Creating ourselves
Nietzsche’s writings did not reach a large audience in his lifetime, so much so that he had to pay for the publication of the final part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra himself. But around 30 years after his death in 1900, the idea of the Superman fed into the rhetoric of Nazism through Hitler’s readings of Nietzsche’s work. Nietzsche’s ideas about the Superman, and particularly his call for an eradication of the Jewish-Christian morality that held sway throughout Europe would have been attractive to Hitler as validation for his own aims. But where Nietzsche seemed to be searching for a return to the more rustic, life-affirming values of pagan Europe, Hitler took his writings as an excuse for unbridled violence and transgression on a grand scale. The consensus amongst scholars is that Nietzsche himself would have been horrified by this turn of events. Writing in an era of extraordinary nationalism, patriotism, and colonial expansion, Nietzsche was one of the few thinkers to call these assumptions into question. At one point in Thus Spoke Zarathustra he makes it clear that he considers nationalism a form of alienation or failure. “Only where the state ends,” Zarathustra says, “there begins the human being who is not superfluous.”
Nietzsche’s open-ended idea of human possibility was important to many philosophers in the period following World War II. His ideas about religion and the importance of self-evaluation can be traced especially in the work of succeeding existentialists such as the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Like Nietzsche’s Superman, Sartre says that we must each define the meaning of our own existence.
Nietzsche’s damning criticisms of the Western philosophical tradition have had a huge impact not only on philosophy, but also on European and world culture, and they went on to influence countless artists and writers in the 20th century.
Nietzsche’s writings were edited and censored by his anti-semitic sister Elizabeth, who controlled his archive after he became insane. This allowed the Nazis to wilfully misinterpret them.
"The degree of introspection achieved by Nietzsche had never been achieved by anyone."
Sigmund Freud
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Nietzsche was born in Prussia in 1844 to a religious family; his father, uncle, and grandfathers were all Lutheran ministers. His father and younger brother died when he was a young child, and he was brought up by his mother, grandmother, and two aunts. At the age of 24 he became a professor at Basel University, where he met the composer Richard Wagner, who influenced him strongly until Wagner’s anti-semitism forced Nietzsche to end their friendship. In 1870 he contracted diphtheria and dysentery, and thereafter suffered continual ill health. He was forced to resign his professorship in 1879, and for the next ten years travelled in Europe. In 1889 he collapsed in the street while attempting to prevent a horse from being whipped, and suffered some form of mental breakdown from which he never recovered. He died in 1900 aged 56.
Key works
1872 The Birth of Tragedy
1883–85 Thus Spoke Zarathustra
1886 Beyond Good and Evil
1888 Twilight of the Idols
See also: Plato • Immanuel Kant • Søren Kierkegaard • Albert Camus • Michel Foucault • Jacques Derrida
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Ethics
APPROACH
Cultural Zionism
BEFORE
5th century BCE Socrates combines both confidence and an admission of his own foolishness.
1511 Desiderius Erasmus writes The Praise of Folly, a satirical work which appears to praise foolish behavior.
1711 The English poet Alexander Pope writes that “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.”
1843 In his book Fear and Trembling, Søren Kierkegaard writes about founding faith “on the strength of the absurd.”
AFTER
1961 Michel Foucault writes Madness and Civilization, a philosophical study of the history of folly.
Ahad Ha’am was the pen name of the Ukrainian-born Jewish philosopher Asher Ginzberg, a leading Zionist thinker who advocated a Jewish spiritual renaissance. In 1890 he claimed in a semi-satirical essay that although we worship wisdom, self-confidence matters more.
In any difficult or dangerous situation, he says, the wise are those who hold back, weighing up the advantages and disadvantages of any action. Meanwhile (and greatly to the disapproval of the wise) it is the self-confident who forge ahead, and often win the day. Ha’am wants to suggest—and when reading him we should remember that this is a suggestion that is meant half-seriously and half-satirically—that individual folly can often yield a result, simply because of the self-confidence that goes along with it.
Wisdom and confidence
Although in his original essay Ha’am seemed to celebrate the potential advantages of foolishness, this was a view from which he later distanced himself, perhaps afraid that others might read what was essentially an exercise in satire as if it were written with high-minded seriousness. Self-confidence is only warranted, he later made clear, when the difficulties of an undertaking are fully understood and evaluated.
Ha’am was fond of quoting an old Yiddish proverb: “an act of folly which turns out well is still an act of folly.” On some occasions we act foolishly, without fully understanding the difficulties of the task we are undertaking, but we win through because luck is on our side. However, says Ha’am, this does not make our prior foolishness in any way commendable.
If we want our actions to bring results, it may indeed be the case that we need to develop and use the kind of self-confidence that can occasionally be seen in acts of folly. At the same time, we must always temper this self-confidence with wisdom, or our acts will lack true effectiveness in the world.
See also: Socrates • Søren Kierkegaard • Michel Foucault • Luce Irigaray
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Philosophy of language
APPROACH
Semiotics
BEFORE
c.400 BCE Plato explores the relationship between names and things.
c.250 BCE Stoic philosophers develop an early theory of linguistic signs.
1632 Portuguese philosopher John Poinsot writes his Treatise on Signs.
AFTER
1950s Saussure’s analysis of the structures of language influences Noam Chomsky’s theory of generative grammar, which aims to expose the rules of a language that govern its possible word combinations.
1960s Roland Barthes explores the literary implications of signs and semiotics.
Saussure was a 19th-century Swiss philosopher who saw language as made up of systems of “signs”, with the signs acting as the basic units of the language. His studies formed the basis of a new theory, known as semiotics. This new theory of signs was developed by other philosophers during the 20th century such as Russia’s Roman Jakobson, who summed up the semiotic approach when he said that “every message is made of signs.”
Saussure said that a sign is made up of two things. Firstly, a “signifier”, which is a sound-image. This is not the actual sound, but the mental “image” we have of the sound. Secondly, the “signified”, or concept. Here Saussure turns his back on a long tradition that says language is about the relationships between words and things, because he is saying that both aspects of a sign are mental (our concept of a “dog” for example, and a sound-image of the sound “dog”). Saussure claims that any message—for example “my dog is called Fred”—is a system of signs. This means that it is a system of relationships between sound-images and concepts. However, Saussure states that the relationship between the signified and the signifier is arbitrary
—so there is nothing particularly “doggy” about the sound “dog”, which is why the word can be chien in French, or gou in Chinese.
Saussure’s work on language became the basis of modern linguistics, and influenced many philosophers and literary theorists.
"In the lives of individuals and of societies, language is a factor of greater importance than any other."
Ferdinand de Saussure
See also: Plato • Charles Sanders Peirce • Ludwig Wittgenstein • Roland Barthes • Julia Kristeva
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Ontology
APPROACH
Phenomenology
BEFORE
5th century BCE Socrates uses argument to try to answer philosophical questions with certainty.
17th century René Descartes uses doubt as a starting point for his philosophical method.
1874 Franz Brentano, Husserl’s teacher, claims that philosophy needs a new scientific method.
AFTER
From 1920s Martin Heidegger, Husserl’s student, develops his teacher’s method of phenomenology, leading to the birth of existentialism.
From 1930s Husserl’s phenomenology reaches France, influencing thinkers such as Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
Husserl was a philosopher haunted by a dream that has preoccupied thinkers since the time of the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates: the dream of certainty. For Socrates, the problem was this: although we easily reach agreement on questions about things we can measure (for example, “how many olives are there in this jar?”), when it comes to philosophical questions such as “what is justice?” or “what is beauty?”, it seems that there is no clear way of reaching agreement. And if we cannot know for certain what justice is, then how can we say anything about it at all?
The problem of certainty
Husserl was a philosopher who started life as a mathematician. He dreamed that problems such as “what is justice?” might be solved with the same degree of certainty with which we are able to solve mathematical problems such as “how many olives are in the jar?” In other words, he hoped to put all the sciences—by which he meant all branches of human knowledge and activity, from math, chemistry, and physics to ethics and politics—on a completely secure footing.
Scientific theories are based on experience. But Husserl believed that experience alone did not add up to science, because as any scientist knows, experience is full of all kinds of assumptions, biases, and misconceptions. Husserl wanted to drive out all of these uncertainties to give science absolutely certain foundations.
To do this, Husserl made use of the philosophy of the 17th-century philosopher René Descartes. Like Husserl, Descartes wanted to free philosophy from all assumptions, biases, and doubts. Descartes wrote that although almost everything could be doubted, he could not doubt that he was doubting.
Phenomenology
Husserl takes up a similar approach to Descartes, but uses it differently. He suggests that if we adopt a scientific attitude to experience, laying aside every single assumption that we have (even including the assumption that an external world exists outside of us), then we can start philosophy with a clean slate, free of all assumptions. Husserl calls this approach phenomenology: a philosophical investigation of the phenomena of experience. We need to look at experience with a scientific attitude, laying to one side (or “bracketing out” as Husserl calls it) every single one of our assumptions. And if we look carefully and patiently enough, we can build a secure foundation of knowledge that might help us deal with the philosophical problems that have been with us since the very beginnings of philosophy.
However, different philosophers following Husserl’s method came to different results, and there was little agreement as to what the method actually was, or how one carried it out. Toward the end of his career, Husserl wrote that the dream of putting the sciences on firm foundations was over. But although Husserl’s phenomenology failed to provide philosophers with a scientific approach to experience, or to solve philosophy’s most enduring problems, it nevertheless gave birth to one of the richest traditions in 20th-century thought.
Mathematics does not rely on empirical evidence, which is full of assumptions, to reach its conclusions. Husserl wanted to put all science (and all knowledge) on a similar foundation.
"We entirely lack a rational science of man and of the human community."
Edmund Husserl
EDMUND HUSSERL
Husserl was born in 1859 in Moravia, then a part of the Austrian empire. He started his career studying mathematics and astronomy, but after finishing his doctorate in mathematics he decided to take up philosophy.
In 1887 Husserl married Malvine Steinschneider, with whom he had three children. He also became Privatdozent (private lecturer) at Halle, where he remained until 1901. He then accepted an associate professorship at the University of Göttingen, before becoming a professor of philosophy at the University of Freiburg in 1916, where Martin Heidegger was among his students. In 1933, Husserl was suspended from the university on account of his Jewish background, a decision in which Heidegger was implicated. Husserl continued to write until his death in 1938.
Key works
1901 Logical Investigations
1907 The Idea of Phenomenology
1911 Philosophy as a Rigorous Science
1913 Ideas toward a Pure Phenomenology
See also: René Descartes • Franz Brentano • Martin Heidegger • Emmanuel Levinas • Maurice Merleau-Ponty
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Epistemology
APPROACH
Vitalism
BEFORE
13th century John Duns Scotus distinguishes between intuitive and abstract thought, and claims that intuitive thought takes precedence.
1781 Immanuel Kant publishes Critique of Pure Reason, claiming that absolute knowledge is impossible.
AFTER
1890s William James begins to explore the philosophy of everyday experience, popularizing pragmatism.
1927 Alfred North Whitehead writes Process philosophy, suggesting that the existence of the natural world should be understood in terms of process and change, not things or fixed stabilities.
Henri Bergson’s 1910 book Creative Evolution explored his vitalism, or theory of life. In it, Bergson wanted to discover whether it is possible to really know something—not just to know about it, but to know it as it actually is.
Ever since the philosopher Immanuel Kant published The Critique of Pure Reason in 1781, many philosophers have claimed that it is impossible for us to know things as they actually are. This is because Kant showed that we can know how things are relative to we ourselves, given the kinds of minds we have; but we can never step outside of ourselves to achieve an absolute view of the world’s actual “things-in-themselves.”
Two forms of knowledge
Bergson, however, does not agree with Kant. He says that there are two different kinds of knowledge: relative knowledge, which involves knowing something from our own unique particular perspective; and absolute knowledge, which is knowing things as they actually are. Bergson believes that these are reached by different methods, the first through analysis or intellect, and the second through intuition. Kant’s mistake, Bergson believes, is that he does not recognize the full importance of our faculty of intuition, which allows us to grasp an object’s uniqueness through direct connection. Our intuition is linked to what Bergson called our élan vital, a life-force (vitalism) that interprets the flux of experience in terms of time rather than space.
Suppose you want to get to k
now a city, he says. You could compile a record of it by taking photographs of every part, from every possible perspective, before reconstructing these images to give some idea of the city as a whole. But you would be grasping it at one remove, not as a living city. If, on the other hand, you were simply to stroll around the streets, paying attention in the right way, you might acquire knowledge of the city itself—a direct knowledge of the city as it actually is. This direct knowledge, for Bergson, is knowledge of the essence of the city.
But how do we practice intuition? Essentially, it is a matter of seeing the world in terms of our sense of unfolding time. While walking through the city, we have a sense of our own inner time, and we also have an inner sense of the various unfolding times of the city through which we are walking. As these times overlap, Bergson believes that we can make a direct connection with the essence of life itself.
Capturing the essence of a city, person, or object may only be possible through direct knowledge gained from intuition, not analysis. Bergson says we underestimate the value of our intuition.
HENRI BERGSON
Henri Bergson was one of the most influential French philosophers of his time. Born in France in 1859, he was the son of an English mother and a Polish father. His early intellectual interests lay in mathematics, at which he excelled. Despite this, he took up philosophy as a career, initially teaching in schools. When his book Matter and Memory was published in 1896, he was elected to the Collège de France and became a university lecturer. He also had a successful political career, and represented the French government during the establishment of the League of Nations in 1920. His work was widely translated and influenced many other philosophers and psychologists, including William James. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927, and died in 1941 at the age of 81.
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