tiistai 11. joulukuuta 2018

Friedrich Eduard Beneke: Groundwork for physics of morals (1822)

The title of Beneke’s Grundlegung zur Physik der Sitten is an obvious play with Kant’s Groundwork for metaphysics of morals: in essence, Beneke appears to be suggesting that morals should be brought down from the abstractions of Kantian ethics and into the natural world we live in. This attempt is evident, firstly, in the form Beneke chooses - it is not written as a scholarly book, but as a collection of letters sent to a Kantian friend. In addition, Beneke sides, against Kant, with Jacobi, a philosopher of the concrete.

Beneke’s attack against Kantian morals goes farther than these rather formal matters. The main point of content Beneke has with Kant is that morals and ethics are not primarily based upon reasoning, but on feeling. In one sense, this is just a restatement of Beneke’s thesis that all conceptual activities are just reactivations of sensory and perceptual activities. On the other hand, Beneke’s statement has also stronger implications - he wants to say that what we feel to be moral or immoral is our only criterion for stating what is moral or immoral.

Beneke’s criterion of morality goes against some central Kantian tenets about morality, first of them being that moral behaviour should be based on an assumed absolutely free choice of noumenal will. As Kantians would note, feelings are part of the physical world and therefore always have causes and therefore are not absolutely free, unlike they thought human reason to be. Beneke would agree, but also reject the whole notion of absolutely free choice - all we need in morality is free will in the sense of a will not affected by external coercion.

Furthermore, Kantians would note that feeling can never be a universally valid criterion for anything, since feelings differ from one individual to another. Beneke, on the other hand, is against the very notion of a priori certain statements, except as statements that we feel to be true whatever our circumstances. Furthermore, he contends that ethics need not be universally valid, but could be, for instance, relative to culture. His pet example is bigamy, which is ethically wrong in Europe, but might be acceptable for cultures where men have higher sex drives (Beneke does not consider the possibility of females with a higher sex drive). He also appears to accept that different cultural values can be graded and that civilisation brings with it higher values.

Beneke does give a sort of definition of what immoral or unethical activity consists of - activity is immoral, when it has been caused by a desire so extensive that it hinders other desires. Note that Beneke is not saying that immorality would be connected to a too extensive pleasure. In fact, he is very much against what he calls a monkish attitude in which all pleasures are disparaged. For instance, there is nothing wrong in enjoying the carnal delights, but it is only when a person becomes addicted to these delights and when too much of her time is spent in trying to obtain them that her actions become immoral. Beneke also notes that this definition of immorality/morality is in a sense not dependent on the culture - one is not immoral or moral because of one’s values, but because of how well one lives in accordance with these values.

What seems at first unclear is how to extend this definition to ethics involving persons other than oneself. Beneke’s answer is simply to assume that people also have desire to help other people and too strong egoistic desires hinder the altruistic desires. What Beneke does not seem to have considered is the possibility that a person might not have any altruistic desires - such a person would not, according to Beneke’s definition, be immoral, although he would always act egoistically.

An interesting consequence of Beneke’s feeling-based ethics is that he can assume the existence of moral geniuses, who have an instinctual knack of doing the right thing. Beneke also notes that just like aesthetic excellence comes in two variations - beauty based on harmony of forces and sublimity based on grandiosity of a single force - similarly ethical excellence comes in two shapes. Firstly, he notes, there is the ethical excellence arising out of lack of ethical struggles or a state of complete innocence, and secondly, there is also the excellence arising out of struggle with strong desires. Considering for a while, which type of excellence is better, he then comes to the conclusion that ethical behaviour generated from struggle is at least more stable - an innocently ethical person might later succumb to the temptations of strong desires.

torstai 25. lokakuuta 2018

Friedrich Eduard Beneke: New foundation for metaphysics (1822)

Beneke’s Neue Grundlegung zur Metaphysik is a programmatic declaration of the possibility of metaphysics. Beneke does not give a definite explanation of metaphysics, but he evidently contrasts it with a mere study of human consciousness - metaphysics, in comparison, deals with being and not mere thinking.

Problem of justifying the possibility metaphysics means then for Beneke a problem for showing that we can think of something we know to exist. Beneke’s not that original solution is to note that when we think of our very activities of thinking, we necessarily think of something that exists, because self-evidently our own activities of thinking must exist, whenever we happen to think them.

Beneke’s aim in pointing out this rather clear-looking fact is to argue against a position he calls strong idealism.This strong idealism is apparently supposed to endorse the notion that we can never connect thinking with being, but are always closed within the circle of mere representations of being. It is not at first clear why Beneke would call such a position idealism, but he is at least thinking about Kant’s notion of inner sense, which he explicitly denies.

It might be that Beneke and Kant are speaking of two different things. When talking about inner sense, Kant wants to emphasise that we cannot know even ourselves from a perspective reaching over our experience and that we therefore cannot know e.g. whether we are immortal and immaterial entities or material objects. Beneke accepts this, but insists that we still can know something about our mental life, namely, its existence as such, and even more, what this mental life feels to us. Of course, Kant might object that none of this is enough for knowledge, but we might well ask whether Kant just has a too tight definition of knowledge.

Although Beneke speaks against idealism, he is also willing to speak against a crude sort of realism that would state that we have as immediate connection with other things as with ourselves. Beneke still admits, against what he calls weak idealism, that we can know the existence of other things, although only mediately. The link between our immediate knowledge of ourselves and mediate knowledge of other things is, according to Beneke, our knowledge of our own bodies - we know our bodies just as we know our mental life, but our bodies are also causally connected to other bodies (Beneke deals here briefly with the Humean problem of how we recognise causality, and like in his earlier work, he insists that we can through an indefinite number of repeats become more and more certain of the existence of such a causal connection).

Although the lens of the body allows us to recognise the existence of other things, Beneke says, it also restricts our knowledge to a certain perspective. In other words, Beneke is of the opinion that we know other things more completely, if they happen to resemble ourselves. Even things quite removed from us, such as mere material objects with no life or consciousness, can be known only through the lens of our own bodily feelings - for instance, we can understand the physical movement of objects through our own experiences of moving through space.

torstai 11. lokakuuta 2018

Augustin-Louis Cauchy: Course of analysis (1821)

1789-1857

Analyzing a rich text like Cauchy’s Cours d'Analyse is almost impossible. Thus, I shall instead concentrate, firstly, on general features of the book, and secondly, on some interesting peculiarities of the work.

The title of the book will probably not say much to anyone not experienced with what is nowadays called mathematical analysis - and indeed, it is not clear whether Cauchy’s intentions coincide exactly with this modern notion. Hence, instead of trying to define analysis at this context, I shall merely point out what appears to be the topic of this book, namely, functions.

When Cauchy speaks of functions, he seems to be generalising from individual mathematical operations, such as addition, multiplication, logarithm and sine - in a quite general manner we could say functions involve taking number or numbers and using them to calculate or determine other numbers. Unlike in the current notion of function, Cauchy allows that functions might have several alternative results. For instance, Cauchy notes that although we usually restrict the notion of square root to positive square roots, we might as well take also a negative square root as being one possible result of applying the function of square root.

We can point out two major questions involving functions that interest Cauchy. Firstly, Cauchy, like other mathematicians of the time, is interested of the general question of finding what could be called roots of a function. The function in question will take one number and produce another number as its result, and the root of this function is then a number that when applied to the function will produce zero as a result.

Secondly, Cauchy is interested of what happens when functions are applied to infinitely large or infinitely small quantities. These terms are a remnant from an earlier period of mathematics, when the unclear notion of an infinitely small number was used in making sense of results in differential calculus. With Cauchy, these notions are inevitably connected with the concept of a variable: when we speak of an infinitely great number, we mean a quantity that is meant to change its value by becoming larger and larger and eventually exceeding every finite number. Similarly, an infinitely small number is a quantity that is meant to become smaller and smaller, eventually diminishing beyond all positive numbers, without ever reaching zero.

Now, with the aid of the notion of infinitely small or infinitesimal number, Cauchy defines the concept of a continuity of function. His notion of continuity has something to do with a formula f(x + a) - f(x), where f refers to a function of some type, what is in () is the number applied to the function f, and a is an infinitesimal number. In effect, Cauchy wants us to think of the area where the results of a function lie, when the numbers applied to the function become less and less varied. If the function is continuous around certain number, Cauchy says, this means that the area of results will also be infinitesimal - in other words, the less variation we have with numbers applied to function, the less variation we have with the results.

Although Cauchy’s definition can be used with all numbers applied to functions, he is especially interested of cases where the numbers themselves are either infinitely small or infinitely great, that is, when we think of them as variables decreasing toward zero or increasing without any limit. This operation of finding a limit for a function appears to be yet another function, and just like with all the other functions, Cauchy accepts the possibility of a function having more than one result. For instance, the values of sine function vary constantly between -1 and 1, thus, when the numbers applied to the function increase indefinitely large, the limit of this function, Cauchy says, consists of all the numbers between -1 and 1.

While differential calculus had been the original spur for mathematician’s developing the notions of continuity and limit of a function, for Cauchy this is already just a one possible application of these notions, while other applications, such as the question of an unending series of sums of numbers, might be even more important.

An important application of the notions concerns the other interest mentioned earlier, that is, the question of roots of a function. Cauchy notes that if a function is continuous, whenever numbers are taken from some continuous part of number line, and the same function has a positive result with some number from that part and a negative result with another number from the same part, then the function has a root somewhere between those numbers. This sounds evident, but it requires some careful thinking to actually prove it. In effect, Cauchy notes that due to the continuity of the function in this area, we can find between the numbers described both numbers giving negative and numbers giving positive results, as close to one another as we like. These two series of numbers must have the same limit, which then can have neither positive nor negative result, that is, it must be the root of the function.

Another major theme Cauchy deals with in his book is imaginary - or as we would nowadays say, complex - numbers. Discussions thus far have been grounded in actual numeric operations that make some concrete sense. Thus, negative numbers can be understood as a simple way to speak about operations of subtraction (i.e. - a is just a summarised form of saying “subtract a”), raising number to a fractional expression 1/a is another way of saying that we are taking the ath root of that number, and any difficult calculation involving numbers expressible only as limits of certain number series (such as raising a number to pith power) refer to limits of functions, when applying them to numbers from that series.

Now, when Cauchy starts to speak of square roots of negative numbers, he doesn't really mention any means to make such a mathematical formula sensible (he has the means by which it could be done in his use, but that’s another story). Cauchy then accepts that what mathematicians are speaking about when dealing with square roots of negative numbers is just imaginary of fictional - the signs apparently referring to such roots mean nothing. Still, majority of the operations used in the context of real numbers work as well in the context of these imaginary numbers. Since these imaginary numbers can be used as tools for finding meaningful results to questions involving just real numbers, the interest for this part of the mathematical analysis is then also justified.

lauantai 22. syyskuuta 2018

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Logic

Although now almost completely unheard of in schools, for a considerably long time logic was regarded as an essential part of the education of youth. Samuel Coleridge followed this tradition in his planned, but never published textbook on logic, which was meant for the basis of education of all young people, who were keen on taking on a public career. Logic as such, Coleridge notes, is the final level in the first stage of education, which was meant not so much to teach anything, but to discipline and nurture the young mind and so to develop necessary mental skills for further life. This first stage should begin with teaching the child to read and then to classify different words into different grammatical categories, thus nurturing the skills of finding similarities and differences.

Logic, this final stage in the preliminary education, is then meant to develop the understanding of the young person. Coleridge’s notion of understanding mixes classical  themes with clear Kantian influences. Originally, he notes, understanding or logos was simply a word for wisdom, but in time, true source of higher wisdom or reason was distinguished from understanding as a mere source of learning. Then again, Coleridge continues, understanding was separated from sensibility or pure intuition, which is the foundation of mathematics. This Kantian trinity of reason, understanding and sensibility Coleridge finally incorporates into a Schellingian framework - while in ordinary physics we start with the assumption that objects we sense exist independently of us and affect our sensibility, when dealing with the three faculties of sensibility, understanding and reason, we must instead abstract from all the objects and consider only subject of experience independently of what can be experienced.

Considering then understanding without any relation to its objects, Coleridge notes that we are left with nothing else, but the very forms involved in the use of understanding. Following Kant, he suggests that logic as a study of these forms gives us nothing but a canon, that is, a necessary shape to which the use of understanding must conform. This necessary shape is, unsurprisingly, syllogistic reasoning - for instance, when we first note some feature of a distinct object of understanding, then consider a part of this object and finally conclude that this part has the same feature as the whole object.

Coleridge is still not satisfied with merely stating this necessary shape - that would make for a very short book - but also considers what presuppositions we must assume behind this ability to use syllogistic reasoning. Firstly, he says, we must be able to distinguish objects from one another, either because these objects are naturally separate or because we have the ability abstract an object (say, a colour of a rose from the rose itself). Secondly, all syllogisms assume, Coleridge says, that what is true of some object of understanding is also true of its part. This general principle is something that understanding follows, but it obviously cannot justify it. Here Coleridge in a rather non-Kantian manner harps on the faculty of reason as the source of such immediately evident principles, which understanding can then just assume.

Coleridge goes somewhat further into the difference between understanding and reason. Understanding, as used in logic, Coleridge notes, creates conceptions, that is, unites different experiences by noting similarities they have. Yet, Coleridge continues, this secondary act of unification is dependent on a previous act of unification, in which human mind combines manifolds of sensation into unities, which then are interpreted as being independent of the subject, that is,  as objects of experience. This act of distinguishing oneself from an object creates then in a sense the objects, at least as objects from the viewpoint of the human being - note the obvious Fichtean tendencies here. Similarly Fichtean is Coleridge’s next move: the act of distinguishing is dependent on a previous act, in which subject and object coincide, that is, on a human self-consciousness, which is then the basis of human reason, Coleridge says. Yet, making a Schellingian turn, Coleridge notes that this self-consciousness or human reason is not the ultimate ground, but must be dependent on some pure, more perfect type of self-consciousness, namely, God, and the intuitive knowledge of human reason means just human mind being in immediate connection with God’s mind.

Logic as the study of pure understanding, Coleridge says, is then ultimately dependent on the existence of God. To get to the level of logic, the purely self-conscious subject must have differentiated itself from an object, but this is not enough. Subject must then abstract from itself and regard the object as independent - a sort of subject of its own. This subject in the logical sense can then be related to various things we can say about it or to predicates. Thus, Coleridge notes, we create judgements, which are the material for logical conclusions.

Even in this explanation of the presuppositions of humans doing logic Coleridge has surpassed the limits of logic as a mere canon. He then surpasses the limits even more clearly, when he starts to discuss a more extensive notion of logic as a study of criterion of truth, which he calls dialectic. Coleridge follows Kant in noting that it seems impossible to give any concrete and still generally applicable guidelines for recognising true thoughts, beyond the formal demand that true thoughts correspond with their objects or topics - such guidelines would have to abstract from the peculiarities of the topics, although it is just these topics that would provide the criterion of truth.

Thus, Coleridge concludes, there appears to be only three meaningful answers for the question of truth. Firstly, God is truth in a strong sense that his thoughts are instantly real. This answer is then not useful for understanding truth of human thoughts, especially if they remain on the level of understanding.  Secondly, we can note that for human mind true thoughts must be put into a shape compatible with logic. Yet, this second answer is just a negative criterion, since many consistent thoughts can still be untrue. Thirdly, Coleridge notes, we may speak of true words, if they correspond with thoughts we try to convey with them. Here the most we can do is to rely on common understanding of language speakers, or in more complex cases, on experts of certain topics.

The empty criterion of logic and the grammatical discussion of the meaning of words must then be filled with some material to make some positive sense of truth. One possible material would be the higher truth revealed by human reason, but this material in a sense surpasses what we can understand, Coleridge suggests. The second possible source of material for knowledge is provided by sensations, which allow us to infer the existence of an independent reality or nature. Yet, sensations as such do not constitute knowledge nor even experience, but experience contains also a subjective element, provided by the human mind. It is then the isolation of this subjective element, which Coleridge sees as the primary task of logic as dialectic.

Coleridge’s dialectic follows essentially the lead of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. He first notes that human mind and especially form of sensibility is involved even in the production of perceptions, by situating them in a spatio-temporal framework. Without this framework, Coleridge implies, sensations would be just unordered chaos, but like a kaleidoscope makes junk into beautiful images, form of sensibility arranges sensations into an ordered whole. This operation of our sensibility is so natural to us that we cannot even imagine what it would be like, if sensations weren't spatio-temporally ordered.

Human mind does not stop at mere spatio-temporal perceptions, but also makes judgements about things perceived. Here, Coleridge introduces the division of judgements into analytical and synthetical, although his first example of this division is rather peculiar - Coleridge mentions that if we are thinking about a certain house and then consider our representation and find new, previously unclear details, this is still an analytic judgement, while connecting the representation of house to a completely new representation is then synthetic judgement. In any case, quite in Kantian fashion Coleridge notes that while all analytical judgements are based on the principle of non-contradiction,the truth of synthetical judgements is based on something else. Some of these synthetical judgements are derived from experience and their truth is based on them, but the possibility of synthetic judgement, not based on experience, must still be tested.

Just like Kant, Coleridge attaches the question of synthetical a priori judgements to Hume’s challenge against the notion of causality, and again like Kant, Coleridge notes that if Hume had considered mathematics to be something more than merely analytical science, he might have had different opinion about the causality also. Following the footsteps of the German philosopher, Coleridge remarks that just by considering two numbers - especially if they are very large - we cannot find out their sum, unless we actively combine the numbers in a calculation. Despite this non-analytical nature of mathematical truths, Coleridge thinks they are clearly non-experiential, because of their necessity. The foundation of this necessity, he says, is the spatio-temporal form of sensibility, which affects all our experiences.

Yet, Coleridge says, mere form of sensibility does not by itself explain how we can perform mathematics. Indeed, he continues, when we are studying mathematics, we are not engaging with mere figures and numbers, but also with thoughts concerning figures and numbers. For instance, we apply the notion of quantity in discussing mathematics. This notion must again be something non-empirical, because we can use it in such a necessary science as mathematics. Then again, it is not an intuition, but a concept, thus, Coleridge concludes, its source must be understanding, instead of sensibility. Coleridge is quickly lead to the twelve Kantian categories, derived from twelve forms of judgements. Here Coleridge’s logic abruptly breaks off, without him reaching the planned third part, which would have dealt with an even stronger notion of logic as an organon for discovering truths.

Coleridge’s logic, in the form as it now exists, is a rather strange hodgepodge of disparate fielements. Majority of the work is influenced by and often even copied from Kant’s works. Yet, at key points Coleridge appears to break the limits that Kant set for any meaningful philosophy. Indeed, we are missing a clear account how a person chained to the level of understanding can be raised up to the level where human thinking supposedly meets the divine thought.

torstai 16. elokuuta 2018

Friedrich Eduard Beneke: Experiental study of soul as a foundation for all knowledge in its main branches (1820)

(1797-1854)

If you know German philosophy of early 19th century merely from summarised compendiums, you might think that only one line of thinkers followed Immanuel Kant: Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. You might have read of Schopenhauer as an afterthought, especially if the compendium dealt with the whole of 19th century, but you would most likely not see any mention of Beneke. Still, he took Kantian philosophy in a direction completely different from any of the other thinkers mentioned above.

Beneke’s Erfahrungsseelenlehre als Grundlage alles Wissens in ihren Hauptzügen, a book about “study of soul” or psychology, is an example of this direction. The name of the book already reveals important duality in Beneke’s account of psychology. Firstly, he thinks that psychology should be based on experience and observations. Beneke notes that although empiricism has been an important philosophical school, empirical psychology has not been truly developed since the times of Plato and Aristotle. He remarks that this lack of development has been mostly due to prejudices obscuring this topic, although soul - our own mental life - should be something quite familiar to us. Hence, empiricists have been more successful with natural than human sciences.

Secondly, Beneke notes that psychology is important due to a speculative or idealistic principle. What Beneke means by this principle is not any metaphysical theory about the nature of reality as such nor is it any attempt to explain the essence of soul, like Wolffian rational psychology had been. Instead, Beneke just emphasises the rather obvious truth that we humans can never have any access to any supposedly “neutral”, “completely objective” or God’s viewpoint. Thus, all science is science made by and for humans and study of human beings or psychology must then be the foundation of all science.

Beneke is of the opinion that Kantian philosophy united at least in some sense these two complementary viewpoints. Yet, the problem of Kant’s philosophy and his most famous followers, Beneke suggested, was that they didn’t attempt to make precise observation of human mental life. Beneke himself holds that psychology should use a Euclidean method - his suggestion seems to be that psychology should find the most basic elements of human mental life and explain everything else in mental life through these elements, just like Euclid explained geometry through simple elements, like points and lines.

Beneke’s first task is then to identify basic activities of human mental life. He notes that there are three such activities. The first one of these humans share with all animals, that is, the activity involved with the maintenance of animal body. The second activity consists then of sensory activity, and finally, the third consists of muscular activity. Beneke’s terminology is here somewhat confusing, as he speaks of these activities as being unitary, while still corresponding to multiplicity of faculties, for instance, sensory activity being instantiated by five sensory faculties of touch, smell, taste, hearing and vision. More important than this terminological muddle is Beneke’s remark that it is quite impossible to separate any body and soul within these activities - for instance, we do not have a separate soul using body to receive sensations, but in sensations, and indeed, in all human life, mental and physical aspects are completely intertwined.

Beneke also says that traditionally different senses have been divided into subjective and objective kinds. He opposes this division, because human life does not neatly divide into subjective and objective components - each human being is a subjective individual, but also shares features with other human beings and is in this sense objective. He does admit some gradual difference in the subjectivity and objectivity of senses: smell, taste and touch deal with sensations that are more individual than sounds and visions.

Beneke’s main thesis is that no new faculties are required for explaining human mental life. In one sense this is just a piece of propaganda against previous philosophers: when a Wolffian mentions e.g. a faculty of memory, he is just saying in a curt fashion that humans can, among other things, remember things, but he is not insisting upon any distinct activity of memorising (in fact, many Wolffians wanted to explain these “faculties" or capacities through a single activity).

In another sense, Beneke’s suggestion fails at a deeper level. An important part in Beneke’s reconstruction of mental phenomena is to note that humans can reawaken former, already weakened perceptual activities - this is the foundation of memory and conceptual activities. One might firstly remark that this act of reawakening of perceptual activities - say, imagining a face of an absent person - is an activity quite different from perceiving the face of a present person, because one can clearly imagine things without at the same time perceiving them. It is as if Beneke has confused the similarity of the experiences of perceived and imagined face with the identity of activities behind them. Secondly, even these experiences are clearly of different nature, as was noted already by Hume: perceptions are livelier than imaginations.

With the assumption of reawakening of activities, it is easy for Beneke to reconstruct more complex cognitive activities. Indeed, for Beneke concepts - or conceptual activities, as he prefers - just are activities composed of simple, reawakened activities. For example, concept of flower, in a particular human being, is just the sum of memories of all flowers she has perceived. These concepts might then be connected with muscular activities of tongue etc., thus leading to invention of language.

It is clear that such psychologically understood concepts are very idiosyncratic, because humans might connect very different memories to same word. Indeed, he insists, individual perceptions of same thing are more alike in different persons than their concepts of these things. Concepts might be more universal than perceptions in the sense that many perceptions can awaken same conceptual activities in us, but this doesn’t make these conceptual activities any more necessary.

Despite the idiosyncrasy of concepts, Beneke does not want to say that they would be subjective in comparison with objective perceptions. Beneke is trying to point out that notions like subjectivity and objectivity are a matter of degree. He suggests this as an essential correction of the Kantian idea that space is subjective. This is true of all we experience, Beneke states, but space is still more objective than some other experiences, because it is experienced in a similar manner by all humans.

While conceptual activities are for Beneke unified complexes of activities, judgements are, on the other hand, comparisons of conceptual activities: e.g. in a positive judgement, one notes that a concept is similar to another, in whole or partially. For instance, judgements “this rose is red" means that a conceptual activity of thinking this rose is a part of the conceptual activity of thinking all red things one has perceived. Judgements are then certain, if the concepts involved are clear. Deductions are finally formed of chains of such comparisons of clear concepts.

A clear problem in this rather naive conception of certainty is the problem of induction. How can one be certain that all ravens are black, if one hasn’t perceived all ravens? Beneke’s solution is just to embrace the problem: certain universal judgements require infinity of perceptions. Then again, he admits, there are different grades of certainty, and the more we see perceptions verifying a universal judgement, the more certain the judgement is.

The difference of empirically and a priori certain judgements - and therefore of empirical and a priori sciences - is then only relative and lies in the ease, in which we can find instances verifying them: for a priori certain judgements, all experiences of certain sort provide positive instances. Thus, certainty of mathematics (apparently just geometry) is based on structure of human vision, while certainty of logic is based on structure of human conceptual activities.

As simple as Beneke’s solution of the problem of induction is his solution of Humean problem of causality. In fact, it is for Beneke just one modification of the first problem. A causal judgement, he says, just indicates that one of type of perception always follows another type of perception, and certainty of such a judgement is verified in the same manner as of every other universal judgement. In case of the general principle of causality - every event has its cause - the certainty is based on the very nature of human perception to consist of a series of interconnected events.

As a priori sciences Beneke mentions also aesthetics and ethics, which have to do with feelings or moods. A kind of starting point for Beneke’s account of feelings is provided by the traditional idea of four temperaments. Especially important are the elements out of which Beneke reconstructs the temperaments. These are the complementary aspects of receptivity for external stimuli and force of maintaining inner activity. Both aspects can be stronger or weaker, creating thus four different combinations or temperaments.

The two components of external stimuli and use of inner force are, according to Beneke, also components of feelings, together with basic activities and their combinations or concepts. While there are innumerably many manners to combine different quantities of stimuli and inner force, Beneke underlines three limit cases, corresponding to important aesthetical concepts: state of heightened external stimuli is an experience of pleasurable, state of heightened inner force is an experience of sublimity, and finally, state of balance between stimuli and inner force is an experience of beauty.

Beneke explains these three notions in detail only in relation to basic activities, but these examples suffice. All nourishing activities and lower sensory faculties (smell, taste and touch) are too fleeting to be capable of anything else but the feeling of pleasure, but with other basic activities, Beneke says, all three feelings are present. Thus, quick sounds, variety of irregular shapes and rocking movement are all pleasurable, long sounds, lack of shapes and storm are all sublime, and harmonious sounds, regular shapes and rocking of boat in storm are beautiful.

Kant had famously noted that pleasure wasn’t a topic of what we would call an aesthetical study. In a sense, Beneke concurs, because external stimuli causing pleasures are again very idiosyncratic and therefore mostly incapable of generalisation. Then again, inner force is supposedly something similar from one person to another, which makes sublimity capable of generalisation. Like in other cases, beauty lies also here between pleasure and sublimity, which Beneke uses to account for Kantian idea that judgements of beauty are in a sense both subjective and at least demand universalisation. Now, while Kant had not indicated that a feeling of sublimity would be fully generalisable, he had compared completely idiosyncratic pleasure and subjective, but universality demanding beauty with the objective and fully universal demands of moral principles. In a sense, Beneke follows Kant by taking sublimity as a foundation of the final a priori science or morality.

Beneke’s account of morality is linked to his idea of desire and purposeful activity. Sometimes, he describes, a mental activity, while still active in some sense, points to a more full realisation of itself and thus comes with a yearning toward this fuller realisation - this is a state of desire. Desire as such does not suffice for fulfilling the yearning, and on occasion, desire remains without this actualisation as a mere desire. At other times, desire is fulfilled by an activity, which could then be called purposeful action. While the fulfilling activity can be called purposeful the desiring activity itself is not purposeful - for instance, while an artist creates a work of art through a purposeful activity, aiming to realise an internal idea of an artwork, this internal idea has not come about through any purposeful activity.

Now, human beings make judgements about other humans and their inner mental life through feelings the actions of others generate in them. According to Beneke, it is apparently the feeling of sublimity, from which we can recognise truly moral persons (Beneke thinks that it is especially the individuals and their virtues, which should be the topic of morality). In other words, the feeling of sublime gives an ideal of behaviour, with which to compare concrete human beings. It goes without saying that this ideal lies then not in susceptibility to external stimuli, but on the contrary, in independence from external stimuli.

keskiviikko 15. elokuuta 2018

Thomas Robert Malthus: Principles of political economy (1820)

Although Malthus is mostly remembered from his seminal work on population growth, he was also interested of more extensive questions in economy. Like Ricardo, Malthus followed on the tradition of Adam Smith, and indeed, he engaged in dialogue with Ricardo, often criticising details of latter’s work.

An important point of contention between Ricardo and Malthus was the question of measure of value. Of course, they shared a lot of common conceptual ground in their notions of value. By value of thing both writers meant the so-called exchange value or value measured in relation to something. In other words, when thing A is exchanged for certain quantity of B, then the value of A could be said to be this quantity of B. Usually some goods - at the time, gold - is chosen as a general measuring stick for all other goods.

Now, it is common knowledge that exchange values of goods change, depending on how much demand there is for it and how much supply there is to satisfy this demand. Even the conventional measure of value or gold has a variable value. Ricardo had suggested that despite this variation, there is some natural measure for value of different goods, namely, the amount of labour required for their production. This value was natural, according to Ricardo, because if left unregulated, prices of good would tend to move toward this natural value.

In a sense, Malthus agrees with Ricardo. He admits that goods do have a natural price, which is partially defined by the labour used for their production. Yet, firstly, this natural price is said by Malthus to be determined by other things beyond labour, such as cost of manufactures required for the production - in other words, this natural price is just the lowest price, which would take care of the costs of the goods and especially keep the labourers and people selling goods fed. Secondly, Malthus notes that despite this naturalness, there is no guarantee that prices would universally tend to move toward this point. Indeed, one might well imagine that two items, with equal productions costs, would still never have the same price, if the demand for one would always higher than the demand for the other. Thus, Malthus is more willing to admit that e.g. differences in quality might affect prices of goods. Instead of Ricardo’s measure, Malthus then suggests his own: value of a good should be measured by the amount of labour one could hire with it. Malthus’ suggestion seems believable, when one considers what we usually mean by value - things are more valuable, if we could get more goods and services with the money we could get by selling them.

Just like Ricardo, Malthus still considers mostly agricultural products, which indeed were the most important factor in the economy of the time. Thus, following Ricardo’s example, Malthus is eager to study the relations of three different classes - the landlords, who live by renting their land to farming, labourers, who live by the wages they get from working in the farms, and capitalists, who live by the profits they get from farming. Now, Ricardo thought that the rents, the wages and the profits should be measured by the proportion all the classes receive from the total amount of the produce. Malthus noted quite correctly that at least in case of rents and wages this style of measurement makes no sense, since it assumes that landlords, labourers and capitalists are playing a zero-sum game, where the gain of one means loss for others. Thus, if the total amount of agricultural produce would rise, but the rents of the landlords would remain equal or even rise in lesser quantity, Ricardo’s theory would assume that landlord would have lost something, although he would get the same or even bigger quantity of the products as a rent. Malthus instead suggests, more naturally, that rents and wages should be measured simply by the quantity of the products landlords and labourers receive. The profits of capitalists, on the other hand, should be measured, according to Malthus, in relation to the original capital they have spent for getting the products.

With these measures in hand, Malthus goes on to discuss in what manner each class involved in agricultural production could optimise the value they get from their efforts. The case of landlords is simplest, since practically any permanently positive effect on agricultural produce eventually raises the rents. Thus, in complete opposition to Ricardo, who noted that in poor countries landlords get a larger share of agricultural produce, Malthus notes that in developed countries landlords still fare better, since they get more of that produce, although their proportional share of the whole might be lower. Similar considerations apply to optimising the profits of agricultural capitalist - the more she can produce with less costs, the better. The case of labourers is somewhat more complicated, since rise in production of food, says Malthus, tends to incite population growth, which in the long run lowers wages of labourers. Thus, following his population studies, Malthus suggests that general avoidance of early marriages - the only form of birth control Malthus allows - would be beneficial for all labourers, because it would keep the wages steady.

Like Ricardo, Malthus is careful to distinguish wealth or richness from value - a society with abundance of goods would be immensely rich and wealthy, but the goods would be of no value, since everyone had what they wanted. The more interesting question for Malthus concerns then the means for making a state wealthier. We can at once note some clear deficiencies in Malthusian notion of wealth. He defines wealth as the sum of all material goods, which could be used in exchange. This definition, as Malthus himself notes, at once precludes all immaterial goods, such as skills and cultural artifacts, from entering into account of wealth. Malthus himself notes the unfairness, which leads to giving no value to the work of teachers and artists, since their work does not directly lead to the production of material goods. Still, Malthus says, this restriction must be made for theoretical purposes, because it would be enormously difficult to quantify the immaterial goods. A more important point of criticism is that Malthusian theory gives no value to leisure, which is seen as a mere detriment for development of state. One might speculate that the overall happiness of a state would at some point not be helped by increasing the production of new goods, but by decreasing the amount of work.

Malthus suggests two principles for the progression of national wealth. Firstly, the quality of soil gives a natural limit to what can be produced - lands of certain quality just won’t give enough agricultural produce to make investing in them useful. Although Malthus is again speaking from the standpoint of mostly agricultural society, his point can be clearly extended to an industrial society: the efforts required for finding the necessary raw materials put an ultimate limit to production. Secondly, the interplay of demand and supply regulates the rate at which the potentials of the production can be actualised - if there’s no demand for certain products, capitalists do not have any incitement to sell them. With his regulating principle Malthus does away with an idea common at the time that any supply of goods would just create its own demand. On the contrary, Malthus notes, there might well be times with too many products with not enough buyers. While this state of affairs might at first seem good for the labourers, who could buy things cheaply, it would in time affect them adversely, because there would eventually be no incitement to hire workers for farms and factories, leading the state to a further depression. Thus, Malthus notes, while parsimonious lifestyle of citizens is sometimes good for the society, because it creates more capital that can be used for investments, it might also lead to such a state of too few buyers of goods.

keskiviikko 11. heinäkuuta 2018

Henri de Saint-Simon: Politics (1819) and other late works

Although Saint-Simon began his career with more theoretical accounts of sciences, he became more and more interested of the day-to-day practices of French government. Indeed, many of his late writings were instructions for king and other influential persons on how government should be managed.

While in his earlier works Saint-Simon had mainly criticized nobles and priests, as idlers who did not take any part in the really beneficial work or industry, in later works he on occasion admitted that the two classes had served some purpose in the past. Christianity as such was of greatest importance for Saint-Simon, because it was a religion preaching altruism and condemning egoism, which he considered to be a force preventing the development of society. Even nobility had been of importance, because through Middle Ages European countries were in need of a soldier class defending the nation against hordes of barbarians.

Although Saint-Simon thus admitted a historical purpose for priesthood and nobility, he was also quite certain that time had passed these two classes. They did still cling to power, but now more due to their own egoistic desire to uphold their own interests. Saint-Simon went even so far as to suggest that nobles were a completely different race from the nation they governed - they were Frankish conquerors of Gallic people.

As a sort of dead end in development Saint-Simon considered metaphysicians and legists. He speaks more of legists or jurists, who were originally just people that nobles appointed to hold courts. Jurists were important, Saint-Simon concedes, in making the feudal justice system fairer. Yet, their final attempt, embodied by Maximilian Robespierre, was to base society on empty, general principles, just like metaphysics tried to derive knowledge out of abstract concepts.

The development of society, according to Saint, was based on the work of scientists and industrials, that is, people who worked for their living. An important agenda in Saint-Simon’s works was to note that Bourbon kings had traditionally endorsed these progressive ideals and battled the rebellious nobility. It was only the king Louis XIV and his successors who had turned their coat on this policy and favoured nobility

Saint-Simon spoke a lot about taking the revolution to its end. What he meant by this was not so much continuing revolution, but instead, creating something permanent and stable in place of old structures destroyed by revolution and philosophical criticism of Enlightenment. He was quite adamant that Napoleon had been just another dead end, because all he could do was to set up a new military nobility beside the old one. Indeed, Saint-Simon went even so far as to suggest that no standing army was required - such an army was required only for the purpose of conquest, which was something France should refrain from, and for defensive purposes only a small national guard was needed.

The actual details of the ideal government Saint-Simon envisioned are rather hazy. What is important for him is that idle nobles should be replaced by working industrials who are the true source of national wealth. Most importantly, these industrials should have a say on the national budget - they are used to handle financial issues and they are responsible for helping government with their taxes, so it’s only fair that they have a say on how the government funds are spent.

maanantai 23. huhtikuuta 2018

Arthur Schopenhauer: World as Will and Representation 1 - Analysing Kant

The final part of the first edition of World as Will and Representation is an appendix, in which Schopenhauer recounts his opinions on different aspects of Kantian philosophy. His attitude is mostly critical, although he admits that Kant was a philosophical genius. Yet, what counts as genius in Kant’s philosophy in Schopenhauer’s eyes, is only a small part of what can be found Kant’s writings. Still, it is one of the core ideas - the differentiation between appearance and thing in itself. Of course, we have already seen that what Schopenhauer means by this distinction is not quite what Kant was up to with it. Schopenhauer’s reading of Kant’s distinction could be called Platonist, because he essentially equates distinction with Platonist distinction between sense world and reality behind it - or Hinduist, because he equates Kantian appearance with the notion of maya and thinks that Kant was trying to emphasise the illusionary nature of the world of experience.

Although Schopenhauer thus appreciates Kant’s philosophy and says that Kant managed to finally end the era of scholasticism, which Descartes didn’t really do, he also admits that Kant led to a crisis in philosophy, by which Schopenhauer apparently meant the later German idealists. This crisis was, according to Schopenhauer, at least partly due to Kant’s style. On the whole, Schopenhauer describes Kant’s style as glorious dryness, similar to Aristotle’s, that is, full of accurate distinctions. The problem is, according to Schopenhauer, that the topic of Kant’s philosophy is so difficult that he cannot really explain it well. In Schopenhauer’s opinion, this lack of clarity inspired other philosophers use even more obscure style in their writings.

Yet, the biggest problem Schopenhauer sees in Kant’s philosophy is his search for symmetry that doesn’t always exist. A particular point of criticism was Kantian table of categories, which reappears in the most perplexing places, as the supposed key for the system of human cognition. This search for symmetry, Schopenhauer states, makes Kant ignore such important questions as what a concept in general is and to give completely wrong explanations of e.g. the nature of reason. What Schopenhauer would have liked to see in Kant is a clear demarcation of everything conceptual to reason, leaving to understanding nothing but the task of connecting individual perceptions through causality.

It is then no wonder that Schopenhauer appreciated the first edition of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason more than its second edition, mainly because it fit better with his Berkeleyan-Hinduistic reading. Indeed, Schopenhauer was convinced that in the second edition Kant just tried to distance his own philosophy from Berkeley’s, which ended up just with a muddle. The major fault Schopenhauer sees even in the first edition is the unclear role of thing-in-itself, which is explained as a cause of experience: a notorious failing in Kant’s system. Furthermore, Schopenhauer is not fond of Kant placing, as it were, between thing-in-itself and concrete representations something called the object in general. Schopenhauer is here making another clear strike against conceptualisation of understanding, since Kant was convinced that the faculty of understanding attached this abstract notion of object to perceptions.

The core of Critique of Pure Reason, according to Schopenhauer, is clearly the transcendental aesthetic, and all the problems appears only at the level of transcendental logic. For Kant, transcendental logic and especially transcendental analytic dealt with understanding. Yet, Schopenhauer notes, understanding is not logical or conceptual in the sense that it does not deal with universalities - instead, it just combines individual phenomena through chains of causality into individual processes. In fact, Schopenhauer wants to make a clear demarcation between the perceptual and conceptual levels of human cognition.

Thus, he at once dismisses the Kantian notion that through sensibility objects are given to us and through understanding they are thought. Firstly, Schopenhauer insists that senses do not give us objects. Indeed, he makes fun of the idea that objects would just magically appear in our heads. Instead, senses give us mere sensations and only the combined use of the spatio-temporal form of intuition and the causality introducing activity of understanding brings about objects (in materialistic terms that Schopenhauer sometimes uses, our brains mold sensations into experiences). Schopenhauer notes that even Kant appears to accept this at times, when he says that e.g. understanding makes nature possible.

Furthermore, Schopenhauer says, understanding does not think, that is, it does not use any concepts in the Schopenhauerian sense, which always involves movement to a level of abstract universalities. Instead, this conceptual task Schopenhauer leaves for reason - thinking is second-order cognition, based on universalising individual phenomena. We have already seen that Schopenhauer coldly dismisses the primary logical task of understanding - that of connecting perceptions to an object in general, which could be only something thought. As an ally against this notion of object in general Schopenhauer mentions Berkeley, who had already dismissed the distinction between representation and its object - ironically, the notion of object in general was probably introduced by Kant to distinguish his philosophy from Berkeley’s. With this object in itself Schopenhauer dismisses also twelve categories, which were supposed to be concepts for thinking this very object in itself, leaving only the causality besides space and time as a priori elements of cognition. With categories goes also the need for the schematism of categories, which Schopenhauer suggests was nothing but a misguided attempt to create an analogy with the use of empirical concepts.

Although Schopenhauer discards Kantian categories, he admits that the other side of the equation - the forms of judgement - do form a possible topic of philosophy. Contrary to Kant, Schopenhauer doesn’t try to make statements about human cognition on basis of these forms, but instead, he derives these forms from the characteristics of human cognition. That is, some forms of judgement, he says, have their basis on the conceptual side of human cognition, other on the understanding or the experiential side, while finally some can be derived from the interplay of these two elements. Thus, universal and particular judgements, Schopenhauer insists, are just two different manners, in which reason connects abstract concepts while a so-called singular judgement (e.g. “this swan is white”) connects intuitive cognition with abstract concepts. The difference between affirmative and negative judgements is one of reason, since experience really has no negations; and infinite judgement is an unimportant addition, Schopenhauer adds.

Kantian divisions of judgements according to relation have very different sources, according to Schopenhauer. Hypothetical judgement Schopenhauer takes to be a general form of the principle of sufficient reason, which is mostly based on intuitive side of cognition. Categorical judgement is just a general form of judgement, Schopenhauer says, while disjunctive judgement expresses a logical relation between concepts excluding one another, with no connection to the notion of reciprocal causation, which Schopenhauer also dismisses as an absurdity, because causality in his eyes is always a process with one direction.

This leaves only the Kantian modalities, which Schopenhauer considers to have a mixed origin. The basis of the modalities, in Schopenhauer’s opinion, is necessity, which he takes to be a synonym for something having a cause and thus based on intuitive side of cognition. Other modalities originate then from the interaction of concepts with intuitions. Contingency is a meaningful concept only in relation to some context - while A is necessary, assuming certain conditions, some other thing B would be contingent under the same conditions. Nothing absolute contingent would exist, because all things do have some ground. Actuality, according to Schopenhauer, means just something being a necessary consequence of some cause, at the moment, when it is called actual. Possibility, then, is something which is actual at some moment, and impossible is something that is never actual.

We’ve already noticed that Schopenhauer isn’t convinced about the derivation of twelve categories from the supposed table of forms of judgement. Even less convinced he is of Kant’s attempts to use the symmetry of categories as a method for systematising various parts of philosophy. He explicitly notes that quality is just an arbitrary title for affirmation and negation and their connection with intensive quantities is even more contentious. Furthermore, he notes that Kant uses categories in two contradictory manners: both as preconditions of experience, which contains an intuitive component, and as forms of pure, non-intuitive thinking.

Schopenhauer has a low opinion also about Kant’s transcendental dialectic. Although Schopenhauer agrees with Kant that pre-Kantian metaphysics deserved criticism, he is far from accepting that the supposed search for unconditioned leading to such metaphysics would be inevitable part of human reason. In fact, Schopenhauer says, it’s just a sophism to conclude from the need of grounding individual events a need to give a complete chain of grounds to an event. Indeed, he points out, we can complete a chain of grounds only, when we are speaking of grounds of cognition, which end with concrete perceptions, but not when we are speaking of causes. Thus, there is no need to assume that all humans would form concepts like soul or God.

Schopenhauer points out many mistakes with Kant’s attempts to derive basic concepts in particular parts of dialectics. For instance, Kant assumes the notion of soul as final substance behind accidental properties, although the concept of matter would fit the bill much better. Furthermore, Schopenhauer finds it again absurd that Kant tries to derive the four antinomies from his titles for divisions of categories. For instance, while space and time have some connection with quantities, the relationship between wholes and parts has only a slight relation to qualities and their negations. Particularly ridiculous Schopenhauer considers Kant’s linking causality with freedom, when the concept of the creator in the fourth antinomy would have been a more natural choice.

In general, Schopenhauer doesn’t think that Kantian antinomies are real antinomies, because only the antitheses, holding the possible infinity of experience, are a credible option, while the proofs of theses are based on a mere personal inability to understand what infinity is like. Thus, Schopenhauer thinks that no absolute beginning for events can be thought, although one might think that events of the world end at some point. Against Kant’s proof of the thesis of second antinomy Schopenhauer points out that we need not assume that matter would consist of pre-existing parts, if we want to say that it is divisible into further parts - indeed, this was pointed out already by Hegel, and even Kant noted later that infinite divisibility of matter followed from infinite divisibility of space. Kant’s proof for the third and fourth antinomies, Schopenhauer says, again assume that we must have a complete series of causes with an absolute beginning to explain an event.

Finally, Schopenhauer notes that Kant’s general solution for antinomies actually assumes the truth of the antitheses. Schopenhauer is here clearly interpreting the infinity involved in the antitheses as what could be called potential infinities - that is, when an infinity of series is expressed, what is meant is an incapacity to give any absolute, finite series containing all antecedents. What Schopenhauer does agree with Kant - although he appears to not understand this himself - is that just because of this potential infinity of the world we experience, we must conclude that it is not the world in itself, but dependent on human representation.

A sort of exception in Schopenhauers eyes is Kant’s solution to the third antinomy, which Schopenhauer thinks has significant similarities with his own philosophy. Indeed, Kant’s suggestion that freedom might be possible with things in themselves does bear some resemblance with Schopenhauer’s suggestion that completely free volition lies behind the world of representation. Yet, Kant never suggests that we could ever just feel this freedom, and Schopenhauer is not very thrilled of Kant’s transcendental-style proofs that freedom must exist to make categorical imperative possible. Furthermore, Schopenhauer still thinks that Kant’s solution fails as a solution to the antinomy, because the antinomy is expressly about the world of experience, not about things in themselves. Within the world of experience, Schopenhauer confirms, no freedom exists.

The final part of Kant’s transcendental dialectics, his criticism of natural theology, receives a complete condemnation from Schopenhauer. He does admit that Kant was right in rejecting the traditional proofs of God’s existence, but firstly, he thinks that this rejection is historically quite unimportant, because the proofs themselves are just an uninteresting part of scholastic philosophy, and secondly, he is convinced that David Hume did even that better than Kant. But what Schopenhauer really dislikes in Kant’s account is his suggestion that the idea of God as the most real entity would be somehow necessary for human cognition, when many ancient and non-European cultures never had such an concept.

Schopenhauer puts most of his energy toward Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, primarily because he thought that the meat of his philosophy was to be found in that book. Then again, the primary idea of Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason that reason could be the basis of morality, Schopenhauer finds wanting, because reason can at most, he says, tell how to achieve predetermined long-term objectives, like happiness in life. Furthermore, Schopenhauer is quite convinced that no absolute ought-tos or categorical imperatives, but only ought-tos in relation to certain consequences, like punishments: for instance, a child ought to behave, if she wants her allowance. Still, Schopenhauer does admit that true virtue is done for its own sake, even if he doesn’t want to use the term “ought-to” in this context. In fact, he thinks that Kant couldn’t uphold that ideal, mixing it with happiness in the idea of greatest good. In addition, Schopenhauer insists that this pure virtue is not as formal as Kant thought, but more generalisation of egoistic well-being over all living beings.

The other works of Kant get an even shorter shrift from Schopenhauer. For instance, he notes that Kant’s theory of right is simply wrong, because it tries to distance right from both ethics and from state, finding a third root for a priori judgements. Similarly dismissive Schopenhauer is of Critique of Judgment.

tiistai 17. huhtikuuta 2018

Arthur Schopenhauer: World as Will and Representation 1 - Resignation of will

The final book of Schopenhauer’s major work could be called a treatise of practical philosophy. Yet, Schopenhauer notes that in a sense philosophy is never practical in the sense that it always just describes the world, but never prescribes any rules to it. Indeed, going against Kant, Schopenhauer notes that there can be no categorical imperatives based on mere pure reason, but all maxims of practice must assume some end, which a human being is aiming for.

Schopenhauer begins by noting that what he has thus far called simply will could as well be called will for life. His idea appears to be that life is what corresponds to will in the phenomenal level of the world, and of course, especially in the case of organic entities. Since will is outside the chains of time, Schopenhauer says, life will continue eternally - or as long as there is will. Of course, individual living beings might die, but this is just a natural part of the ever-going cycle of life, consisting of fluctuation of birth and death.

Now, a person who has understood that individuals are mere phenomenal embodiments of one and same primordial will might just embrace this will and happily live her own individual life to its inevitable end, in the full knowledge that this same will will live on in some other form. Yet, it is not inevitable that such is the result of this moment of enlightenment. Will is not in any manner determined, so some person might do completely opposite - will in this embodiment might actually cancel itself and the person would not anymore have urges to do anything. The only explanation for this choice would be the character of the person - and this character itself would be just an inexplicable fact, a free choice of the primordial will.

Although Schopenhauer thus accepts the freedom of will, this has nothing to do with freedom of individuals. Indeed, he is quite convinced that individual human beings, just like all phenomenal entities, must follow the principle of sufficient reason. In case of human actions, this principle says that all actions are based on motives and the inexplicable character - this type of person must do so and so in these and these circumstances. At the same time, while the actions of a human being are predetermined, they still have a feeling of freedom, due to being embodiments of a completely undetermined will.

Although Schopenhauer starts by saying that the choice of embracing or resigning will is completely free, his own character appears to fall on the resigning side of the equation. Indeed, he emphasises that will has no real end and merely drives forward without any hope of finding any final goal. In case of physical world, this just means that gravitational pull etc. will go on for the end of eternity, but with animal and human life results are more drastic. Because the animal urges are driven by pain and suffering, pain and suffering will continue forever.

One might say that Schopenhauer exaggerates the suffering intrinsic to living - most animals can endure feelings of hunger, thirst, tiredness etc., if they do not rise to overwhelming levels. Especially in case of humans Schopenhauer raises then another line of offence. The supposed happiness is just a momentary feeling of a pain passing by and cannot last for very long. Thus, Schopenhauer suggests, if all our needs are satisfied and no urge drives us forward, we are bound to feel bored, which is no better than being in constant pain. We might say that Schopenhauer is here complaining about a first-world problem: a pessimist will grumble, even if everything would be fine.

Schopenhauer does have something more in his side. Will, in Schopenhauerian philosophy, is what really drives human beings forward, while our cognitive side is merely a tool of will. Human cognition is tied to the individual outlook of the space-time world, while will is not. Will tries to renew itself and doesn’t really care about what happens to this individual. According to Schopenhauer, this is especially clear when we think of sexual urges, which do not follow any conscious control. Cognition then merely provides the rationalisation for the urges of will and tries to find means for realising these urges.

Now, due to the restriction to individual outlook, human beings care only for their own urges or only of this particular embodiment of will. Thus, all humans, Schopenhauer says, are natural egoists, caring only for their own agenda. Hence, they are quite willing to nullify the will of others, which leads naturally to Hobbesian war of everyone against one another. Interestingly, Schopenhauer admits that a Hobbesian warfare is a state of unrightness, and indeed, that a violation of anyone’s will, whether through violence or deceit, is a wrong. Indeed, Schopenhauer thinks the concept of wrong is the basis of ethics, in that rightness is just a derivative concept - without possibility of violation of rights, there would be no rights to speak about.

After describing the wrongness inherent in the natural egoism of humans, Schopenhauer takes a long detour to discuss the origin of states. In effect, he is just following the Hobbesian account, where state power comes about, because of attempt to restrict the field of wrong committed, thus actualising natural rules of justice. While state offers a sort of solution for all the wrongs caused by egoism, Schopenhauer also suggests that the primordial will has also an inherent sort of justice. In effect, this is just a butcher’s justice - everyone will die at the end, thus, an egoist who is completely deluded by her own self will fear her impending doom.

Schopenhauer notes that sometimes humans can win their egoistic outlook and tragically suffer or even die for the lives of others - it is in character of these humans to break their individual viewpoint. Yet, he is quick to point out that some characters do much worse than regular egoists. They are not just trying to fulfill their personal will, no matter at what cost, but they also actively want to kill and torture other individuals. Schopenhauer ties the existence of such characters to his own pessimistic outlook of life - these undeniably evil persons try to silence the suffering in their own life by making other embodiments of will suffer instead.

One might get the impression that Schopenhauer is trying to make his reader commit a suicide, just to escape all the suffering in the world. Yet, he notes, killing oneself wouldn’t solve anything. The result would be just the destruction of this one individual, who is just an embodiment of primordial will in the phenomenal world. But just like sun will rise again, after seemingly swallowed by night, so another embodiment of the same will will just take place of the deceased person. Indeed, Schopenhauer suggests that suicide is just one kind of appearance of will - person killing herself still wants to live, just without the confines of her bodily situation.

We now have four possible human characters. There are the evil monsters, driven by their own pain to cause suffering in others. There are unjust people, who are willing to hurt others, because of their own egoistic desires, although they have no specific desire to hurt others. There are just people, who are willing to ignore their egoistic desires, if they would hurt others. And there are good and virtuous people, who want to do good for others, out of love and compassion for them, that is, an instinctive feeling that these others are just embodiments of the same primordial will.

In addition to these four characters, Schopenhauer finally delineates a fifth one, which like the virtuous character might get its start from universal compassion. But unlike virtuous person, who is spurred to action by the suffering of others, this final character is just disgusted by all the suffering around her and feels the futility of the whole primordial will behind this horridness. And what happens now is a sort of miracle. Will, as embodied by this particular individual, sees and understands its own contradictoriness and nullifies itself - this person does not want anything anymore. This does not mean that her body wouldn’t have any urges - quite the contrary, sexual and other drives continue even after this enlightenment. Instead, this person falls into ascetic behaviour and consciously tries to cancel all these drives.

What then is the final fate of the ascetic in Schopenhauerian philosophy? Surprisingly, life of ascesis does something suicide couldn’t - it doesn’t destroy just the phenomenal individual, but also will itself. One might well wonder wouldn’t the world as a whole would have then disappeared altogether, once Christ or Buddha or some other saint had gone through this road. Indeed, Schopenhauerian emphasis on ascesis is in a sense way to incorporate religion - especially Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism - in his philosophy. Yet, Schopenhauer concentrates merely on the idea that the material world is full of suffering, and he seemingly ignores all ideas of a heaven beyond. But most confusingly, he still leaves open the possibility that after the resignation of will something might remain - something that must be better than this life.

sunnuntai 15. huhtikuuta 2018

Arthur Schopenhauer: World as Will and Representation 1 - Ideas

Between the concrete individual objects and primordial will in itself Schopenhauer places ideas. These ideas are already objects or embodiments of will, but they should not yet be individuals and thus are free of ordinary causality. Instead, Schopenhauer conceives them as paradigmatic or prototypical objects for each level in the hierarchy of embodiments of will. Adding this Platonistic layer to a pseudo-Kantian worldview is, again, no novelty and similar attempts can be found e.g. in the philosophy of Schelling.

Similarly unoriginal is Schopenhauer’s notion as to what kind of cognition is required for conceiving these ideas. When a person conceives an idea, Schopenhauer suggests, she must herself be free of her own individuality and become a pure, timeless subject, who looks upon the idea without any urges of ordinary life and without the shackles of causality. In other words, she must be an artistic genius, capable of grasping what is essential in different genera of objects. Genius, Schopenhauer says, forgets her own individuality and is completely enamoured by her vision of the idea. Thus, Schopenhauer endorses the rather romantic notion of a genius, who has a special connection to the essence of the world. Another side of Schopenhauerian genius is her complete detachment from and even ignorance of practical concerns. Schopenhauer goes even so far as to suggest that no true genius could ever understand mathematics, which is essential for explaining the level of individuals.

Note that what make genius special in eyes of Schopenhauer is her ability to envision the idea. Meaning of works of art, then, is just to convey this vision of idea to other persons, who do not happen to have the abilities of genius. A work of art should, therefore, purge its viewer from all volitions. This might happen, for instance, by the work of art describing something that is completely without any interest, say, an ordinary landscape - or, it might try to forget our individual concerns and highlight on e.g. general tragedies of human life. When volition is cancelled, what is left is distinct type of peaceful pleasure in just watching the work. This state of aesthetic observing, Schopenhauer continues, can be achieved in two different manners - through beauty or through sublimity. Beautiful object lulls will peacefully, while sublime object - such as the conflict of powerful natural forces involved in storm - forcefully submits the individual will under their spell. On the contrary, any sort of titillation is bound to be quite unaesthetic, because it will just awaken the urges of volition.

Now, all of this concerns the subjective side of aesthetic experience - that is, what the object must do to us to convey such an experience. Otherwise, the object could be of any sort, and indeed, Schopenhauer says, everything is beautiful. Of course, some objects can be better in evoking the idea they embody - for instance, humans, according to Schopenhauer, are the most beautiful among all things.

Just like many other post-Kantians, Schopenhauer wants to give a sort of hierarchy of arts, which he bases mainly on the hierarchy of objects depicted. Thus, the lowest step in the hierarchy of arts is taken by architecture, which corresponds to lowest rungs in the hierarchy of phenomena, that is, gravity, hardness and other properties characteristic of mere matter. The level of plant life corresponds to art of gardening and to landscape painting, level of animality to animal sculptures and paintings.

As I have already mentioned, the highest rank of beauty in Schopenhauer’s theory is reserved for humans. Human beauty is also most multifarious in its forms. While sculpture shows best the bodily beauty and grace of human form, painting reveals the beautiful character of humans.

The arts mentioned thus far work directly through senses - they let us directly see the idea embodied in the works of art. Thus, these fine arts should be completely apart from conceptualisation and reasoning, Schopenhauer urges, because concepts and reason have developed for pragmatic use in the world of causality, but not for conceiving ideas. Hence, sculptures and paintings should not be used for symbolising general concepts, because such symbolisms and allegories would just distract from the proper purpose of art - a conclusion Schopenhauer shares with Hegelian aesthetics.

Poetry, on the other hand, has to use a completely different method for evoking the idea, because it is based on the very concepts so foreign to idea. Poetry must use allegories, but in a reverse direction - it must use words to convey images through our imagination. Poetry has then most to do with human actions, and its apex, in Schopenhauer’s view, is tragedy, which shows the utter contradictoriness of human life and its almost inevitable ending in tears, but also its solution, namely, the resignation of one’s individual will.

Completely removed from other arts in Schopenhauerian hierarchy is music, which does not convey any idea. Indeed, music is not meant to give us any aesthetic visions, but it directly produces an emotion in us. In other words, it lets us feel the primordial will, of which idea is merely the first embodiment. Schopenhauer goes even so far as to try to find analogies between different aspects of a composition and the hierarchy of phenomenal objects - a foolhardy attempt reminiscent of German idealism.

keskiviikko 28. maaliskuuta 2018

Arthur Schopenhauer: World as Will and Representation 1 - Will behind the phenomena

While the first section of Schopenhauer’s book was nominally Kantian, but in reality something else, the second section is a clear move beyond limits set by Kant. One of the most central thesis in Kant’s philosophy is that we do not have any access to things as they are in themselves. Schopenhauer flatly denies this and states that we indeed have such an access. If we were mere disembodied subjects, such an access wouldn’t exist, but we are not. In fact, we are very much embodied persons. Now, we can regard our bodies from an external viewpoint, as a mere object. Still, we also have access to what our bodies are, not as objects, but as things in themselves - through our will. For instance, we feel an urge to do something, and at once we can see this urge fulfilled in the movement of out body.

Superficially taken, Schopenhauer’s attempt to go beyond Kant’s limits for cognition resembles Fichte’s philosophy in the sense that both philosophers base their attempts on a practically understood self-consciousness. Yet, there are clear differences. While Schopenhauer’s justification is quite crude and seemingly based on nothing more than mere self-feeling, Fichte’s assumption is based on an interesting transcendental deduction: whole experience would not be possible without being set up by a practically understood self-consciousness.

Now, Schopenhauer distinguishes his primal will in itself from all motives seemingly guiding our actions. Such motives are mere phenomenal circumstances, which at most explain why we act at this moment and in this situation as we do. Primal will, on the other hand, is equal to action itself and is, according to Schopenhauer, ultimately explicable, because all explanations occur on the level of representations. In fact, no phenomenal restrictions apply to the primal will. Thus, on the level of will, Schopenhauer concludes, there are no separate individuals, but each and everyone of us is as well a representation of the primal will.

In fact, Schopenhauer goes even further and insists that animals, plants and even bare material objects are all just embodiment of will. At first sight, saying that e.g. gravity is a form of will is just replacing one difficult word (force) with another (will). Yet, it contains at least one description of such a force - it is somehow similar to the urge that we feel in our actions. While forces as such are just closed from us, will we know intimately well, and it is just a matter of extending this familiarity to, first, motiveless urges of animals and plants, and finally, to strivings of all material objects.

Although Schopenhauer then in a sense upholds an ontological monism - all is will - he does not endorse any monistic explanations in the level of science. On the contrary, science works at the level of appearance or representation, so there is no guarantee, he says, that e.g. organic phenomena could be reduced to chemical terms. In fact, Schopenhauer appears to suggest that no reduction of any kind can happen between different sciences. And indeed, if any type of reduction is to be effected, this should happen to a direction completely opposite from the usual attempts of reduction. In other words, inorganic phenomena, like gravity and magnetism, should be understood through an analogy to our own volitional efforts. In fact, Schopenhauer suggests that phenomena could be arranged in a hierarchy according to the level of resemblance they have with human volition. Such levels would then show different levels in the process of becoming apparent of the primordial will - mere material phenomena would show their origin in will least clearly, while human volition would show it most clearly.

We have already remarked about the resemblance of Schopenhauer’s notion of will with Fichte’s practical self-consciousness. Even clearer affinities Schopenhauer’s theory has with the romantic notion of phenomenal world as an appearance of forces of life. Like romantics, Schopenhauer notes that individuality is mere delusion, that everything originates from a unified source and that this source is embodied in a hierarchy of levels, where humanity holds the highest place. Even Schopenhauer’s insistence that at the level of phenomena different embodiments of primordial will strive against one another is not unlike e.g. Hegelian insistence that basic forces contradict one another and even cancel themselves in some circumstances. Furthermore, Schopenhauer’s statement that will can never completely fulfill its strivings, but is always driven to do more and more, is quite on line at least with the ideas of some romantics - although others imagined that at some level (perhaps with humans) such a primal need could be balanced by harmonious reason.

torstai 22. maaliskuuta 2018

Arthur Schopenhauer: World as Will and Representation 1 (1819)

Although in the preface of the first edition of his main work, Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Schopenhauer is quite insistent that no one should read his work, before reading first Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and his own work on the principle of sufficient reason, when I first read the work, I understood it quite well without these aids and even by beginning from the second, supplementary book published later. This is mostly a testament to Schopenhauer’s skills as a writer. Compared to some of his contemporaries, Schopenhauer’s prose is even dull in its simplicity.

The first edition of the work divides into five sections, two dealing with world as representation and two with world as will, while the fifth is a detailed criticism of Kant’s philosophy. I shall follow Schopenhauer’s division in this regard and divide my account of the book into five consecutive posts.

Although I shall thus consider Schopenhauer’s relation to Kant in more detail in a later post, we can already note that in the first section of his book, Schopenhauer offers a quite simplified and even caricaturised version of Kantianism. Schopenhauer’s basis for his form of Kantianism is the conceptual pair of subject and object. Subject is that which is conscious of an object and neither can exist without the other, Schopenhauer says - there could be no consciousness without nothing to be conscious of, but also nothing to be conscious of without any consciousness. While object is spatio-temporal, subject is not. Still, space and time can also be seen as forms of being conscious of, in the sense that subject sees everything spatially and temporally. Same goes for causality - object follows causal laws and subject regards everything as following causal laws. Thus, without any subject, there would be no object, no space, no time and no causality. This quite straightforward idealism Schopenhauer takes as the essence of Kant’s philosophy - and essentially also as the kernel of Berkeley’s philosophy. All of this would quite confuse most Kantians, who would be quick to distinguish between Kant and Berkeley.

We have already seen Schopenhauer develop the basic structure of this first part in his book on the principle of sufficient reason, and what he adds in this work is mostly just the subjective correlates for the objective elements. We have already seen that Schopenhauer follows Kant in regarding space and time as forms of cognition - following Kant, he calls them objects of pure sensibility. Space and time alone would allow no change - space as such is not processual, while time as such has nothing abiding that could change. It is only their combination that makes it possible to experience something as changing, Schopenhauer says. This combination of the two happens through what Schopenhauer, again following Kant, calls understanding. But unlike with Kant, Schopenhauerian understanding does nothing else, but implicitly regards everything in space and time as causal. Causality binds space and time together through the notion of matter, which is just an abiding substrate for all causal changes. Schopenhauer takes this notion of understanding in a quite robust manner: there literally is a module in our brain that combines our individual perceptions into neat causal chains.

Even more adamantly than Kant does Schopenhauer insist that causality cannot be applied outside experience. In fact, Schopenhauer insists that objects do not causally affect subject. Neither does subject create objects, but both appear on the playing field at the same time.

Beyond sensibility and understanding Schopenhauer places reason, which for him, more clearly than for Kant, is a common name for our conceptual abilities. Indeed, it is our conceptual ability reason is all about, since it is the only essentially human cognitive faculty. Schopenhauer thinks that reason by itself cannot really do anything, but is always dependent on the content given by sensibility and understanding, because concepts are just abstract generalisations from perceptions. Still, for practical purposes moving to this level of abstractions is of necessity - for instance, we couldn’t communicate things to others, if we couldn’t use concepts for them. Even so, Schopenhauer emphasises the use of perceptual and intuitive examples even in case of scientific study, which is the place where conceptual side of cognition is at most in play - the certainty of even mathematical principles is essentially based on perceptions and intuitions. The most remarkable thing about this account is how unremarkable it is - even Wolffians could have accepted everything Schopenhauer had to say about reason.

Indeed, in a sense Schopenhauerian notion of reason is closer to Wolffian than Kantian philosophy. When it comes to the practical use of reason, Schopenhauer denies that reason could have any absolute moral principles, which would be based on nothing external. Thus, the only way reason could be used in action would be as a faculty for guiding us to as happy life as possible. Hence, the most perfect system of practical reason for Schopenhauer is Stoicism, which aims at human happiness and notes that it can be achieved only through perfect self-control.

sunnuntai 25. helmikuuta 2018

Louis-Gabriel-Ambroise vicomte de Bonald - Philosophical researches on the premier objects of moral cognitions (1818)

I’ve already discussed de Bonald’s ideas about the proper form of state - to summarise, he was a conservative thinker, who preferred hereditary monarchy over democracy, because the former provided a unifying element required for stabilising society and keeping it running according to necessary laws. I am now about to discuss his opinions on the more theoretical side of philosophy and particularly his work Recherches philosophiques sur les premiers objets des connaissances morales.

De Bonald begins his discussion with a summarised account of the history of philosophy, starting with Thales and ending with Kant and his school. While his account is at first quite diverse, he is finally quite willing to divide all philosophy into two rough classes, according to the question of the source of our ideas - those de Bonald calls Platonists, who believed in the possibility of innate ideas, and those he calls Aristotelians, who upheld that all ideas are ultimately derived from sensations. This is strikingly similar to the ideas of Saint-Simon, which makes one suspect that both thinkers relied on some common tradition in French historygraphy of philosophy.

It is no wonder that de Bonald, with his conservative take on philosophy, prefers the platonistic side of the dispute. This can be seen especially in his attitude toward the question of the origin of language. On the one side of the question, de Bonald sees linguistic atheists, who deny any peculiar origin of language and regard human speech as a mere haphazard accident that has arisen through happy circumstances. At the other side, then, are linguistic theists, who insist that skill language has been created together with the creation of human beings, just like the biblical story of Adam naming animals reveals. Finally, there is also the deistic middle stance, which supposes that human language has arisen gradually over time, from a state of complete silence, but also that humans have had a natural tendency for speech, not to be found with other animals.

De Bonald insists that the proper answer to the question is the theistic one, simply because language is something that could not have been invented - invention would have already required thinking, but human beings simply cannot think without the aid of words. A particular target of his criticism is Condorcet’s notion of the development of human culture, which undoubtedly was highly speculative account. Of course, nowadays we would quickly discount de Bonald’s explanation by saying that it is equally speculative, based on mere unverified myths, while the seemingly separate realms of silent animality and linguistic rationality seem in our eyes to be more like two points on an unbroken continuum.

De Bonald goes even further and suggests that even writing is something humans cannot have invented by themselves, pretty much for the same reason as language couldn’t have been invented - to distinguish sounds within words, one must already have letters to indicate them. What might have been invented was hieroglyphical writing, in which all words were indicated by one picture, but like other thinkers of the time had said, such a manner of writing expressed a stagnation of human development. The truly innovative alphabetical writing, de Bonald insists, must have been of divine making. Indeed, its very purpose was to counteract the all too human habit of forgetting such important things as divine law.

On basis of these considerations, it is no wonder that de Bonald is against any materialistic theories of human constitution. He notes as a physiological fact that human brain plays a crucial role in the formation of human consciousness, because all the nerves clearly transmit sensations to it. Yet, he notes, this does not necessarily mean that brain is the source of thoughts, because it might as well be just the means by which the proper source of thinking - intelligence - receives sensations and transmits commands to various parts of the body. Indeed, de Bonald says, the latter theory bears striking resemblance to the proper form of state, in which a monarchic ruler uses noble ministers to guide the body of state.

De Bonald finds three different aspects in the intelligence: imagination, or the faculty of making mental representations corresponding to sense objects, understanding, or the faculty of conceiving ideas of non-sensuous, intellectual objects, and finally, sensibility, or the faculty of sensing pleasure and pain. Now, all of these aspects have their own form of language, de Bonald continues: imagination makes gestures and pictures, understanding creates articulated speech, while sensibility is shown in involuntary movements and cries.

What de Bonald tries to achieve by distinguishing these three faculties is, firstly, to argue against the Condillacian theory that all thoughts are just modifications of sensations. Especially he wants to say that ideas - say, like of justice or goodness - are not mere sensuous images. Of course, we have learned through senses the linguistic expressions, which refer to these ideas, but the ideas themselves must be innate in us, at leas as innate capacities to think such things, de Bonald concludes.

The second reason for this trivision of mental faculties, lies in de Bonald’s wish to undermine the materialistic philosophy of mind presented by Cabanis. While Cabanis had suggested as significant evidence for materialism that such things like age, gender or climate affect one’s mental constitution, de Bonald suggests that such matters affect only things like taste in foods, which belongs more to sensibility, but not ideas, which should be universal. Indeed, de Bonald states, seeming counterexamples of cultures having different moral norms are not dependent on material influences, like climate, but simply on the moral state of the culture in question.

From the rather clear that fact that a person can wish for one’s own death, de Bonald draws the rather strong conclusion that human soul must be immortal. De Bonald’s reasoning is based on the assumption that soul or human personality can never really hope for its own destruction. Indeed, when one desires death, one desires merely separation of soul from the shackles of body, de Bonald says. Of course, one can quite well suspect such a statement, because we might well assume some suicidal people would really want to destroy their very consciousness.

De Bonald also notes the universal recognition of the existence of God. Indeed, he notes this on each of the three aspects of human cognition: different cultures have had images of divinity, they have talked about gods and they have surely had sentiments of the creator. De Bonald suggests this universal recognition as a premiss in a Cartesian proof of God’s existence - if humans have had cognitive stances about God, God must be possible, which means that he must also exist. Yet, as he himself appears to understand, the most convincing argument he could use is more emotional - the universality of belief in God seems hard to explain, unless God really existed. Indeed, de Bonald notes, even hardline materialists cannot but fail to speak of such matters as the order of the world, thus implicitly already assuming the existence of someone to order matter.

It is no wonder that as a conservative thinker de Bonald doesn’t try to introduce any novelties in his philosophy, but defends a tried worldview. Thus, it is to be accepted that after bringing God into the equation, de Bonald notes that he has organised the world teleologically for the sake of human beings. In another analogy with state, de Bonald calls humans ministers of the divine monarch, leading all the other living beings. This does not mean that humans could despotically rule over animals, because they should be more like guardians to animals. Still, de Bonald sees humans as clearly above animals, because animals are, de Bonald says, perfect and cannot become any better, while humans are perfectible.