Okay, the World After Hegel:
One may roughly divide the immediate post- Hegelian division as Marxist, existentialist, positivist, pragmatist, and Neo- Thomist.
Marx, of course, took the position that the interplay between man and the world, primarily through the organization of labor, led to a dynamic of self- realization among humanity that would have the practical effect of Hegel's "absolute standpoint", permitting man to fullfill himself as a species. Unlike Hegel, who more or less identified the Absolute with a Spinoza- ish version of God, Marx was a materialist, but a materialist who made a great deal out of the Epicurean idea of freedom originating out a random factor in the material world. This "micro- spontaneity" permitted the negation, or questioning, of the prevailing social order, and therefore eventual transcendence, through revolution, until all oppression was finally obliterated.
Kierkegaard regarded the weak point of Hegelianism as its analysis of revelation and Christianity, which are assimilated into the progress of the Idea of Freedom, which is announced as the engine of history by Hegel. The actual questions of Christ's incarnation, death, and resurrection, and their bearing on eternal happiness, are rendered trivial with the System. What is important is the effect on social and cultural development. Kierkegaard considers this bogus, as if an individual can wholly set aside the question of his eternal happiness and "get on" with the System. The fact is, we philosophize as individuals, and care deeply about various issues, and therefore cannot have an Absolute standpoint, as if we were the World Spirit. If the idea of the Absolute standpoint is bogus, because we remain mired in subjectivity, than Hegel has merely performed an elaborate, beautiful, suggestive game, but not achieved his goal.
For Nietzsche, a different problem loomed. He considered that from a cultural perspective, God was dead, that the intelligentsia did not believe, for the most part, and that belief was being eradicated at all levels of society gradually. He recognized this as a crisis, since that meant that there was no objective basis for Truth, Beauty, and the Good, as the universe was no more than a haphazard place, without intelligence and intentionality underlying phenomena. Instead of Truth, there was interpretation, which was always a compromise between reason and are deepest drives as individuals.Nietzsche constantly reiterated that he was expounding his truth, not that he didn't believe it, but that it had no independent warrant. To him, the task, then, was to find an escape from nihilism, by constructing a society that was strong enough to look the Abyss in the face, and to find its own way out of its own subjective sense of vitality. Despairing of forging such a society anytime soon, he envisioned the Superman, a being who could see the pointlessness of it all and embrace it, who could say "Yes!" to existence, and find sufficiency in his own adventure.
The positivists would admit nothing as true except what had been verified by the empirical sciences, or were provisionally acceptable to their worldview, such as demythologized history. They held that all metaphysical questions were invalid, as they addressed hypotheticals not in evidence according to scientific norms, and that ethics was a branch of sociology, where we study the ways that societies work in order to improve them in efficiency and stability. There are no universal ethical norms, although there might be better or worse ways to organize society.
The pragmatists questioned whether much of anything was true, rather than convenient to believe. Pierce, who practically invented pragmatism, was even willing to entertain metaphysical questions, but his method was to ask what was better to believe, rather than what was true. William James published "Varieties of Religious Experience" to suggest that there was something to spirituality, but that different individuals profitted from different types of beliefs. Dewey founded the Teacher's College of Columbia University with the idea that facts and skills were less important than democratic acculturation, teaching cooperation and collective decision- making and the worth of various occupations, as well as "skills for life", like making change or using the post office. Of course, there were no clear criteria for what might be a good belief, but the pragmatists figured that social consensus sufficed to formulate a view of common decency around the idea of human desires and the need for sociability.
Neo- Thomism was originally quite literally a revival of interest in Thomism, largely within Catholic circles, with a view to addressing its applicability to modern problems. Since Aquinas himself had modified Aristotle in a way that made certain themes less "wedded" to Aristotle's cosmology, it seemed the better philosophical starting point, even to some non- Catholics. The idea of the existence of God was the foundation, and then it was presumed that through the process of generalization and abstraction from sensory data one could discern something of the order of the cosmos, and therefore know metaphysical and ethical truths unaided by revelation, since the order of the cosmos should be revealing.
We are now up to the 20th century. I will need at least one more post to finish....... |
