After completing his studies, Schopenhauer taught at Berlin University. He attained a reputation as a philanderer and misogynist; he had several affairs and avoided marriage, and was once convicted of assaulting a woman. In 1831 he moved to Frankfurt, where he lived until his death with a succession of poodles called either Atman (“soul” in Hinduism and Buddhism) or Butz (German for hobgoblin).
Key works
1818 and 1844 The World as Will and Representation
1851 Parerga and Paralipomena
See also: Empedocles • John Locke • Immanuel Kant • Georg Hegel • Friedrich Nietzsche
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Philosophy of religion
APPROACH
Atheism
BEFORE
c.600 BCE Thales is the first Western philosopher to deny that the universe owes its existence to a god.
c.500 BCE The Indian school of atheistic philosophy known as Carvaka is established.
c.400 BCE The ancient Greek philosopher Diagoras of Melos puts forward arguments in defense of atheism.
AFTER
Mid-19th century Karl Marx uses Feuerbach’s reasoning in his philosophy of political revolution.
Late 19th century The psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud argues that religion is a projection of human wishes.
The 19th-century German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach is best known for his book The Essence of Christianity (1841), which inspired revolutionary thinkers such as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The book incorporates much of the philosophical thinking of Georg Hegel, but where Hegel saw an Absolute Spirit as the guiding force in nature, Feuerbach sees no reason to look beyond our experience to explain existence. For Feuerbach, humans are not an externalized form of an Absolute Spirit, but the opposite: we have created the idea of a great spirit, a god, from our own longings and desires.
Imagining God
Feuerbach suggests that in our yearning for all that is best in humankind—love, compassion, kindness, and so on—we have imagined a being that incorporates all of these qualities in the highest possible degree, and then called it “God.” Theology (the study of God) is therefore nothing more than anthropology (the study of humanity). Not only have we deceived ourselves into thinking that a divine being exists, we have also forgotten or forsaken what we are ourselves. We have lost sight of the fact that these virtues actually exist in humans, not gods. For this reason we should focus less on heavenly righteousness and more on human justice—it is people in this life, on this Earth, that deserve our attention.
The Israelites of the Bible, in their need for certainty and reassurance, created a false god—the golden calf—to worship. Feuerbach argues that all gods are created in the same way.
See also: Thales of Miletus • Georg Hegel • Karl Marx
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Political philosophy
APPROACH
Utilitarianism
BEFORE
1651 In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes says that people are “brutish” and must be controlled by a social contract.
1689 John Locke’s book, Two Treatises of Government, looks at social contract theory in the context of empiricism.
1789 Jeremy Bentham advocates the “greatest happiness principle.”
AFTER
1930s Economist J.M. Keynes, influenced by Mill, develops liberal economic theories.
1971 John Rawls publishes A Theory of Justice, based on the idea that laws should be those everyone would accept.
John Stuart Mill was born into an intellectually privileged family, and he was aware from an early age of the British traditions of philosophy that had emerged during the Enlightenment of the 18th century. John Locke and David Hume had established a philosophy whose new empiricism stood in stark contrast to the rationalism of continental European philosophers. But during the late 18th century, Romantic ideas from Europe began to influence British moral and political philosophy. The most obvious product of this influence was utilitarianism, which was a very British interpretation of the political philosophy that had shaped the 18th-century revolutions of both Europe and America. Its originator, Jeremy Bentham, was a friend of the Mill family, and he influenced John’s home education.
Victorian liberalism
As a philosopher Mill sets himself the task of synthesizing a valuable intellectual heritage with the new 19th-century Romanticism. His approach is less sceptical than that of Hume (who argued that all knowledge comes from sense experience, and nothing is certain) and less dogmatic than Bentham (who insisted that everything be judged on its usefulness), but their empiricism and utilitarianism informed his thinking. Mill’s moral and political philosophy is less extreme than his predecessors’, aiming for reform rather than revolution, and it formed the basis of British Victorian liberalism.
After completing his first philosophical work, the exhaustive six-volume System of Logic, Mill turned his attention to moral philosophy, particularly Bentham’s theories of utilitarianism. He had been struck by the elegant simplicity of Bentham’s principle of “the greatest happiness for the greatest number”, and was a firm believer in its usefulness. He describes his interpretation of how utilitarianism might be applied as similar to Jesus of Nazareth’s “golden rule”: do as you would be done by, and love your neighbor as yourself. This, he says, constitutes “the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality.”
Legislating for liberty
Mill supports Bentham’s happiness principle, but he thinks it lacks practicality. Bentham had seen the idea as depending upon an abstract “felicific calculus” (an algorithm for calculating happiness), but Mill wants to find out how it might be implemented in the real world. He is interested in the social and political implications of the principle, rather than merely its use in making moral decisions. How would legislation promoting the “greatest happiness of the greatest number” actually affect the individual? Might laws that sought to do this, enacting a kind of majority rule, actually prevent some people from achieving happiness?
Mill thinks that the solution is for education and public opinion to work together to establish an “indissoluble association” between an individual’s happiness and the good of society. As a result, people would always be motivated to act not only for their own good or happiness, but toward that of everyone. He concludes that society should therefore allow all individuals the freedom to pursue happiness. Furthermore, he says that this right should be protected by the government, and that legislation should be drawn up to protect the individual’s freedom to pursue personal goals. There is, however, one situation in which this freedom should be curtailed, Mill says, and that is where one person’s action impinges on the happiness of others. This is known as the “harm principle.” He underlines this by pointing out that in these cases, a person’s “own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.”
The good samaritan helps his enemy in a biblical parable that demonstrates Mill’s golden rule: do as you would be done by. He believed this would raise society’s overall level of happiness.
"It is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied."
John Stuart Mill
Quantifying happiness
Mill then turns his attention to how best to measure happiness. Bentham had considered the duration and intensity of pleasures in his felicific calculus, but Mill thinks it is also important to consider the quality of pleasure. By this, he is referring to the difference between a simple satisfaction of desires and sensual pleasures, and happiness gained through intellectual and cultural pursuits. In
the “happiness equation” he gives more weight to higher, intellectual pleasures than to baser, physical ones.
In line with his empiricist background, Mill then tries to pin down the essence of happiness. What is it, he asks, that each individual is striving to achieve? What causes happiness? He decides that “the sole evidence it is possible to produce that anything is desirable, is that people do actually desire it.” This seems a rather unsatisfactory explanation, but he goes on to distinguish between two different desires: unmotivated desires (the things we want that will give us pleasure) and conscientious actions (the things we do out a sense of duty or charity, often against our immediate inclination, that ultimately bring us pleasure). In the first case, we desire something as a part of our happiness, but in the second we desire it as a means to our happiness, which is felt only when the act reaches its virtuous end.
Practical utilitarianism
Mill was not a purely academic philosopher, and he believed his ideas should be put into practice, so he considered what this might mean in terms of government and legislation. He saw any restriction of the individual’s freedom to pursue happiness as a tyranny, whether this was the collective tyranny of the majority (through democratic election) or the singular rule of a despot. He therefore suggested practical measures to restrict the power of society over the individual, and to protect the rights of the individual to free expression.
In his time as a Member of Parliament, Mill proposed many reforms which were not to come about until much later, but his speeches brought the liberal applications of his utilitarian philosophy to the attention of a wide public. As a philosopher and politician, he argued strongly in defense of free speech, for the promotion of basic human rights, and against slavery—all of which were obvious practical applications of his utilitarianism. Strongly influenced by his wife Harriet Taylor-Mill, he was the first British parliamentarian to propose votes for women as part of his government reforms. His liberalist philosophy also encompassed economics, and contrary to his father’s economic theories, he advocated a free-market economy where government intervention is kept to a minimum.
The National Society for Women’s Suffrage was set up in Britain in 1868, a year after Mill tried to secure their legal right to vote by arguing for an amendment to the 1867 Reform Act.
A softer revolution
Mill places the individual, rather than society, at the center of his utilitarian philosophy. What is important is that individuals are free to think and act as they please, without interference, even if what they do is harmful to them. Every individual, says Mill in his essay On Liberty, is “sovereign over his own body and mind.” His ideas came to embody Victorian liberalism, softening the radical ideas that had led to revolutions in Europe and America, and combining them with the idea of freedom from interference by authority. This, for Mill, is the basis for just governance and the means to social progress, which was an important Victorian ideal. He believes that if society leaves individuals to live in a way that makes them happy, it enables them to achieve their potential. This in turn benefits society, as the achievements of individual talents contribute to the good of all.
In his own lifetime Mill was regarded as a significant philosopher, and he is now considered by many to be the architect of Victorian liberalism. His utilitarian-inspired philosophy had a direct influence on social, political, philosophical, and economic thinking well into the 20th century. Modern economics has been shaped from various interpretations of his application of utilitarianism to the free market, notably by the British economist John Maynard Keynes. In the field of ethics, philosophers such as Bertrand Russell, Karl Popper, William James, and John Rawls all took Mill as their starting point.
"One person with a belief is a social power equal to 99 who have only interests."
John Stuart Mill
JOHN STUART MILL
John Stuart Mill was born in London in 1806. His father was the Scottish philosopher and historian James Mill, who founded the movement of “philosophical radicals” with Jeremy Bentham. John was educated at home by his father, whose demanding program began with teaching Greek to John when he was only three years old.
After years of intense study, Mill suffered a breakdown at the age of 20. He left university to work for the East India Company, where he stayed until his retirement in 1857, as it gave him a living and time to write. During this period he met Harriet Taylor, advocate of women’s rights, who—after a relationship of 20 years—eventually became his wife. Mill served as a Member of Parliament from 1865 to 1868, putting into practice his moral and political philosophy.
Key works
1843 System of Logic
1848 Principles of Political Economy
1859 On Liberty
1861 Utilitarianism
1869 The Subjection of Women
1874 On Nature
See also: Thomas Hobbes • John Locke • Jeremy Bentham • Bertrand Russell • Karl Popper • John Rawls
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Metaphysics
APPROACH
Existentialism
BEFORE
1788 Immanuel Kant stresses the importance of freedom in moral philosophy in his Critique of Practical Reason.
1807–22 Georg Hegel suggests a historical consciousness, or Geist, establishing a relationship between human consciousness and the world in which it lives.
AFTER
1927 Martin Heidegger explores the concepts of Angst and existential guilt in his book Being and Time.
1938 Jean-Paul Sartre lays down the foundations of his existentialist philosophy.
1946 Ludwig Wittgenstein acknowledges Kierkegaard’s work in Culture and Value.
Søren Kierkegaard’s philosophy developed in reaction to the German idealist thinking that dominated continental Europe in the mid-19th century, particularly that of Georg Hegel. Kierkegaard wanted to refute Hegel’s idea of a complete philosophical system, which defined humankind as part of an inevitable historical development, by arguing for a more subjective approach. He wants to examine what “it means to be a human being”, not as part of some great philosophical system, but as a self-determining individual.
Kierkegaard believes that our lives are determined by our actions, which are themselves determined by our choices, so how we make those choices is critical to our lives. Like Hegel, he sees moral decisions as a choice between the hedonistic (self-gratifying) and the ethical. But where Hegel thought this choice was largely determined by the historical and environmental conditions of our times, Kierkegaard believes that moral choices are absolutely free, and above all subjective. It is our will alone that determines our judgement, he says. However, far from being a reason for happiness, this complete freedom of choice provokes in us a feeling of anxiety or dread.
Kierkegaard explains this feeling in his book, The Concept of Anxiety. As an example, he asks us to consider a man standing on a cliff or tall building. If this man looks over the edge, he experiences two different kinds of fear: the fear of falling, and fear brought on by the impulse to throw himself off the edge. This second type of fear, or anxiety, arises from the realization that he has absolute freedom to choose whether to jump or not, and this fear is as dizzying as his vertigo. Kierkegaard suggests that we experience the same anxiety in all our moral choices, when we realize that we have the freedom to make even the most terrifying decisions. He describes this anxiety as “the dizziness of freedom”, and goes on to explain that although it induces despair, it can also shake us from our unthinking responses by making us more aware of the available choices. In this w
ay it increases our self-awareness and sense of personal responsibility.
The father of existentialism
Kierkegaard’s ideas were largely rejected by his contemporaries, but proved highly influential to later generations. His insistence on the importance and freedom of our choices, and our continual search for meaning and purpose, was to provide the framework for existentialism. This philosophy, developed by Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, was later fully defined by Jean-Paul Sartre. It explores the ways in which we can live meaningfully in a godless universe, where every act is a choice, except the act of our own birth. Unlike these later thinkers, Kierkegaard did not abandon his faith in God, but he was the first to acknowledge the realization of self-consciousness and the “dizziness” or fear of absolute freedom.
Hamlet is caught on the edge of a terrible choice: whether to kill his uncle or leave his father’s death unavenged. Shakespeare’s play demonstrates the anxiety of true freedom of choice.
SØREN KIERKEGAARD
Søren Kierkegaard was born in Copenhagen in 1813, in what became known as the Danish Golden Age of culture. His father, a wealthy tradesman, was both pious and melancholic, and his son inherited these traits, which were to greatly influence his philosophy. Kierkegaard studied theology at the University of Copenhagen, but attended lectures in philosophy. When he came into a sizeable inheritance, he decided to devote his life to philosophy. In 1837 he met and fell in love with Regine Olsen, and three years later they became engaged, but Kierkegaard broke off the engagement the following year, saying that his melancholy made him unsuitable for married life. Though he never lost his faith in God, he continually criticized the Danish national church for hypocrisy. In 1855 he fell unconscious in the street, and died just over a month later.
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