies of language are ultimately inescapable. (It was perhaps in this sense that the American pragmatist Richard Rorty [1931–2007] recommended that the philosophical search for first principles or “truth” should simply be abandoned; instead, philosophy should take the artifices of literature as its model in order to make the general “conversation of mankind” more stimulating and interesting.)

Lévinas

The philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas (1905–95) filled an important void in post-structuralist ethics. Followers of Derrida and Heidegger increasingly relied on Lévinas’s idea that the traditional, rationalist methods of moral adjudication—Kant’s categorical imperative, for example—fail to do justice to the nature of the individual case in its irreducible particularity.

Lévinas studied under both Husserl and Heidegger in Freiburg during the late 1920s, and his philosophy accordingly occupies a position midway between those of his teachers. Lévinas was impressed by Heidegger’s effort to transcend Husserl’s arid rationalism by according primacy to Dasein’s being-in-the-world rather than to the standpoint of a disembodied transcendental subjectivity. Thus he regarded Being and Time as an existentially rich extension of philosophy’s thematic boundaries beyond the conventions of post-Cartesian epistemology, in which the abstract, subject-object opposition predominates. By the same token, however, Lévinas was profoundly troubled by Heidegger’s affinities with Nazism, from which he concluded that the Freiburg philosopher’s break with Western metaphysics had been insufficiently radical.

In his major work, Totality and Infinity (1961), Lévinas presented a powerful critique of Heidegger for having granted priority to ontology over “ethics,” by which he meant one’s ethical relationship to “the Other.” By beginning with the Seinsfrage, or the question of being, Heidegger’s philosophy merely reenacted the fundamental error of Western metaphysics in general: the attempt to grasp conceptually the meaning of things rather than to respect their “alterity,” or otherness.

For Lévinas the search for totality—as manifest, for example, in the principle of sufficient reason (for everything that is the case, there is a sufficient reason why it should be so and not otherwise)—represents a significant shortcoming of Western thought. At issue is a philosophical will-to-domination that proves destructive of plurality, otherness, and being qua “mystery.” As Lévinas observes in his essay Ethics as First Philosophy (1984):

Modernity [is] distinguished by the attempt to develop from the identification and appropriation of being by knowledge toward the identification of being and knowledge.… The Wisdom of first philosophy is reduced to self-consciousness. Identical and non-identical are identified, [and] the labor of thought wins out over the otherness of things and men.

A concern to highlight and preserve the “otherness of things and men” is the dominant motivation of Lévinas’s philosophizing.

In place of the self-serving reduction of alterity to sameness, Lévinas stresses the primacy of ethics. Specifically, it is the “face of the Other” that offers the basis for an alternative version of first philosophy oriented toward “infinity”—endless openness—rather than totality, which Lévinas associates with the “metaphysical closure.” The biblical commandment “Thou shalt not kill,” Lévinas insists, provides philosophy with an ethical grounding that transcends theoretical reason.

It is ironic, then, that a continental philosophical tradition that began as an impassioned defense of reason in the face of epistemological skepticism should conclude—as do the French Nietzscheans—by equating reason with domination, insisting that the hegemony of reason be rejected or overthrown.

Habermas

As noted above, post-structuralists viewed the concepts of truth, knowledge, and reason as little more than the intellectual instruments of established power. Their supreme cynicism in this regard was perhaps most dramatically expressed by Foucault, who proclaimed in an interview that “all knowledge rests upon injustice,” that “the instinct for knowledge is malicious,” even “murderous,” and that “torture, c’est la raison” (“torture is reason”).

Beginning in the 1970s the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas (born 1929) developed a sophisticated alternative to the skepticism of the post-structuralists. As a philosophical descendant of the Frankfurt School—a movement of Marxist social analysis and criticism associated from the 1920s with the Frankfurt-based Institute for Social Research—Habermas was familiar with the notion of truth as a mask of power, which was, after all, one of the central tenets of Marx’s critique of culture and ideology. This notion, however, presupposes that, beyond the purely partisan interests and perspectives of economic classes, there exist genuinely nonpartisan interests and truly general perspectives. It is this assumption, along with the possibility of distinguishing between “true consciousness” (a defense of generalizable norms) and “false consciousness,” that post-structuralism had abandoned. Accordingly, Habermas maintained that the concepts of truth and knowledge, properly understood, were more complex and durable than the post-structuralists had allowed. In the same vein, he insisted that post-structuralist criticisms of the historical role of reason in the perpetuation of injustice and oppression did nothing to show that reason itself must be abandoned. Rather, he firmly believed in the maxim that the hand that inflicted the wound should cure the disease.

Habermas accepted the post-structuralists’ rejection of the traditional concept of truth as “absolute”—i.e., universal, unchanging, and eternal. In its place, he attempted to develop an understanding of truth rooted in a theory of the conditions of successful communication. Drawing on the tradition of American pragmatism and the speech-act theory of J.L. Austin (1911–60) and his American student John Searle (born 1932), he contended that communication aims at reaching agreement and mutual understanding rather than at successfully manipulating the physical world. Such understanding, however, is the result of a series of assumptions that must take for granted the “truth” or “validity” (in some sense of those terms) of most of the utterances they interpret. If this were not the case, the everyday capacity to coordinate action would be impossible.

The ethical notions of right and wrong also admit of rational adjudication, according to Habermas. His theory of “discourse ethics” attempted to identify the counterfactual conditions or presuppositions of uncoerced agreement. Toward this end, he reformulated Kant’s categorical imperative in “discourse theoretical” terms: an agreement is fair or uncoerced when all parties concerned have been afforded a maximum opportunity to give reasons or to state arguments before a final decision is reached. This practical ideal provides a means of conferring a kind of truth or validity on the ethical principles to which it may be applied. As Habermas observes in Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Justification (1990): “Only those norms can claim to be valid that meet (or could meet) with the approval of all affected in their capacity as participants in a practical discourse.” Thus, whereas Kant’s ethics was confined to the standpoint of independently reasoning subjects, Habermas’s perspective was intersubjective and practical—it stressed the powers of reconciliation inherent in real, practical discourse. And whereas Kant emphasized what each person can will without contradiction to be a general law, Habermas stressed what all people can will in agreement to be a universal norm. In later work, such as Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (1992), Habermas explored the role that discourse ethics could play in justifying the ethical principles that underlay contemporary liberal democracy.

EXISTENTIALISM

Existentialism in the broader sense is a 20th century philosophy that is centered upon the analysis of existence and of the way humans find themselves existing in the world. The notion is that humans exist first and then each individual spends a lifetime changing their essence or nature.

In simpler terms, existentialism is a philosophy concerned with finding self and the meaning of life through free will, choice, and personal responsibility. The belief is that people are searching to find out who and what they are throughout life as they make choices based on their experiences, beliefs, and outlook. And personal choices become unique without the necessity of an objective form of truth. An existentialist believes that a person should be forced to choose and be responsible without the help of laws, ethnic rules, or traditions.

Existentialism – What It Is and Isn’t
Existentialism takes into consideration the underlying concepts:

• Human free will
• Human nature is chosen through life choices
• A person is best when struggling against their individual nature, fighting for life
• Decisions are not without stress and consequences
• There are things that are not rational
• Personal responsibility and discipline is crucial
• Society is unnatural and its traditional religious and secular rules are arbitrary
• Worldly desire is futile

• wealth, pleasure, or honor make the good life
• social values and structure control the individual
• accept what is and that is enough in life
• science can and will make everything better
• people are basically good but ruined by society or external forces
• “I want my way, now!” or “It is not my fault!” mentality

Existentialism – Impact on Society
Existentialistic ideas came out of a time in society when there was a deep sense of despair following the Great Depression and World War II. There was a spirit of optimism in society that was destroyed by World War I and its mid-century calamities. This despair has been articulated by existentialist philosophers well into the 1970s and continues on to this day as a popular way of thinking and reasoning (with the freedom to choose one’s preferred moral belief system and lifestyle).

An existentialist could either be a religious moralist, agnostic relativist, or an amoral atheist. Kierkegaard, a religious philosopher, Nietzsche, an anti-Christian, Sartre, an atheist, and Camus an atheist, are credited for their works and writings about existentialism. Sartre is noted for binging the most international attention to existentialism in the 20th century.

Each basically agrees that human life is in no way complete and fully satisfying because of suffering and losses that occur when considering the lack of perfection, power, and control one has over their life. Even though they do agree that life is not optimally satisfying, it nonetheless has meaning. Existentialism is the search and journey for true self and true personal meaning in life.

Most importantly, it is the arbitrary act that existentialism finds most objectionable-that is, when someone or society tries to impose or demand that their beliefs, values, or rules be faithfully accepted and obeyed. Existentialists believe this destroys individualism and makes a person become whatever the people in power desire thus they are dehumanized and reduced to being an object. Existentialism then stresses that a persons judgment is the determining factor for what is to be believed rather than by arbitrary religious or secular world values.

POSTMODERNISM

Postmodernism is a general and wide-ranging term which is applied to literature, art, philosophy, architecture, fiction, and cultural and literary criticism, among others. It is largely a reaction to the assumed certainty of scientific, or objective, efforts to explain reality. In essence, it stems from a recognition that reality is not simply mirrored in human understanding of it, but rather, is constructed as the mind tries to understand its own particular and personal reality. For this reason, postmodernism is highly skeptical of explanations which claim to be valid for all groups, cultures, traditions, or races, and instead focuses on the relative truths of each person. In the postmodern understanding, interpretation is everything; reality only comes into being through our interpretations of what the world means to us individually. Postmodernism relies on concrete experience over abstract principles, knowing always that the outcome of one's own experience will necessarily be fallible and relative, rather than certain and universal.

Postmodernism is "post" because it is denies the existence of any ultimate principles, and it lacks the optimism of there being a scientific, philosophical, or religious truth which will explain everything for everybody - a characterisitic of the so-called "modern" mind. The paradox of the postmodern position is that, in placing all principles under the scrutiny of its skepticism, it must realize that even its own principles are not beyond questioning. As the philospher Richard Tarnas states, postmodernism "cannot on its own principles ultimately justify itself any more than can the various metaphysical overviews against which the postmodern mind has defined itself."

Jean-François Lyotard's book The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979) is a short but influential essay in which he analyses the epistemology of postmodern culture as the end of 'grand narratives' or metanarratives, which Lyotard considers a quintessential feature of modernity which dereferences "reality" through the use of language-games and mental constructs.

POSTSTRUCTURALISM

By the mid 20th century there were a number of structural theories of human existence. In the study of language, the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) suggested that meaning was to be found within the structure of a whole language rather than in the analysis of individual words. For Marxists, the truth of human existence could be understood by an analysis of economic structures. Psychoanalysts attempted to describe the structure of the psyche in terms of an unconscious.

In the 1960's, the structuralist movement, based in France, attempted to synthesise the ideas of Marx, Freud and Saussure. They disagreed with the existentialists' claim that each man is what he makes himself. For the structuralist the individual is shaped by sociological, psychological and linguistic structures over which he/she has no control, but which could be uncovered by using their methods of investigation.

Originally labelled a structuralist, the French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault came to be seen as the most important representative of the post-structuralist movement. He agreed that language and society were shaped by rule governed systems, but he disagreed with the structuralists on two counts. Firstly, he did not think that there were definite underlying structures that could explain the human condition and secondly he thought that it was impossible to step outside of discourse and survey the situation objectively.

Jacques Derrida developed deconstruction as a technique for uncovering the multiple interpretation of texts. Influenced by Heidegger and Nietzsche, Derrida suggests that all text has ambiguity and because of this the possibility of a final and complete interpretation is impossible.

Conclusion to Continental Philosophy

Since the time of Kant, continental philosophy traditionally has concerned itself with the most general philosophical questions—e.g., about the meaning of human existence and the ultimate nature of reality. Indeed, Kant made these questions the centrepiece of his philosophical enterprise when, in the three critiques, he inquired: “What can I know?” (Critique of Pure Reason), “What should I do?” (Critique of Practical Reason), and “What might I hope?” (Critique of Judgment). In respect of generality, therefore, continental philosophy has tended to differ from the Anglo-American, or analytic, tradition, which since the turn of the 20th century has been characterized by the intensive investigation of narrower or more-technical philosophical problems.

Reflecting the widespread influence of post-structuralist philosophy in the late 20th century, much of contemporary intellectual culture is skeptical, if not hostile, toward traditional, “absolutist” perspectives regarding the possibility of knowledge and consensus in ethics, politics, history, and even science. The question arises, therefore, as to what role continental philosophy should play. In view of the pressing challenges of a technological civilization in which values and norms are often determined by the drive to master nature technologically or by predominant social or economic interests, its role must be to hold the banner of reason aloft in the face of the allures of baser social trends.

• Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction by Simon Critchley
• Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction by Christopher Butler
• Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction by Catherine Belsey
• Existentialism: A Very Short Introduction by Thomas Flynn
• Introduction to Phenomenology by Robert Sokolowski
• Husserl's Phenomenolog by Dan Zahavi

• Continental Philosophy (Wikipedia)
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