The Philosophy Book

by DK Publishing

  A new analytical tradition

  To some extent, the traditional concerns of philosophy—such as asking what exists—were answered by science in the early 20th century. Albert Einstein’s theories offered a more detailed explanation of the nature of the universe, and Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theories gave people a radically new insight into the workings of the mind.

  As a result, philosophers turned their attention to questions of moral and political philosophy or, since philosophy had become the province of professional academics, to the more abstract business of logic and linguistic analysis. At the vanguard of this movement of logical analysis—which became known as analytic philosophy—was the work of Gottlob Frege, who linked the philosophical process of logic with mathematics. His ideas were enthusiastically received by a British philosopher and mathematician, Bertrand Russell.

  Russell applied the principles of logic that Frege had outlined to a thorough analysis of mathematics in the Principia Mathematica, which he wrote with Alfred North Whitehead, and then—in a move that revolutionized philosophical thinking—he applied the same principles to language. The process of linguistic analysis was to become the major theme in 20th century British philosophy.

  One of Russell’s pupils, Ludwig Wittgenstein, developed Russell’s work on logic and language, but also made key contributions in areas as diverse as perception, ethics, and aesthetics, becoming one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century. Another, slightly younger Viennese philosopher, Karl Popper, took his cue from Einstein, and strengthened the link between scientific thinking and philosophy.

  Meanwhile, in Germany, philosophers rose to the challenge posed by Nietzsche’s ideas with a philosophy based on the experience of the individual in a godless universe: existentialism. Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology (the study of experience) laid the groundwork, and this was carried forward by Martin Heidegger, who was also greatly influenced by the Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard. Heidegger’s work, produced in the 1920s and 30s, was largely rejected in the mid-20th century due to his connections with the Nazi party during World War II, but his works were key to the development of existentialism, and were important to late 20th-century culture.

  Wars and revolutions

  Philosophy was as affected by the massive political upheavals of the 20th century as any other cultural activity, but it also contributed to the ideologies that shaped the modern world. The revolution that formed the Soviet Union in the 1920s had its roots in Marxism, a 19th-century political philosophy. This theory became more prevalent globally than any single religion, dominating the policy of China’s Communist Party until around 1982, and replacing traditional philosophies across Asia.

  Liberal democracies in Europe during the 1930s were threatened by fascism, forcing many thinkers to flee from the continent to Britain and the US. Philosophers turned their attention to left-wing or liberal politics in reaction to the oppression they experienced under totalitarian regimes. World War II and the Cold War that followed it colored the moral philosophy of the second half of the 20th century.

  In France, existentialism was made fashionable by Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus, who were all novelists. This trend was in keeping with the French view of philosophy as part of an essentially literary culture. It was also fundamental to the direction that continental philosophy was to take in the last decades of the 20th century.

  IN CONTEXT

  BRANCH

  Ethics

  APPROACH

  Existentialism

  BEFORE

  380 BCE Plato explores the distinction between reality and appearance in his dialogue, The Republic.

  1st century CE The Sermon on the Mount, in Matthew’s gospel in the Bible, advocates turning away from this world to the greater reality of the world to come.

  1781 Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason argues that we can never know how the world is “in itself.”

  AFTER

  1930s Nietzsche’s work is used to help construct the mythology of Nazism.

  1966 Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things discusses the overcoming of “man.”

  Nietzsche’s idea that man is something to be surpassed appears in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, perhaps his most famous book. It was written in three parts in 1883–84, with a fourth part added in 1885. The German philosopher used it to launch a sustained attack on the history of Western thought. He targets three linked ideas in particular: first, the idea we have of “man” or human nature; second, the idea we have of God; and third, the ideas we have about morality, or ethics.

  Elsewhere Nietzsche writes about philosophizing “with a hammer”, and here he certainly attempts to shatter many of the most cherished views of the Western philosophical tradition, especially in relation to these three things. He does so in a style that is astonishingly hot-headed and fevered, so that at times the book seems closer to prophecy than philosophy. It was written quickly, with Part I taking him only a few days to set down on paper. Even so, while Nietzsche’s book does not have the calm, analytical tone that people have perhaps come to expect of philosophical works, the author still succeeds in setting out a remarkably consistent and hugely challenging vision.

  Zarathustra descends

  The name of Nietzsche’s prophet, Zarathustra, is an alternative name for the ancient Persian prophet Zoroaster. The book begins by telling us that at the age of 30, Zarathustra goes to live in the mountains. For ten years he delights in the solitude, but one dawn, he wakes to find that he is weary of the wisdom he has accumulated alone on the mountain. So he decides to descend to the market place to share this wisdom with the rest of humankind.

  On the way down to the town, at the foot of the hill, he meets with an old hermit. The two men have already met, ten years before, when Zarathustra first ascended the mountain. The hermit sees that Zarathustra has changed during the past decade: when he climbed the mountain, the hermit says, Zarathustra carried ashes; but now, as he descends, he is carrying fire.

  Then the hermit asks Zarathustra a question: why are you going to the trouble of sharing your wisdom? He advises Zarathustra to stay in the mountains, warning him that nobody will understand his message. Zarathustra then asks a question: what does the hermit do in the mountains? The hermit replies that he sings, weeps, laughs, mumbles, and praises God. On hearing this, Zarathustra himself laughs. Then he wishes the hermit well and continues on his way down the mountain. As he goes, Zarathustra says to himself, “How can it be possible! This old hermit has not yet heard that God is dead.”

  Behold the Superman

  The idea of the death of God may be the most famous of all Nietzsche’s ideas, and it is closely related both to the idea that man is something to be surpassed and to Nietzsche’s distinctive understanding of morality. The relationship between these things becomes clear as the story continues.

  When he reaches the town, Zarathustra sees that there is a crowd gathered around a tightrope walker who is about to perform, and he joins them. Before the acrobat has a chance to walk across his rope, Zarathustra stands up. It is at this point that he says, “Behold! I teach you the Superman!” He continues by telling the crowd the real point he wishes to convey: “Man is something to surpassed….” Zarathustra follows this with a long speech, but when he gets to the end, the crowd only laughs, imagining that the prophet is just another showman, or perhaps even a warm-up performer for the tightrope-walker.

  In opening his book in this unusual way, Nietzsche seems to be betraying his own unease with the reception that his philosophy will receive, as if he is
afraid that he will be seen as a philosophical showman without anything real to say. If we want to avoid making the same mistake as the crowd gathered around Zarathustra, and actually understand what Nietzsche is saying, it is necessary to explore some of Nietzsche’s core beliefs.

  The prophet Zoroaster (c.628–551 BCE), also known as Zarathustra, founded a religion based on the struggle between good and evil. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra places himself “beyond good and evil.”

  Overturning old values

  Nietzsche believes that certain concepts have become inextricably entangled: humankind, morality, and God. When his character Zarathustra says that God is dead, he is not simply launching an attack upon religion, but doing something much bolder. “God” here does not only mean the god that philosophers talk about or the religious pray to; it means the sum total of the higher values that we might hold. The death of God is not just the death of a deity; it is also the death of all the so-called higher values that we have inherited.

  One of the central purposes of Nietzsche’s philosophy is what he calls the “revaluation of all values”, an attempt to call into question all of the ways that we are accustomed to thinking about ethics and the meanings and purposes of life. Nietzsche repeatedly maintains that in doing so he is setting out a philosophy of cheerfulness, which, although it overturns everything we have thought up until now about good and evil, nevertheless seeks to affirm life. He claims that many of the things that we think are “good” are, in fact, ways of limiting, or of turning away from, life.

  We may think it is not “good” to make a fool of ourselves in public, and so resist the urge to dance joyfully in the street. We may believe that the desires of the flesh are sinful, and so punish ourselves when they arise. We may stay in mind-numbing jobs, not because we need to, but because we feel it is our duty to do so. Nietzsche wants to put an end to such life-denying philosophies, so that humankind can see itself in a different way.

  Existing between the levels of animal and Superman, human life, Nietzsche says, is “a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting.”

  Blaspheming against life

  After Zarathustra proclaims the coming of the Superman, he swiftly moves to condemn religion. In the past, he says, the greatest blasphemy was to blaspheme against God; but now the greatest blasphemy is to blaspheme against life itself. This is the error that Zarathustra believes he made upon the hillside: in turning away from the world, and in offering up prayers to a God who is not there, he was sinning against life.

  The history behind this death of God, or loss of faith in our higher values, is told in Nietzsche’s essay, How the “Real World” at last Became a Myth, which was published in Twilight of the Idols. The essay carries the subtitle “History of an Error”, and it is an extraordinarily condensed one-page history of Western philosophy. The story begins, Nietzsche says, with the Greek philosopher Plato.

  "Man is a rope tied between the animal and the Superman—a rope over an abyss."

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  The real world

  Plato divided the world into an “apparent” world that appears to us through our senses, and a “real” world that we can grasp through the intellect. For Plato, the world we perceive through the senses is not “real” because it is changeable and subject to decay. Plato suggests that there is also an unchanging, permanent “real world” that can be attained with the help of the intellect. This idea comes from Plato’s study of mathematics. The form or idea of a triangle, for example, is eternal and can be grasped by the intellect. We know that a triangle is a three-sided, two-dimensional figure whose angles add up to 180º, and that this will always be true, whether anyone is thinking about it or not and however many triangles exist in the world. On the other hand, the triangular things that do exist in the world (such as sandwiches, pyramids, and triangular shapes drawn on a chalkboard), are triangular only insofar as they are reflections of this idea or form of the triangle.

  Influenced by mathematics in this way, Plato proposed that the intellect can gain access to a whole world of Ideal Forms, which is permanent and unchanging, whereas the senses have access only to the world of appearances. So, for example, if we want to know about goodness, we need to have an intellectual appreciation of the Form of Goodness, of which the various examples of goodness in the world are only reflections. This is an idea that has had far-reaching consequences for our understanding of the world; not least because, as Nietzsche points out, this way of dividing up the world makes the “real world” of the intellect the place where everything of value resides. In contrast, it makes the “apparent world” of the senses a world that is, relatively speaking, unimportant.

  Some religions and philosophies insist that a more important “real world” exists elsewhere. Nietzsche sees this as a myth that tragically prevents us from living fully now, in this world.

  Christian values

  Nietzsche traces the fortunes of this tendency to split the world into two and finds that the same idea appears within Christian thought. In place of the “real world” of Plato’s Forms, Christianity substitutes an alternative “real world”; a future world of heaven that is promised to the virtuous. Nietzsche believes that Christianity views the world we live in now as somehow less real than heaven, but in this version of the “two worlds” idea the “real world” is attainable, albeit after death and on condition that we follow Christian rules in this life. The present world is devalued, as it is with Plato, except insofar as it acts as a stepping stone to the world beyond. Nietzsche claims that Christianity asks us to deny the present life in favor of the promise of a life to come.

  Both the Platonic and Christian versions of the idea that the world is divided into a “real” and an “apparent” one have profoundly affected our thoughts about ourselves. The suggestion that everything of value in the world is somehow “beyond” the reach of this world leads to a way of thinking that is fundamentally life-denying. As a result of this Platonic and Christian heritage, we have come to see the world we live in as a world that we should resent and disdain, a world from which we should turn away, transcend, and certainly not enjoy. But in doing so, we have turned away from life itself in favor of a myth or an invention, an imagined “real world” that is situated elsewhere. Nietzsche calls priests of all religions “preachers of death”, because their teachings encourage us to turn from this world, and from life to death. But why does Nietzsche insist that God is dead? To answer this, we must look to the work of the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, whose ideas are critical to understanding the philosophy behind Nietzsche’s work.

  The Superman is someone of enormous strength and independence in mind and body; Nietzsche denied any had existed, but named Napoleon, Shakespeare, and Socrates as models.

  A world beyond reach

  Kant was interested in the limits of knowledge. In his book Critique of Pure Reason, he argued that we cannot know the world as it is “in itself.” We cannot attain it with the intellect, as Plato believed; nor is it promised to us after death as in the Christian view. It exists (we assume), but it is forever out of reach. The reasons that Kant uses to come up with this conclusion are complex, but what is important from Nietzsche’s point of view is that, if the real world is said to be absolutely unattainable—even to the wise or the virtuous, in this world or the next—then it is “an idea grown useless, superfluous.” As a result, it is an idea that we need to do away with. If God is dead, Nietzsche is perhaps the person who stumbles across the corpse; neverthe
less, it is Kant whose fingerprints are all over the murder weapon.

  Philosophy’s longest error

  Once we have dispensed with the idea of the “real world”, the long-held distinction between the “real world” and the “apparent world” begins to break down. In How the “Real World” at last Became a Myth, Nietzsche goes on to explain this as follows: “We have abolished the real world; what world is left? The apparent world, perhaps? … But no! With the real world we have also abolished the apparent world.” Nietzsche now sees the beginning of the end of philosophy’s “longest error”: its infatuation with the distinction between “appearance” and “reality”, and the idea of two worlds. The end of this error, Nietzsche writes, is the zenith of mankind—the high point of all humanity. It is at this point—in an essay written six years after Thus Spake Zarathustra—that Nietzsche writes “Zarathustra begins.”

  This is a key moment for Nietzsche because when we grasp the fact that there is only one world, we suddenly see the error that had put all values beyond this world. We are then forced to reconsider all our values and even what it means to be human. And when we see through these philosophical illusions, the old idea of “man” can be surpassed. The Superman is Nietzsche’s vision of a fundamentally life-affirming way of being. It is one that can become the bearer of meaning not in the world beyond, but here; Superman is “the meaning of the Earth.”