The Philosophy Book
Page 35
BRANCH
Ethics
APPROACH
Existentialism
BEFORE
c.350 St Augustine of Hippo writes that evil is not a force, but comes from a lack of goodness.
1200s Thomas Aquinas writes Disputed questions on evil, exploring the idea of evil as a lack of something, rather than a thing in itself.
AFTER
1971 American social scientist Philip Zimbardo conducts the notorious “Stanford Prison Experiment” in which ordinary students are persuaded to participate in “evil” acts that would normally be considered unthinkable both to themselves and to others.
In 1961, the philosopher Hannah Arendt witnessed the trial of Adolph Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust. In her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt writes of the apparent “everydayness” of Eichmann. The figure before her in the dock did not resemble the kind of monster we might imagine. In fact, he would not have looked out of place in a café or in the street.
A failure of judgement
After witnessing the trial, Arendt came to the conclusion that evil does not come from malevolence or a delight in doing wrong. Instead, she suggests, the reasons people act in such ways is that they fall victim to failures of thinking and judgement. Oppressive political systems are able to take advantage of our tendencies toward such failures, and can make acts that we might usually consider to be “unthinkable” seem normal.
The idea that evil is banal does not strip evil acts of their horror. Instead, refusing to see people who commit terrible acts as “monsters”, brings these acts closer to our everyday lives, challenging us to consider how evil may be something of which we are all capable. We should guard against the failures of our political regimes, says Arendt, and the possible failures in our own thinking and judgement.
Eichmann committed atrocities not through a hatred of the Jewish community, Arendt suggests, but because he unthinkingly followed orders, disengaging from their effects.
See also: St Augustine of Hippo • Thomas Aquinas • Theodor Adorno
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Ethics
APPROACH
Phenomenology
BEFORE
1920s Edmund Husserl explores our relationship to other human beings from a phenomenological perspective.
1920s Austrian philosopher Martin Buber claims that meaning arises out of our relationship with others.
AFTER
From 1960 Levinas’ s work on relationships influences the thoughts of French feminist philosophers such as Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva.
From 1970 Levinas’s ideas on responsibility influence psychotherapy.
2001 Jacques Derrida explores responsibility in relation to humanitarian questions such as political asylum.
Levinas’ s ideas are most easily understood through looking at an example. Imagine that you are walking down a street on a cold winter evening, and you see a beggar huddled in a doorway. She may not even be asking for change, but somehow you can’ t help feeling some obligation to respond to this stranger’ s need. You may choose to ignore her, but even if you do, something has already been communicated to you: the fact that this is a person who needs your help.
Inevitable communication
Levinas was a Lithuanian Jew who lived through the Holocaust. He says that reason lives in language in Totality and Infinity (1961), explaining that “language” is the way that we communicate with others even before we have started to speak. Whenever I see the face of another person, the fact that this is another human being and that I have a responsibility for them is instantly communicated. I can turn away from this responsibility, but I cannot escape it. This is why reason arises out of the face-to-face relationships we have with other people. It is because we are faced by the needs of other human beings that we must offer justifications for our actions. Even if you do not give your change to the beggar, you find yourself having to justify your choice.
Nothing else in our lives so disrupts our consciousness as an encounter with another person, who, simply by being there, calls to us and asks us to account for ourselves.
See also: Edmund Husserl • Roland Barthes • Luce Irigaray • Hélène Cixous • Julia Kristeva
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Epistemology
APPROACH
Phenomenology
BEFORE
4th century BCE Aristotle claims that philosophy begins with a sense of wonder.
1641 René Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy establishes a form of mind–body dualism that Merleau-Ponty will reject.
Early 1900s Edmund Husserl founds phenomenology as a philosophical school.
1927 Martin Heidegger writes Being and Time, a major influence on Merleau-Ponty.
AFTER
1979 Hubert Dreyfus draws on the works of Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Merleau-Ponty to explore philosophical problems raised by artificial intelligence and robotics.
The idea that philosophy begins with our ability to wonder at the world goes back as far as ancient Greece. Usually we take our everyday lives for granted, but Aristotle claimed that if we want to understand the world more deeply, we have to put aside our familiar acceptance of things. And nowhere, perhaps, is this harder to do than in the realm of our experience. After all, what could be more reliable than the facts of direct perception?
French philosopher Merleau-Ponty was interested in looking more closely at our experience of the world, and in questioning our everyday assumptions. This puts him in the tradition known as phenomenology, an approach to philosophy pioneered by Edmund Husserl at the beginning of the 20th century. Husserl wanted to explore first-person experience in a systematic way, while putting all assumptions about it to one side.
"Man is in the world and only in the world does he know himself."
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
The body-subject
Merleau-Ponty takes up Husserl’s approach, but with one important difference. He is concerned that Husserl ignores what is most important about our experience—the fact that it consists not just of mental experience, but also of bodily experience. In his most important book, The Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty explores this idea and comes to the conclusion that the mind and body are not separate entities—a thought that contradicts a long philosophical tradition championed by Descartes. For Merleau-Ponty, we have to see that thought and perception are embodied, and that the world, consciousness, and the body are all part of a single system. And his alternative to the disembodied mind proposed by Descartes is what he calls the body-subject. In other words, Merleau-Ponty rejects the dualist’s view that the world is made of two separate entities, called mind and matter.
Cognitive science
Because he was interested in seeing the world anew, Merleau-Ponty took an interest in cases of abnormal experience. For example, he believed that the phantom limb phenomenon (in which an amuptee “feels” his missing limb) shows that the body cannot simply be a machine. If it were, the body would no longer acknowledge the missing part—but it still exists for the subject because the limb has always been bound up with the subject’s will. In other words, the body is never “just” a body—it is always a “lived” body.
Merleau-Ponty’s focus on the role of the body in experience, and his insights into the nature of the mind as fundamentally embodied, have led to a revival of interest in his work among cognitive scientists. Many recent developments in cognitive science seem to bear out his idea that, once we break with our familiar acceptance of the world, experience is very strange indeed.
MRI scans
of the brain provide doctors with life-saving information. However, in Merleau-Ponty’s view, no amount of physical information can give us a complete account of experience.
MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY
Maurice Merleau-Ponty was born in Rochefort-sur-Mer, France, in 1908. He attended the École Normale Supérieure along with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and graduated in philosophy in 1930. He worked as a teacher at various schools, until joining the infantry during World War II. His major work, The Phenomenology of Perception, was published in 1945, after which he taught philosophy at the University of Lyon.
Merleau-Ponty’s interests extended beyond philosophy to include subjects such as education and child psychology. He was also a regular contributor to the journal Les Temps modernes. In 1952, Merleau-Ponty became the youngest-ever Chair of Philosophy at the College de France, and remained in the post until his death in 1961, at the age of only 53.
Key works
1942 The Structure of Behaviour
1945 The Phenomenology of Perception
1964 The Visible and the Invisible
See also: Aristotle • Edmund Husserl • Ludwig Wittgenstein • Martin Heidegger • Jean-Paul Sartre
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Ethics
APPROACH
Feminism
BEFORE
c.350 BCE Aristotle says, “The female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities.”
1792 Mary Wollstonecraft publishes A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, illustrating the equality of the sexes.
1920s Martin Heidegger sets out a “philosophy of existence,” prefiguring existentialism.
1940s Jean-Paul Sartre says “existence precedes essence.”
AFTER
1970s Luce Irigaray explores the philosophical implications of sexual difference.
From 1980 Julia Kristeva breaks down the notions of “male” and “female” as characterized by de Beauvoir.
French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir writes in her book The Second Sex that throughout history, the standard measure of what we take to be human—both in philosophy and in society at large—has been a peculiarly male view. Some philosophers, such as Aristotle, have been explicit in equating full humanity with maleness. Others have not said as much, but have nevertheless taken maleness as the standard against which humanity is to be judged. It is for this reason that de Beauvoir says that the Self (or “I”) of philosophical knowledge is by default male, and his binary pair—the female—is therefore something else, which she calls the Other. The Self is active and knowing, whereas the Other is all that the Self rejects: passivity, voicelessness, and powerlessness.
De Beauvoir is also concerned with the way that women are judged to be equal only insofar as they are like men. Even those who have written on behalf of the equality of women, she says, have done so by arguing that equality means that women can be and do the same as men. She claims that this idea is mistaken, because it ignores the fact that women and men are different. De Beauvoir’s philosophical background was in phenomenology, the study of how things appear to our experience. This view maintains that each of us constructs the world from within the frame of our own consciousness; we constitute things and meanings from the stream of our experiences. Consequently de Beauvoir maintains that the relationship that we have to our own bodies, to others, and to the world, as well as to philosophy itself, is strongly influenced by whether we are male or female.
"Representation of the world is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view."
Simone de Beauvoir
Existential feminism
Simone De Beauvoir was also an existentialist, believing that we are born without purpose and must carve out an authentic existence for ourselves, choosing what to become. In applying this idea to the notion of “woman”, she asks us to separate the biological entity (the bodily form which females are born into) from femininity, which is a social construct. Since any construct is open to change and interpretion, this means that there are many ways of “being a woman”; there is room for existential choice. In the introduction to The Second Sex de Beauvoir notes society’s awareness of this fluidity: “We are exhorted to be women, remain women, become women. It would appear, then, that every female human being is not necessarily a woman.” She later states the position explicitly: “One is not born but becomes a woman.”
De Beauvoir says that women must free themselves both from the idea that they must be like men, and from the passivity that society has induced in them. Living a truly authentic existence carries more risk than accepting a role handed down by society, but it is the only path to equality and freedom.
The many myths of woman as mother, wife, virgin, symbol of nature, and so on trap women, claimed de Beauvoir, into impossible ideals, while denying their individual selves and situations.
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
The existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir was born in Paris in 1908. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne University, and it was here that she met Jean-Paul Sartre, with whom she began a lifelong relationship. Both a philosopher and an award-winning novelist, she often explored philosophical themes within fictional works such as She Came to Stay and The Mandarins. Her most famous work, The Second Sex, brought an existentialist approach to feminist ideas. Despite initially being vilified by the political right and left, and being placed on the Vatican’s Index of Forbidden Books, it became one of the most important feminist works of the 20th century. De Beauvoir was a prolific writer, producing travel books, memoirs, a four-volume autobiography, and political essays over the course of her life. She died at the age of 78, and was buried in Montparnasse cemetery.
Key works
1944 Pyrrhus and Cineas
1947 The Ethics of Ambiguity
1949 The Second Sex
1954 The Mandarins
See also: Hypatia of Alexandria • Mary Wollstonecraft • Jean-Paul Sartre • Luce Irigaray • Hélène Cixous • Martha Nussbaum
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Philosophy of language
APPROACH
Analytic philosophy
BEFORE
c.400 BCE Plato’s Cratylus investigates the relationship between words and things.
19th century Søren Kierkegaard stresses the importance of the study of language for philosophy.
1950s Ludwig Wittgenstein writes that there is no such thing as a private language.
AFTER
1980s Richard Rorty suggests that knowledge is more like “conversation” than the representation of reality.
1990s In Consciousness Explained, Quine’s former student Daniel Dennett says that both meaning and inner experience can only be understood as social acts.
Some philosophers assert that language is about the relationship between words and things. Quine, however, disagrees. Language is not about the relationship between objects and verbal signifiers, but about knowing what to say and when to say it. It is, he says in his 1968 essay Ontological Relativity, a social art.
Quine suggests the following thought experiment. Imagine that we come across some people—perhaps natives of another country—who speak a language we do not share. We are sitting with a group of these people when a rabbit appears, and one of the natives says “gavagai.” We wonder if there can be a connection between the event—the appearance of the rabbit—and the fact that the native says “gavagai.” As time goes on, we note that every time a rabbit appears, somebody says “gavagai”, so we conclude that “gavagai” can be reliably translated as rabbit. But, Quine insists, we are
wrong. “Gavagai” could mean all manner of things. It could mean “oh, look, dinner!” for example, or it could mean “behold, a fluffy creature!”
If we wanted to determine the meaning of “gavagai”, we could try another method. We could point to other fluffy creatures (or other things on the dinner menu) and see if our utterance of “gavagai” met with assent or dissent. But even if we were to reach a position where, in each and every occasion on which “gavagai” was uttered, we ourselves would utter the word “rabbit”, we still could not be sure that this was an appropriate translation. “Gavagai” could mean “set of rabbit parts” or “wood-living rabbit” or “rabbit or hare”; it might even refer to a short prayer that must be uttered whenever a rabbit is seen.
Unsettled language
In attempting to establish the precise meaning of this mysterious “gavagai”, therefore, we might think that the solution would be to learn the language of our informants thoroughly, so that we could be absolutely sure of the contexts in which the word was spoken. But this would only result in multiplying the problem, because we could not be sure that the other words we found ourselves using to explain the meaning of “gavagai” were themselves accurate translations.
Quine refers to this problem as the “indeterminacy of translation”, and it has unsettling implications. It suggests that ultimately words do not have meanings. The sense of somebody uttering “gavagai” (or, for that matter, “rabbit”), and of this utterance being meaningful comes not from some mysterious link between words and things, but from the patterns of our behavior, and the fact that we have learned to participate in language as a social art.