In doing so, Nietzsche also made the form of his writing essential to its content and thus raised profound questions about the relationship between philosophy and literature. The consequences of his views and of his overall project are still being pursued in philosophy, literature, and criticism. If his perspectivism is, after all, true, then, in appropriately paradoxical fashion, this pursuit will never be finally over.
Nietzsche’s apropos question, it turns out, is a good place to begin regarding his subject. For the Problem of God cannot be defined by any single question but is more an umbrella term covering a variety of ancient and more overshadowing terminological varieties in reassembling the covering umbrella of
modernity and the postmodern questions regarding God. Does God exist? What is the nature of God? Why is there evil and suffering in the world? Although a slight ray of light is obscured but implicitly within these are questions about our own meaning and purpose in the world. If God does exist, why has humanity been created? If God is dead, what is the right way for us to go about conducting our lives?
It is in defining and examining the (for him historical) phenomenon of nihilism that Nietzsche’s attack on Christianity sets in, and it has remained the only truly subtle point that, within the whole range of his more unrestrained argumentativeness, this Antichrist makes against Christianity. For it is at this point that Nietzsche asks (and asks the same question in countless variations throughout his work): What is the specific qualifying that the Christian tradition has instilled a cultivated in the minds of men? They are, he thinks, two fold: on the one hand, a more refined sense of truth than any other civilization has known, an almost uncontrollable desire for absolute spiritual and intellectual certainties, and, on the other hand, the ever-present suspicion that life on this earth is not a supreme value, but in need of a higher, belief transcendental justification. This, Nietzsche believes, is a destructive, and even -destructive alliance, which is bound finally to corrode the very Christian beliefs on which it rests, for the mind exercised and guided in its search adversarial consciousness by the most sophisticated and comprehensive supreme beings that the world has ever known - a theology that through Thomas Aquinas has assimilated into its grand system the genius of Aristotle was at the same time fashioned and directed by the indelible Christian distrust of the ways of the world. Consequently, it ought to follow, with the utmost logical precision and determination, a course of systematically “devaluing” the knowable real.
This mind, Nietzsche predicts, will eventually, in a frenzy of intellectual honestly, unmask a humbug what it began by regarding as the finer things in life. The boundless faith in that, the joint legacy of Christ and Greek, will in the end dislodge every possible belief in truth of any faith. Souls, long disciplined in a school of unworthiness and humility, will insist upon knowing the worst about themselves, and only be able to grasp what is humiliating. Psychology will denigrate the creations of beauty, laying bare the wangle of unworthy desires of which they are “mere” sublimation.
All new knowledge about the soul, knowledge about a different soul, can it ever happen that the freely discovering mind says to the soul, “This is what you are, “is it not quite as if the mind said to the soul: “This is how I wish you to see your. This is the image after which I create you. This is my secret about you: I shock you with it and, shockingly, at once wrest it from you.” Worse: having received and revealed it secret, their soul is no longer what I was when it lived in secrecy. For there are secrets that are created in the process of their revelation. Worse still, having been told its secrets, the soul may create to be a soul. This step from modern psychology to soullessness is imperceptibly distanced from that of modern physics, just as dissoluble the concept of “Matter.”
This valuing quantification is manifest in today’s world, which we live in an age during which many of us have experienced the death of God. Its well-known phrase is recounted as, "God is dead” which was made famous by the 19th Century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Although he was by temperament and atheist, Nietzsche’s controversial statement was more a realization on his part than a pronouncement. He simply weighed the astonishing German military power of his day and the incredible advances in modern science (including Darwinism) and technology against the declining belief in the Christian God. For Nietzsche, human ingenuity and power had reached such heights as to make God psychologically irrelevant. Although he has often been ridiculed and scorned by right-wing fundamentalists who have misunderstood his meaning, Nietzsche him felt great ambivalence concerning the death of God. On the one hand, he feared and predicted humanity, with no system of moral guidance, would plunge it into wars and disasters the likes of which have never been seen. On the other hand, he was hopeful the life denying ethics of Christianity might be replaced with a new life affirming philosophy. "At last," he wrote, "the sea, our sea, lies open before us. Perhaps there has never been so open a sea." If Nietzsche only gave voice to a thought concerning the relevancy of God that was increasingly on the minds of many in his day, it was the horrific Holocaust a few years later that would nail the lid on God’s coffin. In the face of such horror and suffering it became impossible for many to believe in the existence of a just and loving God. As the German Theologian and pacifist, Deitrich Bonhoeffer wrote while imprisoned for plotting to assassinate Hitler, ". . . everything evidently gets along without ‘God,’ and just as well as before." In this statement, like Nietzsche, Bonhoeffer realized that humanity had come of age, no longer needing faith in God when it could rely upon its own inventiveness to determine its fate and control the forces of nature. However, the concentration of human suffering and evil displayed during the Holocaust touched upon a nerve essential to the human condition and much older than recent advancements through science and technology. More than a century before both Nietzsche and Bonhoeffer, philosopher David Hume asked "Is [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? From what place then is evil? Theologians as renown as C.S. Lewis and thinkers as ancient as Epicurus have voiced similar questions. For many the facts of human suffering is proof enough that God cannot exist. Nonetheless, the problem of suffering has proven such a stumbling block for theologians over the centuries that a range of differing solutions has been proposed. In specific regard to the Holocaust, for example, Robert L. Rubenstein argues in his book After Auschwitz, "To see any purpose in the death camps, the traditional believer is forced to regard the most demonic, antihuman explosion in all history as a meaningful expression of God’s purpose. He goes on to say, "A God who tolerates the suffering that become more even that one single innocent child, may that is either infinitely cruel or hopelessly indifferent. For Rubenstein the reality of such evil proves that even if God does exist, such a being cannot be all-powerful.
Other solutions to the problem suggest suffering is a divine test of some sort, such as the biblical character Job went through. Unfortunately this solution also implicates God in the malicious and intentional suffering humans experience. Some blame humanity it for evil and suffering, through the doctrines of original sin and free will. This argument has several problems. Firstly, if God is omniscient, all-knowing, why create a world that would fall so utterly from its original perfection? Furthermore, even if God is bound by some imposed guideline of non-interference, as Creator such a God must take some, if not full, responsibility for the outcome of Creation. Finally, blaming human beings for the existence of evil and suffering in the world may explain moral evils, but it doesn’t explain the presence of natural evil such as disease, tornadoes, droughts, hurricanes, etc., etc., events’ human beings have no control over. Finally, some theologies give God a get-out-of-jail-free-card by simply concluding the ways of God are incomprehensible to human beings. That is, God may appear indifferent, malicious, uncaring, but this is only because we, in our limited capacity, cannot understand the mind of God. All of these arguments, however, may be last ditch efforts to cling to the belief in God even amid what some have concluded is overwhelming evidence that such a God does not exist.
In fairness, it should be noted that the hope for a perfect world without suffering and evil may be typical of modern humanity and not indicative of humanity in general. With the advent of science and the increasing sufficiency of technology, both mechanical and medical, is our latent hope that we will one day solve all our problems by ushering in a techno-utopian world. To do so, however, many have come to the conclusion that we must kill first kill God, which is to say, if we are to advance we must move beyond our antiquated and traditional beliefs. In his book, The Problem of God, Yesterday and Today, John Courtney Murray describes two types of postmodern atheists, the atheist of the communist world Revolution and the atheist of the Theatre, For the Marxist, according to Murray, the goal is to build a new world, free of all misery, by giving human beings their freedom, a freedom from belief in God and from religion it that is viewed as an opium of the people. "He has discovered that it is history, not God, that makes the nature of man." Inscribes Murray, "This discovery was the death of God. When man came to know him through history, when he came to understand that he is the creature of history and not of God, God was dead. He died out of history, leaving man as its master."
The fatal flaw of pure reason is, of course, the absence of emotion, and purely rational explanations of the division between subjective reality and external reality had limited appeal outside the community of intellectuals. The figure most responsible for infusing our understanding of Cartesian dualism with emotional content was the death of God theologian Friedrich Nietzsche. After declaring that God and ‘divine will’ do not exist, Nietzsche reified the ‘essences’ of consciousness in the domain of subjectivity as the ground for individual ‘will’ and summarily dismissed all pervious philosophical attempts to articulate the ‘will to truth’. The problem, claimed Nietzsche, is that earlier versions of the ‘will to power’ disguise the fact that all allege truths were arbitrarily created in and are expression or manifestations of individual ‘will’.
In Nietzsche’s view, the separation between mind and mater is more absolute and total than had previously been imagined. Based on the assumptions that there are no real or necessary correspondences between linguistic constructions of reality in human subjectivity and external reality, he declared that we are all locked in ‘a prison house of language’. The prison as he conceived it, however, it was also a ‘space’ where the philosopher can examine the ‘innermost desires of his nature’ and articulate a new massage of individual existence founded on will.
“Those who fail to enact their existence in this space,” says Nietzsche, “are enticed into sacrificing their individuality on the nonexistent altars of religious beliefs and democratic or socialist ideals and become, therefore, members of the anonymous and docile crowd.” Nietzsche also invalidated the knowledge claims of science in the examination of human subjectivity. Science, he said, not only exalted natural phenomena and favours reductionistic examinations of phenomena at the expense of mind. It also seeks to educe mind to a mere material substance, and thereby to displace or subsume the separateness and uniqueness of mind with mechanistic description that disallows any basis for the free exercise of individual will.
Nietzsche’s emotionally charged defence of intellectual freedom and his radical empowerment of mind as the maker and transformer of the collective fictions that shape human reality in a soulful mechanistic inverse proved terribly influential on twentieth-century thought. Nietzsche sought to reinforce his view of the subjective character of scientific knowledge by appealing to an epistemological crisis over the foundations of logic and arithmetic that arose during the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Though a curious course of events, attempts by Edmund Husserl, a philosopher trained in higher math and physics, to resolve this crisis resulted in a view of the character of human consciousness that closely resembled that of Nietzsche. Husserl, of course, was a principal founder of ‘phenomenology’ and from Franz Brentano (1838-1917) inherited the view that the central problem in understanding thought is that of explaining the way in which an intentional direction, or content, can belong to the mental phenomenon that exhibits it. Mental phenomena are founded in sensory data, but whereas for Brentano there is no sharp distinction between ‘intuitions’ and concepts, Husserl reinstates that this way of thinking is that the content is immanent, existing within the mental act, and anything external drops out as secondary or irrelevant to the intrinsic nature of the mental state. The problem is nonetheless of reconciling the subjective or psychological nature of mental life with its objective and logical content preoccupied Husserl from this time onwards. Husserl eventually abandoned his attempt to keep both a subjective and a naturalistic approach to knowledge together, abandoning the naturalism in favour of a kind of ‘transcendentalism’ idealism’.
`Nietzsche, in an effort to subvert the epistemological authority of scientific knowledge, sought to legitimatize a division between mind and world much starker than that originally envisioned by Descartes. What is not as widely known, however, is that Nietzsche and other seminal figures in the history of philosophical postmodernism were very much aware of an epistemological crisis in scientific thought than arose much earlier that, that occasioned by wave-particle dualism in quantum physics. This crisis resulted from attempts during the last three decades of the nineteenth century to develop a logically - consistent definition of number and arithmetic that would serve to reinforce the classical view of correspondence between mathematical theory and physical reality. As it turned out, these efforts resulted in paradoxes of a recursion and -reference that threatened to undermine both the efficacy of this correspondence and the privileged character of scientific knowledge.
Nietzsche appealed to this crisis in an effort to reinforce his assumption that, the absence of ontology, all knowledge (including scientific knowledge) was grounded only in human consciousness. As the crisis continued, a philosopher trained in higher mathematics and physics, Edmund Husserl, attempted to preserve the classical view of correspondence between mathematical theory and physical reality by deriving the foundation of logic and number from consciousness in ways that would preserve -consistency and rigour. Even so, this effort to ground mathematical physics in human consciousness, or in human subjective reality, was no trivial matter. It represented a direct link between these early challenges and the efficacy of classical epistemology and the tradition in philosophical thought that culminated in philosophical postmodernism. Nietzsche’s emotionally charged decence of intellectual freedom and his radical empowerment of mind as the maker and transformer of the collective fictions that shape human reality in a soulless mechanistic universe proved terribly influential on twentieth-century thought.
`Friedrich Nietzsche is openly pessimistic about the possibility of knowledge. ‘We simply lack any organ for knowledge, for ‘truth’: We know (or believe or imagine) just as much as may be useful in the interests of the human herd, the species: and even what is called ‘utility’ is ultimately also a mere belief, something imaginary and perhaps precisely that most calamitous stupidity of which we will not perish some day’ (The Gay Science).
This position is very radical, Nietzsche does not simply deny that knowledge, construed as the adequate representation of the world by the intellect, exists. He also refuses the pragmatist identification of knowledge and truth with usefulness: he writes that we think we know what we think is useful, and that we can be quite wrong about the latter.
Nietzsche’s view, his ‘Perspectivism’, depends on his claim that there is no sensible conception of a world independent of human interpretation and to which interpretations would correspond if hey were to constitute knowledge. He sums up this highly controversial position in The Will to Power: ‘Facts are precisely what there is not. Only interpretation’.
It is often claimed that Perspectivism is -undermining. If the thesis that all views are interpretations is true then, it is argued there is at least one view that is not an interpretation. If, on the other hand, the thesis is it an interpretation, then there is no reason to believe that it is true, and it follows again that nit every view is an interpretation.
Yet this refutation assumes that if a view, like Perspectivism it, is an interpretation it is wrong. This is not the case. To call any view, including Perspectivism, an interpretation is to say that it can be wrong, which is true of all views, and that is not a sufficient refutation. To show the Perspectivism is literally false producing another view superior to it on specific epistemological grounds is necessary.
Perspectivism does not deny that particular views can be true. Like some versions of cotemporary anti-realism, its attributional approach for ‘truth in relation to facts’ specified internally those approaches themselves. But it refuses to envisage a single independent set of facts, To be accounted for by all theories. Thus Nietzsche grants the truth of specific scientific theories does, however, deny that a scientific interpretation can possibly be ‘the only justifiable interpretation of the world’ (The Gay Science): Neither the facts that science addresses nor the methods it employs are privileged. Scientific theories serve the purposes for which hey have been devised, but these have no priority over the many other purposes of human life. The existence of many purposes and needs relative to which the value of theories is established-another crucial element of Perspectivism is sometimes thought to imply a reason relative, according to which no standards for evaluating purposes and theories can be devised. This is correct only in that Nietzsche denies the existence of single set of standards for determining epistemic value, but holds that specific views can be compared with and evaluated in relation to one another the ability to use criteria acceptable in particular circumstances does not presuppose the existence of criteria applicable in all. Agreement is therefore not always possible, since individuals may sometimes differ over the most fundamental issues dividing them.
Still, Nietzsche would not be troubled by this fact, which his opponents too also have to confront only he would argue, to suppress it by insisting on the hope that all disagreements are in particular eliminable even if our practice falls woefully short of the ideal. Nietzsche abandons that ideal. He considers irresoluble disagreement and essential part of human life.
Knowledge for Nietzsche finds its point reference by the idea of the ‘given’ basis beyond which its conferring material and of a rational defensible theory of confirmation and inference. That it is based on desire and bodily needs more than social refinement’s Perspectives are to be judged not from their relation to the absolute but on the basis of their effects in a specific era. The possibility of any truth beyond such a local, pragmatic one becomes a problem in Nietzsche, since either a noumenal realm or a historical synthesis exists to provide an absolute criterion of adjudication for competing truth claims: what gets called truths are simply beliefs that have been for so long that we have forgotten their genealogy? In these Nietzsche reverses the Enlightenment dictum that truth is the way to liberation by suggesting that trying classes in as far as they are considered absolute for debate and conceptual progress and cause as opposed to any ambient behaviour toward the ease of which backwardness and unnecessary misery. Nietzsche moves back and forth without revolution between the positing of trans-histories; truth claims, such as his claim about the will to power, and a kind of epistemic nihilism that calls into question not only the possibility of truth but the need and desire of it as well. However, perhaps what is most important, Nietzsche introduces the notion that truth is a kind of human practice, in a game whose rules are contingent rather than necessary it. The evaluation of truth claims should be based of their strategic efforts, not their ability to represent a reality conceived of as separately autonomous than that of human influence, for Nietzsche the view that all truth is truth from or within a particular perspective. The perspective may be a general human pin of view, set by such things as the nature of our sensory apparatus, or it may be thought to be bound by culture, history, language, class or gender. Since there may be many perspectives, there are also different families of truth. The term is frequently applied to Nietzsche’s philosophy.
The best-known disciple of Husserl was Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), and the work of both figures greatly influenced that of the French atheistic existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. The work of Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre became foundational to that of the principal architects of philosophical postmodernism, the deconstructionist’s Jacques Lacan, Roland Bathes, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, this direct linkage among the nineteenth-century crises about epistemological foundations of physics and the origins of philosophical postmodernism served to perpetuate the Cartesian two-world dilemma in an even more oppressive form.
Of Sartre’s main philosophical work, Being and Nothingness, Sartre examines the relationships between Being For-it (consciousness) and Being In-it (the non-conscious world). He rejects central tenets of the rationalalist and empiricist traditions, calling the view that the mind or is a thing or substance. ‘Descartes’s substantialist illusion’, and claiming also that consciousness dos not contain ideas or representations . . . are idolist invented by the psychologists. Sartre also attacks idealism in the forms associated with Berkeley and Kant, and concludes that his account of the relationship between consciousness and the world is neither realist nor idealist.
Sartre also discusses Being For-others, which comprises the aspects of experience about interactions with other minds. His views are subtle: Roughly, he holds that one’s awareness of others is constituted by feelings of shame, pride, and so on.
Sartre’s rejection of ideas, and the denial of idealism, appear to commit him to direct realism in the theory of perception. This is neither inconsistent with his claim as been non-realist nor idealist, since by ‘realist’ he means views that allow for the mutual independence or in-principle separability of mind and world. Against this Sartre emphasizes, after Heidegger, that perceptual experience has an active dimension, in hat it is a way of interacting and dealing with the world, than a way of merely contemplating it (‘activity, as spontaneous, unreflecting consciousness, constitutes a certain existential stratum in the world’). Consequently, he holds that experience is richer, and open to more aspects of the world, than empiricist writers customarily claim:
When I run after a streetcar . . . there is consciousness of-the-streetcar-having-to-be-overtaken, etc., . . . I am then plunged into the world of objects, it is they that constitute the unity of my consciousness, it is they that present themselves with values, with attractive nd repellent qualities . . .
Relatedly, he insists that I experience material things as having certain potentialities -for-me (’nothingness’). I see doors and bottles as openable, bicycles as ridable (these matters are linked ultimately to the doctrine of extreme existentialist freedom). Similarly, if my friend is not where I expect to meet her, then I experience her absence ‘as a real event’.
These Phenomenological claims are striking and compelling, but Sartre pays insufficient attention to such things as illusions and hallucinations, which are normally cited as problems for direct realists. In his discussion of mental imagery, however, he describes the act of imaging as a ‘transformation’ of ‘psychic material’. This connects with his views that even a physical image such as a photograph of a tree does not figure as an object of consciousness when it is experienced as a tree-representation (than as a piece of coloured cards). Nonetheless, the fact remains that the photograph continues to contribute to the character of the experience. Given this, seeing how Sartre avoids positing a mental analogue of a photograph for episodes of mental imaging is hard, and harder still to reconcile this with his rejection of visual representations. If ones image is regarded as debased and the awareness of awakening is formally received as a differential coefficient of perceptual knowledge, but this merely rises once more the issue of perceptual illusion and hallucination, and the problems of reconciling them are dialectally the formalization built upon realism.
Much of Western religion and philosophical thought since the seventeenth century has sought to obviate this prospect with an appeal to ontology or to some conception of God or Being. Yet we continue to struggle, as philosophical postmodernism attests, with the terrible prospect by Nietzsche-we are locked in a prison house of our individual subjective realities in a universe that is as alien to our thought as it is to our desires. This universe may seem comprehensible and knowable in scientific terms, and science does seek in some sense, as Koyré puts it, to ‘find a place for everything.’ Nonetheless, the ghost of Descartes lingers in the widespread conviction that science does not provide a ‘place for man’ or for all that we know as distinctly human in subjective reality.
Nonetheless, after The Gay Science (1882) began the crucial exploration of -mastery. The relations between reason and power, and the revelation of the unconscious striving after power that provide the actual energy for the apparent -denial of the ascetic and the martyred were during this period that Nietzsche’s failed relationship with Lou Salome resulted in the emotional crisis from which Also sprach Zarathustra (1883-5, trans., as Thus Spoke Zarathustra) signals a recovery. This work is frequently regarded as Nietzsche’s masterpiece. It was followed by Jenseits von Gut and Böse (1887), trans., as Beyond Good and Evil); Zur Genealogie der Moral (1887, trans., as, The Genealogy of Moral.)
In Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-85), Friedrich Nietzsche introduced in eloquent poetic prose the concepts of the death of God, the superman, and the will to power. Vigorously attacking Christianity and democracy as moralities for the ‘weak herd’, he argued for the ‘natural aristocracy’ of the superman who, driven by the ‘will to power’, celebrates life on earth rather than sanctifying it for some heavenly reward. Such a heroic man of merit has the courage to ‘live dangerously’ and thus rise above the masses, developing his natural capacity for the creative use of passion.
Also known as radical theology, this movement flourished in the mid 1960s. As a theological movement it never attracted a large following, did not find a unified expression, and passed off the scene as quickly and dramatically as it had arisen. There is even disagreement as to whom its major representatives were. Some identify two, and others three or four. Although small, the movement attracted attention because it was a spectacular symptom of the bankruptcy of modern Theology and because it was a journalistic phenomenon. The very statement "God is dead" was tailor-made for journalistic exploitation. The representatives of the movement effectively used periodical articles, paperback books, and the electronic media. This movement gave expression to an idea that had been incipient in Western philosophy and theology for some time, the suggestion that the reality of a transcendent God at best could not be known and at worst did not exist at all. Philosopher Kant and theologian Ritschl denied that one could have a theoretical knowledge of the being of God. Hume and the empiricist for all practical purposes restricted knowledge and reality to the material world as perceived by the five senses. Since God was not empirically verifiable, the biblical world view was said to be mythological and unacceptable to the modern mind. Such atheistic existentialist philosophers as Nietzsche despaired even of the search of God; it was he who coined the phrase "God is dead" almost a century before the death of God theologians.
Mid-twentieth century theologians not associated with the movement also contributed to the climate of opinion out of which death of God theologies emerged. Rudolf Bultmann regarded all elements of the supernaturalistic, theistic world view as mythological and proposed that Scripture be demythologized so that it could speak its message to the modern person.
Paul Tillich, an avowed anti supernaturalist, said that the only nonsymbiotic statement that could be made about God was that he was being it. He is beyond essence and existence; therefore, to argue that God exists is to deny him. It is more appropriate to say God does not exist. At best Tillich was a pantheist, but his thought borders on atheism. Dietrich Bonhoeffer (whether rightly understood or not) also contributed to the climate of opinion with some fragmentary but tantalizing statements preserved in Letters and Papers from Prison. He wrote of the world and man ‘coming of age’, of ‘religionless Christianity’, of the ‘world without God’, and of getting rid of the ‘God of the gaps’ and getting along just as well as before. It is not always certain what Bonhoeffer meant, but if nothing else, he provided a vocabulary that later radical theologians could exploit.
It is clear, then, that as startling as the idea of the death of God was when proclaimed in the mid 1960s, it did not represent as radically a departure from recent philosophical and theological ideas and vocabulary as might superficially appears.
Just what was death of God Theology? The answers are as varied as those who proclaimed God's demise. Since Nietzsche, theologians had occasionally used "God is dead" to express the fact that for an increasing number of people in the modern age God seems to be unreal. Nonetheless, the idea of God's death began to have special prominence in 1957 when Gabriel Vahanian published a book entitled God is Dead. Vahanian did not offer a systematic expression of death of God theology. Instead, he analysed those historical elements that contributed to the masses of people accepting atheism not so much as a theory but as a way of life. Vahanian him did not believe that God was dead. Still, he urged that there be a form of Christianity that would recognize the contemporary loss of God and exert its influence through what was left. Other proponents of the death of God had the same assessment of God's status in contemporary culture, but were to draw different conclusions.
Thomas J. Altizer believed that God had really died. Nonetheless, Altizer often spoke in exaggerated and dialectic language, occasionally with heavy overtones of Oriental mysticism. Sometimes knowing exactly what Altizer meant when he spoke in dialectical opposites is difficult such as "God is dead, thank God" Apparently the real meaning of Altizer's belief that God had died is to be found in his belief in God's immanence. To say that God has died is to say that he has ceased to exist as a transcendent, supernatural being. Alternately, he has become fully immanent in the world. The result is an essential identity between the human and the divine. God died in Christ in this sense, and the process has continued time and again since then. Altizer claims the church tried to give God life again and put him back in heaven by its doctrines of resurrection and ascension. However, the traditional doctrines about God and Christ must be repudiated because man has discovered after nineteen centuries that God does not exist. Christians must even now will the death of God by which the transcendent become immanent.
For William Hamilton the death of God describes the event many have experienced over the last two hundred years. They no longer accept the reality of God or the meaningfulness of language about him. Non theistic explanations have been substituted for theistic ones. This trend is irreversible, and everyone must come to terms with the historical-cultural -death of God. God's death must be affirmed and the secular world embraced as normative intellectually and good ethically. Doubtless, Hamilton was optimistic about the world, because he was optimistic about what humanity could do and was doing to solve its problems.
Paul van Buren is usually associated with death of God theology, although he him disavowed this connection. Yet, his disavowal seems hollow in the light of his book The Secular Meaning of the Gospel and his article "Christian Education Post Mortem Dei." In the former he accepts empiricism and the position of Bultmann that the world view of the Bible is mythological and untenable to modern people. In the latter he proposes an approach to Christian education that does not assume the existence of God but does assume ‘the death of God’ and that ‘God is gone’. Van Buren was concerned with the linguistic aspects of God's existence and death. He accepted the premise of empirical analytic philosophy that real knowledge and meaning can be conveyed only by language that is empirically verifiable. This is the fundamental principle of modern secularists and is the only viable option in this age. If only empirically verifiable language is meaningful, by that very fact all language that refers to or assumes the reality of God is meaningless, since one cannot verify God's existence by any of the five senses. Theism, belief in God, is not only intellectually untenable, it is meaningless. In, The Secular Meaning of the Gospel van Buren seeks to reinterpret the Christian faith without reference to God. One searches the book in vain for even one clue, that van Buren is anything but a secularist trying to translate Christian ethical values into that language game. There is a decided shift in van Buren's later book Discerning the Way, however.
In retrospect, there was clearly no single death of God Theology, only death of God theologies. Their real significance was that modern theology, by giving up the essential elements of Christian belief in God, had logically led to what was really antitheologies. When the death of God theologies passed off the scene, the commitment to secularism remained and manifested it in other forms of secular theology in the late 1960s and the 1970s.
Nietzsche is unchallenged as the most insightful and powerful critic of the moral climate of the 19th century (and of what of it remains in ours). His exploration of unconscious motivation anticipated Freud. He is notorious for stressing the ‘will to power’ that is the basis of human nature, the ‘resentment’ that comes when it is denied its basis in action, and the corruptions of human nature encouraged by religion, such as Christianity, that feed on such resentment. Yet the powerful human being who escape all this, the Ubermensch, is not the ‘blood beast’ of later fascism: It is a human being who has mastered passion, risen above the senseless flux, and given creative style to his or her character. Nietzsche’s free spirits recognize themselves by their joyful attitude to eternal return. He frequently presents the creative artist rather than the warlord as his best exemplar of the type, but the disquieting fact remains that he seems to leave him no words to condemn any uncaged beast of prey whose best to find their style by exerting repulsive power find their style by exerting repulsive power over others. This problem is no t helped by Nietzsche’s frequently expressed misogyny, although in such matters the interpretation of his many-layered and ironic writings is no always straightforward. Similarly y, such Anti-Semitism as has been found in his work is balanced by an equally vehement denunciation of anti-Semitism, and an equal or greater dislike of the German character of his time.
Nietzsche’s current influence derives not only from his celebration of will, but more deeply from his scepticism about the notions of truth and act. In particular, he anticipated any of the central tenets of postmodernism: an aesthetic attitude toward the world that sees it as a ‘text’; the denial of facts; the denial of essences; the celebration of the plurality of interpretation and of the fragmented, as well as the downgrading of reason and the politicization of discourse. All awaited rediscoveries in the late 20th century. Nietzsche also has the incomparable advantage over his followers of being a wonderful stylist, and his Perspectivism is echoed in the shifting array of literary devices-humour, irony, exaggeration, aphorisms, verse, dialogue, parody-with that he explores human life and history.
Yet, it is nonetheless, that we have seen, the origins of the present division that can be traced to the emergence of classical physics and the stark Cartesian division between mind and the bodily world is two separate substances, the is as it happened associated with a particular body, but is -subsisting, and capable of independent existence, yet Cartesian duality, much as the ‘ego’ that we are tempted to imagine as a simple unique thing that makes up our essential identity, but, seemingly sanctioned by this physics. The tragedy of the Western mind, well represented in the work of a host of writers, artists, and intellectual, is that the Cartesian division was perceived as uncontrovertibly real.
Beginning with Nietzsche, those who wished to free the realm of the mental from the oppressive implications of the mechanistic world-view sought to undermine the alleged privileged character of the knowledge called physicians with an attack on its epistemological authority. After Husserl tried and failed to save the classical view of correspondence by grounding the logic of mathematical systems in human consciousness, this not only resulted in a view of human consciousness that became characteristically postmodern. It also represents a direct link with the epistemological crisis about the foundations of logic and number in the late nineteenth century that foreshadowed the epistemological crisis occasioned by quantum physics beginning in the 1920's. This, as a result in disparate views on the existence of oncology and the character of scientific knowledge that fuelled the conflict between the two.
If there were world enough and time enough, the conflict between each that both could be viewed as an interesting artifact in the richly diverse coordinative systems of higher education. Nevertheless, as the ecological crisis teaches us, the ‘old enough’ capable of sustaining the growing number of our life firms and the ‘time enough’ that remains to reduce and reverse the damage we are inflicting on this world ae rapidly diminishing. Therefore, put an end to the absurd ‘betweeness’ and go on with the business of coordinate human knowledge in the interest of human survival in a new age of enlightenment that could be far more humane and much more enlightened than any has gone before.
It now, which it is, nonetheless, that there are significant advances in our understanding to a purposive mind. Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary approach to cognition that draws primarily on ideas from cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics and logic. Some philosophers may be cognitive scientists, and others concern themselves with the philosophy of cognitive psychology and cognitive science. Since inauguration of cognitive science these disciplines have attracted much attention from certain philosophers of mind. This has changed the character of philosophy of mind, and there are areas where philosophical work on the nature of mind is continuous with scientific work. Yet, the problems that make up this field concern the ways of ‘thinking’ and ‘mental properties’ are those that these problems are standardly and traditionally regarded within philosophy of mind than those that emerge from the recent developments in cognitive science. The cognitive aspect is what has to be understood is to know what would make the sentence true or false. It is frequently identified with the truth cognition of the sentence. Justly as the scientific study of precesses of awareness, thought, and mental organization, often by means of computer modelling or artificial intelligence research. Contradicted by the evidence, it only has to do with is structure and the way it functioned, that is just because a theory does not mean that the scientific community currently accredits it. Generally, there are many theories, though technically scientific, have been rejected because the scientific evidence is strangely against it. The historical enquiry into the evolution of -consciousness, developing from elementary sense experience too fully rational, free, thought processes capable of yielding knowledge the presented term, is associated with the work and school of Husserl. Following Brentano, Husserl realized that intentionality was the distinctive mark of consciousness, and saw in it a concept capable of overcoming traditional mind-body dualism. The stud y of consciousness, therefore, maintains two sides: a conscious experience can be regarded as an element in a stream of consciousness, but also as a representative of one aspect or ‘profile’ of an object. In spite of Husserl’s rejection of dualism, his belief that there is a subject-matter lingering back, behind and yet remaining after each era of time, or bracketing of the content of experience, associates him with the priority accorded to elementary experiences in the parallel doctrine of phenomenalism, and phenomenology has partly suffered from the eclipse of that approach to problems of experience and reality. However, later phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty do full justice to the world-involving nature of Phenomenological theories are empirical generalizations of data experience, or manifest in experience. More generally, the phenomenal aspects of things are the aspects that show themselves, than the theoretical aspects that are inferred or posited in order to account for them. They merely described the recurring process of nature and do not refer to their cause or that, in the words of J.S. Mill, ‘objects are the permanent possibilities of sensation’. To inhabit a world of independent, external objects are, on this view, to be the subject of actual and possible orderly experiences. Espoused by Russell, the view issued in a programme of translating talk about physical objects and their locations into talking about possible experience. The attempt is widely supposed to have failed, and the priority the approach gives to experience has been much criticized. It is more common in contemporary philosophy to see experience as it a construct from the actual way of the world, than the other way round.
Phenomenological theories are also called ‘scientific laws’ ‘physical laws’ and ‘natural laws.’ Newton’s third law is one example, saying that, every action ha an equal and opposite reaction. ‘Explanatory theories’ attempt to explain the observations rather than generalized them. Whereas laws are descriptions of empirical regularities, explanatory theories are conceptual constrictions to explain why the data exit, for example, atomic theory explains why we see certain observations, the same could be said with DNA and relativity, Explanatory theories are particularly helpful in such cases where the entities (like atoms, DNA . . . ) cannot be directly observed.
What is knowledge? How does knowledge get to have the content it has? The problem of defining knowledge in terms of true belief plus some favoured relation between the believer and the facts begun with Plato, in that knowledge is true belief plus logos, as it is what enables us to apprehend the principle and firms, i.e., an aspect of our own reasoning.
What makes a belief justified for what measures of belief is knowledge? According to most epistemologists, knowledge entails belief, so that to know that such and such is the case. None less, there are arguments against all versions of the thesis that knowledge requires having a belief-like attitude toward the known. These arguments are given by philosophers who think that knowledge and belief or facsimile, are mutually incompatible (the incompatibility thesis) or by ones who say that knowledge does not entail belief, or vice versa, so that each may exist without the other, but the two may also coexist (the separability thesis). The incompatibility thesis that hinged on the equation of knowledge with certainty. The assumption that we believe in the truth of claim we are not certain about its truth. Given that belief always involves uncertainty, while knowledge never does, believing something rules out the possibility of knowledge knowing it. Again, given to no reason to grant that states of belief are never ones involving confidence. Conscious beliefs clearly involve some level of confidence, to suggest otherwise, that we cease to believe things about which we are completely confident is bizarre.
A.D. Woozley (1953) defends a version of the separability thesis. Woozley’s version that deals with psychological certainty than belief per se, is that knowledge can exist without confidence about the item known, although knowledge might also be accompanied by confidence as well. Woozley says, ‘what I can do, where what I can do may include answering questions.’ On the basis of this remark he suggests that even when people are unsure of the truth of a claim, they might know that the claim is true. We unhesitatingly attribute knowledge to people that correct responses on examinations if those people show no confidence in their answers. Woozley has given to acknowledge that it would be odd for those who lack confidence to claim knowledge. Saying it would be peculiar, ‘I know it is correct.’ But this tension; still ‘I know is correct.’ Woozley explains, using a distinction between condition under which are justified in making a claim (such as a claim to know something) and conditioned under which the claim we make is true. While ‘I know such and such’ might be true even if I answered whether such and such holds, nonetheless claiming that ‘I know that such should be inappropriate for me and such unless I was sure of the truth of my claim.’
Colin Redford (1966) extends Woozley’s defence of the separability thesis. In Redford’s view, not only in knowledge compatible with the lacking of certainty, it is also compatible with a complete lack of belief. He argues by example, in this one example, Jean had forgotten that he learned some English history years prior and yet he is able to give several correct responses to questions such as, ‘When did the Battle of Hastings occur?’ since he forgot that the battle of Hastings took place in 1066 in history, he considers his correct response to be no more than guesses. Thus when he says that the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066 he would deny having the belief that the Battle of Hasting took place in 1066.
Those who agree with Radford’s defence of the separation thesis will probably think of belief as an inner state that can be directed through introspection. That Jean lacks’ beliefs out English history are plausible on this Cartesian picture since Jean does not find him with the belief out of which the English history when with any beliefs about English history when he seeks them out. One might criticize Radford, however, by rejecting the Cartesian view of belief. One could argue that some beliefs are thoroughly unconscious. For example, (1859), according to which having beliefs is a matter of the way people are disposed to behave (and has not Radford already adopted a behaviourist conception of knowledge?) Since Jean gives the correct response when queried, a form of verbal behaviour, a behaviourist would be tempted to credit him with the belief that the battle of Hastings occurred in 1066.
Once, again, but the jargon is attributable to different attitudinal values. AS, D. M. Armstrong (1973) makes a different task against Radford. Jean does know that the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066. Armstrong will grant Radford that points, which in fact, Armstrong suggests that Jean believe that 1066 is not the actual date that did occur of the Battle of Hastings. For Armstrong parallels the belief of such and such is just possible bu t no more than just possible with the belief that such and such is not the case. However, Armstrong insists Jean also believe that the Battle did occur in 1066. After all, had Jean been mistaught that the Battle occurred in 1066, and had he forgotten being ‘taught’ this and subsequently ‘guessed’ that it took place in 10690, we would surely describe the situation as one in which Jean’ false belief about te Battle became a memory trace that was causally responsible or his guess. Thus while Jean consciously believes that the Battle did not occur in 1066, unconsciously he does believe it occurred in 1066. So after all, Radford does not have a counterexample to the claim that knowledge entails belief.
Suppose that Jean’s memory had been sufficiently powerful to produce the relevant belief. As Radford says, Jan has every reason to suppose that his response is mere guesswork, and so he has every reason to consider his belief false. His belief would be an irrational one, and hence one about whose truth Jean would be ignorant.
The attempt to understand the conceptual representation that is involved in religious belief, existence, necessity, fate, creation, sun, justice, Mercy, Redemption, God. Until the 20th century the history of western philosophy is closely intertwined with attempts to make sense of aspect of pagan, Jewish or Christian religion, while in other tradition such as Hinduism, Buddhism or Taoism, there is even less distinction between religious and philosophical enquiry. The classic problem of conceiving an appropriate object of religious belief is that of understanding whether any term can be predicated of it: Does it make to any sense of talking about its creating to things, willing events, or being one thing or many? The via negativa of Theology is to claim that God can only be known by denying ordinary terms of any application (or them); Another influential suggestion is that ordinary term only apply metaphorically, sand that there is in hope of cashing the metaphors. Once a description of a Supreme Being is hit upon, there remains the problem of providing any reason for supposing that anything answering to the description exists. The medieval period was the high-water mark-for purported proof of the existence of God, such as the Five-Ays of Aquinas, or the ontological argument of such proofs have fallen out of general favour since the 18th century, although theories still sway many people and some philosophers.
Generally speaking, even religious philosophers (or perhaps, they especially) have been wary of popular manifestations of religion. Kant, him a friend of religious faith, nevertheless distinguishes various perversions: Theosophy (using transcendental conceptions that confuses reason), demonology (indulging an anthropomorphic, mode of representing the Supreme Being), theurgy (a fanatical delusion that feeling can be communicated from such a being, or that we can exert an influence on it), and idolatry, or a superstition’s delusion the one can make one acceptable to his Supreme Being by order by means than that of having the moral law at heart (Critique of judgement) these warm conversational tendencies have, however, been increasingly important in modern Theology.
Since Feuerbach there has been a growing tendency for philosophy of religion either to concentrate upon the social and anthropological dimension of religious belief, or to treat a manifestation of various explicable psychological urges. Another reaction is retreat into a celebration of purely subjective existential commitments. Still, the ontological arguments continue to attach attention. Modern anti-fundamentalists trends in epistemology are not entirely hostile to cognitive claims based on religious experience.
Still, the problem f reconciling the subjective or psychological nature of mental life with its objective and logical content preoccupied from of which is next of the problem was elephantine Logische untersuchungen (trans. as Logical Investigations, 1070). To keep a subjective and a naturalistic approach to knowledge together. Abandoning the naturalism in favour of a kind of transcendental idealism. The precise nature of his change is disguised by a penchant for new and impenetrable terminology, but the ‘bracketing’ of eternal questions for which are to a great extent acknowledged implications of a solipistic, disembodied Cartesian ego is its starting-point, with it thought of as inessential that the thinking subject is ether embodied or surrounded by others. However by the time of Cartesian Meditations (trans. as, 1960, fist published in French as Méditations Carthusianness, 1931), a shift in priorities has begun, with the embodied individual, surrounded by others, than the disembodied Cartesian ego now returned to a fundamental position. The extent to which the desirable shift undermines the programme of phenomenology that is closely identical with Husserl’s earlier approach remains unclear, until later phenomenologists such as Merleau -Ponty has worked fruitfully from the later standpoint.
Pythagoras established and was the central figure in school of philosophy, religion, and mathematics: He was apparently viewed by his followers as semi-divine. For his followers the regular solids (symmetrical three-dimensional forms in which all sides are the same regular polygon) with ordinary language. The language of mathematical and geometric forms seem closed, precise and pure. Providing one understood the axioms and notations, and the meaning conveyed was invariant from one mind to another. The Pythagoreans following which was the language empowering the mind to leap beyond the confusion of sense experience into the realm of immutable and eternal essences. This mystical insight made Pythagoras the figure from antiquity must revered by the creators of classical physics, and it continues to have great appeal for contemporary physicists as they struggle with the epistemological of the quantum mechanical description of nature.
Pythagoras (570 Bc) was the son of Mn esarchus of Samos ut, emigrated (531 Bc) to Croton in southern Italy. Here he founded a religious society, but were forces into exile and died at Metapomtum. Membership of the society entailed -disciplined, silence and the observance of his taboos, especially against eating flesh and beans. Pythagoras taught the doctrine of metempsychosis or the cycle of reincarnation, and remained as to remember their former existence. The soul, which as its own divinity and may have existed as an animal or plant, can, however gain release by a religious dedication to study, after which it may rejoin the universal world-soul. Pythagoras is usually, but doubtfully, accredited with having discovered the basis of acoustics, the numerical ratios underlying the musical scale, thereby intimating the arithmetical interpretation of nature. This tremendous success inspired the view that the whole of the cosmos should be explicable in terms of harmonia or number. The view represents a magnificent brake from the Milesian attempt to ground physics on a conception shared by all things, and to concentrate instead on form, meaning that physical nature receives an approachable foundation in different geometric breaks. The view is vulgarized in the doctrine usually attributed to Pythagoras, that all things are number. However, the association of abstract qualitites with numbers, but reached remarkable heights, with occult attachments for instance, between justice and the number four, and mystical significance, especially of the number ten, cosmologically Pythagoras explained the origin of the universe in mathematical terms, as the imposition of limits on the limitless by a kind of injection of a unit. Followers of Pythagoras included Philolaus, the earliest cosmosologist known to have understood that the earth is a moving planet. It is also likely that the Pythagoreans discovered the irrationality of the square root of two.
The Pythagoreans considered numbers to be among te building blocks of the universe. In fact, one of the most central of the beliefs of Pythagoras mathematical, his inner circle, was that reality was mathematical in nature. This made numbers valuable tools, and over time even the knowledge of a number’s name came to be associated with power. If you could name something you had a degree of control over it, and to have power over the numbers was to have power over nature.
One, for example, stood for the mind, emphasizing its Oneness. Two was opinion, taking a step away from the singularity of mind. Three was wholeness (whole needs a beginning, a middle and its ending to be more than a one-dimensional point), and four represented the stable squareness of justice. Five was marriage-being the sum of three and two, the first odd (male) and even (female) numbers. (Three was the first odd number because the number one was considered by the Greeks to be so special that it could not form part of an ordinary grouping of numbers).
It should be noted that Murray wrote his book in 1964 when communism was still perceived by many as the world’s greatest threat. Had he written it a few years later he may have decided to call his atheist of communist world Revolution something else. Evidently, what he is truly talking about is any philosophy that suggests human beings can create a utopian world completely on their own. Nowadays we might refer to this as the atheist of the techno-revolution, or the atheist of humanism-which, again, values our expectation that our own inventiveness will save us.
The second kind of atheist, the atheist of the Theatre, refers to the sort of person who simply tries to exist in a godless world. The atheist of the Theatre is a tragic character who wants the best for the world but feels helpless to do much about it and is ultimately reduced to a mere spectator. "His mind is full of darkness," writes Murray, "it is oppressed with a sense of the finitude and fragility of existence; it shivers before the un-predictabilities of history."10 Unlike the atheist of the Revolution who links freedom with freedom from poverty, the atheist of the Theatre wants freedom from the angst of a purposeless and uncertain existence. Such a person can only accomplish this through -invention or -determination. This, however, cannot be accomplished so long as God lives. If God is present, then God is the inventor of the human being who has no choice but to adhere to a predetermined nature and destiny. So, in order for the atheist of the Theatre to gain the freedom to chart one’s own destiny, God must be dismissed.
As different as these two types may appear, Murray suggests they share several characteristics in common. Firstly, they both take the presence of evil as evidence of God’s nonexistence. Secondly, they both accept the death of God, that is, belief in God is irrelevant. Thirdly, atheism is a postulate they feel obliged to express. This is to say that not only do they not believe in God, but they feel such a belief is somehow harmful, primarily because it is detrimental to freedom.
Of course, the deaths of God pundits have not been met without plenty of criticism. Nonetheless, they simply respond by claiming their critics choose to avoid the modern condition by clinging to archaic and meaningless fantasies. As Thomas Ogletree has written concerning The Death of God Controversy, "The refusal of God’s death amounted to a nostalgic desire to avoid the present moment by a flight into a past that is no more. The notion of God’s death has become so prominent and argument that there have been several Deaths of God theologians who have attempted to abstract positive meaning from Christianity while accepting the death of God philosophy. Ogletree’s book introduces us to three such theologians, William Hamilton, Paul Van Buren and Thomas J.J. Altizer.
For Hamilton, the death of God implies that God can no longer be thought of as a "need-fulfiller and problem-solver." He rejects the idea that God is a kind of candy dispenser or "cosmic bellhop," ever ready to attend to humanity’s needs. Unlike those Christians who cling to their idea of God, even in the wake of divine irrelevance, by rejecting contemporary society and holding to tradition, Hamilton seems to have found a way to have his cake and eat it too. For Hamilton, the Christian’s task is to find God by returning to society and becoming active in the alleviation of human suffering. This is not entirely different from the idea expounded by Paul Van Buren who wrote, ". . . . If I understand the nature and development of Christianity, I would want to argue that what Christianity is basically about is a certain form of life-patterns of human existence, norms of human attitudes, and dispositions and moral behaviour."14 For these two theologians there are something in Christianity that presents a viable, even necessary, way of living even in the wake of God’s death.
Thomas Altizer takes the matter as step further by insinuating that God must die in order for Jesus to live. The modern problem of God might best be illustrated in the argument that only God is or only the world is-the sacred or the profane, pantheism vs. materialism. The modern atheist chooses the world, the material, the profane. "If there is one clear portal to the twentieth century," writes Altizer, "it is a passage through the death of God, the collapse of any meaning or reality lying beyond the newly discovered radical immanence of modern man, immanently dissolving even the memory or the shadow of transcendence."15 The loss of transcendence, however, is not understood by Altizer as the loss of the sacred but as the redemption of the profane. God is not killed by modern humanity, but sacrifices God- to humanity by entering into the profane world via the Christ, God made flesh. Although those who cling to Christian tradition will likely consider such a radical notion as heresy, it seems somehow comforting to think that God might somehow dwell among us, in our very suffering and profanity.
So far I have spoken as if the death of God is to be taken for granted, as if it is an undeniable fact of the modern condition. This, however, is a presupposition I am not entirely sure of. Just this week I spent several days in Washington, D.C. and had the opportunity to hear all of Kentucky’s State Representatives and U.S. Senator Jim Bunning address a large group of their constituents. Without fail, each one of them had something to say about God, mostly in reference to George W. Bush and his intention to go to war with Iraq. Congressman Ken Lucas, the only Democrat among Kentucky’s Washington delegation, asked the group to pray for Mr. Bush and concluded by saying "the Almighty is with him." Congressman Ernie Fletcher, who hopes to become the next Kentucky Governor, spoke of a presentation he attended during the Gideon Bible Society as presented by Mr. Bush in which its one-billionth printed Bible. Mr. Bush responded by assuring those present that the "Will of God" is his top priority. Representative Ann Northup referred to him as a "deeply spiritual man," and Harold Rogers publicly thanked God that Mr. Bush was in office at the time of 911. In regard to war with Iraq, Representative Ron Lewis quoted Abraham Lincoln’s reference to the Civil War by saying "the question is not whether or not God is on our side, but whether or not we are on God’s side." Finally, U.S. Senator Jim Bunning boasted about a Senate resolution supporting the phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, thanked God for George W. Bush, and concluded by warning the audience that in light of pressing problems "we must keep our faith in God or we won’t survive as a people or as a nation."
Perhaps you will agree, it doesn’t sound like those who represent the people of at least one State in the Nation are atheists. The fact is that the people of the United States remain highly religious, especially compared with the rest of the Western world. According to an article in The Economist entitled The Fight for God, 47% of the people in the United States regularly attend church services, as compared with only 20% in Western Europe and 14% in Eastern Europe. What is more, is that only 2% of the population in the United States actually claims to be atheists?
Yet these statistics do not necessarily mean all of this talk about the death of God has been for not, but they serve as a framework for reinterpreting the meaning of God’s death. I would suggest that even though the idea of God lives on, the experience of God having died. In this sense the death of God may have begun much earlier than with the rise of science and technology. It was during the Patristic age of the early Church Fathers that the problem became purely ontological, that is, asking the question "What is God?" Rather than "Is God with us?" This arose over the controversy concerning Jesus’ divinity. Is he human or God? If he is God, what then is God? Tertullian tried to solve the problem with a biological and an anthropomorphic answer, claiming the Father and the Son are both part of a single organism and share the same mind and will. Origen claimed the Son (Logos) emanates from the Father in a diminished capacity. Arius taught that there was a time "when he was not," which is to say Jesus, although a perfect creature is nonetheless a creation of God. All of this became heresy after the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, after it was determined that the Father and the Son are of the same substance (homoousios), relying heavily upon Athenasius of Alexandria’s credo that the Son is like the Father in every way except for the name Father. The Nicene Creed ushered in the age of Christian scholasticism that gave birth to thinkers like Thomas Aquinas and Saint Augustine, but it also dramatically altered the nature of the Problem of God.
Before this event the Problem of God had always been about the living God and whether or not such is God who dwells with us, rather than the distant and abstract God of theological debate. The Problem of God, which is a uniquely western theological term, is rooted deep within the Judeo/Christian tradition, beginning with the Biblical story of Moses’ encounter with the burning bush. When Moses asks God’s name, God replies, "ehyeh ser ehyeh" I am who I am. Murray understands this to mean God is present with the people.
Ancient people did not think abstractly about God. Nor did they wonder why evil and suffering were in the world. They took the existence of both for granted. What they wanted to know was whether or not God would be with them in the midst of their struggles. In Exodus, for instance, the Israelites are reported to have asked, "Is the Lord among us or not?" Murray breaks the Old Testament Problem of God into four questions, the Existential question, Is God here with us now? The Functional question, How will this God who is with us save us? The Noetic question, How is this God who is present to be known? The Onomastic question, How is this God who is present among us to be named? After Jesus came on the scene, these questions remained essentially the same, but were answered through the lens of the Christ.
This sort of question implies a desire to have intimate knowledge of the Divine. They are questions about how we ought to conduct our lives rather than about abstract thoughts and concepts. If there is any value to having a belief in God today, perhaps these sort of question ought to be at the heart of such belief, less we remain as those who would contribute to the pain and suffering of others by making war and poverty while paying intellectual lip service to an abstract notion of God. Perhaps, furthermore, the Problem of God is not a problem that is to be solved or ought to be solved. Early theologians celebrated the fact that God cannot be truly known. As Thomas Aquinas said, "One thing that remains completely unknown in this life, namely, what God is."19 Augustine said similarly, "If you have comprehended, what you have comprehended is not God." Or as Cryil of Jerusalem said, "In the things of God the confession of no knowledge is great knowledge." "It is by this ignorance, as long as life lasts, that we are best united with God," wrote Aquinas, "This is the darkness in which God dwells."
So the Problem of God remains today very much the same as it has throughout history. Even in our limited understanding and modern disbelief in the relevance of God, we want to know, in the midst of the turmoil, suffering and evil we face today, is it possible that God is with us? Or are we left alone to deal these problems completely on our own? Are we creatures of purpose and destiny, or must we choose our own way? Do we need God? In their book The Invisible Landscape, Terrence and Dennis McKenna write; Western humans have lost their sense of unity with the cosmos and with the transcendent mystery within themselves. Modern science has given us a picture of human beings as accidental products of random evolutionary processes in a universe that is it without purpose or meaning. This alienation of modern humans from the numinous ground of their beings has engendered the existentialist ethic and the contemporary preoccupation with the immediate historical situation. Humans are regarded as leading a wholly profane existence within a wholly profane time, which is within history; the reality of the sacred is denied or reduced to the level of psychology.
In the end it would seem the Problem of God is ultimately the Problem of Humanity, for it is our suffering that draws us toward the idea of God, and repels us from it.
Friedrich Nietzsche had very different opinions concerning the man known to history as Jesus Christ and his legacy, and the religion called Christianity. As a well-known philosopher of contemporary times, Nietzsche's reputation with Christianity is severely ambiguous, as a result of a "long customary" association with the Nazi Party of Germany, which, as one critic points out, is "like linking St. Francis with the Inquisition in which the order he founded played a major role." Still, despite much misunderstanding and prejudice, Nietzsche's influence on the world remains consistently strong, as "few thinkers of any age equal his influence." Nietzsche's philosophy is rooted in his own interpretation of the life of Jesus of Nazareth and the history of Christianity, as he considered him the first philosopher of the "irrevocable anti-Christian era" from which all Christian and secular systems associated with Christianity would henceforth bow. Nietzsche, however, does not see this new era in the history of the world as essentially negative; he believes that he is the first of 'the new way'; and "things will be different," positively. Furthermore, one must understand Nietzsche's position on Jesus and Christianity, the most crucial part of his philosophical system, as separate issues, to appreciate completely and comprehend the rest.
To this end, Nietzsche is clear that he has different attitudes about Jesus and Christianity. This distinction is "no less than the distinction between life and death, the great 'Yes' and the decadent 'No.'" Furthermore, there is a "severance" between Jesus and the Christian tradition. This is clearly a result, according to Nietzsche, of the greediness and short-sightedness of St. Paul, who lock up Christianity so much that the religion has little in common with the ideas and teachings that its founder represented. As a consequence, Western society has gone backwards, Nietzsche writes, "everything is visibly becoming Judiazed, Christianized, moblike (what does the words matter)."
Nietzsche considers him "the atheist," whose challenges against Christianity all Christians must now face and consider. Although he admits that he is "an opponent of Christianity de riguer," Nietzsche has a distinct respect for the man Jesus. While Nietzsche does not go so far as to embrace all of the ideas and teachings of Jesus, he clearly draws a clear dichotomy between Jesus and Nazareth and "the Christ of the creeds"Cand what Nietzsche is most concerned with is the historical Jesus. The end of Nietzsche's analysis of Jesus and Christianity is a request for the reassessment of Western culture's values, especially religious values, which call for the eventual expulsion of Christianity as he knew it.
In short, Nietzsche respects and admires Jesus of Nazareth, "but denies that he has any meaning for our age" Nietzsche believes the Jewish contention that Jesus is not the Messiah and that the Messiah has not yet appeared in history. Even so, Nietzsche reveres Jesus as no other character in history, particularly because he came to know Jesus as the very opposite of Christianity. Nietzsche writes as a philologist, "The word 'Christianity' is already a misunderstanding reality there has only been one Christian, and he died on the Cross." While leaving such an impact on the world is admirable (and a good characteristic of a Übermensch), Nietzsche "could know Jesus as the greatest and truest revolutionary in history," despite the sour legacy he left.
Despite all of this hostility, Nietzsche looked upon the symbol of the crucified Christ as “the most sublime of all symbols." Nonetheless, Jesus remains the only Christian in whom will ever have lived, yet he was crucified by mortals. The Christians were making their professed faith a weird comedy. The cross, to Nietzsche, is a "ghastly paradox" that revolves around the idea of "God of the cross." This concept is absurd to Nietzsche, who wonders how it is logical that the "mystery of an unimaginable and ultimate cruelty and -crucifixion of God for the salvation of man?" Furthermore, Nietzsche comments:
God him sacrifices him for the guilt of humankind, God him makes payment to him, God as the only being who can redeem man from what has become unredeemable for man him, the creditor sacrifices him for his debtor, out of love (one can credit that?) Out of love for his debtor-Nietzsche sees this entire concept of a crucified god as utterly ridiculous and ironic for a god to do so "out of love." While "Christianity's -sacrificing God make’s infinite its adherents' guilt and debt," Nietzsche observes, "Jesus had done away with the concept of 'guilt.'" Yet, to Nietzsche, Jesus, like him, had come "too early" and died "too young . . . not 'at the right time.'" They were both revolutionaries who were rebelling against the old ways.
Clearly, Nietzsche is interested in a historical assemblage of Jesus, who, nonetheless, left no writings, as Nietzsche had to go to the next best source, the Gospels, which he despised. Nietzsche writes that the Bible is "the greatest audacity and 'sin against the spirit' that literary Europe has on its conscience." As a result, while Jesus preached and taught about freedom, Nietzsche believed that "it was immediately transformed by those who preached it (and especially by Paul) to assert their own power."
Nietzsche is convinced that Jesus him would deny "everything that today is called Christian." Critic William Hubben argues that Jesus was literally an anarchist, who "attacked the Jewish hierarchy, the 'just' and supreme rulers," and died for these sins, absolutely not for the sins of others. Nietzsche recognized that Jesus had supposedly expelled the world from the concepts of guilt and sin, wondering, "[h]ow could he have died for the sins of others?" Furthermore, while some Christians viewed Jesus as a completely divine judge of 'the quick and the dead,' Nietzsche viewed Jesus as anything but a judge: "Jesus opposed those who judged others, and wanted to destroy the morality existing in his age" (emphasis added). Nonetheless, one can be assured that Nietzsche "reveres the life and death of Jesus." However, it is not in the same way that a traditional "Christian" reveres Jesus; as critic Walter Kaufmann writes, “instead of interpreting it [Jesus' life] as a promise of another world and another life, and instead of conceding the divinity of Jesus, Nietzsche insists: Ecce Homo! Man can live and die in a grand style, working out his own salvation instead of relying on the sacrifice of another." Nietzsche, then, does not 'believe in Jesus' in the creedal tradition, but respects him as a worthy opponent.
More specifically, Nietzsche views Jesus as his only true opponent. He closes, in the last line of his autobiographical Ecce Homo, "Have I been understood? -Dionysus verses the Crucified." I interpret this line as Nietzsche recognizing that Jesus is the highest of competitors to Nietzsche's own "Dionysian ideal for man." This statement is also meant as an ironic contrast; That is, a contrast between "the tragic life verses life under the cross": The roller-coaster, "dangerous" life of the Übermensch (as exemplified by Goethe) verses weakness.
In the sum, Nietzsche's interpretation of the life of Jesus, while suspicious, contrasts his feelings surrounding Christianity; Recognizing a major difference between the historical Jesus and the Jesus of the creeds. To this end, the events surrounding Jesus' death, rather than his resurrection becomes pivotal, as Nietzsche writes, "Jesus him could not have desired anything by his death but publicly to offer the sternest test, the proof of his teaching . . . But his disciples were far from forgiving his death." Thus, after Jesus' death, his followers asked, "Who killed him? Who was his natural enemy? This came like a flash of lightning," and their answer was, "Judaism," the ruling class. The offspring of this, Christianity, for Nietzsche became "another in a line of failed attempts to understand the teachings of the great creators and transformers of life"; in other words, the creedal, pre-modern Jesus has no relevance to a contemporary, post-modern society.
Nietzsche has an obvious dislike of Christianity because of its unfaithfulness to the teachings of its supposed founder, Jesus of Nazareth, the flawed morality of Christians, and the warped concept of the Christian God. Nietzsche calls Christianity "the religion of pity," as it represents weakness in every form of which he can think. Furthermore, churches has little influence legitimate justification for influence in the lives of humans today, as Nietzsche asks, "does the church today still have any necessary role to play? Does it still have the right to exist? Or could one do without it? Quaeritur." To this interrogative, Nietzsche answers that the "future of humanity is. Placed in jeopardy" by institutional Christianity, which "destroys the instincts out of which affirmative institutions develop." In other words, Christianity hinders the progress of humanity. What is more, Christian morality is hell-bent on defining the world as "ugly and bad," and has therefore made the world "ugly and bad." To make things worse, "Christianity has created a fictitious world," where nothing is dared to be questioned, and as a result, the world will break down-this way "must vanish" (emphasis added). To Nietzsche, Christianity is little more than an opiate, that is, as mentioned earlier, a weak religion of the herd.
It was stated above that Nietzsche believes that the only Christian died on the cross, and this is 'Christianity' in its purest sense. However, as far as Christians today know, understand, and define Christianity, Nietzsche says that there have never been any Christians: "The 'Christian' that which has been called a Christian for two millennia, is merely a psychological -misunderstanding." Nietzsche blames the 'corruption' of Christianity on the "first Christians," who created the very same institution that Jesus was rebelling against, Judaism, when they founded Christianity and the worst of these "first Christians," was Paul, as Nietzsche writes: "The life, the example, the teaching, the death, the meaning and the right of the entire Gospel nothing was left once this hate-obsessed false-coiner had grasped what alone he could make use of. Not the reality, not the historical truth!" In fact, Nietzsche argues, it was Paul who condemned Christianity to its present stagnant state by making "this indecency of an interpretation," that is, “'If Christ is not resurrected from the dead our faith is vain.'All at once the Evangel became the most contemptible of all unfulfillable promises, the impudent doctrine of personal immortality."
As a result of Paul's bad interpretation and institutionalization of Christianity, it became clear to Nietzsche that Christianity is "not a counter-movement against the Jewish" religion, but its logical end, "one further conclusion to its fear-inspiring logic." Again, Christianity has become, in turn, exactly what Jesus had rebelled against. In the Gay Science Nietzsche asks "And the Christians? Did they become Jews in this respect? Did they perhaps succeed?" The answer is 'yes,' as Nietzsche observes that "Christianity did aim to 'Judaize' the world."
All that happened has happened, came within the accordance with James Mark's reading of Nietzsche, as a result of Paul and the other "first Christians'" "need for . . . power" over others, forming a priestly caste, like the Jewish priestly caste before them, that has the "authority to pronounce that forgiveness, and thereby control the herd that feels the need of it." Nietzsche even goes so far to hint that Christianity was invented by the "first Christians" in revenge, by "their ignorance of superiority over ressentiment. For Nietzsche, this is the beginning of the downfall of Christianity: All the sick and sickly instinctively strive after a herd organization as a means of shaking off their dull displeasure and feeling of weakness. Moreover, Nietzsche blames the corruption of all churches, Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant alike, on their institutionalization, as he observes that Christians are an unphilosophical race, that "demands its [Christianity's] discipline to become 'moralized and comparatively humanized." Further, Nietzsche asks, that if this is true, "How could God have permitted that?" Answering, "[f]or this question the deranged reason of the little community [of early Christianity] found a downright terrifyingly absurd answer: God gave his Son for the forgiveness of sins, as a sacrifice. All at once it was over with the Gospel." Nietzsche responds, "what atrocious paganism.”
Next Nietzsche's most structured problem with Christianity is the ethical system that it promotes. Nietzsche's words show no mercy to Christianity, writing "In Christianity neither morality nor religions come into contact with reality at any point.” Even worse, he ranks liquor with Christianity as "the European narcotics." Nietzsche observes that Christians are "the domestic animal, the herd animal, the sick animal." Following this, Nietzsche's psychology was broken into existential categories, like Aquinas and Kierkegaard before him, which ranked the beast of burden as the lowest form of human being, one who 'follows the crowd' and lives life according to the status quo, that is, a waste this is the Christian to Nietzsche. For example, the Christian has become, as a result of this institutionalized Christianity, "a soldier, a judge, and a patriot who knows nothing against non-resistance to evil"; in other words, the life Christians live, "under the cross," is fake, counterfeit, and gilded; that is, the way of life against which Jesus rebelled. Christian morality, then, is a twisting of "Jesus' teachings into a doctrine of morality."
What Nietzsche finds most unsettling about Christian ethics is its concern for denying the pleasures of life. "A Christian's thinking is perverted," Nietzsche critic William Hubben writes, "even when he humbles him, he does so only to be exalted," citing Luke 18:14.
“. . . for everyone that exalts on him shall be abased. He that humbles him shall be exalted."). Concluding that Christians' "only great delight is the mean and petty pleasure of condemning others." Further, critic John Evans states that Nietzsche was "disturbed" that "out of ressentiment and revenge, the early Christians sought power to perverse concepts of life denial and 'sin.'" Nietzsche's writings support these claims, writing on sexuality, the highest of pleasures: "Christianity gave Eros poison to drink: he did not die of it but degenerated into a vice." Again, "[I]t was only Christianity, with its ressentiment against life in its foundations, which made sexuality something impure: it threw the filth on the beginning, on the prerequisite of life." According to Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche interpreted all Christian morality into the statement, "suffering is supposed to lead to a holy existence," and he could not accept this way of living. Furthermore, Nietzsche observed that only "martyrdom and the ascetic's slow destruction of his body were permitted" by Christianity as acceptable forms of suicide. In the end, Nietzsche gives up all hope of finding any good (qualities of the Übermensch) in Christianity, which has "waged war to the death against this higher type of man" and teaches "men to feel the supreme values of intellectuality as sinful." To Nietzsche, then, the institution of Christianity was "a radical betrayal of the life view that Jesus had espoused." Jesus, as a man, had "attempted to go 'beyond good and evil," however, his ideas were corrupted following his death.
Nietzsche will perhaps be remembered most of all for his philosophy of God, and more specifically, the Christian God. To Nietzsche, the Christian God like Christianity-is the God of the sick and the weak. Still, Nietzsche distinguishes the God of Christianity as the opposite of the God of Jesus, so far as to say that there cannot be any true God found in Christianity. To the Christian God, man is "God's monkey," whom God in his long eternities created for a pastime. As a result, Nietzsche concludes that "the Christian concept of God . . . is one of the most corrupt conceptions of God arrived at on this earth." Nietzsche was obsessed, above all, with this area of philosophy, like "no other in history, and his obsession was entered on the death of God."
The "death of God" motif that was popularized by Jean-Paul Sartre in the twentieth century "harks back to Nietzsche, who first coined the expression." The following is Nietzsche's famous story of the "madman": Have you not heard of that madman that lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the marketplace, and cried incessantly? : "I seek God! I seek God!" -As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter . . . The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Where is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him as you and me. All of us are his murderers, but how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? . . . Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead, and we have killed him.
This, according to Nietzsche, is a message for the future, concluding "I have come too early, my time is not yet." Nietzsche puts this message into the voice of a madman, "whose message falls on deaf ears," as what he has to say is too shocking and comical for the crowd ('herd') to take seriously, but the madman has the last laugh, according to Nietzsche, as the madman is correct in what he has to say. Does this mean that God has literally died? Philosophers and theologians answer this question in many different ways, often dodging the answer. Critic John Mark answers, "it is really something that has happened to man; God has died because we no longer accept him." Existentialist Karl Jaspers wrote that "Nietzsche does not say 'There is no God,' or 'I do not believe in God,' but 'God is dead.' Many academic scholars, believe that Nietzsche was an atheist, who says that the idea of the Christian God, like Zeus and other Gods before, has died, in that humanity must find something more stable to rest and reassess its values upon. Episcopalian Bishop John Spong interprets Nietzsche's declaration that ‘God is dead’ as a sign that the Christian religion needs to declare their traditional theistic God dead or ‘unemployed’. Theologian Thomas Altizer answers that in the false Pauline ‘Christianity’ that Nietzsche has exposed, its centre, Jesus "is a dead and empty Christ who is the embodiment of the determining nothingness"; refusing to allow the living Jesus to arise as the nihilist that he was two millennia ago. Another theologian, Don Cupitt, writes that the death of God means that the characteristics of the God that has relevance to some post-modern society that shares characteristics of a human corpse and the dead's affect on human life. What is more, Zen monk and Buddhist theologian Nhat Hanh answers that the death of God is the essential "death of every concept we may have of God in order to experience God as a living reality directly." While these possible interpretations may have been what the "death of God" meant to Nietzsche, theologian Paul Tillich has gone so far as to call Nietzsche "the most candid" of the "Christian humanists." Their indirect effectuality seems less than are to what is seemingly unambiguously discontinued, as they are a comprehensive answer to be offered from neither theology nor philosophy.
I do not wish to baptize Nietzsche, least of mention, is that, I conclude that while Nietzsche's personal theological convictions are moot and many have debated what Nietzsche's statement "God is dead" means for Christians in the twentieth century, his opinions on Jesus of Nazareth and the Christian religion remain clear. The salient notion is that Nietzsche's treatment of the theistic Christian God is as an absurdity, the enemy of what the philosopher believes to be 'the good life.
In conclusion, Nietzsche clearly has pronounced separate judgements upon the man Jesus of Nazareth and the religion that is believed to be loosely based on Jesus' life, Christianity. To Nietzsche, Jesus was a great man worthy of respect, perhaps evens a Übermensch; Christianity, however, is corrupt insofar as the fathers of the church institutionalized the teachings of Jesus in an act of hostility toward the Jews. Furthermore, Nietzsche believes that Christianity has become the very establishment against which Jesus rebelled in Judaism: an already corrupt, stagnant, static, hierarchical religion. Finally, it cannot be deciphered whether Nietzsche accepted a god or not. If there is a God to Nietzsche, it would be above morality, would not impose ethics upon humans, would not judge on the basis of its own sacrifice, and would not deny human nature into -denial that is, the opposite of the Christian God. Nietzsche simply foresees him as the one who is replacing Jesus in a manner of successive revelation, predicting correctly that he, like Jesus, is a madman who has "come too early," who has and will continue to be misinterpreted and institutionalized incorrectly.
Once, again, have you not heard of that madman that lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, then running to the marketplace, and cried incessantly? "I seek God! I seek God." As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? Asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? Asked another, or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? Emigrated? Thus they yelled and laughed. The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes.
"Where is God?" He cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him -you and I. All of us are his murderers, but how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Where is it moving now? Where are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead, and we have killed him.
How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives, who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us-for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto.
Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners. They, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. "I have come too early," he said then; "My time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder requires time; The light of the stars requires time; Deeds, are though done, but it still requires time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most-distant stars and yet they have done it themselves."
It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem as antiquatedly set. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: "What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepultures of God?" (The Gay Science 1882, 1887).
In his book, The Antichrist, Nietzsche sets out to denounce and illegitimize not only Christianity it as a belief and a practice, but also the ethical-moral value system which modern western civilization has inherited from it. This book can be considered a further development of some of his ideas concerning Christianity that can be found in Beyond Good and Evil and in The Genealogy of Morals, particularly the idea that the present morality is an inversion of true, noble morality. An understanding of the main ideas in the latter works is therefore quite helpful in understanding and fully appreciating the ideas set forth in The Antichrist. One of the most important of these ideas is that Christianity has made people nihilistic and weak by regarding pity and related sentiments as the highest virtues. Here, just as in the Genealogy, Nietzsche traces the origin of these values to the ancient Jews who lived under Roman occupation, but here he puts them in terms of a reversal of their conception of God. He argues that the Jewish God was once one that embodied the noble virtues of a proud, powerful person, but when they became subjugated by the Romans, their God began to embody the "virtues" (more like sentiments) of an oppressed, resentful people, until it became something entirely alien to what it formerly had been.
Further in the book, after Nietzsche devotes a few passages to contrasting Buddhism with Christianity, he paints a picture of the Jesus of history as actually having lived a type of "Buddhistic" existence, and lambastes Paul particularly for turning this historically correct Jesus, for, Jesus, the "Nazarene," into Jesus the "Christ." Also, Nietzsche argues that the Christian moral and metaphysical principles he considers so decadent has infiltrated our philosophy, so much that philosophers unwittingly work to defend these principles even when God is removed from the hypothesis. The purpose of this paper is to expound and assess some of these important reproaches that Nietzsche raises against Christianity, in order to glean from them those elements that can be considered to have lasting significance. It should also be noted that The Antichrist is predominantly aphoristic work, so this paper will not attempt to tie these ideas of Nietzsche's together into a coherent system. To do so, in my opinion, would not do Nietzsche justice. Instead these ideas will be presented and examined as they appear in the work -ne by one and loosely associated.
Nietzsche begins by criticizing Christianity for denouncing and regarding as evil those basic instincts of human beings that are life-preserving and strength-promoting. In their place, Christianity maintains and advocates value which Nietzsche sees as life-negating or nihilistic, of which the most important is pity. Nietzsche writes: Christianity is called the religion of pity. Pity stands opposed to the tonic emotions that heighten our vitality: it has a depressing effect. We are deprived of strength when we feel pity. That loss of strength which suffering as such inflicts on life is still further increased and multiplied by pity. Pity makes suffering contagious.
Pity, according to Nietzsche, is nothing less than the multiplication of suffering, in that it allows us to suffer along with those for whom we feel pity. It depresses us, sapping us of our strength and will to power. It is interesting to note that the German word for pity it, Mitleid, literally means "suffering with" (leid = pain, suffering + mit = with). So to feel pity for someone is simply to suffer along with them, as Nietzsche sees it. It also promotes the preservation of those whom nature has selected for destruction, or in other words, those who Nietzsche calls "failures." This preservation of failures, he argues, makes the overall picture of life look decadent, in that it becomes filled with weak and retrograde individuals. Pity, then, has a twofold effect for Nietzsche, since it both multiplies suffering and leads to the preservation of those who would cause us this suffering as the objects of our pity. Ultimately, pity is nihilism put into practice, according to Nietzsche, since it makes life simply seem more miserable and decadent and therefore more worthy of negation it. Nietzsche does not really develop this conception of pity any farther. As it stands, it seems to be explicitly problematic. Does his conception of pity mean to include compassion and sympathy as well? Can these words be used interchangeably? The German word for compassion is Mitleid as well, so it is possible that Nietzsche is using them interchangeably. The German word for sympathy, however, is Mitgefhl, which means "feeling with." Perhaps Nietzsche is confusing pity with compassion and sympathy. Pity would seem to have a more negative connotation, in that it is a suffering-with that does not achieve anything; a waste of emotional energy toward those who are beyond help, in other words. Sympathy and compassion, as I understand the terms, seem to lean more toward having an understanding (a "feeling-with") of what someone is suffering through and being in a position to help that person. I take Nietzsche to be using (maybe misusing) these terms interchangeably, however, since he uses the word sympathy (Mitgefühl) in other works in very similar contexts.
To Nietzsche, the Christian conception of God is one of the most decadent and contradictory of any type that has ever been conceived, he writes: The Christian conception of God-God as god of the sick, God as a spider, Godas spirit-is one of the most corrupt conceptions of the divine ever acquired on earth. It may even represent the low-water mark in the descending development of divine types. God degenerated into the contradiction of life, instead of being its transfiguration and eternal Yes! God as the declaration of war against life, against nature, against the will to live! God-the formula for every slander against "this world," for every lie about the "beyond" God-the deification of nothingness, the will to nothingness means more than nothingness it and therefore is pronounced metaphysically. Nietzsche is interested in showing how the God of Israel, that is, the God of the Old Testament, was at the time a God of a very proud and powerful Jewish people. This is a sustaining conception of God, than the Christian one, according to Nietzsche, in that it was the Jew's own God-for them only. This God was conceived of as a being to whom some proud people could give thanks for their power and. Assuredness, and it was a manifestation of the Jews' own -proclaimed virtues. The ancient Jews ascribed both the good and the bad to their God, and in that respect it was consistent with nature, both helping and harming. When the Jews found themselves oppressed by Rome during the occupation of Palestine, however, with their freedom, power, and pride stripped from them, their God required a change that was reflective of their predicament. Instead of having a God that embodied the noble virtues of some proud and powerful people, as it once did, the God of the Jews developed into one that embodied the sentiments of an oppressed, resentful, and ineffective group.
It became a God of people who were trying to preserve themselves at any cost, even if that cost were the inversion of their own noble values. They transformed their God into a God of the weak, the poor, and the oppressed, making a virtue out of the necessity of their own condition. Want of revenge on their enemies, by any and the only means possible for them psychologically prompted the Jews to elevate their type of God to the point at which it became a God for everyone. That is to say, that their God became the one, true God, to whom everyone was held accountably. It also became a God that was all good, incapable of doing anything harmful, while the God of their enemies and oppressors became evil-in effect, the Devil. This is a very unhealthy type of God, according to Nietzsche, in that it "degenerates step by step into a mere symbol, a staff for the weary, a sheet-anchor for the drowning; when he becomes the God of the poor, the sinners, and the sick better than anyone else, and the attribute ‘Saviour’ or ‘Redeemer’ remains in the end as the one essential attribute of divinity . . . .”
A God such as this can thus have an appeal to any group of people who are in a state of subjugation. Yet unlike the pagan Gods of strong, proud people, this type of God, as Nietzsche points out, remains in the state in which it was conceived (a God of the sick and weak), despite how strong a following it receives. It receives such a strong following because those who are from the ghettos, slums, and hospitals of the world, are the masses (There was no middle class in ancient Palestine; there were only the more elite subjugator and the subjugated masses). The God for ‘everyone’, is overwhelming among those who live in conditions of powerlessness and misery, in that it allows them to deny their present existence in favour of a better one that is to come, in an appeal to "redemption" in a world beyond. Therefore, this God-type becomes a life-denying one, in that it represents a denial of "this" life, as opposed to the healthy yes-saying, life-affirming, consistent-with-nature God of the ancient Jews. This particular type of God is therefore one that is ultimately nihilistic, involving the denial and rejection of the world and everything in it as sinful and decadent. Nature, flesh, and instinct thus become ever more devalued until they reach a point at which nature is seen as a cesspool, the flesh is mortified, and instincts are put in terms of evil "temptations." The concept of God continues to "deteriorate," as Nietzsche terms it, until what ultimately remains are a conception of God as "pure spirit," or in other words, as something to be aware among the integrally immaterial and non-corporeal, just as this is held up as an ideal form of existence. Nietzsche simply thinks of this idea of pure spirit as pure "nothingness," in that it is merely an absurd, contradictory-to-nature postulation. To him, it ultimately represents nihilism and nothing less.
These claims of Nietzsche's are difficult to argue against, because Nietzsche does not really use much in the way of an argument here to arrive at these claims. One is to concur of what has already confronted the reading scribes of his Genealogy of Morals in order to understand better what is going on in these passages. The Genealogy actually does have a sustained argument for claims that are intimately related to the ones above that are found in The Antichrist. This argument deals with how the slave class (Jews), out of hatred and resentment, got their revenge on the noble class (Romans) by shaming them into accepting the slave class' morality. This is one of Nietzsche's most important claims, and it is essential to an understanding of The Antichrist. Nietzsche argues for this claim in the Genealogy by giving an account of the origins of the words ‘good' and ‘bad' and ‘good' and ‘evil'. In their etymological senses, the terms "moral" and "ethical" mean literally "common" and "ordinary." The etymological origin of the word "good," according to Nietzsche, reveals that it once meant "privileged," "aristocratic," "with a soul of high order," etc., and that "bad" originally meant "common," "low," and "plebeian." Even the German word schlecht, which means "badly," is akin to schlicht, which means "plain" or "simple." Furthermore, the word’s schlechthin und schlechtweg literally means "simply" or "downright." This was the language of the aristocratic upper classes in classical times, whom Nietzsche calls the noble, or master class. The word "bad" was used by the master class, without any moral or ethical connotations, simply to refer and to differentiate them from common people, whom Nietzsche refers to as the slave class. The master class calls them "good," due to their apparently superior social standing, or in other words, "good" was simply a term for those things that they were, fierce, proud, brave, and noble. The lower class, or the slave class, on the other hand, developed their own moral language, which is that of the language of "good" and "evil." The anger and hatred that the slave class had for the master class had no outlet, or in other words their anger was impotent, due to their physical and political powerlessness. Nietzsche calls this the anger of ressentiment. The only way the slave class could get their revenge on the master class was to accept nothing less than a complete revaluation of the master class' values. The Jews, who epitomized the "priestly" way of life, according to Nietzsche, were the ones who began what he calls the "slave revolt in morality," which inverted the "aristocratic value equation (good=powerful=beautiful=happy=beloved of God)," to make a good out of their own station in life, and an evil out of the station of their enemies -he objects of their impotent anger and revenge. The slave class accomplished this effect by turning "good" and "bad" into terms which not only made reference to one's political station in life, but also pointed to one's soul and depth as a person.
Thus, the language of "good" and "bad," which was originally used for the purpose of amorally denoting one's station in life, was reevaluated into the language of "good" and "evil," in which what is "good" is common, ordinary, poor, and familiar, and what is "evil" is damnable, unfamiliar, cruel, godless, accursed, and unblessed. In effect, the master class, over the last two thousand years, has been "poisoned" and shamed by the slave class and its language of "good" and "evil" into accepting the inversion of their own noble values, and thus the morality of the slave class, namely that which is "common," "ordinary," and "familiar," is the one that prevails today. From the above argument, understanding how Nietzsche claims that the subjugated Jews transformed their once yes-saying God into the nay-saying God of ressentiment and hatred is easier. This argument seems to ring true in many ways, but it is nevertheless based on the psychological presupposition that human beings are always seeking power and mastery over others, or in other words, that they are always exerting their "will to power," as Nietzsche calls it. In this way, Nietzsche sees the Jews as cunningly having found a way to regain power over their oppressors psychologically by shaming them with the use of the language of good and evil. This assessment goes for what is to follow below as well.
As he demonstrates, Nietzsche is careful not to confuse Buddhism with Christianity in his criticisms. Though he believes that both religions are nihilistic and decadent, he regards Buddhism as a far healthier and more realistic approach. In contrast to the Christian, who is always trying to avoid sin, the Buddhist's main goal is to reduce suffering it. The latter does not fall into the same trap as Christianity does, according to Nietzsche, do not carry any moral presuppositions. It has long abandoned them, seeing them as mere deceptions. The Buddhist is therefore not engaged in the practice of moralizing and making judgments about others. A Buddhist achieves this reduction of suffering by living a passive, non-combatanting lifestyle. He does not become angry or resentful, no matter what transgressions someone has assertively enacted against him. Neither does he worry about him nor others. He takes measures that will help him to avoid exciting his senses, while the Christian, on the other hand, does just the opposite through living an ascetic lifestyle and maintaining an emotionally charged relationship with his God through prayer. The Buddhist, in his avoidance of suffering, simply aims to maintain its steady state of peace, calm, and mildness in his lifestyle and temperament. It is a very important point that in pursuing this aim, the Buddhist actually succeeds, whereas the Christian does not succeed in removing sin, and is thus always in a state of wanting "redemption" and "forgiveness," never attaining the "grace" of God that he so desires. The Buddhist is therefore able to achieve a sort of peace and tranquillity on earth.
This idea is vital, in that it relates directly with Nietzsche's conception of the historical Jesus. Nietzsche paints a picture of the Jesus of history for being a true evangel, which means that he did not subscribe to the concepts of guilt, punishment, and reward. He did not engage in faith, but only in actions, and these actions prescribed a way of life that Nietzsche sees as Buddhistic. The evangel does not get angry, does not pass judgment, and does neither he feel any hatred nor resentment for his enemies. He rejected the whole idea of sin and repentance, and believed that this evangelical way of life was divine in it, closing the gap between man and God so much that it is God, according to Nietzsche. Therefore, he saw prayer, faith, and redemption as farcical, instead believing that the "kingdom of heaven" is a state of mind that can be experienced on earth by living this type of peaceful, judgment-suspending existence, free from worry, guilt, and anger. Nietzsche argues that this was the life of Jesus and nothing more, and this way of life was the "glad tidings" which he brought. Nietzsche writes: The "bringer of glad tidings" died as he had lived, as he had taught-not to "redeem men" but to show how one must live. This practice is his legacy to humanity: his behaviour before the judges, before the catch poles, before the accusers and all kinds of slander and scorn-his behaviour on the cross. He does not resist, he does not defend his right, he takes no step that might ward off the worst; on the contrary, he provokes it. He begs, he suffers, he loves with those, in those, who do him evil. Not to resist, not to be angry, not to hold responsible-but to resist not even the evil one-to love him.
This conception of Jesus is entirely alien to the one that the church has given us. For the creation and dissemination of this misconception, Nietzsche blames Paul. He also blames Jesus' immediate followers as well. Once Jesus had been executed, according to Nietzsche, his followers could not come to grips with the shock of his sudden loss. Filled with a want of revenge, they wanted to know who killed him and why. They determined that the rulers of the existing Jewish order had killed him because his doctrine went against that order. Not wanting his death to have been in vain, they saw him as a rebel against the Jewish status quo in the same way that they saw themselves as such. In this way, argues Nietzsche, his followers completely misunderstood him. The truly "evangelic" thing to do, he says, would have been to forgive his death instead, or to die in the like manner without judgment or need of vindication. However, Jesus' followers, resentful about his loss, wanted vengeance upon those of the existing Jewish order. The way that they accomplished this vengeance is the same as the way in which the Jews exacted their revenge on their Roman oppressors. They considered Jesus to be the Messiah of whom they were foretold by Jewish scripture, and in this way they elevated him to divine status--as the Son of God (since he referred to him metaphorically as a "child of God"). Faced with the question of how God could allow Jesus' death to occur, they came up with the idea that God had sent down his own Son as a sacrifice for their sins, as a sacrifice of the guiltless for the sins of the guilty, even though Jesus him refused to engage in feeling guilt. They then used the figure of Jesus and their misunderstanding of his doctrine of the "kingdom of God" for making judgments against their enemies in the existing Jewish order, just as the Jews had turned their God into something universal for the purpose of passing judgment on the Romans: On the other hand, the frenzied veneration of these totally unhinged souls no longer endured the evangelic conception of everybody's equal right to be a child of God, as Jesus had taught: it was their revenge to elevate Jesus extravagantly, to sever him from themselves-precisely as the Jews had formerly, out of revenge against their enemies, severed their God from themselves and elevated him. The one God and the one Son of God-both products of resentment.
The figure of Paul, according to Nietzsche, exacerbated this misunderstanding of Jesus' teachings even further. In fact, that is an understatement. In this immortalized figure of crucified Jesus, Paul, with his "priestly" instincts, saw a way to gain power by forming "herds," as Nietzsche puts it. He completely rewrote the history of Jesus' life and Christianity for his own purposes, adding the doctrines of the resurrection, the immaculate conception, and the idea of personal immortality as a reward. Nietzsche attributes Paul's efforts to the hatred and ressentiment of the priestly class, and refers to Paul as the "dysangelist," or in other words, the "bringer of ill tidings." After Paul, the life of Jesus had been turned into something completely alien and antithetical to what it actually was. Again, this theory of Nietzsche's rests on the assumption that humans are in essence motivated by a will to power. Historical evidence concerning the historical Jesus is quite lacking in Nietzsche's account; in that, it relies on a psychological profile of those who participated in this historical scene. However, this psychological analysis seems to present a scenario that is at least conceivable--especially more so than the idea of an immaculate conception and resurrection. I think Nietzsche takes the Buddhistic element of Jesus too far, however. He provides too specifically an account of Jesus' lifestyle and philosophical persuasions without any evidence. It is still quite possible that Jesus could have simply been a more noteworthy rebel against the Romans and the Jewish status quo. More historical evidence would seem to be in order, but Nietzsche's account remains very compelling without it. Its profound significance lies in the fact that in it, Nietzsche has the courage and honesty to show us what, in his and every non-Christian's eyes, is far more likely to have been the case.
Nietzsche is also concerned with how deeply these decadent Christian values have ingrained themselves in our social practices and presuppositions. He especially laments how it has infiltrated the study of philosophy, particularly German philosophy. As Nietzsche argues, he sees modern philosophy as having "theologians' blood in its veins," saying whom we consider our antithesis is necessary: it is the theologians and whatever has theologians' blood in its veins-and that includes our whole philosophy.
Nietzsche argues that Christianity has poisoned philosophy with this nihilistic rejection of the body in favour of pure spirit. He compares the idealist philosopher with the priest, in that the former reduces everything in the world to idea, so that the physical world does not really exist. Figures such as Georg Hegel have done exactly this sort of thing, and Nietzsche is especially critical of German philosophy, both for its idealists’ tendencies and its conception of morality-both of which can be traced to this theologian's instinct. Nietzsche blames Germany's heavy Protestant tradition for the corruption of philosophy, and he criticizes Kant especially for being the latest, "greatest" philosopher to continue this corruption. Kant denies that the physical world can be apprehended directly (the world of noemenon) by the senses, and in this respect he is not a strict idealist, save a phenomenalist. What is meant by this is that all we can perceive are phenomenon, which appear to us as ideas, and the physical (noemenal) world is something that we can never directly observe. Kant's system does not deny that the physical world exists, but it denies that it exists as we know it, and that is enough for Nietzsche to criticize him. One can understand, however, how Nietzsche sees the theologian's blood running through Kant's veins, in that Kant sees the physical world as mere phenomenon -phantom reality. Nietzsche also criticizes Kant for finding a way to maintain a theoretical justification for morality-the Christian morality-while removing God from the picture, namely the Categorical Imperative. Nietzsche rejects this system as one that turns people into automatons. He claims that a virtue must be one of the people's own inventions, not an abstract "duty" in-it, which must be followed universally for its own sake. If the people do not follow its own virtues and do its own duty, he argues, it will perish. What Nietzsche seems to be getting at is that people simply do what they need to do to thrive and preserve themselves, and as explained earlier, different people find themselves having to adapt to different circumstances, such as the Jews did under Roman occupation. Their virtues and duties had to change according to their situation. This is what Kant means when he says that "Kant's categorical imperative endangered life it!"8 Nietzsche then goes on to denounce Kant's deontologicalism it: An action demanded by the instinct of life is proved to be right by the pleasure that accompanies it; yet this nihilist with his Christian dogmatic entrails considered pleasure an objection. What could destroy us more quickly than working, thinking, and feeling without any inner necessity, without any deeply personal choice, without pleasure-as an automaton of "duty?” This is the very recipe for decadence, even for idiocy. Kant became an idiot, and this man was contemporary of Goethe! This catastrophic spider was considered the German philosopher-he still is.
Kant, in this way, also goes against nature with his system of morality, according to Nietzsche. It is simply a Christian God's "Thou shalt" disguised by a secular, theoretical philosophy, or as Nietzsche would see it, it is borne of the theologian's instinct. Any philosophy student can see where Nietzsche gets these ideas from, and in most respects, he seems to be right about this. However, not all of the nihilistic elements of philosophy have their roots in Christianity. Western philosophy has a fundamental inheritance from Plato, who also, as Nietzsche is surely aware, rejects the physical world. He does this not because he thinks of it as sinful, but because he thinks it is ultimately only shadows of reality. Instead, Plato favours the world of the Forms, in which the Forms are paradigms of all objects and concepts that can be found in the physical, sensory world in which we presently live. Plato favours this other world because the physical world is in a constant state of flux, he argues. Since we cannot have knowledge of something that is always changing, as he claims, there can be no real knowledge of anything in the physical world. Knowledge then, for Plato, can only be possible in this other world through contemplation of the Forms, since these Forms are unchanging. Therefore, western post-Socratic philosophy began with a rejection of the physical world, and this rejection also constitutes a large, if not major source of the nihilism in western philosophy about which Nietzsche so often complains.
To refute of which is the claim that Plato and Nietzsche are at opposite poles regarding the treatment of the non-rational elements of the soul, and argue that, instead, they share a complex and psychologically rich view of the role of reason toward the appetites and the emotions. My argument makes use of the Freudian distinction between sublimation, i.e., the re-channelling of certain undesirable appetitive and emotional forces toward more beneficial ends, and repression. I show that both Plato and Nietzsche argue in favour of sublimation and against repression of the non-rational elements of the soul.
Nietzsche’s moral philosophy is often seen as the antitheses of Plato’s for at least the following reason: Plato’s concept of psychic harmony, i.e., the state that it is best for the soul to be in, is said to involve repression of the non-rational elements of the soul (the thumos and the appetitive part) by reason. This repression, in Nietzschean terms, can be classified as a form of asceticism, and Nietzsche is seen as rejecting all forms of asceticism. I will argue in the following sections that this interpretation relies on a misunderstanding of both Plato and Nietzsche, in that it is neither true that Plato believes repression to be reason’s main way of controlling the non-rational parts of the soul, nor that Nietzsche rejects all forms of rational control over one’s character. In this section, however, I want to highlight these passages in which Plato and Nietzsche say things that could be misinterpreted in the way I have outlined, i.e., what lesser truths would make one believe that the interpretation as a whole is correct.
It would be false to claim that Plato cannot, and has not been interpreted as claiming that reason should repress the appetites. Annas, in her Companion to Plato’s Republic writes the following: [. . . .] Reason as Plato conceives it will decide for the whole soul in a way that does not take the ends of the other parts as given but may involve suppressing or restraining them
The end of the rational part, according to Plato, is to decide on behalf of the whole soul what is good for it, and make sure that it pursues only those ends. In the metaphor of the soul in which the rational part is a little man, the thumos a lion, and the appetitive part a many-headed beast, Plato tells us that "all our actions and words should tend to give the man within us complete domination over the entire man, and make him take charge of the many-headed beast." We may read this as meaning that the rational part should repress the appetitive part, and curb the thumos so that it only acts as reason would have it act. However, as I will argue, in this mis-reading, all we should in fact read in Plato’s proposal, is that reason should control the appetites and the thumos, but control them by means other than repression.
Nietzsche supposed the rejection of asceticism, and all forms of control over the elements of one’s character, can be deduced from many passages. At this point as we occupy of a particular surface in space and time, whose manifesting inclinations of force fields and atomizations are combining quality standards whose presence is awaiting to the future, however, what seems more important and, perhaps, relevantly significant are the contributions that follow: At which time I abhor all those moralities that say ‘do not do this! Renounce! Overcome your: Those who command man first of all and above all to gain control of him thus afflict him with a particular disease; Namely, a constant irritability in the face of natural stirring and inclinations - as it were, a kind of itching. People like St. Paul have an evil eye for the passions: all they know of the passions is what is dirty, disfiguring, and heartbreaking; hence their idealistic tendencies aim at the annihilation of the passions, and they find perfect purity in the divine.
These passages contrive to give us the following impression of Nietzsche’s moral philosophy, i.e., that Nietzsche stands up for the passions, and other natural stirrings and inclinations against moralists who want to annihilate them, overcome, renounce, or control them. If we add this up to the above interpretation of Plato, then concluding that Plato is just the kind of philosopher Nietzsche is naturals’ outcry denounces -and in fact there are many passages in which Nietzsche does denounce Plato, sometimes just for this reason.
That this interpretation of Nietzsche as rejecting control of the non-rational parts of the soul is misleading, in that although it is true that Nietzsche rejects repression as a means of controlling those parts, he does not reject all forms of control, quite the contrary. Together with my argument in that Plato does not believe the appetitive part should be repressed, this will refute the claim that Nietzsche and Plato’s treatment of the non-rational parts of the soul are opposed, or significantly different. A need to introduce certain concepts that are useful in ascertaining the proper meaning of Plato and Nietzsche’s claims regarding the control of the soul by reason.
The preceding section highlighted the sources of the interpretations of Nietzsche and Plato’s positions on the treatment of the irrational parts of the soul as opposite. Plato, it has been said, believes that we should repress these elements or else enlist some of them on the side of reason to repress the others. Nietzsche on the other hand is said to have believed that all parts of our character are of equal value, and hence that we should get rid of nothing, but on the contrary, let all our ‘instincts’ rule us. This is an oversimplified view, but it expresses best the common belief among philosophers that Plato and Nietzsche held radically different views regarding the role of reason and of the non-rational elements of the soul. I believe this view is mistaken: Not just in its exaggerated form, but in any form that contains the claim that Plato and Nietzsche disagreed significantly as to whether and how we should gain rational control over the non-rational elements of our souls.
The concept we need most here is that of sublimation (sublimieren in German - a concept that, incidentally, was introduced by Goethe before its meaning was developed more fully by Freud). It means the redirection of forces impinged upon impulses under which are highly objective, that is, if one were taken anthelmintically, than inexpediently, in that to another spells of one, and to society. In order to understand sublimation, however, we need to spell out two more Freudian concepts, of ‘impulse’ and ‘repression’. An impulse (Trieb: Usually erroneously translated as ‘instinct’) is a force, or pressure the goal of which is (sexual) satisfaction of some kind or other (e.g., oral) which it attains by discharging it on some object. The force is the driving aspect of the impulse, ‘the amount of force or the measure of the demand for work that it represents’.
Freud was interested in two types of impulsive behaviours, repression, and sublimation. Both exist as a means of dealing with problematic impulses, i.e., impulses that we cannot live within society, that we are ashamed of, that would be disapproved of by others, that threatens our relationships with others. Repression presupposes two of the simplest: to repress an impulse is to prevent it from achieving its aim, i.e., satisfaction. The impulse is driven back, shut out, rejected, in no particular direction. As Freud argued, this -denial is far from being the most effective manner of dealing with violent unwanted impulse. In that, if we do not look atop to whatever one is to push them, then one will not know from where they are likely to come back. They will come back, just as the heads on the multi-headed monster of the Republic keep growing back with different shapes, as pathological symptoms.
The second mechanism for dealing with troublesome impulses is sublimation. When an impulse is sublimated, it is not prevented from reaching its satisfaction, but it is made to reach via a different route from that which it would naturally follow, i.e., by settling for its satisfaction on a different object. In Freud’s words: [Sublimation] enables excessively strong excitations arising from particular sources of sexuality to find an outlet and use in other fields, so that a considerable increase in psychological efficiency results from a disposition that is it perilous. Here we have one of the origins of artistic creativity - and, according to the completeness or incompleteness of the sublimation, a characterological analysis of a highly gifted individual. Freud saw sublimation as society’s means of achieving impulsive renunciation without appealing to repression. Still, more important, he saw it as the individual’s means of achieving rational control over the dark forces of her unconscious mind. Sublimation is the work of the ego, the rational , and what it achieves is ‘a defusion of the instincts, and a liberation of the aggressive instincts in the superego’. Freud thought sublimation was preferable to repression because it brings about greater rational control.
Much more could be said about Freud’s work on the human soul, and in particular, on his concept of sublimation. However, I shall now leave Freud to return to Plato and Nietzsche, and show how his concepts of sublimation and repression can be used to understand these two philosophers’ moral psychologies not as opposed, but on the contrary, both arguing along similar and very plausible lines.
Let us turn again to the metaphor of the tripartite soul as the joining of a multi-headed beast, a lion, and a little man. I suggested in that reading Plato’s claim that we should aim to achieve was wrong ‘complete dominion’ of reason over the soul as a claim that reason should repress the other parts. Reading the passage in its entirety can vindicate this suggestion in part simply. At 589ab Plato writes, And on the other hand, he who says that justice is the more profitable affirms that all our actions and words should tend to give the man within us complete dominion over the entire man and make him take charge of the many-headed beast -like a farmer who cherishes and adapts in the cultivated plants but checks the growth of the wild - and he will make an ally of the lion’s nature, and caring for all the beasts alike will at first make friends, in and of one another and to him, and so foster their growth.
This passage is ambiguous, but what should stand out, as well as the claim that reason must dominate the soul, is to mention that one should care for one’s appetitive part, and foster its growth. This is surely not consistent with the claim that one should repress it. However, Plato’s meaning is unclear, and in order to make sense of the metaphor of the farmer, we need to look at Plato’s other recommendations as to how reason should manifest its dominion. The clearest, I believe, is to be found in Plato’s portrait of the reasonable man at. Nevertheless, when, I suppose, a man’s condition is healthy and sober, and he goes to sleep after arousing his rational part and entertaining it with fair words and thoughts, and attaining to clear -consciousness, while he has neither starved nor indulged to repletion his appetitive part, so that it may be lulled to sleep and not disturb the better part by its pleasure or pain . . .
The reasonable man -, i.e., the man whose soul is governed by the rational part, in other words, the just man - as he is portrayed in Book Nine of the Republic, does not indulge nor starve his appetitive part. This is why his sleep, unlike the tyrant’s, is undisturbed by violent dreams. If reason is not in control and if the appetites are not lulled to sleep, then the ‘terrible, fierce and lawless broods of desires’ which exists ‘in every one of us, even in some reputed most respectable’ will reveal themselves in our sleep as ‘lawless’ dreams.
This very Freudian analysis tells us the following, appetites, which are not controlled by reason, are likely to come back and disturb us in our sleep as violent dreams. Still, the control that reasons must exert is not repression: we have to make sure that the lawless appetites are neither indulged nor starved, and what is repression but the starving of impulses, i.e., preventing them from ever being satisfied? Repression, or starvation of the appetites, Plato tells us, is as much the cause of tyrannical behaviour patterns as indulging appetites. The ‘lawless pleasures and appetites’ should not be repressed, but ‘controlled by the laws and the better desires in alliance with reason.
That the rational control Plato proposes is not a repressive kind is one thing, but what else is it, and do we have grounds for supposing that it is a kind of sublimation? In following, it would not be far fetched to propose that he does believe we should sublimate the appetites that need to be controlled.
Does Plato use the vocabulary of sublimation when he defines psychic harmony? Surely he does in the case of the thumos. The emotions that are so unruly in children ('for they are from their enactable birth cradles -full of rage and high spirits', are brought to 'marshal themselves on the side of reason, and this through 'the blending of music and gymnastics that will render them concordant, intensifying and fostering the one [reason] with fair words and teachings, and relaxing and sobering and making gently the other by harmony and rhythm' The idea that the appetites should be sublimated is present elsewhere in the Republic "But, again, we surely are aware that when in a man the desires incline strongly to any-one thing, they are weakened for other things. It is as if the stream had been diverted into another channel. So when a man's desires have been taught to flow in the channel of learning and all that sort of thing, they will be concerned, I presume, with the pleasures of the soul in it, and will be indifferent to those of which the body is the instrument if the man is true and not a sham philosopher."
Plato seems to accept the following: the lawless appetites should be controlled and prevented from ruling the soul, but at the same time, they should not be repressed, i.e., extinguished. Their motivational force should be redirected so that it assists the whole soul in its pursuit of the Good. More precisely, it seems that Plato is arguing that bodily impulses can be sublimated through philosophy, i.e., that sexual desires, for instance, will be replaced, to a degree at least, by desires to acquire philosophical knowledge.
We can conclude this section by answering the initial challenge as follows. It is not the case that Psychic harmony involves the repression of a whole genus of desires: Plato makes it clear that the appetites of the reasonable man must neither be starved nor over-indulged. He believes control is necessary, but preferably, a creative type of control, i.e., not one that seeks to extinguish appetitive or emotional drives, but one that sublimates them, transforms them into drives of a similar but more beneficial nature.
Having argued that Plato does not believe that unruly impulses should be repressed, but instead advocate a kind of control that we can properly refer to as sublimation in the Freudian sense of that term, but we must now turn to the claim that Nietzsche rejects all kinds of control of the non-rational elements of the soul as forms of asceticism, and therefore repression. I shall argue that Nietzsche, like Plato, believes that a kind of control like sublimation is both necessary and beneficial
There is no question that Nietzsche rejects repression as unhealthy - as verily does Plato - nor that he claims that philosophers in general, and Plato and Socrates in particular favour a certain kind of asceticism. However, it does not follow that Nietzsche does not believe some control of the desires is necessary. Although sublimation is incompatible with repression - an impulse cannot be redirected in other channels if it is repressed (a criminal cannot be rehabilitated if he is executed) - it can be seen as some kind of control, and is thus quite compatible with the pursuit of psychic harmony as described by Plato. In particular, one passage from Daybreak shows how close the two philosophers really are regarding the treatment of appetites, which threaten psychic health: one already stands before the irrefutable insight that there exists no essential difference between criminals and the insane [ . . . ] One should place before him quite clearly the possibility and the means of becoming cured (the extinction, transformation, sublimations of this [tyrannical] drive)
That Nietzsche mentions extinction along with sublimation or transformation, does not mean that he sees repression as a good general policy any more than Plato does. Here he is talking about the tyrannical drive of the criminal. Had that drive not been allowed to become tyrannical, (and that this kind of prevention need not appeal to repression but may be achieved through sublimation) it would not need to be extinguished.
Nietzsche also believes that sublimation is the explanation for the existence of asceticism. Cruel impulses are sublimated through ressentiment and bad conscience and give birth to ascetic impulses. Desires to murder, arson, rape and torture are replaced by desires for -castigation. Civilization seeks to prevent the gratification of the cruel instincts (for obvious reasons), and by introducing the ideas of responsibility for one's actions and guilt, helps to turn these instincts against themselves, i.e., transform desires to hurt others into desires to hurt one.
There be of three containing comments on the Genealogy as pertaining to Nietzsche’s concerns with the origins of morality and culturally sublimated expressions of drives as well as Federn’s comment that Nietzsche ‘was the first to discover the significance of abreaction, of repression, of flight into illness, of the instincts - and some comments speculating on Nietzsche’s personality a relevant psychodynamic.
Of the Genealogy, ‘guilt, bad conscience and the like, explores, among other things, how at a critical juncture in the development of civilization an morality, drives that had been more freely expressed were constrained and turned inward. This led to the development of the ‘base conscience’ an the ‘entire inner word’ [which] originally thin as if it were stretched between two membranes, expanded and extended it, acquire depth, breadth, and height. In, What is the Meaning of Ascetic Ideas’ were to explore of how bad conscience or quilt is appropriated by the ascetic priest, in the service of comforting, and thus ensuring the obedience of the vulnerable ‘herd’. The ascetic priest exercising his own will to power (such as by imposing his interpretations on the minds of others) provides meaning and justification in for what would otherwise be meaningless suffering. He provides comfort of sorts with a realm of existence that is divine , holy, pure, and true. Nonetheless, the will to power may have had certain cosmological and mythic dimensions for Nietzsche, but the concept is also rooted in psychology.
In addition to Nietzsche writing specifically of the sublimation of the secular drive, the will to power and its vicissitude drives, particularly in the form of appropriation and incorporation. As Staten points out, this notion of the primitive will to power is similar to Freud’s idea in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego according to which ‘identification [is] the earliest expression of an emotional tie with another person . . . It behaves like a derivation of the first oral phase for a prize is assimilated by eating. It would appear that Nietzsche goes a step further than Freud in one of his notes when he writes: ‘Nourishment - is only derivative, the original phenomenon is, to desire to incorporate everything.’ Nietzschean will to power never take place without a pleasurable excitation that there is no reason not to call erotic.
Nietzsche condemns those moralities that condemn life,’the morality that would un man’. And we can note that his highest affirmation includes ‘a yes-saying. . . . even to quilt, whereby there is a mutually reinforcing relationship between the growing capacity to say, ‘Yes, thus shall I will it’ it would do above all else, to create beyond it. The will I a creator, and all it was is a fragment, a riddle, a dreadful accident - until the creative will says to it: ‘But thus I shall will it, the creative says to it, ‘But thus I will, thus shall I will it.
In saying ‘yes’ to eternal recurrence as related to Nietzsche’s idea of becoming who one is. It is a saying ‘yes’ to what one is and has stilled: It is to identify one with all of one’s actions, to see hat everting one does (what one become) is what one is. In the ideal case it is also to fit all this into a coherent whole and to want to be everything that one is: It is to give style to one’s character, to be, in becoming, least of mention, one cannot accomplish the Nietzschean redemption without knowing and choosing who one is: To decide that some past event was a benefit presupposes and commits me to certain views as to who I am, what my dominant desires and goals are now. Still to point out, that affirming eternal decree involves an affirmation of life, of the intrinsic whole of life in opposition to the ascetic ideal, in that ‘Nietzsche’s ideals to love the whole process enough that one is willing to relive eternally been those parts of it that one does not and cannot live. That the ‘reason for wishing most fervently the repetition of each’, is that one.
While Nietzsche is quite willing, as in his psychological explorations, to draw distinction between ‘deeper’ realities in relation to ‘surface’ appearances, he also argue that on a fundamental level one cannot draw a distinction between a merely apparent world and a perspective-free true factual world. The ‘deeper’ realities he discovered cannot be regarded as facts-in-themselves or anything else of the kind that would be free of embeddedness in human schemes, practices, theories, and interpretations. Of perspectival seeing and knowing.
Although Nietzsche calls into question the absolute value of truth, vales the illusion (the truthful illusions) of art that a stimulant to life, values. Masks, veils and even the creative lie, he also answers the call of truth. Truth calls to us tempts us to unveil her. If we have integrity we will say ‘Yes’ to the hardest service, surrounding much that we held dear, inclining our wishes ‘not to see . . . [what]. one does’. When the unveiling takes place we come upon not truth (or woman) in-it but an appearance which is reality by way of a particular perspective. One might regard this situation as, among other possibilities, and opportunity for creative play of the interpretive capacities, for the creating and destroying of play, for a creative sublimation of the will to power. But none of this regarded as truth. What it does involve, in the words of Linda Alcoff, is that for Nietzsche ‘neither a noumenal realm nor a historical synthesis exists to provide an absolute criterion of adjudication for competing truth claims and perhaps what is most important, Nietzsche introduces the notion that truth is a kind of human practice, Alcoff also suggests that ‘perspectives are to be judged not on their relation to the absolute but on the basis of their effects in specific area. For Alcoff, this entails ‘local pragmatic’ truths even though Nietzsche does posit trans-historical truth claims such as his claim regarding the will to power. Nietzsche is concerned with what corresponds to or fits the facts, but such fact are not established without as human contribution, without interpretation. Of course for those for whom the term ‘fact’ should entail before the ‘factum brutum’ there may be an objection to their use of such terms as ‘fact’, ‘reality’, etc., in such a context.
Justifiably for Nietzsche’s bad conscience offers relief n from as deeper, truer guilt or fear of abandonment but from the hopelessness, helplessness, depression, etc., that would exist in the face of the inability to direct one’s instincts, one ‘s will to power, one’s freedom, outward into an upon the world. But also recall the passage in which Nietzsche suggests that ‘this man of the bad conscience . . . apprehend in ‘God’ the ultimate antithesis o of hoi own ineluctable animal instincts, and he reinterprets these instincts themselves as a form of guilt before God (his hostility, rebellion, insurrection against the Lord, the father, the primal ancestor and origin of the world.) For Nietzsche this bad conscience is not rooted or ground in a primal rebellious and hostile deed, rather, it is grounded in splitting off from the ineluctable animal instinct as guilt before or sin against the father upon who is projected the antithesis of such instincts. This can occur when more spontaneous instinctual expression is blocked in the is substituted for the object of instinctual gratification, particularly aggression. As the aggression turned against the as the object upon which to discharge this drive, this bad can be potentially freed and made good by participating in the power of, the being of, God who is the idealized antithesis of such instincts.
(When God acts aggressively, it is with the believer’s good conscience.) And Freud follows Nietzsche when he states that, ‘the believer has a share in he greatest of his god’. He also follows Nietzsche and others who emphasize the spiritual or physiological sickness that accompanies the achievements of civilization with its foundations in repression and guilt. For both thinkers, guilt, however painful, can provide relief from something more painful, whether a greater quilt or depression.
The relevant concept in Nietzsche’s reflections on control of the non-rational elements of the soul has to ‘- overcoming’ or ‘giving style’ to one’s character. This is discussed at length in Gay Science of which this is an extract: One thing is needful: . . . .to ‘give style’ to one’s character, a great and rare art! It is practised - by these who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye. The weak characters without power over them hate the constraint of style [and] are always out to form or interpret themselves and their environment as free nature - wild, arbitrary, fantastic, disorderly, astonishing. [. . . .] For one thing is needful: that a human being should attain satisfaction with him, whether it is by means of this or that poetry and art; only then is a human being at all tolerable to behold. Whoever is dissatisfied with him is continually ready for revenge, and we others will be his victims, if only by having to endure his ugly sight. For the sight of what is ugly makes one bad and gloomy.
One way of interpreting this passage is to understand it to mean that one must come to accept all of one’s defects and not attempt to eliminate or control them. Something like this can be suggested by the following comment by Staten: His stance toward him is the antithesis of, says, St. Augustine’s; Instead of judging, condemning, and paring away at his impulses, Nietzsche says he has simply tried to arrange them so that they might all coexist. ‘Contrary capacities’ dwell in him, he says, and he has tried to ‘mix nothing’, to ‘reconcile nothing’.
However, Staten's analysis is vague. Granted, Nietzsche does not think, so-called weaknesses should be repressed. We discussed his arguments against repression of instincts earlier in this section, and argued that they were not in fact incompatible with Plato’s views on rational control of the soul. Both Nietzsche and Plato, we saw, advocate some form of control of the impulses that does not involve 'paring away' at them, but insofar as possible, involves their redirection toward an object more suited to the well-being of the soul or character as a whole, i.e., some form of sublimation of the instincts. Does what Nietzsche say at contradicting these arguments in any way? What he suggests we actually do with the undesirable instincts is this: Here the ugly that could not be removed is concealed; there it has been reinterpreted and made sublime. Much that is vague and resisted shaping has been saved and exploited for distant views; it is meant to beckon toward the far and immeasurable. Unfortunately thee will not of any attempt to explain what each of the transformations described in this passage actually amounts to - unfortunately, but the passage is vague and metaphorical beyond interpretation. What matters here, is that Nietzsche proposes several ways of dealing with undesirable instincts, and that whatever these ways are, they do not amount to leaving them untouched. Maybe Nietzsche does not pair away at his instincts (although the phrase 'the ugly that could not be removed' may suggest that he in fact does.) Yet he does judge them, i.e., he has to decide whether they must be concealed, or transformed, or saved up. There is no suggestion that any instinct is as good as another and that all will hold a place of honour in the character to which style has been given. To 'style' is to constrain and control, and one cannot give style to one's character and thereby render it tolerable to behold, if one is not able to control one's instincts. As Nietzsche writes later on in that passage, 'the weak characters without power over them hate the constraint of style'. Weakness is equated with lack of - control, and not, as the quotation from Staten may suggest, with control of one's instincts.
Nietzsche does not reject moral theories that demand that we control our desires. What he does reject is repression as an extinction. On the contrary, he seems to believe that an ideal life would involve sublimation - a form of control - of the appetites for the benefit of the pursuit of one's ideal. It follows from these conclusions that there is in fact no significant difference between Nietzsche and Plato's moral psychology regarding the control of the appetites: Neither is in favour of repression, both advocate a certain creative control involving sublimation.
As far as defending opposite theories about how we should control the non-rational elements of the soul, Plato and Nietzsche in fact hold very similar views. Their views can be explained by referring to certain Freudian concepts, sublimation and repression. According to Freud, impulses lend themselves too more than one kind of control. They can either be repressed, i.e., prevented from attaining satisfaction, or sublimated, i.e., their force can be redirected toward a more beneficial object. The first kind of control is rejected by both Plato and Nietzsche (at least as a general policy) as ineffective and unhealthy. Plato sees repression as one of the paths to tyrannical behaviour patterns (those impulses, which are repressed come back at night as violent dreams). Nietzsche views it as one of the worst manifestations of asceticism, one that prevents the ‘one thing needful’, giving style, i.e., the integration of all of one’s character traits, and makes us ‘continually ready for revenge, bad and gloomy’.
The second means of controlling impulses, sublimation, is one that we found to hold an important place in both Plato and Nietzsche’s moral psychologies. Both believe that potentially harmful instincts can be redirected Nietzsche higher goals, and contribute to the perfection of the character. We saw that Plato used the vocabulary of sublimation in the Republic, where he talks of the appetitive impulses being redirected toward a love of learning. Nietzsche had written of sublimation, an he specifically wrote of the sublimation of sexual dives in the Genealogy. Freud’s use the term as here duffers somewhat from his later and more Nietzschean usage such as in Three Essays o the Theory of Sexuality. But a Kaufmann notes ‘the word is older than Freud or Nietzsche. . . . it was Nietzsche who first gave it the specific connotation it has today.’‘. Kaufmann regards the concept of sublimation as one of the most important concept in Nietzsche’s entire philosophy. Nietzsche, we saw, actually uses the term sublimation when he describes the kind of control one must impose on one’s character in order to give style to it.
When two philosophers who are among the more concerned with the question how we should live turn out to hold very similar moral psychologies, then the concepts they use are probably concepts that should hold an important place in any moral psychology. That these concepts are affirming Freudian non-objections. Freud him was deeply concerned with the problem of how best we could live our lives, and how we could deal with the dark forces of our unconscious. These forces are recognised by Plato (even the most respectable of us, he says are subject to them) also through Nietzsche. Should not a central concern of moral philosophy be how best to deal with them, how best to control them rationally? If so, then it seems that we need a moral psychology that explains what role these dark impulses play in the human soul, and how reason might control them. This, I have argued, is exactly what Plato and Nietzsche attempt to do.
One hundred years ago Thus Speak Zarathustra appeared. The most celebrated work of Nietzsche, it has been read and cited by even moderately educated people. The German philosopher has a stormy reputation due to his tirades against Christianity and his aristocratic rejection of conventional moral views. Nietzsche provokes all kinds of reactions. Each reader may have his own Nietzsche, drawing from him a cherished opinion to be worn as a coloured badge with the hope of shocking ordinary folk. In fact in the last one hundred years, everything and anything has been said about Nietzsche.
This absence of professionalism and this facile subjectivism have produced occasionally disastrous consequences. From the beginning Nietzsche's thought has defied systematic construction. Even now the most memorable characteristics of his pioneering work are his ferocious fulminations, his deconstruction, and the acrid stench left by those who have raided his texts. One cannot hope to say finally what Nietzsche really meant. Still, finding a unifying thread may be possible. This requires ignoring abusively and merely subjectivist interpretations while highlighting those of true value. The renewed interest in Nietzsche's works has produced a vast and expanding body of relevant literature, as much as it is pivotal.
In June 1981 Rudolf Augstein, editor of Der Spiegel, stated without qualification that Hitler was the man of action who put Nietzsche's thought into practice. The journalist took for proof the falsifications of some of Nietzsche's manuscripts by his sister Elisabeth Nietzsche-Forster, who had shaken Hitler's hand in the twilight of her life. This argument is perhaps a bit thin in view of the many other writings that his sister did not doctor.
Augstein is concerned not just about Nietzsche's revival by a young generation of German philosophers but also by the progressive abandonment among German intellectuals of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School for Social Research. For Germans educated in the wake of "de-Nazification," the Frankfurt School's attack on bourgeois values, though often couched in arcane phrases, represented an effort to come to terms with the German past. Nonetheless, Frankfurt's total rejection of all thought that affirms a given fact has led to an impasse. Negativity cannot be an end in it; no one can progress intellectually or artistically through a permanent process of negation.
For Jurgen Habermas, the last important representative of the Frankfurt School, the Real is bad in that it does not include from the start all the Good existing in ideal form. Confronted by the imperfect Real, one feels compelled to maximize the Good, to moralize ad extremum in order to minimize the force of evilly encrusted in a real world marked by incompleteness. Imperfect reality must call forth a redeeming revolution. However, this revolution runs the risk of affirming and shaping another categorical class of settings that are imperfectly real things. Habermas rejects great global revolutions that initiate new eras. Instead he prefers sporadic micro-revolutions that inaugurate ages of permanent corrections, small injections of the Good into the sociopolitical tissue inevitably tainted by the Bad. Nonetheless, the world of political philosophy cannot rest content with this constant tinkering, but this dogged adherence to reform without limitation, as this social engineering without substance. The suspicions of Nazism weighing heavily on Nietzscheism and the impossibility of keeping philosophy at the level of permanent negation make it necessary to reject the obsession with the proto-Nazi Nietzsche and the Frankfurt School's negative attitude toward any given.
Nietzsche has had his share of Nazi interpreters. Philosophers who fellow-travelled with the Nazis often made kind references to his thought. Yet recent scholarship shows that Nietzsche found not only Nazi admirers but also socialist and leftist ones. In Nietzsche in German Politics and Society 1890-1918 (1983), the British Professor R. Hinton Thomas demonstrates the close relationship between Nietzsche and German socialism. Thomas deals with Nietzsche's impact in Imperial Germany on social democratic circles, on anarchists and feminists, and on the youth’s movement. This produced, on balance more resolute enemies of the Third Reich than Nazi cadres. Thomas shows that Nietzsche helped shape a libertarian ideology during the rise of the German social democratic movement. At the urging of August Bebel, the famed German socialist, the infant Social Democratic Party in 1875 adopted the Gotha Program, which sought to achieve redistributionist aims through legal means. In 1878 the government enacted anti-socialist laws, which curbed the party's activities. In 1890, with the Erfurt Program, the party took on a harder revolutionary cast in conformity with Marxist doctrine. Social democracy subsequently oscillated between strict legalism, also known as "revisionism" or "reformism" because it accepted a liberal capitalist society, and a rhetorical commitment to revolution accompanied by demands for far-reaching changes.
According to Thomas, this second tendency remained a minority position but incorporated Nietzschean elements. A faction of the party, led by Bruno Wille, ridiculed the powerlessness of reformist social democrats. This group, which called it Die Jungen (The Youths), appealed to grass-roots democracy, spoke of the need for more communication within the party, and ended up rejecting its rigid parent. Wille and his friends mocked the conformism of party functionaries, great and small, and the "cage" constituting organized social democracy. The party's stifling constraints subdued the will and thwarted individual self-actualization. Die Jungen exalted "voluntarism," or the exercise of will, which they associated with true socialism. This emphasis on will left little place for the deterministic materialism of Marxism, which the group described as an "enslaving" system.
Kurt Eisner, the leader of the revolutionary socialist Bavarian Republic, devoted his first book in 1919 to the philosophy of Nietzsche. Though he criticized the "megalomania" that he found in Thus Spake Zarathustra, he also praised its aristocratic ideals. The aristocratic values found in Nietzsche, he said, had to be put at the service of the people, not treated as ends in themselves. Gustav Landauer (1870-1919), another founder of the Bavarian "Red Republic," emphasized Nietzschean voluntarism in his training of political revolutionaries. Landauer's original anarchistic individualism became more communitarian and populist during the course of his political career, approaching the folkish, nationalist thinking of his enemies. Landauer died in the streets of Munich fighting the soldiers of the Freikorp, a group of paramilitary adventurers who were classified as "rightist" but who shared very much of Landauer's outlook.
Contrary to a later persistent misconception, Nietzsche aroused suspicion on the nationalist Right at the end of the nineteenth century. According to Thomas, this was because Nietzsche mocked many things German, (which offended the pan-Germanists), was generally contemptuous of politics, had no enthusiasm for nationalism, and fell out with the composer Richard Wagner, a fervent and anti-Semitic German nationalist.
Nietzsche's vitalist concepts and naturalist vocabulary may account for his early support on the European Left and for his later popularity on the non-Christian Right. Nietzsche's emphases on will and his affirmation of an ethic of creativity have had diverse appeal. In his concise work, Helmut Pfotenhauer assesses Nietzsche's legacy from the point of view of physiology, a term with a naturalistic connotation. This word appears frequently in Nietzsche's work in the phrase Kunst als Physiologie, art as physiology.
The great French writer Balzac, who coined the phrase "physiology of marriage," said about this neologism: "Physiology was formerly the science dealing with the mechanism of the coccyx, the progress of the fetus, or the life of the tapeworm. Today physiology is the art of speaking and writing incorrectly about anything." In the nineteenth century the term physiology was associated with a type of popular literature such as the garrulous serials in daily newspapers. Physiology was intended to classify the main features of daily life. Thus there was a physiology of the stroller or of the English tourist pacing up and down Paris boulevards. In that sense physiology has some limited relationship to the zoological classifications of Buffon or Linnaeas. In his Comedie humaine, Balzac draws a parallel between the animal world and human society. "Political zoology" is used by various nineteenth-century writers, including Gustave Flaubert and Edgar Allen Poe. Nietzsche was aware of the literary and scientific usage of physiology. He noted that the physiological style was invading universities and that the vocabulary of his time was embellished with terms drawn from biology. One wonders why Nietzsche resorted to the term physiology when he believed that it was often used carelessly.
In Pfotenhauer's view, Nietzsche had no intention of giving respectability to the pseudoscientific or pseudo-aesthetic excesses of the "physiologists" of his day. His intention, as interpreted by Pfotenhauer, was to challenge an established form of aesthetics. He constructed the expression "physiology of the art," insofar as the arts were conventionally approached as mere objects of contemplation. From Nietzsche's perspective, artistic productivity is an expression of our nature and ultimately of Nature itself. Through art, Nature becomes more active within us.
By using the term physiology Nietzsche was making a didactic point. He celebrated the exuberance of vital forces, while frowning on any attempt to neutralize the vital processes by giving a value to the average. In other words, Nietzsche rejected those sciences that limited their investigations to the averages, excluding the singular and exceptional. Nietzsche though that Charles Darwin, by limiting himself to broad classes in his biology, favoured the generic without focussing on the exceptional individual. Nietzsche saw physiology as a tool to do for the individual confronting existential questions what Darwin had accomplished as a classifier of entire phyla and species. He attempted to analyse clinically the struggle of superior individuals for self-fulfilment in a world without inherent metaphysical meaning.
"God is dead" is an aphorism identified with Nietzsche. Nietzsche believed that, together with God, all important ontological and metaphysical systems had died. Only the innocence of human destiny remained, and he did not want it to be frozen in some "superior unity of being." Recognizing the reign of destiny, he thought, involved certain risks. In the river of changing life, creative geniuses run the risk of drowning, of being only fragmentary and contingent moments. How can anyone gladly say "yes" to life without an assurance that his achievements will be preserved, not simply yielded to the natural rhythms of destiny? Perhaps the query of Silene to King Midas is well-established. "Is this fleeting life worth being lived? Would it not have been better had we not been born?" Would it not be ideal to die as quickly as possible?
These questions pick up the theme of Arthur Schopenhauer, the famous philosopher of pessimism. The hatred of life that flowed from Schopenhauer's pessimism was unsatisfactory to Nietzsche. He believed that in an age of spiritual confusion the first necessity was to affirm life itself. This is the meaning of "the transvaluations of all values" as understood by Pfotenhauer. Nietzsche's teachings about the will were intended to accomplish the task of reconstructing values. The creative exercise of will was both an object of knowledge and an attitude of the knowing subject. The vital processes were to be perceived from the point of view of constant creativity.
Though the abundance of creative energy, man can assume divine characteristics. The one who embraces his own destiny without any resentment or hesitation turns himself into an embodiment of that destiny. Life should express itself in all its mobility and fluctuation, immobilizing or freezing it into a system was an assault on creativity. The destiny that Nietzsche urged his readers to embrace was to be a source of creative growth. The philosopher was a "full-scale artist" who organized the world in the face of chaos and spiritual decline. Nietzsche's use of physiology was an attempt to endow vital processes with an appropriate language. Physiology expressed the intended balance between Nature and mere rationality.
Myth, for Nietzsche, had no ethnological point of reference. It was, says Pfotenhauer, the "science of the concrete" and the expression of the tragedy resulting from the confrontation between man's physical fragility (Hinfalligkeit) and his heroic possibilities. Resorting to myth was not a lapse into folk superstition, as the rationalists believed it to be. It was moderately an attempt to see man's place within Nature.
Pfotenhauer systematically explored the content of Nietzsche's library, finding "vitalist" arguments drawn from popular treatments of science. The themes that riveted Nietzsche's attention were: Adaptation, the increase of potential within the same living species, references to vital forces, corrective eugenics, and spontaneous generation. Nietzsche's ideas were drawn from the scientific or parascientific speculations of his time and from literary, cultural, and artistic tracts. He criticized the imitative classicism of some French authors and praised the profuse style of the Baroque. In the philosopher's eyes, the creativity of genius and rich personalities had more value than mere elegant conversation. Uncertainty, associated with the ceaseless production of life, meant more to him than the search for certainty, which always implied a static perfection. On the basis of this passion for spiritual adventure he founded a "new hierarchization of values." The man who internalized the search for spiritual adventure anticipated the "superman," about whom so much has been said. Pfotenhauer's Nietzsche is made to represent the position that the creative man allies himself with the power of vital impulse against stagnant ideas, accepting destiny's countless differences and despising limitations. Nietzschean man does not react with anguish in the face of fated change.
Nietzsche had no desire to inaugurate a worry-free era. Instead, he responded to the symptoms of a declining Christian culture by criticizing society from the standpoint of creative and heroic fatalism. This criticism, which refuses to accept the world as it is, claims to be formative and affirmative: it represents a will to create new forms of existence. Nietzsche substituted an innovative criticism affirming destiny for an older classical view based on fixed concepts. Nietzsche's criticism does not include an irrational return to a historic and unformed existence. Nietzsche, as presented by Pfotenhauer, constructs his own physiology of man's nature as a creative being.
To begin with, there are some obvious general parallels between Nietzsche and Sartre that few commentators would wish to dispute. Both are vehement atheists who resolutely face up to the fact that the cosmos has no inherent meaning or purpose. Unlike several other thinkers, they do not even try to replace the dead God of Christian theology with talk of Absolute Spirit or Being. In one of only two brief references to Nietzsche in Being and Nothingness, Sartre upholds his rejection of "the illusion of worlds-behind-the-scene”; That is, the notion that there is a Platonic true world of noumenal being which stand behind becoming and reduces phenomena to the status of mere illusion or appearance. Both thinkers also insist that it be human beings who create moral values and attempt to give meaning to life. Sartre speaks ironically of the "serious" men who think that values have an absolute objective existence, while Nietzsche regards people who passively accept the values they have been taught as sheep-like members of the herd.
When we attempt a deeper explanation of the ultimate source of values, the relationship between Sartre and Nietzsche becomes more problematic. Nietzsche says that out of a nation (or people’s) tablet of good and evil speaks "the voice of their will to power.” For Sartre, the values that we adopt or posits are part of our fundamental project, which is to achieve justified being and become in-itself-for-itself. It appears, therefore, that both thinkers regard man as an essentially Faustian striver, and that grouping Sartre with Nietzsche as a proponent of would not be unfair "will to power.” Clearly, Sartre would object to such a Nietzschean characterization of his existential psychoanalysis. In Being and Nothingness he rejects all theories that attempt to explain individual behaviour in terms of general substantive drives, and he is particularly critical of such notions as the libido and the will to power. Sartre insists that these are not psycho-biological entities, but original projects like any other that the individual can negate through his or her freedom. He denies that striving for power is a general characteristic of human beings, denies the existence of any opaque and permanent will-entity within consciousness, and even denies that human beings have any fixed nature or essence.
However, Sartre's criticisms of the will to power are only applicable to popular misunderstandings of Nietzsche's thought. Like the for-itself, Nietzsche's "will" should not be regarded as a substantive entity. Although it is derived from the metaphysical theories of Schopenhauer and is sometimes spoken of in ways that invite ontologizing, Nietzsche's conception of the will is predominantly adjectival and phenomenological. Its status is similar to that of Sartre's for-itself, which should not be considered a metaphysical entity even though it is a remote descendent of the "thinking substance" of Descartes. Thus, in Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche criticizes the unjustified metaphysical assumptions that are bound up with the Cartesian "I think" and the Schopenhauerian "I will" he says that "willing seems to me to be above all something complicated, something that is a unity only as a word.” Although there are passages in the writings of both Sartre and Nietzsche that can be interpreted metaphysically if taken out of context, regarding is better "nothingness" and "will" as alternate adjectival descriptions of our being.
Although Nietzsche's use of the word "power" invites misunderstanding, he clearly uses the term in a broad sense and has a sophisticated conception of power. Nietzsche is not claiming that everyone really wants political power or dominion over other people. Nietzsche describes philosophy as "the most spiritual will to power," and regards the artist as a higher embodiment of the will to power than either the politician or the conqueror. Through his theory Nietzsche can account for a wide variety of human behaviour without being reductionist. Thus, a follower may subordinate himself to a leader or group to feel empowered, and even the perverse or negative behaviour of the ascetic priest or embittered moralist can be accounted for in terms of the will to power.
Nietzsche speaks of "power" in reaction to the 19th century moral theorists who insisted that men strive for utility or pleasure. The connotations of "power" are broader and richer, suggesting that a human being is more than a calculative "economic man" whose desires could be satisfied with the utopian comforts of a Brave New World. Nietzsche's meaning could also be brought out by speaking of a will toward a self-realization, (one of his favourite mottoes was "Become what you are!") or, by thinking of "power" as a psychic energy or potentiality whose possession "empowers" us to aspire, strive, and create.
In Being and Nothingness, Sartre presents himself as the discoverer of the full scope of human freedom, contrasting his seemingly open and indeterminate conception of human possibilities with a psychological and philosophical tradition that limits human nature by positing "opaque" drives and goals and insisting on their universality. Such an image of Sartre is widely held, although his insistence that consciousness strives to become in-itself-for-it gives his view of man of the greater determinatives, than a cursory glance at some of his philosophical rhetoric and literary works would suggest. For this reason, Sartre can profitably be related to other theorists who argue that man is motivated by a unitary force or strives for a single goal.
When evaluating such theories, the really essential distinction is between those that are open, inclusive and empirically indeterminate, and those that are narrow and reductionist. This could be illustrated by comparing the narrow utilitarianism of Bentham to Mill's broader development of the theory, or by contrasting Freud and Jung's conception of the libido. While Freud was resolutely reductionist and insisted that "the name of libido be properly reserved for the instinctual forces of sexual life," Jung broadened the term to refer to all manifestations of instinctual psychic energy. Thus, Sartre appears revolutionary when he contrasts him with Freud although he cannot legitimately claim that his view of man is more open or less reductionist than that of Nietzsche. Most likely, Sartre and many of his commentators would take issue with the above conclusion, and from a certain perspective their criticisms are justified. Unlike Nietzsche, Sartre is intent on upholding man's absolute freedom, rejecting the influence of instinct, denying the existence of unconscious psychic forces, and portraying consciousness as a nothingness that has no essence. In comparison even with other non-reductionist views of man, then, it would seem that the radical nature of Sartre's thought is unmatched.
However, in a more fundamental respect Sartre's ontology limits human possibilities by: (1) declaring that consciousness is a lack that is doomed to strive for fulfilment and justification vainly, and by (2) accepting important parts of the Platonic view of becoming as ontologically given rather than merely as aspects of his own original project. It is in this way that Sartre's philosophy becomes shipwrecked on reefs that Nietzsche manages to avoid.
For Sartre, "the for-it is defined ontologically as a lack of being," and "freedom is really synonymous with lack.” 6 Along with Plato he equates desire with a lack of being, but in contrast with Hegel he arrives at the pessimistic conclusion that "human reality therefore is by nature an unhappy consciousness with no possibility of surpassing its unhappy state.” In other words, the human condition is basically Sisyphean, for man is condemned to strive to fill his inner emptiness but is incapable of achieving justified being. This desire to become in-self-for-it, which Sartre also refers to as the project of being God, is said to define man and come "close to being the same as a human `nature' or an `essence'".8 Sartre tries to reconcile this universal project with freedom by claiming that our wish to be in-it-for-itself determines only the meaning of human desire but does not constitute it empirically. However such freedom is tainted, for no matter what we do empirically we can . . . neither avoid futile striving nor achieve an authentic sense of satisfaction, plenitude, joy, or fulfilment.
In Part Four of Being and Nothingness, Sartre describes how consciousness endeavours to create for its lack of being by striving to acquire and acknowledge the world. With the apparent reductionistic vehemence, he explains a variety of human behaviour in terms of the insatiable desire to consume, acquire, dominate, violate, and destroy. Sartre says that knowledge and discovery are appropriative enjoyments, and he characterizes the scientist as a sort of intellectual peeping Tom who wants to strip away the veils of nature and deflower her with his Look. Similarly, He says that the artist wants to produce substantive being that exists through him, and that the skier seeks to possess the field of snow and conquer the slope. Thus art, science, and play are all activities of appropriation, which either wholly or in part seek to possess the absolute being of the in-itself. Destruction is also an appropriative function. Sartre says that "a gift is a primitive form of destruction," describes giving as "a keen, brief enjoyment, almost sexual," and declares that "to give is to enslave.” He even interprets smoking as "the symbolic equivalent of destructively appropriating the entire world.”
Aside from the sweeping and one-sided nature of Sartre's claims, the most striking aspect of this section is the negativity of its account of human beings. Not only are we condemned to dissatisfaction, but some of our noblest endeavours are unmasked as pointless appropriation and destruction. One is reminded not of Nietzsche's will to power, but of Heidegger's scathing criticism of the "will to power" (interpreted popularly) as the underlying metaphysics of our era that embodies all that is most despicable about modernity. For Heidegger, it is such an insatiable will that occurs of an embodied quest to subjugate nature, mechanize the world, and enjoy ever-increasing material progress.
However, while Sartre speaks of consciousness as nothingness or a lack - a sort of black hole in being which can never be filled - Nietzsche associates’ man's being with positivity and plenitude. His preferred metaphor for the human essence be the will -an active image that allows striving and creativity to be reconciled with plenitude. It enables him to see activity and desire as a positive aspect of our nature, rather than a comparatively desperate attempt to fill the hole at the heart of our being. For Nietzsche, all that proceeds from weakness, sickness, inferiority, or lack is considered reactive and resentful, while that which proceeds from health, strength, or plenitude is characterized in positive terms. For instance, at the beginning of Thus Spoke Zarathustra he likens Zarathustra to a full cup wanting to overflow and to the sun that gives its light out of plenitude and superabundance. Later, he contrasts the generosity of the gift-giving virtue with the all-too-poor and hungry selfishness of the sick, which greedily "sizes up those who have much to eat" and always "sneaks around the table of those who give.”
An even sharper contrast can be drawn between Nietzsche and Sartre's attitudes towards Platonism. While both reject the transcendent realm of perfect forms, Sartre fails to realize that a denial of the truth-value of Platonic metaphysics without a corresponding rejection of Platonic aspirations and attitudes can only lead to pessimism and resentment against being. The inadequacy and incompleteness of Sartre's break with Platonism can be brought out by examining it in terms of William James conception of the common nucleus of religion. James says that the religious attitude fundamentally involves (1) "an uneasiness" or, the "sense that there is something wrong about us as we naturally stand," and (2) "its solution.” Sartre vehemently rejects all religious and metaphysical "solutions," but he accepts the notion that there is ‘an essential wrongness’ or, lack in being. Not only does he regard consciousness as a lack, but in Nausea, Sartre condemns the wrongness of nature and other people in terms that are both Platonic and resentful
Just as Plato admired the mathematical orderliness of music and looked down upon nature as a fluctuating and imperfect copy of the forms, the central contrast of Nausea is between the sharp, precise, inflexible order of a jazz song, and the lack of order and purpose of a chestnut tree. Roquentin enjoys virtually his only moments of joy in the novel while listening to the jazz, but experiences his deepest nausea while sitting beneath the tree. He regards its root as a "black, knotty mass, entirely beastly," speaks of the abundance of nature as "dismal, ailing, embarrassed at itself," and asks "what good are so many duplications of trees?".Nothing could be a more striking blasphemy against nature. Trees are one of the most venerable and life-giving of all organic beings, providing us with oxygen and shade. Many ancient peoples regarded trees as sacred, and enlightenment (from the insight of the Buddha to Newton's discovery of gravitation) is often pictured as coming while sitting under a tree. Roquentin too, experiences a sort of negative epiphany while he is beneath the chestnut tree. He concludes that "every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance".18 In contrast to the pointlessness of the tree and other existing organic beings, Sartre says that a perfect circle is not absurd because "it is clearly explained by the rotation of a straight segment around one of its extremities.” In such a Platonic spirit, he reflects:
If you existed, you had to exist all the way, as far as mouldiness, bloatedness, obscenities were concerned. In another world, circles, bars of music keep their pure and rigid lines.
In Nausea, Sartre reveals a contempt for human beings that surpasses his contempt for nature and even rivals the misanthropy of Schopenhauer. He particularly despises the organic, biological aspect of our nature. He speaks of living creatures as "flabby masses which move spontaneously," and seems to have a particular aversion for fleshy, overweight people. He mocks at "the fat, pale crowd," describes a bourgeois worthy in the Bouville gallery as "defenceless, bloated, slobbering, vaguely obscene," and recalls a "terrible heat wave that turned men into pools of melting fat.” Sartre also feels that people are somehow diminished while eating. Roquentin is glad when the Self-Taught Man is served his dinner for "his soul leaves his eyes, and he docilely begins to eat.” Hugo thinks that Olga offers him food because "it keeps the other person at a distance," and "when a man is eating, he seems harmless.” Sartre also takes a negative view of sensuality. Roquentin says of young lovers in a café that they make him a little sick, and his account of sex with the patronne includes the fact that "she disgusts me a little" and that his arm went to sleep while playing "distractedly with her sex under the cover.” Perhaps his attitude toward sensuality is most uncharitably manifested when he thinks of a woman that he once show had been dining, remembering her as, a "fat, hot, sensual, absurd, with red ears," and imagines her now somewhere - in the midst of smells? - this soft throat rubbing up luxuriously against smooth stuffs, nestling in lace, and the woman picturing her bosom under her blouse, thinking "My titties, my lovely fruits."
Throughout Nausea the narrator's attitude toward people is uncharitable, judgemental, and resentful. Like the tolerably hostile Other of Being and Nothingness, Roquentin transcends and objectifies other people with his Look. He sits in cafes observing and passing judgement on people, and seems particularly to enjoy dehumanizing others by focussing on their unattractive physical features. He sees one fellow as a moustache beneath "enormous nostrils that could pump air for a whole family and that eat up half his face," while another person is described as "a young man with a face like a dog.” He treats the Self-Taught Man (whom Sartre uses to caricature humanism) coldly and condescendingly and does not even deem him worthy of a proper name. His attitude toward the eminent bourgeois portrayed in the Bouville gallery is an almost classic example of ressentiment. While looking at their portraits, he felt that their "judgement went through (him) like a sword and questioned (his) very right to exist" Like Hugo in Dirty Hands, he senses the emptiness of his own existence and feels inadequate and abnormal before the Look of purposeful and self-confident others who unreflectively feel that they have a right to exist. However, he manages to transcend their looks by concentrating on their bodily weaknesses and all-too-human faults. Thus, he overcomes one dead worthy by focussing on his "thin mouth of a dead snake" and pale, round, flabby checks, and he puts a reactionary politician in his place by recalling that the man was only five feet tall, had a squeaking voice, was accused of putting rubber lifts in his shoes, and had a wife who looked like a horse. Roquentin hates the bourgeois, but for him virtually all the people of Bouville are bourgeois:
Idiots. Thinking that I am going to see they are thick is repugnant to me, self-satisfied faces. They make laws, they write popular novels, they get married, they are fools enough to have children. Although Sartre is more insightful than the unreflective and self-satisfied "normal" people whom he judges so uncharitably, he seems unaware that his own thought fails to escape the ancient reefs of Platonism and metaphysical pessimism. Even the upbeat ending of Nausea is comparatively tentative and half-hearted, and does not question or overturn any of the ontological views expressed earlier in the book.
On the other hand, although Nietzsche shares many of the same philosophical premises as Sartre, his view of life and nature is much less bleak because he thoroughly rejects the Platonic world-view and all metaphysical forms of pessimism. First, throughout his writings Nietzsche vehemently opposes the Platonic prejudice that puts being above becoming, idealizes rationality and purpose, and despises the disorderly flux of nature and the organic and animalistic aspects of the body. He admires Heraclitus rather than Parmenides, denies that there is any "eternal spider or spider web of reason," and declares "over all things stand the heaven Accident, the heaven Innocence, the heaven Chance, the heaven Prankishness.” Unlike Sartre, he had a high regard for the vital, superabundant, and non-rational aspect of nature, and loved music for its ability to express emotional depths and Dionysian ecstasy rather than as an embodiment of reason, order, or precision.
In response to Schopenhauer and several religious traditions, Nietzsche refutes metaphysical pessimism. He denies that life or nature is essentially lacking or evil, or that any negative evaluation of being as a whole could possess truth-value. This is in keeping with his sceptical position, which denies that the thing-in-itself is knowable and insists that all philosophical systems reflect the subjectivity of their author and are "a kind of involuntary and incognizant memoir.” If Nietzsche were to speak in the language of Being and Nothingness, he would insist that the desire to achieve the complete and justified being of the in-itself-for-itself be simply Sartre's original project, not an ontological given that condemns every person to unhappy consciousness.
One of the central themes of Thus Spoke Zarathustra is the overcoming of pessimism and despair through the will. Zarathustra says that "my will always comes to me as my liberator and joy-bringer. Willing discharges, that which is the true teaching of will and liberty.” At the end of `The Tomb Song,' he turns to his will to overcome despair, referring it as something invulnerable and unburiable that can redeem his youth and shatter tombs. Although the will to power is often associated with striving for the overman (not to mention those who wrongly link it with domination and conquest), it is also essential to such Nietzschean themes as amor fati, eternal recurrence, and the affirmation of life. In order to affirm his existence, Zarathustra says that he must redeem the past by transforming "the will's ill will against time, as it was" into a creative "But thus I will it; Thus shall I will it" It is out of such reflections that the project of embracing eternal recurrence emerges.
In keeping with his desire to affirm life, Nietzsche's attitude toward other people is more charitable and less negative than that of Roquentin and many of Sartre's other literary heroes. Admittedly, Nietzsche makes many nasty remarks about historical figures, but these are often balanced by corresponding positive observations, and most of his polemical fury is directed against ideas, dogmas, and institutions rather than individuals. For instance, Zarathustra says of priests that "though they are my enemies, pass by them silently with sleeping swords. Among them too there are heroes.” While some of his comments on the rabble are comparable to Sartre's comments on the bourgeois, Zarathustra also criticizes his "ape" who sits outside a great city and vengefully denounces its inhabitants, for "where one can no longer love, there must be, at least of One by which should pass.”
God is dead. The terror with which this event - and he did call it an event - filled Nietzsche is hardly understood any more. Yet to that latecomer in a long line of theologians and believers it meant the disapperance of meaning from the sentiment of life. This, as Nietzsche feared, pointed the way to nihilism. “A nihilist,” he wrote, “is a person who says of the world as it is, that it better were not, and, with regard to the world as it should be, that it does not and cannot exist.” And it does not exist because God is no more. Therefore, there cannot be any belief in a beyond, an ineffable life beyond the grave, not even in the possibility of that “godless” peace of Buddha and Schopenhauer that is indistinguishable from the peace of God and attainable only through the overcoming of all worldly desires and aspirations.
Nihilism, Nietzsche believes, is the fate of all religious traditions if along the road their fundamental assumptions are lost. This, according to him, is so with Judaism because of its all-persuasive “Thou shalt not” that, in the long run, can be accepted and obeyed only within a rigorously disciplined community of the faithful; and it is so with Christianity, not only because it was, to a large extent, heir to the Jewish moralism but, at the same time, tended to judge the whole domain of the natural to be a conspiracy against the divine spirit. For the Christian, the Here and Now with its deceptive promises of happiness - all of which promise, when it comes to it, an inevitable loss, and with its illusions of achievement, all of which conceal for a while the imminence of failure - is nothing but the testing ground for the soul to prove that it deserves the bliss of the Beyond. Nietzsche, like many before him, is philosophically outraged by this doctrine that conceives of Eternity as, at some point, taking over from Time, projecting it into endlessness, and of Time for being an outsider to the Eternity and, after the death of God, forever an exile from it. Everything, therefore, exists only for a while in its individual articulation and then never more. From this void, the black hole, there arises Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence. It is to cure time of its mortal disease, its terminal destructiveness.
Of those modern thinkers who resolutely face the fact that God is dead and the universe contains no inherent meaning or purpose, and Sartre and Nietzsche follow among the most important. However, although they begin from nearly similar premises, Sartre is both less radical and less life-affirming of a thinker than Nietzsche. It is particularly ironic that he puts so much emphasis on freedom, and yet refuses to grant consciousness the power to overcome its insatiable yearning to be in-itself-for-itself, and fails to question his own Platonic prejudices against nature and becoming. Since scientists, during the nineteenth century were engrossed with uncovering the workings of external reality and seemingly knew of themselves that these virtually overflowing burdens of nothing, in that were about the physical substrates of human consciousness, the business of examining the distributive contribution in dynamic functionality and structural foundation of mind became the province of social scientists and humanists. Adolphe Quételet proposed a ‘social physics’ that could serve as the basis for a new discipline called sociology, and his contemporary Auguste Comte concluded that a true scientific understanding of the social reality was quite inevitable. Mind, in the view of these figures, was a separate and distinct mechanism subject to the lawful workings of a mechanical social reality.
More formal European philosophers, such as Immanuel Kant, sought to reconcile representations of external reality in mind with the motions of matter-based on the dictates of pure reason. This impulse was also apparent in the utilitarian ethics of Jerry Bentham and John Stuart Mill, in the historical materialism of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and in the pragmatism of Charles Smith, William James and John Dewey. These thinkers were painfully aware, however, of the inability of reason to posit a self-consistent basis for bridging the gap between mind and matter, and each remains obliged to conclude that the realm of the mental exists only in.
The fatal flaw of pure reason is, of course, the absence of emotion, and purely explanations of the division between subjective reality and external reality, of which had limited appeal outside the community of intellectuals. The figure most responsible for infusing our understanding of the Cartesian dualism with contextual representation of our understanding with emotional content was the death of God theologian Friedrich Nietzsche 1844-1900. After declaring that God and ‘divine will’, did not exist, Nietzsche reified the ‘existence’ of consciousness in the domain of subjectivity as the ground for individual ‘will’ and summarily reducing all previous philosophical attempts to articulate the ‘will to truth’. The dilemma, forth in, had seemed to mean, by the validation, . . . as accredited for doing of science, in that the claim that Nietzsche’s earlier versions to the ‘will to truth’, disguises the fact that all alleged truths were arbitrarily created in and are expressed or manifesting the individualism of ‘will’.
In Nietzsche’s view, the separation between mind and matter is more absolute and total than previously been imagined. Based on the assumption that there is no really necessary correspondence between linguistic constructions of reality in human subjectivity and external reality, he deuced that we are all locked in ‘a prison house of language’. The prison as he concluded it, was also a ‘space’ where the philosopher can examine the ‘innermost desires of his nature’ and articulate a new message of individual existence founded on ‘will’.
Those who fail to enact their existence in this space, Nietzsche says, are enticed into sacrificing their individuality on the nonexistent altars of religious beliefs and democratic or socialists’ ideals and become, therefore, members of the anonymous and docile crowd. Nietzsche also invalidated the knowledge claims of science in the examination of human subjectivity. “Science,” he said, “is not exclusive to natural phenomenons and favoured reductionistic examination of phenomena at the expense of mind? It also seeks to reduce the separateness and uniqueness of mind with mechanistic descriptions that disallow and basis for the free exercise of individual will.
Nietzsche’s emotionally charged defence of intellectual freedom and radial empowerment of mind as the maker and transformer of the collective fictions that shape human reality in a soulless mechanistic universe proved terribly influential on twentieth-century thought. Furthermore, Nietzsche sought to reinforce his view of the subjective character of scientific knowledge by appealing to an epistemological crisis over the foundations of logic and arithmetic that arose during the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Through a curious course of events, attempted by Edmund Husserl 1859-1938, a German mathematician and a principal founder of Phenomenology, wherefor to resolve this crisis resulted in a view of the character of consciousness that closely resembled that of Nietzsche.
Husserl and Martin Heidegger, were both influential figures of the French atheistic existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. The work of Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre became foundational to that of the principal architects of philosophical postmodernism, and deconstructionist Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. It obvious attribution of a direct linkage between the nineteenth-century crisis about the epistemological foundations of mathematical physics and the origin of philosophical postmodernism served to perpetuate the Cartesian two-world dilemma in an even more oppressive form. It also allows us better to understand the origins of cultural ambience and the ways in which they could resolve that conflict.
The mechanistic paradigm of the late nineteenth century was the one Einstein came to know when he studied physics. Most physicists believed that it represented an eternal truth, but Einstein was open to fresh ideas. Inspired by Mach’s critical mind, he demolished the Newtonian ideas of space and time and replaced them with new, “relativistic” notions.
In quantum field theory, potential vibrations at each point in the four fields are capable of manifesting themselves in their complemtarity, their expression as individual particles. And the interactions of the fields result from the exchange of quanta that are carriers of the fields. The carriers of the field, known as messenger quanta, are the ‘coloured’ gluons for the strong-binding-force, of which the photon for electromagnetism, the intermediate boson for the weak force, and the graviton or gravitation. If we could re-create the energies present in the fist trillionths of trillionths of a second in the life of the universe, these four fields would, according to quantum field theory, become one fundamental field.
The movement toward a unified theory has evolved progressively from super-symmetry to super-gravity to string theory. In string theory the one-dimensional trajectories of particles, illustrated in the Feynman lectures, seem as if, in at all were possible, are replaced by the two-dimensional orbits of a string. In addition to introducing the extra dimension, represented by a smaller diameter of the string, string theory also features another mall but non-zero constant, with which is analogous to Planck’s quantum of action. Since the value of the constant is quite small, it can be generally ignored but at extremely small dimensions. But since the constant, like Planck’s constant is not zero, this results in departures from ordinary quantum field theory in very small dimensions.
Part of what makes string theory attractive is that it eliminates, or ‘transforms away’, the inherent infinities found in the quantum theory of gravity. And if the predictions of this theory are proven valid in repeatable experiments under controlled conditions, it could allow gravity to be unified with the other three fundamental interactions. But even if string theory leads to this grand unification, it will not alter our understanding of ave-particle duality. While the success of the theory would reinforce our view of the universe as a unified dynamic process, it applies to very small dimensions, and therefore, does not alter our view of wave-particle duality.
While the formalism of quantum physics predicts that correlations between particles over space-like inseparability, of which are possible, it can say nothing about what this strange new relationship between parts (quanta) and the whole (cosmos) cause to result outside this formalism. This does not, however, prevent us from considering the implications in philosophical terms. As the philosopher of science Errol Harris noted in thinking about the special character of wholeness in modern physics, a unity without internal content is a blank or empty set and is not recognizable as a whole. A collection of merely externally related parts does not constitute a whole in that the parts will not be “mutually adaptive and complementary to one-another.”
Wholeness requires a complementary relationship between unity and difference and is governed by a principle of organization determining the interrelationship between parts. This organizing principle must be universal to a genuine whole and implicit in all parts constituting the whole, even the whole is exemplified only in its parts. This principle of order, Harris continued, “is nothing really in and of itself. It is the way he parts are organized, and another constituent additional to those that constitute the totality.”
In a genuine whole, the relationship between the constituent parts must be “internal or immanent” in the parts, as opposed to a more spurious whole in which parts appear to disclose wholeness dur to relationships that are external to the arts. The collection of parts that would allegedly constitute the whole in classical physics is an example of a spurious whole. Parts continue a genuine whole when the universal principle of order is inside the parts and hereby adjusts each to all so that they interlock and become mutually complementary. This not only describes the character of the whole revealed in both relativity theory and quantum mechanics. It is also consistent with the manner in which we have begun to understand the relations between parts and whole in modern biology.
Modern physics also reveals, claimed Harris, complementary relationship between the differences between parts that constitute and the universal ordering principle that are immanent in each part. While the whole cannot be finally disclosed in the analysis of the parts, the study of the differences between parts provides insights into the dynamic structure of the whole present in each part. The part can never, however, be finally isolated from the web of relationships that discloses the interconnections with the whole, and any attempt to do so results in ambiguity.
Much of the ambiguity in attempts to explain the character of wholes in both physics and biology derives from the assumption that order exists between or outside parts. Yet order in complementary relationships between difference and sameness in any physical event is never external to that event, and the cognations are immanent in the event. From this perspective, the addition of non-locality to this picture of the distributive constitution in dynamic function of wholeness is not surprising. The relationships between part, as quantum event apparent in observation or measurement, and the undissectable whole, calculate on in but are not described by the instantaneous correlations between measurements in space-like separate regions, is another extension of the part-whole complementarity in modern physics.
If the universe is a seamlessly interactive system that evolves to higher levels of complex and complicating regularities of which ae lawfully emergent in property of systems, we can assume that the cosmos is a single significant whole that evinces progressive order in complementary relations to its parts. Given that this whole exists in some sense within all parts (quanta), one can then argue that in operates in self-reflective fashion and is the ground from all emergent plexuities. Since human consciousness evinces self-reflective awareness in te human brain (well protected between the cranium walls) and since this brain, like all physical phenomena, can be viewed as an emergent property of the whole, it is unreasonable to conclude, in philosophical terms at least, that the universe is conscious.
Nevertheless, since the actual character of this seamless whole cannot be represented or reduced to its parts, it lies, quite laterally, beyond all human representation or descriptions. If one chooses to believe that the universe be a self-reflective and self-organizing whole, this lends no support whatsoever to conceptual representation of design, meaning, purpose, intent, or plan associated with mytho-religious or cultural heritage. However, if one does not accept this view of the universe, there is noting in the scientific description of nature that can be used to refute this position. On the other hand, it is no longer possible to argue that a profound sense of unity with the whole, which has long been understood as foundation of religious experiences, but can be dismissed, undermined, or invalidated with appeals to scientific knowledge.
While we have consistently tried to distinguish between scientific knowledge and philosophical speculation based on this of what is obtainable, let us be quite clear on one point - there is no empirically valid causal linkage between the former and the latter. Those who wish to dismiss the speculative base on which is obviously free to do as done. However, there is another conclusion to be drawn, in that is firmly grounded in scientific theory and experiment there is no basis in the scientific descriptions of nature for believing in the radical Cartesian division between mind and world sanctioned by classical physics. Clearly, his radical separation between mind and world was a macro-level illusion fostered by limited awareness of the actual character of physical reality nd by mathematical idealizations extended beyond the realms of their applicability.
Nevertheless, the philosophical implications might prove in themselves as a criterial motive in debative consideration to how our proposed new understanding of the relationship between parts and wholes in physical reality might affect the manner in which we deal with some major real-world problems. This will issue to demonstrate why a timely resolution of these problems is critically dependent on a renewed dialogue between members of the cultures of human-social scientists and scientist-engineers. We will also argue that the resolution of these problems could be dependent on a renewed dialogue between science and religion.
As many scholars have demonstrated, the classical paradigm in physics has greatly influenced and conditioned our understanding and management of human systems in economic and political realities. Virtually all models of these realities treat human systems as if they consist of atomized units or parts that interact with one another in terms of laws or forces external to or between the parts. These systems are also viewed as hermetic or closed and, thus, its discreteness, separateness and distinction.
Consider, for example, how the classical paradigm influenced or thinking about economic reality. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the founders of classical economics -figures like Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Thomas Malthus conceived of the economy as a closed system in which intersections between parts (consumer, produces, distributors, etc.) are controlled by forces external to the parts (supply and demand). The central legitimating principle of free market economics, formulated by Adam Smith, is that lawful or law-like forces external to the individual units function as an invisible hand. This invisible hand, said Smith, frees the units to pursue their best interests, moves the economy forward, and in general legislates the behaviour of parts in the best vantages of the whole. (The resemblance between the invisible hand and Newton’s universal law of gravity and between the relations of parts and wholes in classical economics and classical physics should be transparent.)
After roughly 1830, economists shifted the focus to the properties of the invisible hand in the interactions between parts using mathematical models. Within these models, the behaviour of parts in the economy is assumed to be analogous to the awful interactions between pats in classical mechanics. It is, therefore, not surprising that differential calculus was employed to represent economic change in a virtual world in terms of small or marginal shifts in consumption or production. The assumption was that the mathematical description of marginal shifts in the complex web of exchanges between parts (atomized units and quantities) and whole (closed economy) could reveal the lawful, or law-like, machinations of the closed economic system.
These models later became one of the fundamentals for microeconomics. Microeconomics seek to describe interactions between parts in exact quantifiable measures - such as marginal cost, marginal revenue, marginal utility, and growth of total revenue as indexed against individual units of output. In analogy with classical mechanics, the quantities are viewed as initial conditions that can serve to explain subsequent interactions between parts in the closed system in something like deterministic terms. The combination of classical macro-analysis with micro-analysis resulted in what Thorstein Veblen in 1900 termed neoclassical economics - the model for understanding economic reality that is widely used today.
Beginning in the 1939s, the challenge became to subsume the understanding of the interactions between parts in closed economic systems with more sophisticated mathematical models using devices like linear programming, game theory, and new statistical techniques. In spite of the growing mathematical sophistication, these models are based on the same assumptions from classical physics featured in previous neoclassical economic theory - with one exception. They also appeal to the assumption that systems exist in equilibrium or in perturbations from equilibria, and they seek to describe the state of the closed economic system in these terms.
One could argue that the fact that our economic models are assumptions from classical mechanics is not a problem by appealing to the two-domain distinction between micro-level macro-level processes expatiated upon earlier. Since classical mechanic serves us well in our dealings with macro-level phenomena in situations where the speed of light is so large and the quantum of action is so small as to be safely ignored for practical purposes, economic theories based on assumptions from classical mechanics should serve us well in dealing with the macro-level behaviour of economic systems.
The obvious problem, . . . acceded peripherally, . . . nature is relucent to operate in accordance with these assumptions, in that the biosphere, the interaction between parts be intimately related to the hole, no collection of arts is isolated from the whole, and the ability of the whole to regulate the relative abundance of atmospheric gases suggests that the whole of the biota appear to display emergent properties that are more than the sum of its parts. What the current ecological crisis reveal in the abstract virtual world of neoclassical economic theory. The real economies are all human activities associated with the production, distribution, and exchange of tangible goods and commodities and the consumption and use of natural resources, such as arable land and water. Although expanding economic systems in the really economy ae obviously embedded in a web of relationships with the entire biosphere, our measure of healthy economic systems disguises this fact very nicely. Consider, for example, the healthy economic system written in 1996 by Frederick Hu, head of the competitive research team for the World Economic Forum - short of military conquest, economic growth is the only viable means for a country to sustain increases in natural living standards . . . An economy is internationally competitive if it performs strongly in three general areas: Abundant productive ideas from capital, labour, infrastructure and technology, optimal economic policies such as low taxes, little interference, free trade and sound market institutions. Such as the rule of law and protection of property rights.
The prescription for medium-term growth of economies in countries like Russia, Brazil, and China may seem utterly pragmatic and quite sound. But the virtual economy described is a closed and hermetically sealed system in which the invisible hand of economic forces allegedly results in a health growth economy if impediments to its operation are removed or minimized. It is, of course, often trued that such prescriptions can have the desired results in terms of increases in living standards, and Russia, Brazil and China are seeking to implement them in various ways.
In the real economy, however, these systems are clearly not closed or hermetically sealed: Russia uses carbon-based fuels in production facilities that produce large amounts of carbon dioxide and other gases that contribute to global warming: Brazil is in the process of destroying a rain forest that is critical to species diversity and the maintenance of a relative abundance of atmospheric gases that regulate Earth temperature, and China is seeking to build a first-world economy based on highly polluting old-world industrial plants that burn soft coal. Not to forget, . . . the virtual economic systems that the world now seems to regard as the best example of the benefits that can be derived form the workings of the invisible hand, that of the United States, operates in the real economy as one of the primary contributors to the ecological crisis.
In “Consilience,” Edward O. Wilson makes to comment, the case that effective and timely solutions to the problem threatening human survival is critically dependent on something like a global revolution in ethical thought and behaviour. But his view of the basis for this revolution is quite different from our own. Wilson claimed that since the foundations for moral reasoning evolved in what he termed ‘gene-culture’ evolution, the rules of ethical behaviour re emergent aspects of our genetic inheritance. Based on the assumptions that the behaviour of contemporary hunter-gatherers resembles that of our hunter-gatherers forebears in the Palaeolithic Era, he drew on accounts of Bushman hunter-gatherers living in the centre Kalahari in an effort to demonstrate that ethical behaviour is associated with instincts like bonding, cooperation, and altruism.
Wilson argued that these instincts evolved in our hunter-gatherer accessorial descendabilities, whereby genetic mutation and the ethical behaviour associated with these genetically based instincts provided a survival advantage. He then claimed that since these genes were passed on to subsequent generations of our dependable characteristics, which eventually became pervasive in the human genome, the ethical dimension of human nature has a genetic foundation. When we fully understand the “innate epigenetic rules of moral reasoning,” it seems probable that the rules will probably turn out to be an ensemble of many algorithms whose interlocking activities guide the mind across a landscape of nuances moods and choices.
Any reasonable attempt to lay a firm foundation beneath the quagmire of human ethics in all of its myriad and often contradictory formulations is admirable, and Wilson’s attempt is more admirable than most. In our view, however, there is little or no prospect that it will prove successful for a number of reasons. Wile te probability for us to discover some linkage between genes and behaviour, seems that the lightened path of human ethical behaviour and ranging advantages of this behaviour is far too complex, not o mention, inconsistently been reduced to a given set classification of “epigenetic ruled of moral reasoning.”
Also, moral codes and recoding may derive in part from instincts that confer a survival advantage, but when we are the examine to these codes, it also seems clear that they are primarily cultural products. This explains why ethical systems are constructed in a bewildering variety of ways in different cultural contexts and why they often sanction or legitimate quite different thoughts and behaviours. Let us not forget that rules f ethical behaviours are quite malleable and have been used sacredly to legitimate human activities such as slavery, colonial conquest, genocide and terrorism. As Cardinal Newman cryptically put it, “Oh how we hate one another for the love of God.”
According to Wilson, the “human mind evolved to believe in the gods” and people “need a sacred narrative” to his view are merely human constructs and, therefore, there is no basis for dialogue between the world views of science and religion. “Science for its part, will test relentlessly every assumption about the human condition and in time uncover the bedrock of the moral and religiously sentient. The result of the competition between the two world views, is believed, as I, will be the secularization of the human epic and of religion itself.
Wilson obviously has a right to his opinions, and many will agree with him for their own good reasons, but what is most interesting about his thoughtful attempted to posit a more universal basis for human ethics in that it s based on classical assumptions about the character of both physical and biological realities. While Wilson does not argue that human’s behaviour is genetically determined in the strict sense, however, he does allege that there is a causal linkage between genes and behaviour that largely condition this behaviour, he appears to be a firm believer in classical assumption that reductionism can uncover the lawful essences that principally govern the physical aspects attributed to reality, including those associated with the alleged “epigenetic rules of moral reasoning.”
Once, again, Wilson’s view is apparently nothing that cannot be reduced to scientific understandings or fully disclosed in scientific terms, and this apparency of hope for the future of humanity is that the triumph of scientific thought and method will allow us to achieve the Enlightenments ideal of disclosing the lawful regularities that govern or regulate all aspects of human experience. Hence, science will uncover the “bedrock of moral and religious sentiment, and the entire human epic will be mapped in the secular space of scientific formalism.” The intent is not to denigrate Wilson’s attentive efforts to posit a more universal basis for the human condition, but is to demonstrate that any attempt to understand or improve upon the behaviour based on appeals to outmoded classical assumptions is unrealistic and outmoded. If the human mind did, in fact, evolve in something like deterministic fashion in gene-culture evolution - and if there were, in fact, innate mechanisms in mind that are both lawful and benevolent. Wilson’s program for uncovering these mechanisms could have merit. But for all the reasons that have been posited, classical determinism cannot explain the human condition and its evolutionary principle that govern in their functional dynamics, as Darwinian evolution should be modified to acclimatize the complementary relationships between cultural and biological principles that governing evaluations do indeed have in them a strong, and firm grip upon genetical mutations that have attributively been the distribution in the contribution of human interactions with themselves in the finding to self-realizations and undivided wholeness.
Freud’s use of the word “superman” or “overman”in and of itself might indicate only a superficial familiarity with a popular term associated with Nietzsche . However, as Holmes has pointed out, Freud is discussing the holy, or saintly , and its relation to repression and the giving up of freedom of instinctual expression, central concerns of the third essay of on the Genealogy of Morals, ‘What is the Meaning of Ascetic Ideals.’
Nietzsche writes of the anti-nature of the ascetic ideal, how it relates to a disgust with oneself, its continuing destructive effect upon the health of Europeans, and how it relates to the realm of ‘subterranean revenge’ and ressentiment. In addition, Nietzsche writes of the repression of instincts (though not specifically on impulses towards sexual perversions) and of their being turned inward against the self. Continuing, he wrote on the ‘instinct for freedom forcibly made latent . . . this instinct for freedom pushed back and repressed. In closing, and even more of the animal, and more still of the material: Zarathustra also speaks of most sacred, now he must find allusion caprice, even in the most sacred, that freedom from his love may become his prey. The formulation as it pertains to sexual perversions and incest certainly does not derive from Nietzsche (although, along different lines incest was an important factor in Nietzsche’s understanding of Oedipus), the relating freedom was very possibly influenced by Nietzsche, particularly in light of Freud’s reference as the ‘holy’; as well as to the ‘overman’. As these of issues re explored in the Antichrist which had been published just two years earlier.
Nietzsche had written of sublimation, and he specifically wrote of sublimation of sexual drives in the Genealogy. Freud’s use of the term as differing somewhat from his later and more Nietzschean usage such as in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, but as Kaufmann notes, while ‘the word is older than either Freud or Nietzsche . . . it was Nietzsche who first gave it the specific connotation it has today’. Kaufmann regards the concept of sublimation as the most important concepts in Nietzsche’s entire philosophy.
Of course it is difficult to determine whether or not Freud may have been recently reading Nietzsche or was consciously or unconsciously drawing on information he had come across some years earlier. It is also possible that Freud had recently of some time earlier, registered a limited resource of the Genealogy or other works. At a later time in his life Freud claimed he could not read more than a few passage s of Nietzsche due to being overwhelmed by the wealth of ideas. This claim might be supported by the fact that Freud demonstrates only a limited understanding of certain of Nietzsche’s concepts. For example, his reference to the ‘overman’, such in showing a lack of understanding of the self-overcoming and sublimation, not simply freely gratified primitive instincts. Later in life, Freud demonstrates a similar misunderstanding in his equation the overman with the tyrannical father of the primal horde. Perhaps Freud confused the overman with he ‘master’ whose morality is contrasted with that of ‘slave ‘ morality in the Genealogy and Beyond Good and Evil. The conquering master more freely gratifies instinct and affirms himself, his world and has values as good. The conquered slave, unable to express himself freely, creates negating, resentful, vengeful morality glorifying his own crippled. Alienated condition, and her crates a division not between goof (noble) and bad (Contemptible), but between good (undangerous) and evil (wicked and powerful - dangerous ness).
Much of what Rycroft writes is similar to, implicit in, or at least compatible with what we have seen of Nietzsche’s theoretical addresses as to say, as other materia that has been placed on the table fr consideration. Rycroft specifically states that h takes up ‘a position much nearer Groddeck’s [on the nature of the, “it” or id] than Freud’s. He doesn’t mention that Freud was ware of Groddeck’s concept of the “it” and understood the term to be derived from Nietzsche. However, beyond ‘the process itself; as a consequence of grammatical habit - that the activity, ‘thinking’, requires an agent.
The self, as in its manifesting in constructing dreams, ma y be an aspect of our psychic live tat knows things that our waking “I” or ego may not know and may not wish to know, and a relationship ma y be developed between these aspects of our psychic lives in which the latter opens itself creatively to the communications of he former. Zarathustra states: ‘Behind your thoughts and feelings, my brother, there stands a mighty ruler, an unknown sage - whose name is self. In your body he dwells, he is your body’. Nonetheless, Nietzsche’s self cannot be understood as a replacement for an all-knowing God to whom the “I” or ego appeals for its wisdom, commandments, guidance and the like. To open oneself to another aspect of oneself that is wiser (an unknown sage) in the sense that new information can be derived from it, does not necessarily entail that this ‘wiser’ component of one’s psychic life has God-like knowledge and commandments which if one (one’s “I”) deciphers and opens correctly to will set one on the straight path. It is true though that when Nietzsche writes of the self as ‘a mighty ruler an unknown sage ‘ he does open himself to such an interpretation and even to the possibility that this ‘ruler’ is unreachable, unapproachable for the “I.” (Nietzsche/Zarathustra redeeming the body) and after “On the Despisers of he Body, makes it clear, that there are aspects of our psychic selves that interpret the body, that mediate its directives, ideally in ways that do not deny the body but aid in the body doing ‘what it would do above all else, to create beyond itself’.
Also the idea of a fully formed, even if the unconscious, ‘mighty ruler’ and ‘unknown sage ‘ as a true self beneath an only apparent surface is at odds with Nietzsche ‘s idea that there is no one true, stable, enduring elf in and of itself to be found once the veil of appearance is removed. And even early in his career Nietzsche wrote sarcastically of ‘that cleverly discovered well of inspiration, the unconscious’. There is, though, a tension in Nietzsche between the notion of bodily-based drive s pressing for discharge (which can, among other things, (sublimated) and a more organized bodily-based self which may be ‘an unknown sage’ and in relation to which the “I” may open to potential communications in the manner for which there is no such conception of self for which Freud and the dream is not produced with the intention of being understood.
Nietzsche explored the ideas of psychic energy and drives pressing for discharge. His discussion on sublimation typically implies an understanding of drives in just such a sense as does his idea that dreams provide for discharge of drives. Nonetheless, he did not relegate all hat is derived from instinct and the body to this realm. While for Nietzsche there is no stable, enduring true self awaiting discovery and liberation, the body and the self (in the broadest sense of the term, including what is unconscious and may be at work in dreams as Rycroft describes it) may offer up potential communication and direct to the “I” or ego. However, at times Nietzsche describes the “I” or ego as having very little, if any, idea as to how it is being by the “it.”
Nietzsche, like Freud, describes of two types of mental possesses, on which ‘binds’ [man’s] life to reason and its concepts in order not to be swept away by the current and to lose himself, the other, pertaining to the worlds of myth, art and the dream, ‘constantly showing the desire to shape the existing world of the wide-wake person to be variegatedly irregular and disinterested, incoherent, exciting and eternally new, as is the world of dreams’. Art may function as a ’middle sphere’ and ‘middle faculty’ (transitional sphere and faculty) between a more primitive ‘metaphor-world’ of impressions and the forms of uniform abstract concepts.
Again, Nietzsche, like Freud attempts to account for the function of consciousness in light of the new under stranding of conscious mental functioning. Nietzsche distinguishes between himself and ‘older philosophers’ who do not appreciate the significance of unconscious mental functioning, while Freud distinguishes the unconscious of philosophers and the unconscious of psychoanalysis. What is missing is the acknowledgement of Nietzsche as philosopher and psychologist whose idea as on unconscious mental functioning have very strong affinities with psychoanalysis, as Freud himself will mention on a number of other occasions. Neither here nor in his letters to Fliess which he mentions Lipps, nor in his later paper in which Lipp (the ‘German philosopher’) is acknowledged again, is Nietzsche mentioned when it comes to acknowledging in a specific and detailed manner as important forerunner of psychoanalysis. Although Freud will state on a number of occasions that Nietzsche’s insight are close to psychoanalysis, very rarely will he state any details regarding the similarities. He mentions a friend calling his attention to the notion of the criminal from a sense of guilt, a patient calling his attention to the pride-memory aphorism, Nietzsche’s idea in dreams we cannot enter the realm of the psyche of primitive man, etc. there is never any derailed statement on just what Nietzsche anticipated pertinently to psychoanalysis. This is so even after Freud has been taking Nietzsche with him on vacation.
Equally important, the classical assumption that the only privileged or valid knowledge is scientific is one of the primary sources of the stark division between the two cultures of humanistic and scientists-engineers, in this view, Wilson is quite correct in assuming that a timely end to the two culture war and a renewer dialogue between members of those cultures is now critically important to human survival. It is also clear, however, that dreams of reason based on the classical paradigm will only serve to perpetuate the two-culture war. Since these dreams are also remnants of an old scientific word view that no longer applies in theory in fact, to the actual character of physical reality, as reality is a probable service to frustrate the solution for which in found of a real world problem.
However, there is a renewed basis for dialogue between the two cultures, it is believed as quite different from that described by Wilson. Since classical epistemology has been displaced, or is the process of being displaced, by the new epistemology of science, the truths of science can no longer be viewed as transcendent ad absolute in the classical sense. The universe more closely resembles a giant organism than a giant machine, and it also displays emergent properties that serve to perpetuate the existence of the whole in both physics and biology that cannot be explained in terms of unrestricted determinism, simple causality, first causes, linear movements and initial conditions. Perhaps the first and most important precondition for renewed dialogue between the two cultural conflicting realizations as Einstein explicated upon its topic as, that a human being is a “part of the whole.’ It is this spared awareness that allows for the freedom, or existential choice of self-decision of determining our free-will and the power to differentiate direct cars to free ourselves of the “optical allusion”of our present conception of self as a “part limited in space and time” and to widen “our circle of compassion to embrace al living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” Yet, one cannot, of course, merely reason oneself into an acceptance of this view, nonetheless, the inherent perceptions of the world are reason that the capacity for what Einstein termed “cosmic religious feelings.” Perhaps, our enabling capability for that which is within us to have the obtainable ability to enabling of ours is to experience the self-realization, that of its realness is to sense its proven existence of a sense of elementarily leaving to some sorted conquering sense of universal consciousness, in so given to arise the existence of the universe, which really makes an essential difference to the existence or its penetrative spark of awakening indebtednesses of reciprocality?
Those who have this capacity will hopefully be able to communicate their enhanced scientific understanding of the relations among all aspects, and in part that is our self and the whole that are the universe in ordinary language wit enormous emotional appeal. The task lies before the poets of this renewing reality have nicely been described by Jonas Salk, which “man has come to the threshold of a state of consciousness, regarding his nature and his relationship to the Cosmos, in terms that reflects “reality.” By using the processes of Nature and metaphor, to describe the forces by which it operates upon and within Man, we come as close to describing “reality” as we can within te limits of our comprehension. Men will be very uneven in their capacity or such understanding, which, naturally, differs for different ages and cultures, and develops and changes over the course of time. For these reasons it will always be necessary to use metaphorical and mythical provisions as comprehensive guides to living. In this way. Man’s afforded efforts by the imagination and intellect can be playing the vital roles embarking upon the survival and his endurable evolution.
Before anything else, there is no solid functional basis in the contemporary fields of thought for believing in the stark Cartesian division between mind and world that some have moderately described as ‘the disease of the Western mind’. Dialectic orchestration will serve as the background for understanding a new relationship between parts and wholes in physics, with a similar view of that relationship that has emerged in the co-called ‘new biology’ and in recent studies of the evolution of a scientific understanding to a more conceptualized representation of ideas, and includes its allied ‘content’.
Nonetheless, it seems a strong possibility that Plotonic and Whitehead connect upon the issue of the creation of the sensible world may by looking at actual entities as aspects of nature’s contemplation. The contemplation of nature is obviously an immensely intricate affair, involving a myriad of possibilities, therefore one can look at actual entities as, in some sense, the basic element or elements of a vast and expansive process.
We could derive a scientific understanding of these ideas with the aid of precise deduction, as Descartes continued his claim that we could lay the contours of physical reality out in three-dimensional co-ordinates. Following the publication of Isaac Newton’s ‘Principia Mathematica’ in 1687, reductionism and mathematical modelling became the most powerful tools of modern science. The dream that we could know and master the entire physical world through the extension and refinement of mathematical theory became the central feature and principals of scientific knowledge.
The radical separation between mind and nature formalized by Descartes served over time to allow scientists to concentrate on developing mathematical descriptions of matter as pure mechanism without any concern about its spiritual dimensions or ontological foundations. Meanwhile, attempts to rationalize, reconcile or eliminate Descartes’s merging division between mind and matter became the most central feature of Western intellectual life.
Philosophers like John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and David Hume tried to articulate some basis for linking the mathematical describable motions of matter with linguistic representations of external reality in the subjective space of mind. Descartes’ compatriot Jean-Jacques Rousseau reified nature as the ground of human consciousness in a state of innocence and proclaimed that ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternities’ are the guiding principles of this consciousness. Rousseau also fabricated the idea of the ‘general will’ of the people to achieve these goals and declared that those who do not conform to this will were social deviants.
The Enlightenment idea of ‘deism’, which imaged the universe as a clockwork and God as the clockmaker, provided grounds for believing in a divine agency, from which the time of moment the formidable creations also imply, in of which, the exhaustion of all the creative forces of the universe at origins ends, and that the physical substrates of mind were subject to the same natural laws as matter. In that, the only means of mediating the gap between mind and matter was pure reason, causally by the traditional Judeo-Christian theism, which had previously been based on both reason and revelation, responded to the challenge of deism by debasing tradionality as a test of faith and embracing the idea that we can know the truths of spiritual reality if only through divine revelation. This engendered a conflict between reason and revelation that persists to this day. And laid the foundation for the fierce completion between the mega-narratives of science and religion as frame tales for mediating the relation between mind and matter and the manner in which they should ultimately define the special character of each.
The nineteenth-century Romantics in Germany, England and the United States revived Rousseau’s attempt to posit a ground for human consciousness by reifying nature in a different form. Goethe and Friedrich Schelling proposed a natural philosophy premised on ontological Monism (the idea that adhering manifestations that govern toward evolutionary principles have grounded inside an inseparable spiritual Oneness) and argued God, man, and nature for the reconciliation of mind and matter with an appeal to sentiment, mystical awareness, and quasi-scientific attempts, as the afforded the efforts of mind and matter, nature became a mindful agency that ‘loves illusion’, as it shrouds man in mist, presses him or her heart and punishes those who fail to see the light. Schelling, in his version of cosmic unity, argued that scientific facts were at best partial truths and that the mindful creative spirit that unities mind and matter is progressively moving toward self-realization and ‘undivided wholeness’.
The British version of Romanticism, articulated by figures like William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, placed more emphasis on the primary of the imagination and the importance of rebellion and heroic vision as the grounds for freedom. As Wordsworth put it, communion with the ‘incommunicable powers’ of the ‘immortal sea’ empowers the mind to release itself from all the material constraints of the laws of nature. The founders of American transcendentalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Theoreau, articulated a version of Romanticism that commensurate with the ideals of American democracy.
The American envisioned a unified spiritual reality that manifested itself as a personal ethos that sanctioned radical individualism and bred aversion to the emergent materialism of the Jacksonian era. They were also more inclined than their European counterpart, as the examples of Thoreau and Whitman attest, to embrace scientific descriptions of nature. However, the Americans also dissolved the distinction between mind and natter with an appeal to ontological monism and alleged that mind could free itself from all the constraint of assuming that by some sorted limitation of matter, in which such states have of them, some mystical awareness.
Since scientists, during the nineteenth century were engrossed with uncovering the workings of external reality and seemingly knew of themselves that these virtually overflowing burdens of nothing, in that were about the physical substrates of human consciousness, the business of examining the distributive contribution in dynamic functionality and structural foundation of mind became the province of social scientists and humanists. Adolphe Quételet proposed a ‘social physics’ that could serve as the basis for a new discipline called sociology, and his contemporary Auguste Comte concluded that a true scientific understanding of the social reality was quite inevitable. Mind, in the view of these figures, was a separate and distinct mechanism subject to the lawful workings of a mechanical social reality.
More formal European philosophers, such as Immanuel Kant, sought to reconcile representations of external reality in mind with the motions of matter-based on the dictates of pure reason. This impulse was also apparent in the utilitarian ethics of Jerry Bentham and John Stuart Mill, in the historical materialism of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and in the pragmatism of Charles Smith, William James and John Dewey. These thinkers were painfully aware, however, of the inability of reason to posit a self-consistent basis for bridging the gap between mind and matter, and each remains obliged to conclude that the realm of the mental exists only in the subjective reality of the individual
A distinctive yet peculiar presence has of awaiting to the future, its foundational frame of a proposal to a new understanding of relationships between mind and world, within the larger context of the history of mathematical physics, the origin and extensions of the classical view of the fundamentals of scientific knowledge, and the various ways that physicists have attempted to prevent previous challenges to the efficacy of classical epistemology.
There is no basis in contemporary physics or biology for believing in the stark Cartesian division between mind and world that some have moderately described as ‘the disease of the Western mind’. The dialectic orchestrations will serve as background for understanding a new relationship between parts and wholes in physics, with a similar view of that relationship that has emerged in the co-called ‘new biology’ and in recent studies of the evolution of a scientific understanding to a more conceptualized representation of ideas, and includes its allied ‘content’.
Nonetheless, it seems a strong possibility that Plotonic and Whitehead connect upon the issue of the creation of the sensible world may by looking at actual entities as aspects of nature’s contemplation. The contemplation of nature is obviously an immensely intricate affair, involving a myriad of possibilities, therefore one can look at actual entities as, in some sense, the basic elements of a vast and expansive process.
We could derive a scientific understanding of these ideas with the aid of precise deduction, as Descartes continued his claim that we could lay the contours of physical reality out in three-dimensional co-ordinates. Following the publication of Isaac Newton’s “Principia Mathematica” in 1687, reductionism and mathematical modelling became the most powerful tools of modern science. The dream that we could know and master the entire physical world through the extension and refinement of mathematical theory became the central feature and principals of scientific knowledge.
The radical separation between mind and nature formalized by Descartes served over time to allow scientists to concentrate on developing mathematical descriptions of matter as pure mechanism without any concern about its spiritual dimensions or ontological foundations. Meanwhile, attempts to rationalize, reconcile or eliminate Descartes’s merging division between mind and matter became the most central feature of Western intellectual life.
Philosophers like John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and David Hume tried to articulate some basis for linking the mathematical describable motions of matter with linguistic representations of external reality in the subjective space of mind. Descartes’ compatriot Jean-Jacques Rousseau reified nature as the ground of human consciousness in a state of innocence and proclaimed that “Liberty, Equality, Fraternities” are the guiding principles of this consciousness. Rousseau also fabricated the idea of the ‘general will’ of the people to achieve these goals and declared that those who do not conform to this will were social deviants.
The Enlightenment idea of ‘deism’, which imaged the universe as a clockwork and God as the clockmaker, provided grounds for believing in a divine agency, from which the time of moment the formidable creations also imply, in of which, the exhaustion of all the creative forces of the universe at origins ends, and that the physical substrates of mind were subject to the same natural laws as matter, in that the only means of mediating the gap between mind and matter was pure reason. The causality of historically accomplished Judeo-Christian theism had previously been based on both reason and revelation. It’s process of respondent challenges of deism through which the debasing tradionality as a test of faith and embracing the idea that we can know the truths of spiritual reality, in that can be achieved only through divine revelation. This engendered a conflict between reason and revelation that persists to this day. And laid the foundation for the fierce completion between the mega-narratives of science and religion as frame tales for mediating the relation between mind and matter and the manner in which they should ultimately define the special character of each.
The nineteenth-century Romantics in Germany, England and the United States revived Rousseau’s attempt to posit a ground for human consciousness by reifying nature in a different form. Goethe and Friedrich Schelling proposed a natural philosophy premised on ontological Monism (the idea that adhering manifestations that govern toward evolutionary principles have grounded inside an inseparable spiritual Oneness) and argued God, man, and nature for the reconciliation of mind and matter with an appeal to sentiment, mystical awareness, and quasi-scientific attempts, as he afforded the efforts of mind and matter, nature became a mindful agency that ‘loves illusion’, as it shrouds man in mist, presses him or her heart and punishes those who fail to see the light. Schelling, in his version of cosmic unity, argued that scientific facts were at best partial truths and that the mindful creative spirit that unities mind and matter is progressively moving toward self-realization and ‘undivided wholeness’.
The British version of Romanticism, articulated by figures like William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, placed more emphasis on the primary of the imagination and the importance of rebellion and heroic vision as the grounds for freedom. As Wordsworth put it, communion with the “incommunicable powers” of the “immortal sea” empowers the mind to release itself from all the material constraints of the laws of nature. The founders of American transcendentalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Theoreau, articulated a version of Romanticism that commensurate with the ideals of American democracy.
The American envisioned a unified spiritual reality that manifested itself as a personal ethos that sanctioned radical individualism and bred aversion to the emergent materialism of the Jacksonian era. They were also more inclined than their European counterpart, as the examples of Thoreau and Whitman attest, to embrace scientific descriptions of nature. However, the Americans also dissolved the distinction between mind and natter with an appeal to ontological monism and alleged that mind could free itself from all the constraint of assuming that by some sorted limitation of matter, in which such states have of them, some mystical awareness.
Since scientists, during the nineteenth century were engrossed with uncovering the workings of external reality and seemingly knew of themselves that these virtually overflew burdens of nothing, in that were about the physical substrates of human consciousness, the business of examining the distributive contribution in dynamic functionality and structural foundation of mind became the province of social scientists and humanists. Adolphe Quételet proposed a ‘social physics’ that could serve as the basis for a new discipline called sociology, and his contemporary Auguste Comte concluded that a true scientific understanding of the social reality was quite inevitable. Mind, in the view of these figures, was a separate and distinct mechanism subject to the lawful workings of a mechanical social reality.
More formal European philosophers, such as Immanuel Kant, sought to reconcile representations of external reality in mind with the motions of matter-based on the dictates of pure reason. This impulse was also apparent in the utilitarian ethics of Jerry Bentham and John Stuart Mill, in the historical materialism of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and in the pragmatism of Charles Smith, William James and John Dewey. These thinkers were painfully aware, however, of the inability of reason to posit a self-consistent basis for bridging the gap between mind and matter, and each remains obliged to conclude that the realm of the mental exists only in the subjective reality of the individual.
The fatal flaw of pure reason is, of course, the absence of emotion, and purely explanations of the division between subjective reality and external reality, of which had limited appeal outside the community of intellectuals. The figure most responsible for infusing our understanding of the Cartesian dualism with contextual representation of our understanding with emotional content was the death of God theologian Friedrich Nietzsche 1844-1900. After declaring that God and ‘divine will’, did not exist, Nietzsche reified the ‘existence’ of consciousness in the domain of subjectivity as the ground for individual ‘will’ and summarily reducing all previous philosophical attempts to articulate the ‘will to truth’. The dilemma, forth in, had seemed to mean, by the validation, . . . as accredited for doing of science, in that the claim that Nietzsche’s earlier versions to the ‘will to truth’, disguises the fact that all alleged truths were arbitrarily created in the subjective reality of the individual and are expressed or manifesting the individualism of ‘will’.
In Nietzsche’s view, the separation between mind and matter is more absolute and total than previously been imagined, and bases on or upon the speculative assumption that there is no real necessity for which the correspondence between linguistic constructions of reality in human subjectivity and external reality can by means to deuce that which we are all locked in ‘a prison house of language’. The prison as he concluded it, was also a ‘space’ where the philosopher can examine the ‘innermost desires of his nature’ and articulate a new message of individual existence founded on ‘will’.
Those who fail to enact their existence in this space, Nietzsche says, are enticed into sacrificing their individuality on the nonexistent altars of religious beliefs and democratic or socialists’ ideals and become, therefore, members of the anonymous and docile crowd. Nietzsche also invalidated the knowledge claims of science in the examination of human subjectivity. Science, he said. Is not exclusive to natural phenomenons and favours reductionistic examination of phenomena at the expense of mind? It also seeks to reduce the separateness and uniqueness of mind with mechanistic descriptions that disallow and basis for the free exercise of individual will.
Nietzsche’s emotionally charged defence of intellectual freedom and radial empowerment of mind as the maker and transformer of the collective fictions that shape human reality in a soulless mechanistic universe proved terribly influential on twentieth-century thought. Furthermore, Nietzsche sought to reinforce his view of the subjective character of scientific knowledge by appealing to an epistemological crisis over the foundations of logic and arithmetic that arose during the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Through a curious course of events, attempted by Edmund Husserl 1859-1938, a German mathematician and a principal founder of phenomenology, wherefor to resolve this crisis resulted in a view of the character of consciousness that closely resembled that of Nietzsche.
The best-known disciple of Husserl was Martin Heidegger, and the work of both figures greatly influenced that of the French atheistic existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. The work of Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre became foundational to that of the principal architects of philosophical postmodernism, and deconstructionist Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. It obvious attribution of a direct linkage between the nineteenth-century crisis about the epistemological foundations of mathematical physics and the origin of philosophical postmodernism served to perpetuate the Cartesian two-world dilemma in an even more oppressive form. It also allows us better to understand the origins of cultural ambience and the ways in which they could resolve that conflict.
Nietzsche’s emotionally charged defences of intellectual freedom and radial empowerment of mind as the maker and transformer of the collective fictions that shape human reality in a soulless mechanistic universe proved terribly influential on twentieth-century thought. Furthermore, Nietzsche sought to reinforce his view of the subjective character of scientific knowledge by appealing to an epistemological crisis over the foundations of logic and arithmetic that arose during the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Through a curious course of events, attempted by Edmund Husserl 1859-1938, a German mathematician and a principal founder of phenomenology, wherefor to resolve this crisis resulted in a view of the character of consciousness that closely resembled that of Nietzsche.
The best-known disciple of Husserl was Martin Heidegger, and the work of both figures greatly influenced that of the French atheistic existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. The work of Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre became foundational to that of the principal architects of philosophical postmodernism, and deconstructionist Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. It obvious attribution of a direct linkage between the nineteenth-century crisis about the epistemological foundations of mathematical physics and the origin of philosophical postmodernism served to perpetuate the Cartesian two-world dilemma in an even more oppressive form. It also allows us better to understand the origins of cultural ambience and the ways in which they could resolve that conflict.
The mechanistic paradigm of the late n nineteenth century was the one Einstein came to know when he studied physics. Most physicists believed that it represented an eternal truth, but Einstein was open to fresh ideas. Inspired by Mach’s critical mind, he demolished the Newtonian ideas of space and time and replaced them with new, “relativistic” notions.
Two theories unveiled and unfolding as their phenomenal yield held by Albert Einstein, attributively appreciated that the special theory of relativity ( 1905 ) and, also the tangling and calculably arranging affordance, as drawn upon the gratifying nature whom by encouraging the finding resolutions upon which the realms of its secreted reservoir in continuous phenomenons, in additional the continuatives as afforded by the efforts by the imagination were made discretely available to any the unsurmountable achievements, as remain obtainably afforded through the excavations underlying the artifactual circumstances that govern all principle ‘forms’ or ‘types’ in the involving evolutionary principles of the general theory of relativity (1915 ), wherefore, the special theory gives a unified account of the laws of mechanics and of electromagnetism, including optics. Before 1905 the purely relative nature of uniform motion had in part been recognized in mechanics, although Newton had considered time to be absolute and postulated absolute space.
If the universe is a seamlessly interactive system that evolves to a higher level of complexity, and if the lawful regularities of this universe are emergent properties of this system, we can assume that the cosmos is a singular point of significance as a whole that evinces the ‘progressive principal order’ of complementary relations its parts. Given that this whole exists in some sense within all parts (quanta), one can then argue that it operates in self-reflective fashion and is the ground for all emergent complexities. Since human consciousness evinces self-reflective awareness in the human brain and since this brain, like all physical phenomena can be viewed as an emergent property of the whole, it is reasonable to conclude, in philosophical terms at least, that the universe is conscious.
But since the actual character of this seamless whole cannot be represented or reduced to its parts, it lies, quite literally beyond all human representations or descriptions. If one chooses to believe that the universe be a self-reflective and self-organizing whole, this lends no support whatsoever to conceptions of design, meaning, purpose, intent, or plan associated with any mytho-religious or cultural heritage. However, If one does not accept this view of the universe, there is nothing in the scientific descriptions of nature that can be used to refute this position. On the other hand, it is no longer possible to argue that a profound sense of unity with the whole, which has long been understood as the foundation of religious experience, which can be dismissed, undermined or invalidated with appeals to scientific knowledge.
Uncertain issues surrounding certainty are especially connected with those concerning ‘scepticism’. Although Greek scepticism entered on the value of enquiry and questioning, scepticism is now the denial that knowledge or even rational belief is possible, either about some specific subject-matter, e.g., ethics, or in any area whatsoever. Classical scepticism, springs from the observation that the best methods in some area seem to fall short of giving us contact with the truth, e.g., there is a gulf between appearances and reality, it frequently cites the conflicting judgements that our methods deliver, with the result that questions of truth-realizations become disintegrations of the undefinable. In classic thought the various examples of this conflict were systemized in the tropes of Aenesidemus. So that, the scepticism of Pyrrho and the new Academy was a system of argument and inasmuch as opposing dogmatism, and, particularly the philosophical system building of the Stoics.
As it has come down to us, particularly in the writings of Sextus Empiricus, its method was typically to cite reasons for finding our issue undecidable (sceptics devoted particular energy to undermining the Stoics conception of some truths as delivered by direct apprehension or some katalepsis). As a result the sceptics conclude eposhé, or the suspension of belief, and then go on to celebrate a way of life whose object was ataraxia, or the tranquillity resulting from suspension of belief.
Fixed by its will for and of itself, the mere mitigated scepticism which accepts every day or commonsense belief, is that, not s the delivery of reason, but as due more to custom and habit. Nonetheless, it is self-satisfied at the proper time, however, the power of reason to give us much more. Mitigated scepticism is thus closer to the attitude fostered by the accentuations from Pyrrho through to Sextus Expiricus. Despite the fact or the interpretation with which set the dramatization that the phrase ‘Cartesian scepticism’ is seldom used, Descartes himself was not a sceptic, however, in the ‘method of doubt’ uses a sceptical scenario in order to begin the process of finding a general distinction to mark its point of knowledge. Descartes trusts in categories of ‘clear and distinct’ ideas, not far removed from the phantasiá kataleptikê of the Stoics.
For many sceptics have traditionally held that knowledge requires certainty, artistry. And, of course, they affirm of having being such beyond doubt that knowledge is not feigned to possibilities. In part, nonetheless, of the principle that every effect it’s a consequence of an antecedent cause or causes. For causality to be true it is not necessary for an effect to be predictable as the antecedent causes may be numerous, too complicated, or too interrelated for analysis. Nevertheless, in order to avoid scepticism, this participating sceptic has generally held that knowledge does not require certainty, except for alleged cases of things that are evident for one just by being true. It has often been thought, that any thing known must satisfy certain criteria as well as true. It is often taught that anything is known must satisfy certain standards. In so saying, that by ‘deduction’ or ‘induction’, there will be criteria specifying when it is. As these alleged cases of self-evident truths, the general principle specifying the sort of consideration that will make such standard in the apparent or justly conclude in accepting it warranted to some degree.
Besides, there is another view - the absolute globular view that we do not have any knowledge whatsoever. In whatever manner, it is doubtful that any philosopher seriously entertains of absolute or the completed consummation of scepticism. Even the Pyrrhonist sceptics, who held that we should refrain from accenting to any non-perceptible standards that no such hesitancies about the indecisions of affirming such disputations of asserting to ‘the evident’, the non-evident or palpably non-apparent perceptions are any belief that requires evidences because it is warranted.
René Descartes (1596-1650), in his sceptical guise, never doubted the content of his own ideas. It’s challenging logic, inasmuch as of whether they ‘corresponded’ to anything beyond ideas.
Its challenge to the radical separation between mind and world promoted and sanctioned by the deconstructionists is fairly straightforward. If physical reality is on the most fundamental level a seamless whole. It follows that all manifestations of this reality, including neuronal processes in the human brain, can never be separate from this reality. And if the human brain, which constructs an emergent reality based on complex language systems is implicitly part of the whole of biological life and desires its existence from embedded relations to this whole, this reality is obviously grounded in this whole and cannot by definition be viewed as separate or discrete. All of this leads to the conclusion, without any appeal to ontology, that Cartesian dualism is no longer commensurate with our view of physical reality in both physics and biology, there are, however, other more prosaic reasons why the view of human subjectivity sanctioned by the postmodern mega-theorist should no longer be viewed as valid.
From Descartes to Nietzsche to Husserl to the deconstructionists, the division between mind and world has been construed in terms of binary oppositions premises on the law of the excluded middle. All of the examples used by Saussure to legitimate his conception of oppositions between signified and signifiers are premises on this logic, and it also informs all of the extensions and refinements of this opposition by the deconstructionists. Since the opposition between signified and signifiers is foundational to the work of all these theorists, what is to say is anything but trivial for the practitioners of philosophical postmodernism - the binary oppositions in the methodologies of the deconstructionists premised on the law of the excluded middle should properly be viewed as complementary constructs.
Nevertheless, to underlying and hidden latencies are given among the many derivative contributions as awaiting the presences to the future under which in among them narrow down the theory of knowledge, but, nonetheless, the possibilities to identify a set of common doctrines, are, however, the identity styles of discerning instances to recognize, in like manners, these two styles of pragmatism, clarify the innovation that a Cartesian approval is fundamentally flawed, even though of responding very differently but not fordone.
The requirements of absolute certainty or knowledge, as sustained through its connexion of knowledge with activity, as, too, of pragmatism of a reformist distributing knowledge upon the legitimacy of traditional questions about the truth-conditionals of our cognitive practices, and sustain a conception of truth objectives, enough to give those questions that undergo of gathering in their own purposive latencies, yet we are given to the spoken word for which a dialectic awareness sparks the flame from the ambers of fire.
Pragmatism of a determinant revolution, by contrast, relinquishing the objectivity of early days, and acknowledges no legitimate epistemological questions over and above those that are naturally kindred of our current cognitive conviction.
It seems clear that certainty is a property that can be assembled to either a person or a belief. We can say that a person, 'S' might be certain or we can say that its descendable alignment is coordinated to accommodate the connexion, by saying that 'S' has the right to be certain just in case the value of 'p' is sufficiently verified.
In defining certainty, it is crucial to note that the term has both an absolute and relative sense. More or less, we take a proposition to be certain when we have no doubt about its truth. We may do this in error or unreasonably, but objectively a proposition is certain when such absence of doubt is justifiable. The sceptical tradition in philosophy denies that objective certainty is often possible, or ever possible, either for any proposition at all, or for any proposition at all, or for any proposition from some suspect family (ethics, theory, memory, empirical judgement etc.) a major sceptical weapon is the possibility of upsetting events that can cast doubt back onto what was hitherto taken to be certainty. Others include reminders of the divergence of human opinion, and the fallible source of our confidence. Fundamentalist approaches to knowledge look for a basis of certainty, upon which the structure of our system is built. Others reject the metaphor, looking for mutual support and coherence, without foundation.
However, in moral theory, the views that there are inviolable moral standards or absolute variable human desires or policies or prescriptions, and subsequently since the 17th and 18th centuries, when the science of man began to probe into human motivations and emotions. For writers such as the French moralistes, and political philosopher Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746), David Hume (1711-76), and both Adam Smith (1723-90) and Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), whereby the prime task to delineate the variety of human reactions and motivations, such inquiry would locate our propensity for moral thinking about other faculties such as perception and reason, and other tendencies, such as empathy, sympathy or self-interest. The task continues especially in the light of a post-Darwinian understanding of the evolutionary governing principles about us.
In some moral system notably that in personal representations as standing for the German and founder of critical philosophy was Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), through which times fraction in being subject as may become true or actual, seems to be an example, if not only to advance the thesis of an illustration of something requiring thought and skill to arrive at the proper conclusion or rightful decision, in what to do is a problem. Insofar as the accomplishment of an end, to make out as or perceive to be something as known to be in a state of mental reorientation in which, physical theory for some experience or action comes readily to leave at a moment’s notice. All of which is to properly realize of what would be to consider the aspects that have evolved and agreeable to reason as we can only offer a rational explanation. Therefore the functionality and authenticity for which our immediate concerns are in corresponding to known facts, as in the discovered reality under which reason has no illusions and faces reality squarely straight-on, and by a realistic appraisal of changes for advancement. This informal deduction is much to consist of a gainful insight into the real moral worth that comes only with acting rightly because it is right. If you do what you should but from some other motive, such as fear or prudence, no moral merit accrues to you. Yet, in turn, for which it gives the impression of being without necessarily being so in fact, in that to look in quest or search, at least of what is not apparent. Of each discount other admirable motivations, are such as acting from sheer benevolence or sympathy. The question is how to balance the opposing ideas, and also how to understand acting from a sense of obligation without duty or rightness beginning to seem a kind of fetish.
The entertaining commodity that rests for any but those whose abilities for vauntingly are veering to the variously involving differences, is that for itself that the variousness in the quality or state of being decomposed of different parts, elements or individuals with which are consisting of a goodly but indefinite number, much as much of our frame of reference that, least of mention, maintain through which our use or by means we are to contain or constitute a command as some sorted mandatorily anthropomorphic virility. Several distinctions of otherwise, diverse probability, are that the right is not all on one side, so that, qualifies (as adherence to duty or obedience to lawful authority), that together constitute the ideal of moral propriety or merit approval. These given reasons for what remains strong in number, are the higher mental categories that are completely charted among their itemized regularities, that through which it will arise to fall, to have as a controlling desire something that transcends ones present capacity for attainment, inasmuch as to aspire by obtainably achieving. The intensity of sounds, in that it is associated chiefly with poetry and music, that the rhythm of the music made it easy to manoeuver, where inturn, we are provided with a treat, for such that leaves us with much to go through the ritual pulsations in rhythmical motions of finding back to some normalcy, however, at this time we ought but as justly as we might, be it that at this particular point of an occupied position as stationed at rest, as its peculiarity finds to its reference, and, pointing into the abyssal of space and time. So, once found to the ups-and-downs, and justly to move in the in and pots of the dance. Placed into the working potentials are to be charged throughout the functionally sportive inclinations that manifest the tune of a dynamic contribution, so that almost every selectively populated pressure ought to be the particular species attributive to evolutionary times, in that our concurrences are temporally at rest. Candidates for such theorizing include material and paternal motivations, capacities for love and friendship, and the development of language is a signalling system, cooperatives and aggressive tendencies our emotional repertoire, our moral reactions, including the disposition to denote and punish those who cheat on agreements or who free-riders, on whose work of others, our cognitive intuition may be as many as other primordially sized infrastructures, in that their intrenched inter-structural foundations are given as support through the functionally dynamic resources based on volitionary psychology, but it seems that it goes of a hand-in-hand interconnectivity, finding to its voluntary relationship with a partially parallelled profession named as, neurophysiological evidences, forming the baser for the underlying circuitry, in terms through which it subserves the psychological mechanism holds to some enacting quality of being one. Rather than another or more, in that agreeing fundamentally or absolutely in what constitutes the objective reality of separate things, that the characteristic identity to establish of our selective resemblance to the sameness of exacting in ourselves. The approach was foreshadowed by Darwin himself, and William James, as well as the sociologist E.O. Wilson.
An explanation of an admittedly speculative nature, tailored to give the results that need explanation, but currently lacking any independent aggressively, especially to explanations offered in sociological and evolutionary psychology. It is derived from the explanation of how the leopard got its spots, etc.
In spite of the notorious difficulty of reading Kantian ethics, a hypothetical imperative embeds a command which in its place are only to provide by or as if by formal action as the possessions of another who in which does he express to fail in responses to physical stress, nonetheless. The reflective projection, might be that: If you want to look wise, stay quiet. The inductive ordering to stay quiet only to apply to something into shares with care and assignment, gives of equalling lots among a number that make a request for their opportunities in those with the antecedent desire or inclination. If one has no desire to look, seemingly the absence of wise becomes the injunction and this cannot be so avoided: It is a requirement that binds anybody, regardless of their inclination. It could be represented as, for example, tell the truth (regardless of whether you want to or not). The distinction is not always signalled by presence or absence of the conditional or hypothetical form: If you crave drink, don't become a bartender may be regarded as an absolute injunction applying to anyone, although only activated in cases of those with the stated desire.
Even so, a proposition that is not a conditional 'p', may affirmatively and negatively, modernize the opinion is wary of this distinction, since what appears categorical may vary notation. Apparently, categorical propositions may also turn out to be disguised conditionals: 'X' is intelligent (categorical?) = if 'X' is given a range of tasks she performs them better than many people (conditional?) The problem. Nonetheless, is not merely one of classification, since deep metaphysical questions arise when facts that seem to be categorical and therefore solid, come to seem by contrast conditional, or purely hypothetical or potential.
A limited area of knowledge or endeavour to which pursuits, activities and interests are a central representation held to a concept of physical theory. In this way, a field is defined by the distribution of a physical quantity, such as temperature, mass density, or potential energy y, at different points in space. In the particularly important example of force fields, such as gravitational, electrical, and magnetic fields, the field value at a point is the force which a test particle would experience if it were located at that point. The philosophical problem is whether a force field is to be thought of as purely potential, so the presence of a field merely describes the propensity of masses to move relative to each other, or whether it should be thought of in terms of the physically real modifications of a medium, whose properties result in such powers that are force fields’ pure potential, fully characterized by dispositional statements or conditionals, or are they categorical or actual? The former option seems to require within ungrounded dispositions, or regions of space that differ only in what happens if an object is placed there. The law-like shape of these dispositions, apparent for example in the curved lines of force of the magnetic field, may then seem quite inexplicable. To atomists, such as Newton it would represent a return to Aristotelian entelechies, or quasi-psychological affinities between things, which are responsible for their motions. The latter option requires understanding of how forces of attraction and repulsion can be grounded in the properties of the medium.
The basic idea of a field is arguably present in Leibniz, who was certainly hostile to Newtonian atomism. Despite the fact that his equal hostility to action at a distance muddies the water, it is usually credited to the Jesuit mathematician and scientist Joseph Boscovich (1711-87) and Immanuel Kant. Both of whose influenced the scientist Faraday, with whose work the physical notion became established. In his supporting verifications, his work entitled, On the Physical Character of the Lines of Magnetic Force (1852), Faraday was to suggest several criteria for assessing the physical reality of lines of force, such as whether they are affected by an intervening material medium, whether the motion depends on the nature of what is placed at the receiving end. As far as electromagnetic fields go, Faraday himself inclined to the view that the mathematical similarity between heat flow, currents, and electromagnetic lines of force was evidence for the physical reality of the intervening medium.
Once, again, our mentioning recognition for which its case value, whereby its view is especially associated the American psychologist and philosopher William James (1842-1910), that the truth of a statement can be defined in terms of a utility of accepting it. Communicable messages of thoughts are made popularly known throughout the interchange of thoughts or opinions through shared symbols. The difficulties of communication between people of different cultural backgrounds and exchangeable directives, only for which our word is the intellectual interchange for conversant chatter, or in general for talking. Man, alone is disquotational among situational analyses that only are viewed as an objection. Since, there are things that are false, as it may be useful to accept. Conversely, to give to the things that are true and accordingly it may be damaging to accept. Nevertheless, there are deep connections between the idea that a representation system is accorded, and the likely success of the projects in progressive formality, by its possession. The evolution of a system of representation either perceptual or linguistic, seems bounded to connect successes with everything adapting or with utility in the modest sense. The Wittgenstein doctrine stipulates the meaning of use that upon the nature of belief and its relations with human attitude, emotion and the idea that belief in the truth on one hand, the action of the other. One way of binding with adherence, wherefore the connexion is found in the idea that natural selection becomes much as much in adapting us to the cognitive creatures, because beliefs have effects, they work. Pragmatism can be found in Kant’s doctrine, and continued to play an influencing role in the theory of meaning and truth.
James, (1842-1910), although with characteristic generosity exaggerated in his debt to Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914), he charted that the method of doubt encouraged people to pretend to doubt what they did not doubt in their hearts, and criticize its individualist’s insistence, that the ultimate test of certainty is to be found in the individuals personalized consciousness.
From his earliest writings, James understood cognitive processes in teleological terms, although James thoughts were held of assisting us in satisfactory interests. His will to Believe doctrine, the view that we are sometimes justified in believing beyond the evidential relics upon the notion that a belief benefits are relevant to its justification. His pragmatic method of analyzing philosophical problems, for which requires that we find the meaning of terms by examining their application to objects in experimental situations, similarly reflects the teleological approach in its attention to consequences.
Such an approach to come or go near or nearer of meaning, yet lacking of an interest in concerns, justly as some lack of emotional responsiveness have excluded from considerations for those apart, and otherwise elsewhere partitioning. Although the work for verification has seemed dismissively metaphysical, and, least of mention, was drifting of becoming or floated along to knowable inclinations that inclines to knowable implications that directionally show the purposive values for which we inturn of an allowance change by reversal for together is founded the theoretical closeness, that insofar as there is of no allotment for pointed forward. Unlike the verificationalist, who takes cognitive meaning to be a matter only of consequences in sensory experience, James took pragmatic meaning to include emotional and matter responses, a pragmatic treat of special kind of linguistic interaction, such as interviews and a feature of the use of a language would explain the features in terms of general principles governing appropriate adherence, than in terms of a semantic rule. However, there are deep connections between the idea that a representative of the system is accurate, and the likely success of the projects and purposes of a system of representation, either perceptual or linguistic seems bound to connect success with evolutionary adaption, or with utility in the widest sense. Moreover, his, metaphysical standard of value, not a way of dismissing them as meaningless but it should also be noted that in a greater extent, circumspective moments’ James did not hold that even his broad sets of consequences were exhaustive of some terms meaning. Theism, for example, he took to have antecedently, definitional meaning, in addition to its varying degree of importance and chance upon an important pragmatic meaning.
James theory of truth reflects upon his teleological conception of cognition, by considering a true belief to be one which is compatible with our existing system of beliefs, and leads us to satisfactory interaction with the world.
Even so, to believe a proposition is to hold it to be true, that the philosophical problem is to align ones precarious states, for which some persons’ constituent representations were formed of their personal beliefs, is it, for example, a simple disposition to behaviour? Or a more complicated, complex state that resists identification with any such disposition, is compliant with verbalized skills or verbal behaviourism which is essential to belief, concernedly by what is to be said about prelinguistic infants, or nonlinguistic animals? An evolutionary approach asks how the cognitive success of possessing the capacity to believe things relates to success in practice. Further topics include discovering whether belief differs from other varieties of assent, such as acceptance, discovering whether belief is an all-or-nothing matter, or to what extent degrees of belief are possible, understanding the ways in which belief is controlled by rational and irrational factors, and discovering its links with other properties, such as the possession of conceptual or linguistic skills.
Nevertheless, for Peirces' famous pragmatist principle is a rule of logic employed in clarifying our concepts and ideas. Consider the claim the liquid in a flask is an acid, if, we believe this, we except that it would turn red: We accept an action of ours to have certain experimental results. The pragmatic principle holds that listing the conditional expectations of this kind, in that we associate such immediacy with applications of a conceptual representation that provides a complete and orderly sets clarification of the concept. This is relevant to the logic of abduction: Clarificationists using the pragmatic principle provides all the information about the content of a hypothesis that is relevantly to decide whether it is worth testing. All the same, as the founding figure of American pragmatism, perhaps, its best expressage would be found in his essay How to Make our Idea s Clear, (1878), in which he proposes the famous dictum: The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate is what we mean by the truth, and the object representation in this opinion are the real. Also made pioneering investigations into the logic of relations, and of the truth-functions, and independently discovered the quantifier slightly later that Frége. His work on probability and induction includes versions of the frequency theory of probability, and the first suggestion of a vindication of the process of induction. Surprisedly, Peirces’’’ scientific outlook and opposition to rationalize coexisted with admiration for Dun Scotus, (1266-1308), a Franciscan philosopher and theologian, who locates freedom in our ability to turn from desire and toward justice. Scotus characterlogical distinction has directly been admired by such different thinkers as Peirce and Heidegger, he was dubbed the doctor subtilis (short for Dunsman) reflects the low esteem into which scholasticism later fell between humanists and reformers.
To a greater extent, and most important, is the famed apprehension of the pragmatic principle, in so that, C.S. Pierce, the founder of American pragmatism, had been concerned with the nature of language and how it related to thought. From what account of reality did he develop this theory of semiotics as a method of philosophy. How exactly does language relate to thought? Can there be complex, conceptual thought without language? These issues that operate on our thinking and attemptive efforts to draw out the implications for question about meaning, ontology, truth and knowledge, nonetheless, they have quite different takes on what those implications are
These issues had brought about the entrapping fascinations of some engagingly encountered sense for causalities that through which its overall topic of linguistic transitions was grounded among furthering subsequential developments, that those of the earlier insistences of the twentieth-century positions. That to lead by such was the precarious situation into bewildering heterogeneity, so that princely it came as of a tolerable philosophy occurring in the early twenty-first century. The very nature of philosophy is itself radically disputed, analytic, continental, postmodern, Critical theory, feminist and non-Western are all prefixes that give a different meaning when joined to philosophy. The variety of thriving different schools, the number of professional philologers, the proliferation of publications, the developments of technology in helping reach all manifest a radically different situation to that of one hundred years ago. Sharing some common sources with David Lewis, the German philosopher Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970) articulated a doctrine of linguistic frameworks that was radically relativistic in its implications. Carnap was influenced by the Kantian idea of the constitution of knowledge: That our knowledge is in some sense the end result of a cognitive process. He also shared Lewis pragmatism and valued the practical application of knowledge. However, as empiricism, he was headily influenced by the development of modern science, regarding scientific knowledge the paradigm of knowledge and motivated by a desire to be rid of pseudo-knowledge such as traditional metaphysics and theology. These influences remain constant as his work moved though various distinct stages and then he moved to live in America. In 1950, he published a paper entitled Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology in which he articulated his views about a linguistic framework.
When an organized integrated whole made up of diverse but interrelated and interdependent parts, the capacity of the system precedes to be real that something that stands for something else by reason that being in accordance with or confronted to action we think it not as it might be an imperfection in character or an ingrained moral weakness predetermined to be agreed upon by all who investigate. The matter to which it stands, in other words, that, if I believe that it is really the case that p, then I except that if anyone were to inquire into the finding of its state of internal and especially the quality values, state, or conditions of being self-complacent as to poise of a comparable satisfactory measure of whether ‘p’, would arrive at the belief that ‘p’ is not part of the theory that the experimental consequences of our actions should be specified by a warranted empiricist vocabulary - Peirce insisted that perceptual theories are abounding in latency. Even so, nor is it his view that the collected conditionals do or not clarify a concept as all analytic. In addition, in later writings, he argues that the pragmatic principle could only be made plausible to someone who accepted its metaphysical realism: It requires that would-bees are objective and, of course, real.
Defeated in two wars, Germany appeared to have invaded vast territories of the world’s mind, with Nietzsche himself as no mean conqueror. For his was the vision of things to come. Much, too much, would strike him as déjà vu: Yes, he had foreseen it, and he would understand, for the ‘Modern Mind’ speaks German, not always good German, but fluent German nonetheless, it was, only forced by learning the idiom of Karl Marx, and was delighted to be introduced to itself in the language of Sigmund Freud’ taught by Rank and later Max Weber, It acquired its historical and sociological self-consciousness, moved out of its tidy Newtonian universe on the instruction of Einstein, and followed a design of Oswald Spengler’s in sending, from the depth of its spiritual depression, most ingeniously engineered objects higher than the moon. Whether it discovers, with Heidegger, the true habitation of its Existenza on the frontier boundaries of Nothing, or mediates, with Sartre and Camus le Néant or the Absurd, whether - to pass to its less serous moods - it is nihilistically young and profitably angry in London or rebelliously debauched and Buddhistic in San Francisco - it is part of a story told by Nietzsche.
As for modern German literature and thought, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that they would not be what they are if Nietzsche had never lived. Name almost any poet, man of letters, philosopher, who wrote in German during the twentieth century and attained to stature and influence - Rilke, George, Kafka, Tomas Mann, Ernst Jünger, Musil, Benn, Heidegger, or Jaspers - and you name at the same time Friedrick Nietzsche. He is too, them all - whether or not they know and acknowledge it (most of them do) - what St. Thomas Aquinas was to Dante: The categorical interpreter of a world that they contemplate poetically or philosophically without ever radically upsetting its Nietzschean structure.
He was convinced that it would take at least fifty years before a few men would understand what he had accomplished. He feared that even then his teaching would be misinterpreted and misapplied. “I am terrified,” he wrote, “by the thought of the sort of people who may one day invoke my authority.” Yet is this not, he added, the anguish of every great teacher? Still, the conviction that he was a great teacher never left him after he had passed through that period of sustained inspiration in which he wrote the first part of Zarathustra. After this, all his utterances convey the disquieting self-confidence and the terror of a man who has reached the culmination of that paradox that he embodies, and whichever has since cast its dangerous spell over some of the finest and some of the coarsest minds.
Are we then, in a better position to probe Nietzsche’s mind and too avid, as he anticipated some might, the misunderstanding that he was merely concerned with religious, philosophical, or political controversies fashionable in his day? If this is a misinterpretation, can we put anything more valid in its place? What is the knowledge that he claims to have, raising him in his own opinion far above the contemporary level of thought? What the discovery that serves him as a lever to unhinge the whole fabric of traditional values?
It is the knowledge that God is dead.
The death of God he calls the greatest event in modern history and the cause of extreme danger. Its paradoxical place a value may be contained in these words. He never said that there was no God, but that the External had been vanquished by Time and that the immortal suffered death at the hands of mortals: “God is dead.” It is like a cry mingled of despair and triumph, reducing, by comparison, the whole story of atheism and agnosticism before and after him to the level of respectable mediocrity and making it sound like a collection of announcements by bankers who regret they are unable to invest in an unsafe proposition. Nietzsche, for the nineteenth century, brings to its perverse conclusion a line of religious thought and experience linked with the names of St. Paul, St. Augustine, Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Dostoevsky, minds for whom God has his clearly defined place, but to whom. He came in order to challenge their natural being, making demands that appeared absurd in the light of natural reason. These men are of the family of Jacob: Having wrestled with God for His blessing, they ever after limp through life with the framework of Nature incurably out of joint. Nietzsche too believed that he prevailed against God in that struggle, and won a new name for himself, the name of Zarathustra. However, the words he spoke on his mountain to the angel of the Lord? I will not let thee go, but thou curse me. Or, in words that Nietzsche did in fact speak: “I have on purpose devoted my life to exploring the whole contrast to a truly religious nature. I know the Devil and all his visions of God.
“God is dead” - this is the very core of Nietzsche’s spiritual existence, and what follows is despair and hope in a new greatness of man, visions of catastrophe and glory, the icy brilliance of analytical reason, fathoming with affected irreverence those depths through which are hidden of a ritual healer.
Perhaps by definition alone, comes the unswerving call of atheism, by this is the denial of or lack of belief in the existence of a god or gods. The term atheism comes from the Greek prefix ‘a-‘, meaning “without,” and the Greek word ‘theos’, meaning “deity.” The denial of gods’ existence is also known as strong, or positive, atheism, whereas the lack of belief in a god is known as negative, or weak, atheism. Although atheism is often contrasted with agnosticism - the view that we cannot know whether a deity exists or not and should therefore suspend belief - negative atheism is in fact compatible with agnosticism.
About one-third of the world’s population adheres to a form of Christianity. Latin America has the largest number of Christians, most of whom are Roman Catholics. Islam is practised by over one-fifth of the world’s population, most of whom live in parts of Asia, particularly the Middle East.
Atheism has wide-ranging implications for the human condition. In the rendering absence to belief in a god, as, too, ethical goals must be determined by secular and nonreligious aims of concern, human beings must take full responsibility for their destiny, and death marks the end of a person’s existence. As of 1994 there were an estimated 240 million atheists around the world comprising slightly more than 4 percent of the world’s population, including those who profess atheism, skepticism, disbelief, or irreligion. The estimate of nonbelievers increases significantly, to about 21 percent of the world’s population, if negative atheists are included.
From ancient times, people have at times used atheism as a term of abuse for religious positions they opposed. The first Christians were called atheists because they denied the existence of the Roman deities. Over time, several misunderstandings of atheism have arisen: That atheists are immoral, that morality cannot be justified without belief in God, and that life has no purpose without belief in God. Yet there is no evidence that atheists are any less moral than believers. Many systems of morality have been developed that do not presuppose the existence of a supernatural being. Moreover, the purpose of human life may be based on secular goals, such as the betterment of humankind.
In Western society the term atheism has been used more narrowly to refer to the denial of theism, in particular Judeo-Christian theism, which asserts the existence of an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good personal being. This being created the universe, took an active interest in human concerns, and guides his creatures through divine disclosure known as revelation. Positive atheists reject this theistic God and the associated beliefs in an afterlife, a cosmic destiny, a supernatural origin of the universe, an immortal soul, the revealed nature of the Bible and the Qur'an (Koran), and a religious foundation for morality.
Theism, however, is not a characteristic of all religions. Some religions reject theism but are not entirely atheistic. Although the theistic tradition is fully developed in the Bhagavad-Gita, the sacred text of Hinduism, earlier Hindu writings known as the Upanishads teach that Brahman (ultimate reality) is impersonal. Positive atheists reject even the pantheistic aspects of Hinduism that equate God with the universe. Several other Eastern religions, including Theravada Buddhism and Jainism, are commonly believed to be atheistic, but this interpretation is not strictly correct. These religions do reject a theistic God believed to have created the universe, but they accept numerous lesser gods. At most, such religions are atheistic in the narrow sense of rejecting theism.
One of the most controversial works of 19th-century philosophy, Thus Spake Zarathustra 1883-1885, articulated German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s theory of the Übermensch, a term translated as “Superman” or “Overman.” The Superman was an individual who overcame what Nietzsche termed the “slave morality” of traditional values, and lived according to his own morality. Nietzsche also advanced his idea that “God is dead,” or that traditional morality was no longer relevant in people’s lives. In this passage, the sage Zarathustra came down from the mountain where he had spent the last ten years alone to preach to the people.
In the Western intellectual world, nonbelief in the existence of God is a widespread phenomenon with a long and distinguished history. Philosophers of the ancient world such as Lucretius were nonbelievers. Even in the Middle Ages (5th to 15th centuries) there were currents of thought that questioned theist assumptions, including skepticism, the doctrine that true knowledge is impossible, and naturalism, the belief that only natural forces control the world. Several leading thinkers of the Enlightenment (1700-1789) were professed atheists, including Danish writer Baron Holbach and French encyclopedist Denis Diderot. Expressions of nonbelief also are found in classics of Western literature, including the writings of English poets Percy Shelley and Lord Byron, the English novelist Thomas Hardy, including French philosophers’ Voltaire and Jean-Paul Sartre, the Russian author Ivan Turgenev, and the American writers’ Mark Twain and Upton Sinclair. In the 19th century the most articulate and best-known atheists and critics of religion were German philosophers’ Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Friedrich Nietzsche. British philosopher Bertrand Russell, Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, and Sartre are among the 20th century’s most influential atheists.
Nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was an influential critic of religious systems, especially Christianity, for which he felt chained to the thickening herd morality. By declaring that “God is dead,” Nietzsche signified that traditional religious belief in God no longer played a central role in human experience. Nietzsche believed we would have to find secular justifications for morality to avoid nihilism - the absence of all belief.
Atheists justify their philosophical position in several different ways. Negative atheists attempt to establish their position by refuting typical theist arguments for the existence of God, such as the argument from first cause, the argument from design, the ontological argument, and the argument from religious experience. Other negative atheists assert that any statement about God is meaningless, because attributes such as all-knowing and all-powerful cannot be comprehended by the human mind. Positive atheists, on the other hand, defend their position by arguing that the concept of God is inconsistent. They question, for example, whether a God who is all-knowing can also be all-good and how a God who lacks bodily existence can be all-knowing.
Some positive atheists have maintained that the existence of evil makes the existence of God improbable. In particular, atheists assert that theism does not provide an adequate explanation for the existence of seemingly gratuitous evil, such as the suffering of innocent children. Theists commonly defend the existence of evil by claiming that God desires that human beings have the freedom to choose between good and evil, or that the purpose of evil is to build human character, such as the ability to persevere. Positive atheists counter that justifications for evil in terms of human free will leave unexplained why, for example, children suffer because of genetic diseases or abuse from adults. Arguments that God allows pain and suffering to build human character fail, in turn, to explain why there was suffering among animals before human beings evolved and why human character could not be developed with less suffering than occurs in the world. For atheists, a better explanation for the presence of evil in the world is that God does not exist.
Atheists have also criticized historical evidence used to support belief in the major theistic religions. For example, atheists have argued that a lack of evidence casts doubt on important doctrines of Christianity, such as the virgin birth and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Because such events are said to represent miracles, atheists assert that extremely strong evidence is necessary to support their occurrence. According to atheists, the available evidence to support these alleged miracles - from Biblical, pagan, and Jewish sources - is weak, and therefore such claims should be rejected.
Atheism is primarily a reaction to, or a rejection of, religious belief, and thus does not determine other philosophical beliefs. Atheism has sometimes been associated with the philosophical ideas of materialism, which holds that only matter exists. Communism, which asserts that religion impedes human progress, and rationalism, which emphasizes analytic reasoning over other sources of knowledge. However, there is no necessary connection between atheism and these positions. Some atheists have opposed communism and some have rejected materialism. Although nearly all contemporary materialists are atheists, the ancient Greek materialist Epicurus believed the gods were made of matter in the form of atoms. Rationalists such as French philosopher René Descartes have believed in God, whereas atheists such as Sartre are not considered to be rationalists. Atheism has also been associated with systems of thought that reject authority, such as anarchism, a political theory opposed to all forms of government, and existentialism, a philosophic movement that emphasizes absolute human freedom of choice; there is however no necessary connection between atheism and these positions. British analytic philosopher A.J. Ayer was an atheist who opposed existentialism, while Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard was an existentialist who accepted God. Marx was an atheist who rejected anarchism while Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, a Christian, embraced anarchism. Because atheism in a strict sense is merely a negation, it does not provide a comprehensive world-view. Presuming other philosophical positions to be outgrowths of atheism is therefore not possible.
Intellectual debate over the existence of God continues to be active, especially on college campuses, in religious discussion groups, and in electronic forums on the Internet. In contemporary philosophical thought, atheism has been defended by British philosopher Antony Flew, Australian philosopher John Mackie, and American philosopher Michael Martin, among others. Leading organizations of unbelief in the United States include The American Atheists, The Committee for the Scientific Study of Religion.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), German philosopher, poet, and classical philologist, who was one of the most provocative and influential thinkers of the 19th century. Nietzsche founded his morality on what he saw as the most basic human drive, the will to power. Nietzsche criticized Christianity and other philosophers’ moral systems as “slave moralities” because, in his view, they chained all members of society with universal rules of ethics. Nietzsche offered, in contrast, a “master morality” that prized the creative influence of powerful individuals who transcended the common rules of society.
Nietzsche studied classical philology at the universities of Bonn and Leipzig and was appointed the professor of classical philology at the University of Basel at the age of 24. Ill health (he was plagued throughout his life by poor eyesight and migraine headaches) forced his retirement in 1879. Ten years later he suffered a mental breakdown from which he never recovered. He died in Weimar in 1900.
In addition to the influence of Greek culture, particularly the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, Nietzsche was influenced by German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, by the theory of evolution, and by his friendship with German composer Richard Wagner.
Nietzsche’s first major work, Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste de Musik (The Birth of Tragedy), appeared in 1872. His most prolific period as an author was the 1880s. During the decade he wrote, Also sprach Zarathustra (Parts one-3, 1883-1884; Part four-4, 1885, and translated to English as, Thus Spake Zarathustra), Jenseits von Gut und Böse, 1886, Beyond Good and Evil - Zur Genealogie de Moral, 1887, also, On the Genealogy of Morals, and the German, Der Antichrist 1888, the English translation, The Antichrist, and Ecce Homo, was completed 1888, and published 1908. Nietzsche’s last major work, The Will to Power, Der Wille zur Macht, was published in 1901.
One of Nietzsche’s fundamental contentions was that traditional value (represented primarily by Christianity) had lost their power in the lives of individuals. He expressed this in his proclamation “God is dead.” He was convinced that traditional values represented a “slave morality,” a morality created by weak and resentful individuals who encouraged such behaviour as gentleness and kindness because the behaviour served their interests. Nietzsche claimed that new values could be created to replace the traditional ones, and his discussion of the possibility led to his concept of the overman or superman.
According to Nietzsche, the masses (whom he termed the herd or mob) conform to tradition, whereas his ideal overman is secure, independent, and highly individualistic. The overman feels deeply, but his passions are rationally controlled. Concentrating on the real world, than on the rewards of the next world promised by religion, the overman affirms life, including the suffering and pain that accompany human existence. Nietzsche’s overman is a creator of values, a creator of its “master morality” that reflects the strength and independence of one who is liberated from all values, except those that he deems valid.
Nietzsche maintained that all human behaviour is motivated by the will to power. In its positive sense, the will to power is not simply power over others, but the power over one’s self that is necessary for creativity. Such power is manifested in the overman's independence, creativity, and originality. Although Nietzsche explicitly denied that any overmen had yet arisen, he mentions several individuals who could serve as models. Among these models he lists Jesus, Greek philosopher Socrates, Florentine thinker Leonardo da Vinci, Italian artist Michelangelo, English playwright William Shakespeare, German author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Roman ruler Julius Caesar, and French emperor Napoleon I.
The concept of the overman has often been interpreted as one that postulates a master-slave society and has been identified with totalitarian philosophies. Many scholars deny the connection and attribute it to misinterpretation of Nietzsche's work.
An acclaimed poet, Nietzsche exerted much influence on German literature, as well as on French literature and theology. His concepts have been discussed and elaborated upon by such individuals as German philosophers Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger, and German Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, German American theologian Paul Tillich, and French writers’ Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. After World War II (1939-1945), American theologians’ Thomas J.J. Altizer and Paul Van Buren seized upon Nietzsche's proclamation “God is dead” in their attempt to make Christianity relevant to its believers in the 1960s and 1970s.
Nietzsche is openly pessimistic about the possibility of knowledge, for truth: we know (or, believe or imagine) just as much as may be useful in the interests of the human herd, the species: and even what is here called ‘utility’, is ultimately also a mere belief, something imaginary and perhaps precisely that most calamitous stupidity of which we shall perish some day.
This position is very radical. Nietzsche does not simply deny that knowledge, construed as the adequate representation of the world by the intellect, exists. He also refuses the pragmatist identification of knowledge and truth with usefulness: he writes that we think we know what we think is useful, and that we can be quite wrong about the latter.
Nietzsche’s view, his ‘perspectivism’, depends on his claim that there is no sensible conception of a world independent of human interpretation and to which interpretations would correspond if they were to constitute knowledge. He sums up this highly controversial position in The Will to Power: Facts are precisely what there is not, only interpretation.
It is often claimed that perspectivism is self-undermining, if the thesis that all views are interpretations is true then, it is argued, there is at least one view that is not an interpretation. If, on the other hand, the thesis is itself an interpretation, then there is no reason to believe that it is true, and it follows again, that not every view is an interpretation.
Nevertheless, this refutation assumes that if a view of perspectivism itself, is an interpretation that it is wrong. This is not the case, to call any view, including perspectivism. An interpretation is to say that it can be wrong, which is true of all views, and that is not a sufficient refutation. To show the perspectivism is actually false producing another view superior to it on specific epistemological grounds is necessary.
Perspectivism does not deny that particular views can be true. Like some versions of contemporary anti-realism, only by its attributes to specific approaches’ truth in relation to facts specified internally by the approaches themselves. Nonetheless, it refuses to envisage a single independent set of facts, to be accounted for by all theories. Thus Nietzsche grants the truth of specific scientific theories, he does, nevertheless, deny that a scientific interpretation can possibly be ‘the only justifiable interpretation of the world’, neither the fact’s science addresses nor the methods it employs are privileged. Scientific theories serve the purpose for which they have been devised, but these have no priority over the many other purposes of human life.
The existence of many purposes and needs relative to which the value of theories is established - another crucial element of perspectivism - is sometimes thought to imply a lawless relativism. According to which no standards for evaluating purposes and theories can be devised. This is correct only in that Nietzsche denies the existence of a single set of standards for determining epistemic value once and for all. However, he holds that specific views can be compared with and evaluated in relation to one another. The ability to use criteria acceptable in particular circumstances does not presuppose the existence of criteria applicable in all. Agreement is therefore, not always possible, since individuals may sometimes differ over the most fundamental issues dividing them.
Least of mention, Nietzsche would not be troubled by this fact, which his opponents too also have to confront only, as he would argue, to suppress it by insisting on the hope that all disagreements are in principal eliminable even if our practice falls woefully short of the ideal. Nietzsche abandons that ideal. He considers irresoluble disagreement an essential parts of human life.
Since, scientists during the nineteenth century were preoccupied with uncovering the workings of external reality and virtually nothing was known about the physical substrate is of human consciousness, the business of examining the dynamics and structure of mind became the province of ‘social scientists’ and ‘humanists’. Adolphe Quételet proposed a social physics’ that could serve as the basis for a new discipline called sociology, and his contemporary Auguste Comte concluded that a true scientific understanding of the social reality was quite inevitable. Mind, in the view of these figures, was a separate and distinct mechanism subject to the lawful workings of a mechanistic social reality.
More formal European philosophers, such as Immanuel Kant, sought to reconcile representations of external reality in mind with the motions of matter based on the dictates of pure reason. This impulse was also apparent in the utilitarian ethics of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, in the historical materialist of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and in the pragmatism of Charles Smith, William James, and John Dewey. All these thinkers were painfully aware, however, of the inability of reason to posit a self-consistent basis for bridging the gap between mind and matter, and each was obligated to conclude that the realm of the mental exists only in the subjective reality of the individual.
The fatal flaw of pure reason is, of course, the absence of emotion, and purely rational explanations of the division between subjective reality and external reality had limited appeal outside the community of intellectuals, the figure most responsible for infusing our understanding of Cartesian dualism with emotional content was the death of God theologian Friedrich Nietzsche. After declaring that God and ‘divine will’, did not exist, Nietzsche reified the ‘existence’ of consciousness in the domain of subjectivity as the ground for individual ‘will’ and summarily dismissed all previous philosophical attempts to articulate the ‘will to truth’. The problem, claimed Nietzsche, is that linear versions of the ‘will to truth’ disguise the fact that all alleged truths were arbitrarily created in the subjective reality of the individual and are expressions or manifestations of individual ‘will’.
Nietzsche’s emotionally charged defence of intellectual freedom and his radical empowerment of mind as the maker and transformer of the collective fictions that shape human reality in a soulless mechanistic universe proved terribly influential on twentieth-century thought. Nietzsche sought to reinforce his view of the subjective character of scientific knowledge and arithmetic that arose during the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Though a curious course of events, attempts by Edmund Husserl, a philosopher trained in higher math and physics, to resolve this crisis results in a view of the character of human consciousness that closely resembled that of Nietzsche.
The best-known disciple of Husserl was Martin Heidegger, and the work of both figures greatly influenced that of the French atheistic existenualist Jean-Paul Sartre. The work of Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre became foundational to that of the principal architects of philosophical postmodernism, the deconstructionalists Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, this direct line found linkage between the nineteenth-century crisis about the epistemological foundations of mathematical physics and the origins of philosophical postmodernism served to perpetuate the Cartesian two world dilemma, in, an even, or oppressive form.
Philosophers like John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and David Hume tried to articulate some basis for liking the mathematical describable motions of matter with linguistic representations of external reality in the subjective space of mind. Descartes’ compatriot Jean-Jacques Rousseau reified nature as the ground of human consciousness in a state of innocence and proclaimed that ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ is the guiding principles of this consciousness. Rousseau also made god-like the idea of the ‘general will’ of the people to achieve these goals and declared that those who do not conform to this will were social deviants.
The Enlightenment idea of deism, which imagined the universe as a clockwork and God as the clockmaker, provided grounds for believing in a divine agency lay the moment of creation. It also implied, however, that all the creative forces of the universe were exhausted at origins, that the physical substrates of mind were subject to the same natural laws as matter, and that the only means of mediating the gap between mind and matter was pure reason. Traditional Judeo-Christian theism, which had previously been based on both reason and revelation, responded to the challenge of deism by debasing rationality as a test of faith and embracing the idea that the truth of spiritual reality can be known only through divine revelation. This engendered a conflict between reason and revelation that persists to this day. And it also laid the fundamental for the fierce competition between the mega-narratives of science and religion as frame tale s for mediating the character of each should be ultimately defined.
The most fundamental aspect of intellectual tradition is the assumption that there is a fundamental division between the material and the immaterial world or between the realm of matter and the realm of pure mind and spirit. The metaphysical framework based on this assumption known as ontological dualism. As the word dual implies, the framework is predicated on an ontology, or a conception of the nature of God or Being, that assumes reality has two distinct and separable dimensions. The concept of Being as continuous, immutable, and having a prior or separate existence from the world of change dates from the ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides. The same qualities were associated with the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and they were considerably amplified by the role played in the theology by Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophy.
The role of seventeenth-century metaphysics is also apparent in metaphysical presuppositions about matter described by classical enumerations of motion. These presuppositions can be briefly defined as follows: (1) The physical world is made up of inert and changeless matter, and this matter changed only in terms of location in space, (2) the behaviour of matter mirrors physical theory and is inherently mathematical, (3) matter as the unchanging unit of physical reality can be exhaustively understood by mechanics, or by the applied mathematics of motion, and (4) the mind of the observer is separate from the observed system of matter, and the ontological bridge between the two physical law and theory.
Once, again, these presuppositions have a metaphysical basis because they are required to assume the following, - that the full and certain truths about the physical world are revealed in a mathematical structure governed by physical laws, which have a prior or separate existence from this world. While Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, and Newton assumed that metaphysics or ontological foundation for these laws was the perfect mind of God, the idea was increasingly regarded, even in the eighteenth century, as somewhat unnecessary, what would endure in an increasingly disguised form was the assumption of ontological dualism. This assumption, which remains alive and well in the debates about scientific epistemology, allowed the truths of mathematical physics to be regarded as having a separate and immutable existence outside the world of change.
As this view of hypotheses and the truths of nature as qualities were extended in the nineteenth century to a mathematical description of phenomena like heat, light, electricity, an magnetism, LaPlaces’ assumptions about the actual character of scientific truths seemed quite correct, this progress suggested that if we could remove all thoughts about the ‘nature of’ or the ‘source of’ phenomena, the pursuit of strictly quantitative concepts would bring us to a complete description of all aspects of physical reality. Subsequently, figures like Combe, Kirchhoff. Hertz, and Poincaré developed a program for the study of nature that was quite different from that of the original creators of classical physics.
The seventeenth-century view of physics as a philosophy of nature or a natural philosophy was displaced by the view of physics as an autonomous science that was ‘the science of nature’. This view, which was premised on the doctrine of positivism, promised to subsume all of the nature with a mathematical analysis of entities in motion and claimed that the true understanding of nature was revealed only in the unmathematical descriptions. Since the doctrine of positivism, assumes that knowledge we call physics resides only in the mathematical formalism of physical theory, it disallows the prospect that the vision of physical reality reveals in physical theory can have any other meaning. In the history of science, the irony is that positivism, which was intended to banish metaphysical concerns from the domain of science, served to perpetuate a seventeenth-century metaphysical assumption about the relationship between physical reality and physical theory.
Kant was to argue that the earlier assumption that our knowledge has the world is a mathematical physics and is wholly determined by the behaviour of physical reality could well be false. Perhaps, he said that the reverse was true - that the objects of nature conform to our knowledge of nature. The relevance of the Kantian position was later affirmed by the leader of the Berlin school of mathematics, Karl Weierstrass, who came to a conclusion that would also be adopted by Einstein - that mathematics is a pure creation of the human mind.
A complete history of the debate over the epistemological foundation of mathematical physics should probably begin with the discovery of irrational numbers by the followers of Pythagoras, the paradoxes of Zeno and Gottfried Leibniz. But since we are more concerned with the epistemological crisis of the late nineteenth century, let us begin with the set theory developed by the German mathematician and logician Georg Cantor. From 1878 to 1897, Cantor created a theory of abstract sets of entities that eventually became a mathematical discipline. A set, as he defined it, is a collection of definite and a distinguishable object in thought or perception conceived as a whole.
Cantor attempted to prove that the proceeds of counting and the definition of integers could be placed on a solid mathematical foundation. His method was repeatedly to place the elements in one set into ‘one-to-one’ correspondence with those in another. In the case of integers, Cantor showed that each integer (1, 2, 3, . . . n) could be paired with an even integer
(2, 4, 6, . . . n), and, therefore, that the set of all integers was equal to the set of all even numbers.
Formidably, Cantor discovered that some infinite sets were larger than others and that infinite sets formed a hierarchy of ever greater infinities. After this failing attempt to save the classical view of logical foundations and internal consistency of mathematical systems, it soon became obvious that a major crack had appeared in the seemingly solid foundations of number and mathematics. Meanwhile, an impressive number of mathematicians began to see that everything from functional analysis to the theory of real numbers depended on the problematic character of number itself.
In 1886, Nietzsche was delighted to learn the classical view of mathematics as a logical consistent and self-contained system that could prove it might be undermined. And his immediate and unwarranted conclusion was that all of logic and the whole of mathematics were nothing more than fictions perpetuated by those who exercised their will to power. With his characteristic sense of certainty, Nietzsche does precisely proclaim. “Without accepting the fictions of logic, without measuring reality against the purely invented world of the unconditional and self-identical, without a constant falsification of the world by means of numbers, man could not live.”
Many writers, along with a few well-known new-age gurus, have played fast and loosely with firm interpretations of some new but informal understanding grounded within the mental in some vague sense of cosmic consciousness. However, these new age nuances are ever so erroneously placed in the new-age section of a commercial bookstore and purchased by those interested in new-age literature, and they will be quite disappointed.
Research in neuroscience has shown that language processing is a staggering complex phenomenon that places incredible demands on memory and learning. Language functions extend, for example, into all major lobes of the neocortex: Auditory opinion is associated with the temporal area; tactile information is associated with the parietal area, and attention, working memory, and planning are associated with the frontal cortex of the left or dominant hemisphere. The left prefrontal region is associated with verb and noun production tasks and in the retrieval of words representing action. Broca’s area, next to the mouth-tongue region of a motor cortex, is associated with vocalization in word formation, and Wernicke’s area, by the auditory cortex, is associated with sound analysis in the sequencing of words.
Lower brain regions, like the cerebellum, have also evolved in our species to help in language processing. Until recently, the cerebellum was thought to be exclusively involved with automatic or preprogrammed movements such as throwing a ball, jumping over a high hurdle or playing noted orchestrations as on a musical instrument. Imaging studies in neuroscience suggest, however, that the cerebellum awaken within the smoldering embers brought aflame by the sparks of awakening consciousness, to think communicatively during the spoken exchange. Mostly actuated when the psychological subject occurs in making difficult the word associations that the cerebellum plays a role in associations by providing access to automatic word sequences and by augmenting rapid shifts in attention.
Critically important to the evolution of enhanced language skills are that behavioural adaptive adjustments that serve to precede and situate biological changes. This represents a reversal of the usual course of evolution where biological change precedes behavioural adaption. When the first hominids began to use stone tools, they probably rendered of a very haphazard fashion, by drawing on their flexible ape-like learning abilities. Still, the use of this technology over time opened a new ecological niche where selective pressures occasioned new adaptions. A tool use became more indispensable for obtaining food and organized social behaviours, mutations that enhanced the use of tools probably functioned as a principal source of selection for both bodied and brains.
The fist stone choppers appear in their fossil executions seem as the remnant fragments remaining about 2.5 million years ago, and they appear to have been fabricated with a few sharp blows of stone on stone. If these primitive tools are reasonable, which were hand-held and probably used to cut flesh and to chip bone to expose the marrow, were created by Homo habilis - the first large-brained hominid. Stone making is obviously a skill passed on from one generation to the next by learning as opposed to a physical trait passed on genetically. After these tools became critical to survival, this introduced selection for learning abilities that did not exist for other species. Although the early tool makers may have had brains roughly comparable to those of modern apes, they were already confronting the processes for being adapted for symbol learning.
The first symbolic representations were probably associated with social adaptations that were quite fragile, and any support that could reinforce these adaptions in the interest of survival would have been favoured by evolution. The expansion of the forebrain in Homo habilis, particularly the prefrontal cortex, was on of the core adaptations. This adaption was enhanced over time by increased connectivity to brain regions involved in language processing.
Imagining why incremental improvements in symbolic representations provided a selective advantage is easy. Symbolic communication probably enhanced cooperation in the relationship of mothers to infants, allowed forgoing techniques to be more easily learned, served as the basis for better coordinating scavenging and hunting activities, and generally improved the prospect of attracting a mate. As the list of domains in which symbolic communication was introduced became longer over time, this probably resulted in new selective pressures that served to make this communication more elaborate. After more functions became dependent on this communication, those who failed in symbol learning or could only use symbols awkwardly were less likely to pass on their genes to subsequent generations.
The crude language of the earliest users of symbolics must have been considerably gestured and nonsymbiotic vocalizations. Their spoken language probably became reactively independent and a closed cooperative system.
The general idea is very powerful, however, the relevance of spatiality to self-consciousness comes about not merely because the world is spatial but also because the self-conscious subject is a spatial element of the world. One cannot be self-conscious without being aware that one is a spatial element of the world, and one cannot be ware that one is a spatial element of the world without a grasp of the spatial nature of the world. Face to face, the idea of a perceivable, objective spatial world that causes ideas too subjectively becoming to denote in the world. During which time, his perceptions as they have of changing position within the world and to the more or less stable way the world is. The idea that there is an objective world and the idea that the subject is somewhere, and where he is given by what he can perceive.
Research, however distant, are those that neuroscience reveals in that the human brain is a massive parallel system which language processing is widely distributed. Computers generated images of human brains engaged in language processing reveals a hierarchal organization consisting of complicated clusters of brain areas that process different component functions in controlled time sequences. And it is now clear that language processing is not accomplished by stand-alone or unitary modules that evolved with the addition of separate modules that were eventually wired together on some neutral circuit board.
While the brain that evolved this capacity was obviously a product of Darwinian evolution, the most critical precondition for the evolution of this brain cannot be simply explained in these terms. Darwinian evolution can explain why the creation of stone tools altered conditions for survival in a new ecological niche in which group living, pair bonding, and more complex social structures were critical to survival. And Darwinian evolution can also explain why selective pressures in this new ecological niche favoured preadaptive changes required for symbolic communication. All the same, this communication resulted directly through its passing an increasingly atypically structural complex and intensively condensed behaviour. Social evolution began to take precedence over physical evolution in the sense that mutations resulting in enhanced social behaviour became selectively advantageously within the context of the social behaviour of hominids.
Because this communication was based on symbolic vocalization that required the evolution of neural mechanisms and processes that did not evolve in any other species. As this marked the emergence of a mental realm that would increasingly appear as separate and distinct from the external material realm.
If the emergent reality in this mental realm cannot be reduced to, or entirely explained as for, the sum of its parts, it seems reasonable to conclude that this reality is greater than the sum of its parts. For example, a complete proceeding of the manner in which light in particular wave lengths has ben advancing by the human brain to generate a particular colour says nothing about the experience of colour. In other words, a complete scientific description of all the mechanisms involved in processing the colour blue does not correspond with the colour blue as perceived in human consciousness. And no scientific description of the physical substrate of a thought or feeling, no matter how accomplish it can but be accounted for in actualized experience, especially of a thought or feeling, as an emergent aspect of global brain function.
If we could, for example, define all of the neural mechanisms involved in generating a particular word symbol, this would reveal nothing about the experience of the word symbol as an idea in human consciousness. Conversely, the experience of the word symbol as an idea would reveal nothing about the neuronal processes involved. And while one mode of understanding the situation necessarily displaces the other, both are required to achieve a complete understanding of the situation.
Even if we are to include two aspects of biological reality, finding to a more complex order in biological reality is associated with the emergence of new wholes that are greater than the orbital parts. Yet, the entire biosphere is of a whole that displays self-regulating behaviour that is greater than the sum of its parts. The emergence of a symbolic universe based on a complex language system could be viewed as another stage in the evolution of more complicated and complex systems. As marked and noted by the appearance of a new profound complementarity in relationships between parts and wholes. This does not allow us to assume that human consciousness was in any sense preordained or predestined by natural process. But it does make it possible, in philosophical terms at least, to argue that this consciousness is an emergent aspect of the self-organizing properties of biological life.
The scientific implications to the relationship between parts (Qualia) and indivisible whole (the universe) are quite staggering. Our primary concern, however, is a new view of the relationship between mind and world that carries even larger implications in human terms. When factors into our understanding of the relationship between parts and wholes in physics and biology, then mind, or human consciousness, must be viewed as an emergent phenomenon in a seamlessly interconnected whole called the cosmos.
All that is required to embrace the alternative view of the relationship between mind and world that are consistent with our most advanced scientific knowledge is a commitment to metaphysical and epistemological realism and a willingness to follow arguments to their logical conclusions. Metaphysical realism assumes that physical reality or has an actual existence independent of a human observer or any act of observation, epistemological realism assumes that progress in science requires strict adherence to scientific mythology, or to the rules and procedures for doing science. If one can accept these assumptions, most of the conclusions drawn should appear fairly self-evident in logical and philosophical terms. And it is also not necessary to attribute any extra-scientific properties to the whole to understand and embrace the new relationship between part and whole and the alternative view of human consciousness that is consistent with this relationship. This is, in this that our distinguishing character between what can be “proven” in scientific terms and what can be reasonably “inferred” in philosophical terms based on the scientific evidence.
Moreover, advances in scientific knowledge rapidly became the basis for the creation of a host of new technologies. Yet, those of which are responsible for evaluating the benefits and risks associated with the use of these technologies, much less their potential impact on human needs and values, normally had expertise on only one side of a two-culture divide. Perhaps, more important, many of the potential threats to the human future - such as, to, environmental pollution, arms development, overpopulation, and spread of infectious diseases, poverty, and starvation - can be effectively solved only by integrating scientific knowledge with knowledge from the social sciences and humanities. We have not done so for a simple reason - the implications of the confusing new fact of nature called non-locality cannot be properly understood without some familiarity wit the actual history of scientific thought. The intent is to suggest that what be most important about this back-ground can be understood in its absence. Those who do not wish to struggle with the small and perhaps, less, then there were fewer in amounts of back-ground implications should feel free to ignore it. But this material will be no more challenging as such, that the hope is that from those of which will find a common ground for understanding and that will meet again on this commonly functions in an effort to close of its circle, resolve the equations of eternity and complete the universe made obtainable to gain into the profound mysteriousness through which its unification holds itself there-within.
Based on what we now know about the evolution of human language abilities, however, it seems clear that our real or actualized self is not imprisoned in our minds. It is implicitly a part of the larger whole of biological life, human observers its existence from embedded relations to this whole, and constructs its reality as based on evolved mechanisms that exist in all human brains. This suggests that any sense of the “otherness” of self and world be is an illusion, in that disguises of its own actualization are to find all its relations between the part that are of their own characterization. Its self as related to the temporality of being whole is that of a biological reality. It can be viewed, of course, that a proper definition of this whole must not include the evolution of the larger undissectible whole. Yet, the cosmos and unbroken evolution of all life, by that of the first self-replication molecule that was the ancestor of DNA. It should include the complex interactions that have proven that among all the parts in biological reality that any resultant of emerging is self-regulating. This, of course, is responsible to properties owing to the whole of what might be to sustain the existence of the parts.
Founded on complications and complex coordinate systems in ordinary language may be conditioned as to establish some developments have been descriptively made by its physical reality and metaphysical concerns. That is, that it is in the history of mathematics and that the exchanges between the mega-narratives and frame tales of religion and science were critical factors in the minds of those who contributed. The first scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, allowed scientists to better them in the understudy of how the classical paradigm in physical reality has marked results in the stark Cartesian division between mind and world that became one of the most characteristic features of Western thought. This is not, however, another strident and ill-mannered diatribe against our misunderstandings, but drawn upon equivalent self realization and undivided wholeness or predicted characterlogic principles of physical reality and the epistemological foundations of physical theory.
Scientific knowledge is an extension of ordinary language into greater levels of abstraction and precision through reliance upon geometry and numerical relationships. We imagine that the seeds of the scientific imagination were planted in ancient Greece. This, of course, opposes any other option but to speculate some displacement afar from the Chinese or Babylonian cultures. Partly because the social, political, and economic climates in Greece were more open in the pursuit of knowledge along with greater margins that reflect upon cultural accessibility. Another important factor was that the special character of Homeric religion allowed the Greeks to invent a conceptual framework that would prove useful in future scientific investigations. But it was only after this inheritance from Greek philosophy was wedded to some essential feature of Judeo-Christian beliefs about the origin of the cosmos that the paradigm for classical physics emerged.
The Greek philosophers we now recognized as the originator’s scientific thoughts were oraclically mystic who probably perceived their world as replete with spiritual agencies and forces. The Greek religious heritage made it possible for these thinkers to attempt to coordinate diverse physical events within a framework of immaterial and unifying ideas. The fundamental assumption that there is a pervasive, underlying substance out of which everything emerges and into which everything returns are attributed to Thales of Miletos. Thales had apparently transcended to this conclusion out of the belief that the world was full of gods, and his unifying substance, water, was similarly charged with spiritual presence. Religion in this instance served the interests of science because it allowed the Greek philosophers to view “essences” underlying and unifying physical reality as if they were “substances.”
The history of science grandly testifies to the manner in which scientific objectivity results in physical theories that must be assimilated into “customary points of view and forms of perception.” The framers of classical physics derived, like the rest of us there, “customary points of view and forms of perception” from macro-level visualized experience. Thus, the descriptive apparatus of visualizable experience became reflected in the classical descriptive categories.
A major discontinuity appears, however, as we moved from descriptive apparatus dominated by the character of our visualizable experience to a complete description of physical reality in relativistic and quantum physics. The actual character of physical reality in modern physics lies largely outside the range of visualizable experience. Einstein, was acutely aware of this discontinuity: “We have forgotten what features of the world of experience caused us to frame pre-scientific concepts, and we have great difficulty in representing the world of experience to ourselves without the spectacles of the old-established conceptual interpretation. There is the further difficulty that our language is compelled to work with words that are inseparably connected with those primitive concepts.”
It is time, for the religious imagination and the religious experience to engage the complementary truths of science in filling that which is silence with meaning. However, this does not mean that those who do not believe in the existence of God or Being should refrain in any sense for assessing the implications of the new truths of science. Understanding these implications does not require to some ontology, and is in no way diminished by the lack of ontology. And one is free to recognize a basis for an exchange between science and religion since one is free to deny that this basis exists - there is nothing in our current scientific world-view that can prove the existence of God or Being and nothing that legitimate any anthropomorphic conceptions of the nature of God or Being. The question of belief in ontology remains what it has always been - a question, and the physical universe on the most basic level remains what has always been - a riddle. And the elemental answer to the question and the ultimate meaning of the riddle is and probably will always be, a matter of personal choice and conviction, in that the finding by some conclusive evidences that openly evince its question, is, much less, that the riddle, is precisely and explicitly relationally found that of, least of mention, a requiring explication that evokes of an immediate introduction for which is the unanswerable representation thereof. In that of its finding as such, their assembling to gather by some inspiring of formidable combinations awaiting the presence to the future. Wherefore, in its secretly enigmatically hidden reservoir lay of the continuous phenomenons, in that, for we are to discover or rediscover upon which the riddle has to undertake by the evincing properties that bind all substantive quantifications raised of all phenomena that adhere to the out-of-the-ordinary endlessnes. That once found might that we realize that its answer belongs but to no man, because once its riddle is solved the owing results are once-more, the afforded efforts gainfully to employ in the obtainable acquirements for which categorize in all of what we seek. In that, the self-naming proclamation belongs only to an overflowing Nothingness, whereby its own bleeding is to call for that which speaks of Nothing. Subsequently, there remains are remnant infractions whose fragments also bleed from their pours as Nothing, for Nothingness means more than Nothingness. If, only to recover in the partialities that unify consciousness, but, once, again, the continuous flow of Nothing gives only to itself the vacuousness that Nothingness belongs of an unchanging endlessness.
Our frame reference point works mostly to incorporate in an abounding classical set affiliation between mind and world, by that lay to some defining features and fundamental preoccupations, for which there is certainly nothing new in the suggestion that contemporary scientific world-view legitimates an alternate conception of the relationship between mind and world. The essential point of attention is that one of “consciousness” and remains in a certain state of our study.
But at the end of this, sometimes labourious journey that precipitate to some conclusion that should make the trip very worthwhile. Initiatory comments offer resistance in contemporaneous physics or biology for believing of the “I” in the stark Cartesian division between mind and world that some have rather aptly described as “the disease of the Western mind.”
Following the fundamental explorations that include questions about knowledge and the intuitive certainty by which but even here the epistemic concepts involved, as this aim is to provide a unified framework for understanding the universe. That in giving the immaterial essences that gave form and structure to this universe were being coded in geometrical and mathematical ideas. And this insight led him to invented algebraic geometry.
A scientific understanding to these ideas could be derived, as did that Descartes declared, that with the aid of precise deduction, and he also claimed that the contours of physical reality could be laid out in three-dimensional coordinates. In classical physics, external reality consisted of inert and inanimate matter moving according to wholly deterministic natural laws, and collections of discrete atomized parts made up wholes. Classical physics was also premised, however, a dualistic conception of reality as consisting of abstract disembodied ideas existing in a domain separate form and superior to sensible objects and movements. The notion that the material world experienced by the senses was inferior to the immaterial world experienced by mind or spirit has been blamed for frustrating the progress of physics up too at least the time of Galileo. But in one very important respect, it also made the first scientific revolution possible. Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton firmly believed that the immaterial geometrical and mathematical ideas that inform physical reality had a prior existence in the mind of God and that doing physics was a form of communion with these ideas.
The tragedy of the Western mind is a direct consequence of the stark Cartesian division between mind and world. This is the tragedy of the modern mind which “solved the riddle of the universe,” but only to replace it by another riddle: The riddle of itself. Yet, we discover the “certain principles of physical reality,” said Descartes, “not by the prejudices of the senses, but by rational analysis, which thus possess so great evidence that we cannot doubt of their truth.” Since the real, or that which actually remains external to ourselves, was in his view only that which could be represented in the quantitative terms of mathematics, Descartes concluded that all qualitative aspects of reality could be traced to the deceitfulness of the senses.
Given that Descartes distrusted the information from the senses to the point of doubting the perceived results of repeatable scientific experiments, how did he conclude that our knowledge of the mathematical ideas residing only in mind or in human subjectivity was accurate, much less the absolute truth? He did so by making a leap of faith - God constructed the world, said Descartes, according to the mathematical ideas that our minds could uncover in their pristine essence. The truths of classical physics as Descartes viewed them were quite literally “revealed” truths, and it was this seventeenth-century metaphysical presupposition that became in the history of science what is termed the “hidden ontology of classical epistemology.” Descartes lingers in the widespread conviction that science does not provide a “place for man” or for all that we know as distinctly human in subjective reality.
The historical notion in the unity of consciousness has had an interesting history in philosophy and psychology. Taking Descartes to be the first major philosopher of the modern period, the unity of consciousness was central to the study of the mind for the whole of the modern period until the 20th century. The notion figured centrally in the work of Descartes, Leibniz, Hume, Reid, Kant, Brennan, James, and, in most of the major precursors of contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive psychology. It played a particularly important role in Kant's work.
A couple of examples will illustrate the role that the notion of the unity of consciousness played in this long literature. Consider a classical argument for dualism (the view that the mind is not the body, indeed is not made out of matter at all). It starts like this: When I consider the mind, which is to say of myself, as far as I am only a thinking thing, I cannot distinguish in myself any parts, but apprehend myself to be clearly one and entire.
Here is another, more elaborate argument based on unified consciousness. The conclusion will be that any system of components could never achieve unified consciousness acting in concert. William James' well-known version of the argument starts as follows: Take a sentence of a dozen words, take twelve men, and to each word. Then stand the men in a row or jam them in a bunch, and let each think of his word as intently as he will; Nowhere will there be a consciousness of the whole sentence.
James generalizes this observation to all conscious states. To get dualism out of this, we need to add a premise: That if the mind were made out of matter, conscious states would have to be distributed over some group of components in some relevant way. Nevertheless, this thought experiment is meant to show that conscious states cannot be so distributed. Therefore, the conscious mind is not made out of matter. Calling the argument that James is using is the Unity Argument. Clearly, the idea that our consciousness of, here, the parts of a sentence are unified is at the centre of the Unity Argument. Like the first, this argument goes all the way back to Descartes. Versions of it can be found in thinkers otherwise as different from one another as Leibniz, Reid, and James. The Unity Argument continued to be influential into the 20th century. That the argument was considered a powerful reason for concluding that the mind is not the body is illustrated in a backhanded way by Kant's treatment of it (as he found it in Descartes and Leibniz, not James, of course).
Kant did not think that we could uncover anything about the nature of the mind, including whether nor is it made out of matter. To make the case for this view, he had to show that all existing arguments that the mind is not material do not work and he set out to do justly that in the Critique of Pure Reason on the Paralogisms of Pure Reason (1781) (paralogisms are faulty inferences about the nature of the mind). The Unity Argument is the target of a major part of that chapter; if one is going to show that we cannot know what the mind is like, we must dispose of the Unity Argument, which purports to show that the mind is not made out of matter. Kant's argument that the Unity Argument does not support dualism is simple. He urges that the idea of unified consciousness being achieved by something that has no parts or components are no less mysterious than its being achieved by a system of components acting together. Remarkably enough, though no philosopher has ever met this challenge of Kant's and no account exists of what an immaterial mind not made out of parts might be like, philosophers continued to rely on the Unity Argument until well into the 20th century. It may be a bit difficult for us to capture this now but the idea any system of components, and for an even stronger reason might not realize that merge with consciousness, that each system of material components, had a strong intuitive appeal for a long time.
The notion that consciousness agrees to unification and was in addition central to one of Kant's own famous arguments, his ‘transcendental deduction of the categories’. In this argument, boiled down to its essentials, Kant claims that to tie various objects of experience together into a single unified conscious representation of the world, something that he simply assumed that we could do, we could probably apply certain concepts to the items in question. In particular we have to apply concepts from each of four fundamental categories of concept: Quantitative, qualitative, relational, and what he called ‘modal’ concepts. Modal concept’s concern of whether an item might exist, does exist, or must exist. Thus, the four kinds of concept are concepts for how many units, what features, what relations to other objects, and what existence status is represented in an experience.
It was relational conceptual representation that most interested Kant and of relational concepts, he thought the concept of cause-and-effect to be by far the most important. Kant wanted to show that natural science (which for him meant primarily physics) was genuine knowledge (he thought that Hume's sceptical treatment of cause and effect relations challenged this status). He believed that if he could prove that we must tie items in our experience together causally if we are to have a unified awareness of them, he would have put physics back on "the secure path of a science.” The details of his argument have exercised philosophers for more than two hundred years. We will not go into them here, but the argument illustrates how central the notion of the unity of consciousness was in Kant's thinking about the mind and its relation to the world.
Although the unity of consciousness had been at the centre of pre-20th century research on the mind, early in the 20th century the notion almost disappeared. Logical atomism in philosophy and behaviourism in psychology were both unsympathetic to the notion. Logical atomism focussed on the atomic elements of cognition (sense data, simple propositional judgments, etc.), rather than on how these elements are tied together to form a mind. Behaviourism urged that we focus on behaviour, the mind being alternatively myth or something otherwise that we cannot and do not need of studying the mysteriousness of science, from which brings meaning and purpose to humanity. This attitude extended to consciousness, of course. The philosopher Daniel Dennett summarizes the attitude prevalent at the time this way: Consciousness may be the last bastion of occult properties, epiphenomena, immeasurable subjective states - in short, the one area of mind best left to the philosophers. Let them make fools of themselves trying to corral the quicksilver of ‘phenomenology’ into a respectable theory.
The unity of consciousness next became an object of serious attention in analytic philosophy only as late as the 1960s. In the years since, new work has appeared regularly. The accumulated literature is still not massive but the unity of consciousness has again become an object of serious study. Before we examine the more recent work, we need to explicate the notion in more detail than we have done so far and introduce some empirical findings. Both are required to understand recent work on the issue.
To expand on our earlier notion of the unity of consciousness, we need to introduce a pair of distinctions. Current works on consciousness labours under a huge, confusing terminology. Different theorists exchange dialogue over the excess consciousness, phenomenal consciousness, self-consciousness, simple consciousness, creature consciousness, states consciousness, monitoring consciousness, awareness as equated with consciousness, awareness distinguished from consciousness, higher orders thought, higher orders experience, Qualia, the felt qualities of representations, consciousness as displaced perception, . . . and on and on and on. We can ignore most of this profusion but we do need two distinctions: between consciousness of objects and consciousness of our representations of objects, and between consciousness of representations and consciousness of self.
It is very natural to think of self-consciousness or, cognitive state more accurately, as a set of cognitive states. Self-knowledge is an example of such a cognitive state. There are plenty of things that I know bout self. I know the sort of thing I am: a human being, a warm-blooded rational animal with two legs. I know of many properties and much of what is happening to me, at both physical and mental levels. I also know things about my past, things I have done and that of whom I have been with other people I have met. But I have many self-conscious cognitive states that are not instances of knowledge. For example, I have the capacity to plan for the future - to weigh up possible courses of action in the light of goals, desires, and ambitions. I am capable of ca certain type of moral reflection, tide to moral self-and understanding and moral self-evaluation. I can pursue questions like, what sort of person I am? Am I the sort of person I want to be? Am I the sort of individual that I ought to be? This is my ability to think about myself. Of course, much of what I think when I think about myself in these self-conscious ways is also available to me to employing in my thought about other people and other objects.
When I say that I am a self-conscious creature, I am saying that I can do all these things. But what do they have in common? Could I lack some and still be self-conscious? These are central questions that take us to the heart of many issues in metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of psychology.
And, if, in at all, a straightforward explanation to what makes those of the “self contents” immune to error through misidentification concerning the semantics of self, then it seems fair to say that the problem of self-consciousness has been dissolved, at least as much as solved.
This proposed account would be on a par with other noted examples as such as the redundancy theory of truth. That is to say, the redundancy theory or the deflationary view of truth claims that the predicate ‘ . . . true’ does not have a sense, i.e., expresses no substantive or profound or explanatory concept that ought to be the topic of philosophic enquiry. The approach admits of different versions, but centres on the pints (1) that ‘it is true that p’ says no more nor less than ‘p’ (so, redundancy”) (2) that in less direct context, such as ‘everything he said was true’, or ‘all logical consequences of true propositions as true’, the predicated functions as a device enabling us to generalize rather than as an adjective or predicate describing the things he said, or the kinds of propositions that follow from true propositions. For example, its translation is to infer that: (œ p, Q)(P & p
q
q)’ where there is no use of a notion of truth.
There are technical problems in interpreting all uses of the notion of truth in such ways, but they are not generally felt to be insurmountable. The approach needs to explain away apparently substantive uses of the notion, such as . . . ‘science aims at the truth’ or ‘truth is a norm governing discourse. Indeed, postmodernist writing frequently advocates that we must abandon such norms, along with a discredited ‘objective’ concept ion of truth. But perhaps, we can have the norms even when objectivity is problematic, since they can be framed within mention of truth: Science wants to be so that whenever science holds that ‘p’, when ‘p’‘. Discourse is to be regulated by the principle that it is wrong to assert ‘p’. When not-p.
Confronted with the range of putatively self-conscious cognitive states, one might assume that there is a single ability that is presupposed. This is my ability to think about myself, and I can only have knowledge about myself if I have beliefs about myself, and I can only have beliefs about myself if I can entertain thoughts about myself. The same can be said for auto-graphical memories and moral self-understanding. These are ways of thinking about myself.
Of course, much of what I think when I think about myself in these self-conscious ways is also available to me to employ in my thoughts about other people and other objects. My knowledge that I am a human being deploys certain conceptual abilities that I can also deploy in thinking that you are a human being. The same holds when I congratulate myself for satisfying the exacting moral standards of autonomous moral agencies. This involves concepts and descriptions that can apply equally to me and to others. On the other hand, when I think about myself, I am also putting to work an ability that I cannot put to work in thinking about other people and other objects. This is precisely the ability to apply those concepts and descriptions to myself. It has become common to refer to this ability as the ability to entertain “I’-thoughts.
What is an, “I”-thought?” Obviously, an “I”-thought is a thought that involves self-reference. I can think an “I”-thought only by thinking about myself. Equally obvious, though, this cannot be all that there is to say on the subject. I can think thoughts that involve a self-reference but am not “I”-thoughts. Suppose I think that the next person to set a parking ticket in the centre of Toronto deserves everything he gets. Unbeknown to be, the very next recipient of a parking ticket will be me. This makes my thought self-referencing, but it does not make it an “I”-thought. Why not? The answer is simply that I do not know that I will be the next person to get a parking ticket in the down-town area in Toronto. Is ‘A’, is that unfortunate person, then there is a true identity statement of the form I = A, but I do not know that this identity holds, I cannot be ascribed the thoughts that I will deserve everything I get? And say I am not thinking genuine “I”-thoughts, because one cannot think a genuine “I”-thought if one is ignorant that one is thinking about one’s self. So it is natural to conclude that “I”-thoughts involve a distinctive type of self-reference. This is the sort of self-reference whose natural linguistic expression is the first-person pronoun “I,” because one cannot be the first-person pronoun without knowing that one is thinking about oneself.
This is still not quite right, however, because thought contents can be specific, perhaps, they can be specified directly or indirectly. That is, all cognitive states to be considered, presuppose the ability to think about oneself. This is not only that they all have to some commonality, but it is also what underlies them all. We can see is more detail what this suggestion amounts to. This claim is that what makes all those cognitive states modes of self-consciousness is the fact that they all have content that can be specified directly by means of the first person pronoun “I” or, indirectly by means of the direct reflexive pronoun “he,” such they are first-person contents.
The class of first-person contents is not a homogenous class. There is an important distinction to be drawn between two different types of first-person contents, corresponding to two different modes in which the first person can be employed. The existence of this distinction was first noted by Wittgenstein in an important passage from The Blue Book: That there are two different cases in the use of the word “I” (or, “my”) which is called “the use as object” and “the use as subject.” Examples of the first kind of use are these” “My arm is broken,” “I have grown six inches,” “I have a bump on my forehead,” “The wind blows my hair about.” Examples of the second kind are: “I see so-and-so,” “I try to lift my arm,” “I think it will rain,” “I have a toothache.”
The explanations given are of the distinction that hinge on whether or not they are judgements that involve identification. However, one can point to the difference between these two categories by saying: The cases of the first category involve the recognition of a particular person, and there is in these cases the possibility of an error, or as: The possibility of can error has been provided for . . . It is possible that, say in an accident, I should feel a pain in my arm, see a broken arm at my side, and think it is mine when really it is my neighbour’s. And I could, looking into a mirror, mistake a bump on his forehead for one on mine. On the other hand, there is no question of recognizing a person when I say I have toothache. To ask “are you sure that its you who have pains?” Its one and only, would be nonsensical.
Wittgenstein is drawing a distinction between two types of first-person contents. The first type, which is describes as invoking the use of “I” as object, can be analysed in terms of more basic propositions. Such that the thought “I am B” involves such a use of “I.” Then we can understand it as a conjunction of the following two thoughts” “a is B” and “I am a.” We can term the former a predication component and the latter an identification component. The reason for braking the original thought down into these two components is precisely the possibility of error that Wittgenstein stresses in the second passages stated. One can be quite correct in predicating that someone is ‘B’, even though mistaken in identifying oneself as that person.
To say that a statement “a is B” is subject to error through misidentification relative to the term “a” means that the following is possible: The speaker knows some particular thing to be “B,” but makes the mistake of asserting “a is B” because, and only because, he mistakenly thinks that the thing he knows to be “B” is what “a” refers to.
The give direction to, then, is that one cannot be mistaken about who is being thought about. In one sense, Shoemaker’s criterion of immunity to error through misidentification relative to the first-person pronoun (simply “immunity to error through misidentification”) is too restrictive. Beliefs with first-person contents that are immune to error through identification tend to be acquired on grounds that usually do result in knowledge, but they do not have to be. The definition of immunity to error trough misidentification needs to be adjusted to accommodate them by formulating it in terms of justification rather than knowledge.
The connection to be captured is between the sources and grounds from which a belief is derived and the justification there is for that belief. Beliefs and judgements are immune to error through misidentification in virtue of the grounds on which they are based. The category of first-person contents being picked out is not defined by its subject matter or by any points of grammar. What demarcates the class of judgements and beliefs that are immune to error through misidentification is evidence base from which they are derived, or the information on which they are based. So, to take by example, my thought that I have a toothache is immune to error through misidentification because it is based on my feeling a pain in my teeth. Similarly, the fact that I am consciously perceiving you makes my belief that I am seeing you immune to error through misidentification.
To say that a statement “a is B” is subject to error through misidentification relative to the term “a” means that some particular thing is B, because his belief is based on an appropriate evidence base, but he makes the mistake of asserting “a is B” because, and only because, he mistakenly thinks that the thing he justified believes to be ‘B’ is what “a” refers to.
Beliefs with first-person contents that are immune to error through misidentification tend to be acquired on grounds that usually result in knowledge, but they do not have to be. The definition of immunity to error through misidentification needs to be adjusted to accommodate by formulating in terms of justification than knowledge. The connection to be captured is between the sources and grounds from which a belief is derived and the justification there is for that belief. Beliefs and judgements are immune to error through misidentification in virtue of the grounds on which they are based. The category of first-person contents picked out is not defined by its subject matter or by any points of grammar. What demarcates the class of judgements and beliefs that ae immune to error through misidentification is the evidence base from which they are derived, or the information on which they are based. For example, my thought that I have a toothache is immune to error through misidentification because it is based on my feeling a pain in my teeth. Similarly, the fact that I am consciously perceiving you makes my belief that I am seeing you immune to error through misidentification.
A suggestive definition is to enounce that a statement “a is b” is subject to error through misidentification relative to the term “a” means that the following is possible: The speaker is warranted in believing that some particular thing is “b,” because his belief is based on an appropriate evidence base, but he makes the mistake of asserting “a is b” because, and only because, he mistakenly thinks that the thing he justified believes to be “b” is what “a” refers to.
First-person contents that are immune to error through misidentification can be mistaken, but they do have a basic warrant in virtue of the evidence on which they are based, because the fact that they are derived from such an evidence base is closely linked to the fact that they are immune to error thought misidentification. Of course, there is room for considerable debate about what types of evidence base ae correlated with this class of first-person contents. Seemingly, then, that the distinction between different types of first-person content can be characterized in two different ways. We can distinguish between those first-person contents that are immune to error through misidentification and those that are subject to such error. Alternatively, we can discriminate between first-person contents with an identification component and those without such a component. For purposes rendered, in that these different formulations each pick out the same classes of first-person contents, although in interestingly different ways.
All first-person consent subject to error through misidentification contains an identification component of the form “I am a” and employ of the first-person-pronoun contents with an identification component and those without such a component. in that identification component, does it or does it not have an identification component? Acquitted by the pain of some infinite regress, at some stage we will have to arrive at an employment of the first-person pronoun that does not have to arrive at an employment of the first-person pronoun that does not presuppose an identification component, then, is that any first-person content subject to error through misidentification will ultimately be anchored in a first-person content that is immune to error through misidentification.
It is also important to stress how self-consciousness, and any theory of self-consciousness that accords a serious role in self-consciousness to mastery of the semantics of the first-person pronoun, are motivated by an important principle that has governed much if the development of analytical philosophy. This is the principle that the philosophical analysis of though can only proceed through the principle analysis of language. The principle has been defended most vigorously by Michael Dummett.
Even so, thoughts differ from that is said to be among the contents of the mind in being wholly communicable: It is of the essence of thought that I can convey to you the very thought that I have, as opposed to being able to tell you merely something about what my though is like. It is of the essence of thought not merely to be communicable, but to be communicable, without residue, by means of language. In order to understand thought, it is necessary, therefore, to understand the means by which thought is expressed. Dummett goes on to draw the clear methodological implications of this view of the nature of thought: We communicate thoughts by means of language because we have an implicit understanding of the workings of language, that is, of the principles governing the use of language, it is these principles, which relate to what is open to view in the mind other than via the medium of language that endow our sentences with the senses that they carry. In order to analyse thought, therefore, it is necessary to make explicit those principles, regulating our use of language, which we already implicitly grasp.
Many philosophers would want to dissent from the strong claim that the philosophical analysis of thought through the philosophical analysis of language is the fundamental task of philosophy. But there is a weaker principle that is very widely held as The Thought-Language Principle.
As it stands, the problem between to different roles that the pronoun “he” can play of such oracle clauses. On the one hand, “he” can be employed in a proposition that the antecedent of the pronoun (i.e., the person named just before the clause in question) would have expressed using the first-person pronoun. In such a situation that holds that “he,” is functioning as a quasi-indicator. Then when “he” is functioning as a quasi-indicator, it is written as “he.” Others have described this as the indirect reflexive pronoun. When “he” is functioning as an ordinary indicator, it picks out an individual in such a way that the person named just before the clause of opacity need not realize the identity of himself with that person. Clearly, the class of first-person contents is not homogenous class.
A subject has distinguished self-awareness to the extent that he is able to distinguish himself from the environment and its content. He has been distinguishing psychological self-awareness to the extent that he is able to distinguish himself as a psychological subject within a contract space of other psychological subjects. What does this require? The notion of a non-conceptual point of view brings together the capacity to register one’s distinctness from the physical environment and various navigational capacities that manifest a degree of understanding of the spatial nature of the physical environment. One very basic reason for thinking that these two elements must be considered together emerges from a point made in the richness of the self-awareness that accompanies the capacity to distinguish the self from the environment is directly proportion are to the richness of the awareness of the environment from which the self is being distinguished. So no creature can understand its own distinction from the physical enjoinment without having an independent understanding of the nature of the physical environment, and since the physical environment is essentially spatial, this requires an understanding of the spatial nature of the physical environment. but this cannot be the whole story. It leaves unexplained why an understanding should be required of this particular essential feature of the physical environment. After all, it is also an essential feature of the physical environment that it is composed of an object that has both primary and secondary qualities, but there is a reflection of this in the notion of a non-conceptual point of view. More is needed to understand the significance of spatiality.
The very idea of a perceived objective spatial world brings with it the ideas of the subject for being in the world, which there course of his perceptions due to his changing position in the world and to the more or less stable in the way of the world is. The idea that there is an objective world and the idea that the subject is somewhere cannot be separated, and where he is given by what he can perceive.
But the main criteria of his work is ver much that the dependence holds equally in the opposite direction.
It seems that this general idea can be extrapolated and brought to bar on the notion of a non-conceptual point of view. What binds together the two apparently discrete components of a non-conceptual point of view is precisely the fact that a creature’s self-awareness must be awareness of itself as a spatial bing that acts upon and is acted upon by the spatial world. Evans’s own gloss on how a subject’s self-awareness, is awareness of himself as a spatial being involves the subject’s mastery of a simple theory explaining how the world makes his perceptions as they are, with principles like “I perceive such and such, such and such holds at ‘P’; so (probably) am ‘P’ and “I’’: am ‘P?’, such does not hold at ‘P’, so I cannot really be perceiving such and such, even though it appears that I am” (Evans 1982). This is not very satisfactory, though. If the claim is that the subject must explicitly hold these principles, then it is clearly false. If, on the other hand, the claim is that these are the principles of a theory that a self-conscious subject must tacitly know, then the claim seems very uninformative in the absence of any specification of the precise forms of behaviour that can only be explained by there ascription to a body of tacit knowledge. We need an account of what it is for a subject to be correctly described as possessing such a simple theory of perception. The point however, is simply that the notion of as non-conceptual point of view as presented, can be viewed as capturing, at a more primitive level, precisely the same phenomenon that Evans is trying to capture with his notion of a simple theory of perception.
Moreover, stressing the importance of action and movement indicates how the notion of a non-conceptual point of view might be grounded in the self-specifying in for action to be found in visual perception. By that in thinking particularly of the concept of an affordance so central to Gibsonian theories of perception. One important type of self-specifying information in the visual field is information about the possibilities for action and reaction that the environment affords the perceiver, by which that affordancs are non-conceptual first-person contents. The development of a non-conceptual point of view clearly involves certain forms of reasoning, and clearly, we will not have a full understanding of he the notion of a non-conceptual point of view until we have an explanation of how this reasoning can take place. The spatial reasoning engaged over which this reasoning takes place. The spatial reasoning involved in developing a non-conceptual point of view upon the world is largely a matter of calibrating different affordances into an integrated representation of the world.
In short, any learned cognitive ability is contractible out of more primitive abilities already in existence. There are good reasons to think that the perception of affordance is innate. And so if, the perception of affordances is the key to the acquisition of an integrated spatial representation of the environment via the recognition of affordance symmetries, affordance transitivities, and affordance identities, then it is precisely conceivable that the capacities implicated in an integrated representation of the world could emerge non-mysteriously from innate abilities.
Nonetheless, there are many philosophers who would be prepared to countenance the possibility of non-conceptual content without accepting that to use the theory of non-conceptual content so solve the paradox of self-consciousness. This is ca more substantial task, as the methodology that is adapted rested on the first of the marks of content, namely that content-bearing states serve to explain behaviour in situations where the connections between sensory input and behaviour output cannot be plotted in a law-like manner (the functionalist theory of self-reference). As such, not of allowing that every instance of intentional behaviour where there are no such law-like connections between sensory input and behaviour output needs to be explained by attributing to the creature in question of representational states with first-person contents. Even so, many such instances of intentional behaviour do need to be explained in this way. This offers a way of establishing the legitimacy of non-conceptual first-person contents. What would satisfactorily demonstrate the legitimacy of non-conceptual first-person contents would be the existence of forms of behaviour in paralinguistic or nonlinguistic creatures for which inference to the best understanding or explanation (which in this context includes inference to the most parsimonious understanding, or explanation) demands the ascription of states with non-conceptual first-person contents.
The non-conceptual first-person contents and the pick-up of self-specifying information in the structure of exteroceptive perception provide very primitive forms of non-conceptual self-consciousness, even if forms that can plausibly be viewed as in place of one’s birth or shortly afterward. The dimension along which forms of self-consciousness must be compared is the richest of the conception of the self that they provide. All of which, a crucial element in any form of self-consciousness is how it enables the self-conscious subject to distinguish between self and environment - what many developmental psychologists term self-world dualism. In this sense, self-consciousness is essentially a contrastive notion. One implication of this is that a proper understanding of the richness of the conception that we take into account the richness of the conception of the environment with which it is associated. In the case of both somatic proprioception and the pick-up of self-specifying information in exteroceptive perception, there is a relatively impoverished conception of the environment. One prominent limitation is that both are synchronic than diachronic. The distinction between self and environment that they offer is a distinction that is effective at a time but not over time. The contrast between propriospecific and exterospecific invariant in visual perception, for example, provides a way for a creature to distinguish between itself and the world at any given moment, but this is not the same as a conception of oneself as an enduring thing distinguishable over time from an environment that also endures over time.
The notion of a non-conceptual point of view brings together the capacity to register one’s distinctness from the physical environment and various navigational capacities that manifest a degree of understanding of the spatial nature of the physical environment. One very basic reason for thinking that these elements must be considered together emerges from a point made from which the richness of the awareness of the environment from which the self is being distinguished. So no creature can understand its own distinctness from the physical environment without having an independent understanding of the nature of the physical environment, and since the physical environment is essentially spatial, this requires an understanding of the spatial nature of the physical environment. But this cannot be the whole story. It leaves unexplained why an understanding should be required of this particular essential feature of the physical environment. After all, it is also an essential feature of the physical environment that it is composed of objects that have both primary and secondary qualities, but there is no reflection of this in the notion of a non-conceptual point of view. More is needed to understand the significance of spatiality.
The general idea is very powerful, that the relevance of spatiality to self-consciousness comes about not merely because the world is spatial but also because the self-conscious subject is himself a spatial element of the world. One cannot be self-conscious without being aware that one is a spatial element of the world, and one cannot be aware that one is a spatial element of the world, and one cannot be aware that one is a spatial element of the world without a grasp of the spatial nature of the world.
The very idea of perceivable, objective spatial wold bings it the idea of the subject for being in the world, with the course of his perceptions due to his changing position in the world and to the more or less stable way the world is. The idea that there is an objective world and the idea that the subject is somewhere cannot be separated, and where he is given by what he can perceive.
One possible reaction to consciousness, is that it is erroneously only because unrealistic and ultimately unwarranted requirements are being placed on what is to count as genuinely self-referring first-person thoughts. Suppose for such an objection will be found in those theories that attempt to explain first-person thoughts in a way that does not presuppose any form of internal representation of the self or any form of self-knowledge. Consciousness arises because mastery of the semantics of the first-person pronoun is available only to creatures capable of thinking first-person thoughts whose contents involve reflexive self-reference and thus, seem to presuppose mastery of the first-person pronoun. If, thought, it can be established that the capacity to think genuinely first-person thoughts does not depend on any linguistic and conceptual abilities, then arguably the problem of circularity will no longer have purchase.
There is no account of self-reference and genuinely first-person thought that can be read in a way that poses just such a direct challenge to the account of self-reference underpinning the conscious. This is the functionalist account, although spoken before, the functionalist view, reflexive self-reference is a completely unmysterious phenomenon susceptible to a functional analysis. Reflexive self-reference is not dependent upon any antecedent conceptual or linguistic skills. Nonetheless, the functionalist account of a reflexive self-reference is deemed to be sufficiently rich to provide the foundation for an account of the semantics of the first-person pronoun. If this is right, then the circularity at which consciousness is at its heart, and can be avoided.
The circularity problems at the root of consciousness arise because mastery of the semantics of the first-person pronoun requires the capacity to think fist-person thoughts whose natural expression is by means of the first-person pronoun. It seems clear that the circle will be broken if there are forms of first-person thought that are more primitive than those that do not require linguistic mastery of the first-person pronoun. What creates the problem of capacity circularity is the thought that we need to appeal to first-person contents in explaining mastery of the first-person pronoun, whereby its containing association with the thought that any creature capable of entertaining first-person contents will have mastered the first-person pronoun. So if we want to retain the thought that mastery of the first-person pronoun can only be explained in terms of first-person contents, capacity circularity can only be avoided if there are first-person contents that do not presuppose mastery of the first-person pronoun.
On the other hand, however, it seems to follow from everything earlier mentioned about “I”-thoughts that conscious thought in the absence of linguistic mastery of the first-person pronoun is a contradiction in terms. First-person thoughts have first-person contents, where first-person contents can only be specified in terms of either the first-person pronoun or the indirect reflexive pronoun. So how could such thoughts be entertained by a thinker incapable of a reflexive self-reference? How can a thinker who is not capable of reflexively reference? How can a thinker who is not the first-person pronoun be plausibly ascribed thoughts with first-person contents? The thought that, despite all this, there are real first-person contents that do not presuppose mastery of the first-person pronoun is at the core of the functionalist theory of self-reference and first-person belief.
The best developed functionalist theory of self-reference has been provided by Hugh Mellor (1988-1089). The basic phenomenon he is interested in explaining is what it is for a creature to have what he terms a “subjective belief,” that is to say, a belief whose content is naturally expressed by a sentence in the first-person singular and the present tense. The explanation of subjective belief that he offers makes such beliefs independent of both linguistic abilities and conscious beliefs. From this basic account he constructs an account of conscious subjective beliefs and the of the reference of the first-person pronoun “I.” These putatively more sophisticated cognitive states are casually derivable from basic subjective beliefs.
Historically, Heidegger' theory of spatiality distinguishes three different types of space: (1) world-space, (2) regions (Gegend), and (3) Dasein's spatiality. What Heidegger calls "world-space" is space conceived as an “arena” or “container” for objects. It captures both our ordinary conception of space and theoretical space - in particular absolute space. Chairs, desks, and buildings exist “in” space, but world-space is independent of such objects, much like absolute space “in which” things exist. However, Heidegger thinks that such a conception of space is an abstraction from the spatial conduct of our everyday activities. The things that we deal with are near or far relative to us; according to Heidegger, this nearness or farness of things is how we first become familiar with that which we (later) represented to ourselves as "space." This familiarity with which are rendered the understanding of space (in a "container" metaphor or in any other way) possible. It is because we act spatially, going to places and reaching for things to use, that we can even develop a conception of abstract space at all. What we normally think of as space - world-space - turns out not to be what space fundamentally is; world-space is, in Heidegger's terminology, space conceived as vorhanden. It is an objectified space founded on a more basic space-of-action.
Since Heidegger thinks that space-of-action is the condition for world-space, he must explain the former without appealing to the latter. Heidegger's task then is to describe the space-of-action without presupposing such world-space and the derived concept of a system of spatial coordinates. However, this is difficult because all our usual linguistic expressions for describing spatial relations presuppose world-space. For example, how can one talk about the "distance between you and me" without presupposing some sort of metric, i.e., without presupposing an objective access to the relation? Our spatial notions such as "distance," "location," etc. must now be re-described from a standpoint within the spatial relation of self (Dasein) to the things dealt with. This problem is what motivates Heidegger to invent his own terminology and makes his discussion of space awkward. In what follows I will try to use ordinary language whenever possible to explain his principal ideas.
The space-of-action has two aspects: regions (space as Zuhandenheit) and Dasein's spatiality (space as Existentiale). The sort of space we deal within our daily activity is "functional" or zuhanden, and Heidegger's term for it is "region." The places we work and live-the office, the park, the kitchen, etc.-all having different regions that organizes our activities and conceptualized “equipment.” My desk area as my work region has a computer, printer, telephone, books, etc., in their appropriate “places,” according to the spatiality of the way in which I work. Regions differ from space viewed as a "container"; the latter notion lacks a "referential" organization with respect to our context of activities. Heidegger wants to claim that referential functionality is an inherent feature of space itself, and not just a "human" characteristic added to a container-like space.
In our activity, how do we specifically stand with respect to functional space? We are not "in" space as things are, but we do exist in some spatially salient manner. What Heidegger is trying to capture is the difference between the nominal expression "we exist in space" and the adverbial expression "we exist spatially." He wants to describe spatiality as a mode of our existence rather than conceiving space as an independent entity. Heidegger identifies two features of Dasein's spatiality - "de-severance" (Ent-fernung) and "directionality" (Ausrichtung).
De-severance describes the way we exist as a process of spatial self-determination by “making things available” to ourselves. In Heidegger's language, in making things available we "take in space" by "making the farness vanish" and by "bringing things close"
We are not simply contemplative beings, but we exist through concretely acting in the world - by reaching for things and going to places. When I walk from my desk area into the kitchen, I am not simply alternating locations from points ‘A’ to ‘B’ in an arena-like space, but I am “taking in space” as I move, continuously making the “farness” of the kitchen “vanish,” as the shifting spatial perspectives are opened as I go along.
This process is also inherently "directional." Every de-severing is aimed toward something or in a certain direction that is determined by our concern and by specific regions. I must always face and move in a certain direction that is dictated by a specific region. If I want to get a glass of ice tea, instead of going out into the yard, I face toward the kitchen and move in that direction, following the region of the hallway and the kitchen. Regions determine where things belong, and our actions are coordinated in directional ways accordingly.
De-severance, directionality, and regionality are three ways of describing the spatiality of a unified Being-in-the-world. As aspects of Being-in-the-world, these spatial modes of being are equiprimordial.9 10 Regions "refer" to our activities, since they are established by our ways of being and our activities. Our activities, in turn, are defined in terms of regions. Only through the region can our de-severance and directionality are established. Our object of concern always appears in a certain context and place, in a certain direction. It is because things appear in a certain direction and in their places “there” that we have our “here.” We orient ourselves and organize our activities, always within regions that must already be given to us.
Heidegger's analysis of space does not refer to temporal aspects of Being-in-the-world, even though they are presupposed. In the second half of Being and Time he explicitly turns to the analysis of time and temporality in a discussion that is significantly more complex than the earlier account of spatiality. Heidegger makes the following five distinctions between types of time and temporality: (1) The ordinary or "vulgar" conception of time; this is time conceived as Vorhandenheit. (2) World-time; this is time as Zuhandenheit. Dasein's temporality is divided into three types: (3) Dasein's inauthentic (uneigentlich) temporality, (4) Dasein's authentic (eigentlich) temporality, and (5) originary temporality or “temporality as such.” The analyses of the vorhanden and zuhanden modes of time are interesting, but it is Dasein's temporality that is relevant to our discussion, since it is this form of time that is said to be founding for space. Unfortunately, Heidegger is not clear about which temporality plays this founding role.
We can begin by excluding Dasein's inauthentic temporality. This mode of time refers to our unengaged, "average" way in which we regard time. It is the “past we forget” and the “future we expect,” all without decisiveness and resolute understanding. Heidegger seems to consider that this mode of a temporality is the temporal dimension of de-severance and directionality, since de-severance and directionality deal only with everyday actions. As such, is the inauthenticity founded within a temporality that must in themselves be set up in an authentic basis of some sort. The two remaining candidates for the foundation are Dasein's authentic temporality and originary temporality.
Dasein's authentic temporality is the "resolute" mode of temporal existence. An authentic temporality is realized when Dasein becomes aware of its own finite existence. This temporality has to do with one's grasp of his or her own life as a whole from one's own unique perspective. Life gains meaning as one's own life-project, bounded by the sense of one's realization that he or she is not immortal. This mode of time appears to have a normative function within Heidegger's theory. In the second half of BT he often refers to inauthentic or "everyday" mode of time as lacking some primordial quality which authentic temporality possesses.
In contrast, an originary temporality is the formal structure of Dasein's temporality itself. In addition to its spatial Being-in-the-world, Dasein also exists essentially as "projection." Projection is oriented toward the future, and this coming orientation regulates our concern by constantly realizing various possibilities. A temporality is characterized formally as this dynamic structure of "a future that makes present in the process of having been." Heidegger calls the three moments of temporality - the future, the present, and the past - the three ecstasies of the temporality. This mode of time is not normative but rather formal or neutral; as Blattner argues, the temporal features that constitute Dasein's temporality describe both inauthentic and authentic temporalities.
There are some passages that indicate that authentic temporality is the primary manifestation of the temporality, because of its essential orientation toward the future. For instance, Heidegger states that "temporality first showed itself in anticipatory resoluteness." Elsewhere, he argues that "the ‘time’ which is accessible to Dasein's common sense is not primordial, but arises rather from authentic temporality." In these formulations, authentic to the temporality is said to find of other inauthentic modes. According to Blattner, this is "by far the most common" interpretation of the status of authentic time.
However, to argue with Blattner and Haar, in that there are far more passages where Heidegger considers an originary temporality as distinct from authentic temporality, and founding for it and for Being-in-the-world as well. Here are some examples: The temporality has different possibilities and different ways of temporalizing itself. The basic possibilities of existence, the authenticity and inauthenticity of Dasein, are grounded ontologically on possible temporalizations of temporality. Time is primordial as the temporalizing of a temporality, and as such it makes possible the Constitution of the structure of care.
Heidegger's conception seems to be that it is because we are fundamentally temporal - having the formal structure of ecstatic-horizontals unity - that we can project, authentically or inauthentically, our concernful dealings in the world and exist as Being-in-the-world. It is on this account that temporality is said to found spatiality.
Since Heidegger uses the term "temporality" rather than "an authentic temporality" whenever the founding relation is discussed between space and time, I will begin the following analysis by assuming that it is originary temporality that founds Dasein's spatiality. On this assumption two interpretations of the argument are possible, but both are unsuccessful given his phenomenological framework.
The principal argument, entitled "The Temporality of the Spatiality that is Characteristic of Dasein." Heidegger begins the section with the following remark: Though the expression `temporality' does not signify what one understands by "time" when one talks about `space and time', nevertheless spatiality seems to make up another basic attribute of Dasein corresponding to temporality. Thus with Dasein's spatiality, existential-temporal analysis seems to come to a limit, so that this entity that we call "Dasein," must be considered as `temporal' `and' as spatial coordinately.
Accordingly, Heidegger asks, "Has our existential-temporal analysis of Dasein thus been brought to a halt . . . by the spatiality that is characteristic of Dasein . . . and Being-in-the-world?" His answer is no. He argues that since "Dasein's constitution and its ways to be are possible ontologically only on the basis of temporality," and since the "spatiality that is characteristic of Dasein . . . belongs to Being-in-the-world," it follows that "Dasein's specific spatiality must be grounded in temporality."
Heidegger's claim is that the totality of regions-de-severance-directionality can be organized and re-organized, "because Dasein as temporality is ecstatic-horizontals in its Being." Because Dasein exists futurely as "for-the-sake-of-which," it can discover regions. Thus, Heidegger remarks: "Only on the basis of its ecstatic-horizontals temporality is it possible for Dasein to break into space."
However, in order to establish that temporality founds spatiality, Heidegger would have to show that spatiality and temporality must be distinguished in such a way that temporality not only shares a content with spatiality but also has additional content as well. In other words, they must be truly distinct and not just analytically distinguishable. But what is the content of "the ecstatic-horizontals constitution of temporality?" Does it have a content above and beyond Being-in-the-world? Nicholson poses the same question as follows: Is it human care that accounts for the characteristic features of a humanistic temporality? Or is it, as Heidegger says, human temporality that accounts for the characteristic features of human care, serves as their foundation? The first alternative, according to Nicholson, is to reduce temporality to care: "the specific attributes of the temporality of Dasein . . . would be in their roots not aspects of temporality but reflections of Dasein's care." The second alternative is to treat temporality as having some content above and beyond care: "the three-fold constitution of care stems from the three-fold constitution of temporality."
Nicholson argues that the second alternative is the correct reading.18 Dasein lives in the world by making choices, but "the ecstasies of temporality lies well prior to any choice . . . so our study of care introduces us to a matter whose scope outreaches care: the ecstasies of temporality itself." Accordingly, "What was able to make clear is that the reign of temporal ecstasies over the choices we make accords with the place we occupy as finite beings in the world."
But if Nicholson's interpretation is right, what would be the content of "the ecstasies of the temporality itself," if not some sort of purely formal entity or condition such as Kant's "pure intuition?" But this would imply that Heidegger has left phenomenology behind and is now engaging in establishing a transcendental framework outside the analysis of Being-in-the-world, such that this formal structure founds Being-in-the-world. This is inconsistent with his initial claim that Being-in-the-world is itself foundational.
Nicholson's first alternative offers a more consistent reading. The structure of temporality should be treated as an abstraction from Dasein's Being-in-the-world, specifically from care. In this case, the content of temporality is just the past and the present and the future ways of Being-in-the-world. Heidegger's own words support this reading: "as Dasein temporalizes itself, a world is too," and "the world is neither present-at-hand nor ready-to-hand, but temporalizes itself in temporality." He also states that the zuhanden "world-time, in the rigorous sense of the existential-temporal conception of the world, belongs as itself." In this reading, "temporality temporalizing itself," "Dasein's projection," and "the temporal projections of the world" are three different ways of describing the same "happening" of Being-in-the-world, which Heidegger calls "self-directive."
However, if this is the case, then temporality does not found spatiality, except perhaps in the trivial sense that spatiality is built into the notion of care that is identified with temporality. The fulfilling contents of “temporality temporalizing itself” simply is the various openings of regions, i.e., Dasein's "breaking into space." Certainly, as Stroeker points out, it is true that "nearness and remoteness are spatially-transient phenomena and cannot be conceived without a temporal moment." But this necessity does not constitute a foundation. Rather, they are equiprimordial. The addition of temporal dimensions does indeed complete the discussion of spatiality, which abstracted from time. But this completion, while it better articulates the whole of Being-in-the-world, does not show that temporality is more fundamental.
If temporality and spatiality are equiprimordial, then all of the supposedly founding relations between temporality and spatiality could just as well be reversed and still hold true. Heidegger's view is that "because Dasein as temporality is ecstatic-horizontals in its Being, it can take along with it a space for which it has made room, and it can do so farcically and constantly." But if Dasein is essentially a factical projection, then the reverse should also be true. Heidegger appears to have assumed the priority of temporality over spatiality perhaps under the influence of Kant, Husserl, or Dilthey, and then based his analyses on that assumption.
However, there may still be a way to save Heidegger's foundational project in terms of authentic temporality. Heidegger never specifically mentions the authenticity of temporalities, since he suggests earlier that the primary manifestation of temporality is authentic temporality, such a reading may perhaps be justified. This reading would treat the whole spatio-temporal structure of Being-in-the-world. The resoluteness of authentic temporality, arising out of Dasein's own "Being-towards-death," would supply a content to temporality above and beyond everyday involvements.
Heidegger is said to have its foundations in resoluteness, Dasein determines its own Situation through anticipatory resoluteness, which includes particular locations and involvements, i.e., the spatiality of Being-in-the-world. The same set of circumstances could be transformed into a new situation with different significance, if Dasein chooses resolutely to bring that about. Authentic temporality in this case can be said to found spatiality, since Dasein's spatiality is determined by resoluteness. This reading moreover enables Heidegger to construct a hierarchical relation between temporality and spatiality within Being-in-the-world than going outside of it to a formal transcendental principle, since the choice of spatiality is grasped phenomenological ly in terms of the concrete experience of decision.
Moreover, one might argue that according to Heidegger one's own grasp of "death" is uniquely a temporal mode of existence, whereas there is no such weighty conception involving spatiality. Death is what makes Dasein "stands before itself in its own most potentiality-for-Being." Authentic Being-towards-death is a "Being towards a possibility - indeed, towards a distinctive possibility of Dasein itself." One could argue that notions such as "potentiality" and "possibility" are distinctively temporal, nonspatial notions. So "Being-towards-death," as temporal, appears to be much more ontologically "fundamental" than spatiality.
However, Heidegger is not yet out of the woods. I believe that labelling the notions of anticipatory resoluteness, Being-towards-death, potentiality, and possibility specifically as temporal modes of being (to the exclusion of spatiality) begs the question. Given Heidegger's phenomenological framework, why assume that these notions are only temporal (without spatial dimensions)? If Being-towards-death, potentiality-for-Being, and possibilities were "purely" temporal notions, what phenomenological sense can we make of such abstract conceptions, given that these are manifestly our modes of existence as bodily beings? Heidegger cannot have in mind such an abstract notion of time, if he wants to treat of the proposed authenticity that corragulates of temporality is the meaning of care. It would seem more consistent with his theoretical framework to say that Being-towards-death is a rich spatio-temporal mode of being, given that Dasein is Being-in-the-world.
Furthermore, the interpretation that defines resoluteness as uniquely temporal suggests too much of a voluntaristic or subjectivistic notion of the self that controls its own Being-in-the-world from the standpoint of its future. This would drive a wedge between the self and its Being-in-the-world, thereby creating a temporal "inner self" which can decide its own spatiality. However, if Dasein is Being-in-the-world as Heidegger claims, then all of Dasein's decisions should be viewed as concretely grounded in Being-in-the-world. If so, spatiality must be an essential constitutive element.
Hence, authentic temporality, if construed narrowly as the mode of temporality, at first appears to be able to found spatiality, but it also commits Heidegger either to an account of time that is too abstract, or to the notion of the self far more like Sartre's than his own. What is lacking in Heidegger's theory that generates this sort of difficulty is a developed conception of Dasein as a lived body - a notion more fully developed by Merleau-Ponty.
The elements of a more consistent interpretation of authentic temporality are present in Being and Time. This interpretation incorporates a view of "authentic spatiality" in the notion of authentic temporality. This would be Dasein's resolutely grasping its own spatio-temporal finitude with respect to its place and its world. Dasein is born at a particular place, lives in a particular place, dies in a particular place, all of which it can relate to in an authentic way. The place Dasein lives are not a place of anonymous involvements. The place of Dasein must be there where its own potentiality-for-Being is realized. Dasein's place is thus a determination of its existence. Had Heidegger developed such a conception more fully, he would have seen that temporality is equiprimordial with thoroughly spatial and contextual Being-in-the-world. They are distinguishable but equally fundamental ways of emphasizing our finitude.
The internalized tensions within his theory eventually led Heidegger to reconsider his own positions. In his later period, he explicitly develops what may be viewed as a conception of authentic spatiality. For instance, in "Building Dwelling Thinking," Heidegger states that Dasein's relations to locations and to spaces inheres in dwelling, and dwelling is the basic character of our Being. The notion of dwelling expresses an affirmation of spatial finitude. Through this affirmation one acquires a proper relation to one's environment.
But the idea of dwelling must accede to the fact that has already been discussed in Being and Time, regarding the term "Being-in-the-world," Heidegger explains that the word "in" is derived from "in-an" - to "reside," "habits are," "to dwell." The emphasis on "dwelling" highlights the essentially "worldly" character of the self.
Thus from the beginning Heidegger had a conception of spatial finitude, but this fundamental insight was undeveloped because of his ambition to carry out the foundational project that favoured time. From the 1930's on, as Heidegger abandons the foundational project focussing on temporality, the conception of authentic spatiality comes to the fore. For example, in Discourse on Thinking Heidegger considers the spatial character of Being as "that-which-regions (die Gegnet)." The peculiar expression is a re-conceptualization of the notion of "region" as it appeared in Being and Time. Region is given an active character and defined as the "openness that surrounds us" which "comes to meet us." By giving it an active character, Heidegger wants to emphasize that region is not brought into being by us, but rather exists in its own right, as that which expresses our spatial existence. Heidegger states that "one needs to understand ‘resolve’ (Entschlossenheit) as it is understood in Being and Time: as the opening of man [Dasein] particularly undertaken by him for openness, . . . which we think of as that-which-regions." Here Heidegger is asserting an authentic conception of spatiality. The finitude expressed in the notion of Being-in-the-world is thus transformed into an authentic recognition of our finite worldly existence in later writings.
Meanwhile, it seems that it is nonetheless, natural to combine this close connection with conclusions by proposing an account of self-consciousness, as to the capacity to think “I”-thoughts that are immune to error through misidentification, though misidentification varies with the semantics of the “self” - this would be a redundant account of self-consciousness. Once we have an account of what it is to be capable of thinking “I”-thoughts, we will have explained everything distinctive about self-consciousness. It stems from the thought that what is distinctive about “I”-thoughts are that they are either themselves immune to error or they rest on further “I” -Thoughts that are immune in that way.
Once we have an account of what it is to be capable of thinking thoughts that are immune to error through misidentification, we will have explained everything about the capacity to think “I”-thoughts. As it would to claim of deriving from the thought that immunity to error through misidentification depends on the semantics of the “self.”
Once, again, that when we have an account of the semantics in that we will have explained everything distinctive about the capacity to think thoughts that are immune to error through misidentification.
The suggestion is that the semantics of “self-ness” will explain what is distinctive about the capacity to think thoughts immune to error through misidentification. Semantics alone cannot be expected to explain the capacity for thinking thoughts. The point in fact, that all that there is to the capacity of think thoughts that are immune tp error is the capacity to think the sort of thought whose natural linguistic expression involves the “self,” where this capacity is given by mastery of the semantics of “self-ness.” Yielding, to explain what it is to master the semantics of “self-ness,” especially to think thoughts immune to error through misidentification.
On this view, the mastery of the semantics of “self-ness” may be construed as for the single most important explanation in a theory of “self-consciousness.”
Its quickened reformulation might be put to a defender of “redundancy” or the deflationary theory is how mastery of the semantics of “self-ness” can make sense of the distinction between “self-ness contents” that are immune to error through misidentification and the “self contents” that lack such immunity. However, this is only an apparent difficulty when one remembers that those of the “selves” content is immune to error through misidentification, because, those employing ‘”I” as object, were able in having to break down their component elements. The identification component and the predication components that for which if the composite identification components of each are of such judgements that mastery of the semantics of “self-regulatory” content must be called upon to explain. Identification component are, of course, immune to error through misidentification.
It is also important to stress how the redundancy and the deflationary theory of self-consciousness, and any theory of self-consciousness that accords a serious role in self-consciousness to mastery of the semantics of the “self-ness,” are motivated by an important principle that has governed much of the development of analytical philosophy. The principle is the principle that the analysis of thought can only continue thought, the philosophical analysis of language such that we communicate thoughts by means of language because we have an implicit understanding of the workings of language, that is, of the principle governing the use of language: It is these principles, which relate to what is open to view and mind other that via the medium of language, which endow our sentences with the senses that they carry. In order to analyse thought, therefore, it is necessary to make explicitly those principles, regulating our use of language, which we already implicitly grasp.
Still, at the core of the notion of broad self-consciousness is the recognition of what consciousness is the recognition of what developmental psychologist’s call “self-world dualism.” Any subject properly described as self-conscious must be able to register the distinction between himself and the world, of course, this is a distinction that can be registered in a variety of way. The capacity for self-ascription of thoughts and experiences, in combination with the capacity to understand the world as a spatial and causally structured system of mind-independent objects, is a high-level way of registering of this distinction.
Consciousness of objects is closely related to sentience and to being awake. It is (at least) being in somewhat of a distinct informational and behavioural intention where its responsive state is for one's condition as played within the immediateness of environmental surroundings. It is the ability, for example, to process and act responsively to information about food, friends, foes, and other items of relevance. One finds consciousness of objects in creatures much less complex than human beings. It is what we (at any rate first and primarily) have in mind when we say of some person or animal as it is coming out of general anaesthesia, ‘It is regaining consciousness’ as consciousness of objects is not just any form of informational access to the world, but the knowing about and being conscious of, things in the world.
We are conscious of our representations when we are conscious, not (just) of some object, but of our representations: ‘I am seeing [as opposed to touching, smelling, tasting] and seeing clearly [as opposed too dimly].’ Consciousness of our own representations it is the ability to process and act responsively to information about oneself, but it is not just any form of such informational access. It is knowing about, being conscious of, one's own psychological states. In Nagel's famous phrase (1974), when we are conscious of our representations, it is ‘like something’ to have them. If, that which seems likely, there are forms of consciousness that do not involve consciousness of objects, they might consist in consciousness of representations, though some theorists would insist that this kind of consciousness be not of representations either (via representations, perhaps, but not of them).
The distinction just drawn between consciousness of objects and consciousness of our representations of objects may seem similar to Form's (1995) contributes of a well-known distinction between P- [phenomenal] and A- [access] consciousness. Here is his definition of ‘A-consciousness’: "A state is A-conscious if it is poised for direct control of thought and action." He tells us that he cannot define ‘P-consciousness’ in any "remotely non-circular way" but will use it to refer to what he calls "experiential properties,” what it is like to have certain states. Our consciousness of objects may appear to be like A-consciousness. It is not, however, it is a form of P-consciousness. Consciousness of an object is - how else can we put it? - consciousness of the object. Even if consciousness is just informational excess of a certain kind (something that Form would deny), it is not all form of informational access and we are talking about conscious access here. Recall the idea that it is like something to have a conscious state. Other closely related ideas are that in a conscious state, something appears to one, that conscious states have a ‘felt quality’. A term for all this is phenomenology: Conscious states have a phenomenology. (Thus some philosophers speak of phenomenal consciousness here.) We could now state the point we are trying to make this way. If I am conscious of an object, then it is like something to have that object as the content of a representation.
Historically, Heidegger' theory of spatiality distinguishes three different types of space: (1) world-space, (2) regions (Gegend), and (3) Dasein's spatiality. What Heidegger calls "world-space" is space conceived as an “arena” or “container” for objects. It captures both our ordinary conception of space and theoretical space - in particular absolute space. Chairs, desks, and buildings exist “in” space, but world-space is independent of such objects, much like absolute space “in which” things exist. However, Heidegger thinks that such a conception of space is an abstraction from the spatializing conduct of our everyday activities. The things that we deal with are near or far relative to us; according to Heidegger, this nearness or farness of things is how we first become familiar with that which we (later) represent to ourselves as "space." This familiarity is what renders the understanding of space (in a "container" metaphor or in any other way) possible. It is because we act spatially, going to places and reaching for things to use, that we can even develop a conception of abstract space at all. What we normally think of as space - world-space - turns out not to be what space fundamentally is; world-space is, in Heidegger's terminology, space conceived as vorhanden. It is an objectified space founded on a more basic space-of-action.
Since Heidegger thinks that space-of-action is the condition for world-space, he must explain the former without appealing to the latter. Heidegger's task then is to describe the space-of-action without presupposing such world-space and the derived concept of a system of spatial coordinates. However, this is difficult because all our usual linguistic expressions for describing spatial relations presuppose world-space. For example, how can one talk about the "distance between you and me" without presupposing some sort of metric, i.e., without presupposing an objective access to the relation? Our spatial notions such as "distance," "location," etc. must now be re-described from a standpoint within the spatial relation of self (Dasein) to the things dealt with. This problem is what motivates Heidegger to invent his own terminology and makes his discussion of space awkward. In what follows I will try to use ordinary language whenever possible to explain his principal ideas.
The space-of-action has two aspects: regions (space as Zuhandenheit) and Dasein's spatiality (space as Existentiale). The sort of space we deal with in our daily activity is "functional" or zuhanden, and Heidegger's term for it is "region." The places we work and live-the office, the park, the kitchen, etc.-all have different regions that organize our activities and contexualize “equipment.” My desk area as my work region has a computer, printer, telephone, books, etc., in their appropriate “places,” according to the spatiality of the way in which I work. Regions differ from space viewed as a "container"; the latter notion lacks a "referential" organization with respect to our context of activities. Heidegger wants to claim that referential functionality is an inherent feature of space itself, and not just a "human" characteristic added to a container-like space.
In our activity, how do we specifically stand with respect to functional space? We are not "in" space as things are, but we do exist in some spatially salient manner. What Heidegger is trying to capture is the difference between the nominal expression "we exist in space" and the adverbial expression "we exist spatially." He wants to describe spatiality as a mode of our existence rather than conceiving space as an independent entity. Heidegger identifies two features of Dasein's spatiality - "de-severance" (Ent-fernung) and "directionality" (Ausrichtung).
De-severance describes the way we exist as a process of spatial self-determination by “making things available” to ourselves. In Heidegger's language, in making things available we "take in space" by "making the farness vanish" and by "bringing things close"
We are not simply contemplative beings, but we exist through concretely acting in the world - by reaching for things and going to places. When I walk from my desk area into the kitchen, I am not simply changing locations from point A to B in an arena-like space, but I am “taking in space” as I move, continuously making the “farness” of the kitchen “vanish,” as the shifting spatial perspectives are opened as I go along.
This process is also inherently "directional." Every de-severing is aimed toward something or in a certain direction that is determined by our concern and by specific regions. I must always face and move in a certain direction that is dictated by a specific region. If I want to get a glass of ice tea, instead of going out into the yard, I face toward the kitchen and move in that direction, following the region of the hallway and the kitchen. Regions determine where things belong, and our actions are coordinated in directional ways accordingly.
De-severance, directionality, and regionality are three ways of describing the spatiality of a unified Being-in-the-world. As aspects of Being-in-the-world, these spatial modes of being are equiprimordial.9 10 Regions "refer" to our activities, since they are established by our ways of being and our activities. Our activities, in turn, are defined in terms of regions. Only through the region can our de-severance and directionality be established. Our object of concern always appears in a certain context and place, in a certain direction. It is because things appear in a certain direction and in their places “there” that we have our “here.” We orient ourselves and organize our activities, always within regions that must already be given to us.
Heidegger's analysis of space does not refer to temporal aspects of Being-in-the-world, even though they are presupposed. In the second half of Being and Time he explicitly turns to the analysis of time and temporality in a discussion that is significantly more complex than the earlier account of spatiality. Heidegger makes the following five distinctions between types of time and temporality: (1) the ordinary or "vulgar" conception of time; this is time conceived as Vorhandenheit. (2) world-time; this is time as Zuhandenheit. Dasein's temporality is divided into three types: (3) Dasein's inauthentic (uneigentlich) temporality, (4) Dasein's authentic (eigentlich) temporality, and (5) originary temporality or “temporality as such.” The analyses of the vorhanden and zuhanden modes of time are interesting, but it is Dasein's temporality that is relevant to our discussion, since it is this form of time that is said to be founding for space. Unfortunately, Heidegger is not clear about which temporality plays this founding role.
We can begin by excluding Dasein's inauthentic temporality. This mode of time refers to our unengaged, "average" way in which we regard time. It is the “past we forget” and the “future we expect,” all without decisiveness and resolute understanding. Heidegger seems to consider that this mode of temporality is the temporal dimension of de-severance and directionality, since de-severance and directionality deal only with everyday actions. As such, inauthentic temporality must itself be founded in an authentic basis of some sort. The two remaining candidates for the foundation are Dasein's authentic temporality and originary temporality.
Dasein's authentic temporality is the "resolute" mode of temporal existence. An authentic temporality is realized when Dasein becomes aware of its own finite existence. This temporality has to do with one's grasp of his or her own life as a whole from one's own unique perspective. Life gains meaning as one's own life-project, bounded by the sense of one's realization that he or she is not immortal. This mode of time appears to have a normative function within Heidegger's theory. In the second half of BT he often refers to inauthentic or "everyday" mode of time as lacking some primordial quality which authentic temporality possesses.
In contrast, to the originary temporality, for which the formal structure of Dasein's temporality itself is grounded to its spatial Being-in-the-world, Dasein also exists essentially as "projection." Projection is oriented toward the future, and this outcome orientation regulates our concern by constantly realizing various possibilities. Temporality is characterized formally as this dynamic structure of "a future that makes present in the process of having been." Heidegger calls the three moments of temporality - the future, the present, and the past - the three ecstasies of temporality. This mode of time is not normative but rather formal or neutral; as Blattner argues, the temporal features that constitute Dasein's temporality describe both inauthentic and authentic temporality.
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