The Philosophy Book
Page 36
No word has a fixed meaning, according to Quine. When the word “rabbit” is spoken, it may mean any one of a number of things, depending on the context in which it is said.
WILLARD VAN ORMAN QUINE
Born in 1908 in Ohio, USA, Quine studied at Harvard with Alfred North Whitehead, a philosopher of logic and mathematics. While there he also met Bertrand Russell, who was to become a profound influence on his thought. After completing his PhD in 1932, Quine traveled throughout Europe, meeting many of its most eminent philosophers, including several of the Vienna Circle.
Returning to teach at Harvard, Quine’s philosophical career was briefly interrupted during World War II when he spent four years decrypting messages for the US Navy intelligence. A great traveler, he was said to be prouder of the fact that he had visited 118 countries than of his many awards and fellowships. Quine became professor of philosophy at Harvard in 1956, and taught there until his death in 2000, aged 92.
Key works
1952 Methods of Logic
1953 From a Logical Point of View
1960 Word and Object
1990 The Pursuit of Truth
See also: Plato • Søren Kierkegaard • Ferdinand de Saussure • Ludwig Wittgenstein • Roland Barthes • Daniel Dennett
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Ethics
APPROACH
Analytic philosophy
BEFORE
1651 In his book Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes considers the relationship between freedom and state power.
1844 Søren Kierkegaard argues that our freedom to make moral decisions is a chief cause of unhappiness.
1859 In his book On Liberty, John Stuart Mill distinguishes between freedom from coercion and freedom to act.
1941 Psychoanalyst Erich Fromm explores positive and negative liberty in his book The Fear of Freedom.
AFTER
Present day The development of new surveillance technology raises fresh questions about the nature of freedom.
What does it mean to be free? This is the question explored by the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin in his famous essay Two Concepts of Liberty, written in 1958. Here he makes a distinction between what he calls “positive” and “negative” freedom. Although he is not the first to draw this distinction, he does so with great originality, and uses it to expose apparent inconsistencies in our everyday notion of freedom.
For Berlin, “negative” freedom is what he calls our “fundamental sense” of freedom. This kind of freedom is freedom from external obstacles: I am free because I am not chained to a rock, because I am not in prison, and so on. This is freedom from something else. But Berlin points out that when we talk about freedom, we usually mean something more subtle than this. Freedom is also a matter of self-determination, of being a person with hopes, and intentions, and purposes that are one’s own. This “positive” freedom is about being in control of one’s own destiny. After all, I am not free just because all the doors of my house are unlocked. And this positive freedom is not exclusively personal, because self-determination can also be desired at the level of the group or of the state.
For Berlin, the problem is that these two forms of freedom are often in conflict. Think, for example, of the freedom that comes from the discipline of learning how to play the tuba. As a beginner, I can do little more than struggle with my own inability to play—but eventually I can play with a kind of liberated gusto. Or think of the fact that people frequently exercise their “positive” freedom by voting for a particular government, knowing that their “negative” freedom will be restricted when that government comes to power.
The goals of life
Berlin points to another problem. Who is to say what a suitable goal of “positive” freedom should be? Authoritarian or totalitarian regimes often have an inflexible view of the purpose of human life, and so restrict “negative” freedoms to maximize their idea of human happiness. Indeed, political oppression frequently arises from an abstract idea of what the good life is, followed by state intervention to make that idea a reality.
Berlin’s response to this is twofold. First, it is important to recognize that the various freedoms we may desire will always be in conflict, for there is no such thing as “the goal of life”—only the goals of particular individuals. This fact, he claims, is obscured by philosophers who look for a universal basis for morality, but confuse “right action” with the purpose of life itself. Second, we need to keep alive the fundamental sense of freedom as an absence of “bullying and domination”, so that we do not find our ideals turning into chains for ourselves and for others.
Soviet propaganda often depicted workers liberated from capitalism. From a capitalist view, however, such images showed a triumph of negative freedom over positive freedom.
ISAIAH BERLIN
Isaiah Berlin was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1909. He spent the first part of his life in Russia, firstly under the Russian empire, and then under the rule of the new Communist state. Due to rising anti-Semitism, however, and problems with the Soviet régime, his family emigrated to Britain in 1921. Berlin was an outstanding student at Oxford University, where he remained as a lecturer. He was a philosopher with broad interests, ranging from art and literature to politics. His essay Two Concepts of Liberty was delivered in 1958 at Oxford University, and it is often considered one of the classics of 20th-century political theory. He is celebrated for being one of the foremost scholars of liberalism.
Key works
1953 The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History
1958 Two Concepts of Liberty
1990 The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas
2000 The Power of Ideas
2006 Political Ideas in the Romantic Age
See also: Jean-Jacques Rousseau • John Stuart Mill • Søren Kierkegaard • Karl Marx • Jean-Paul Sartre
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Ethics
APPROACH
Environmental philosophy
BEFORE
c. 1660 Benedictus Spinoza develops his philosophy of nature as an extension of God.
1949 Aldo Leopold’s The Sand County Almanac is published.
1960 British scientist James Lovelock first proposes his “Gaia hypothesis”, exploring the natural world as a single, self-regulating system.
1962 American biologist Rachel Carson publishes Silent Spring, which becomes an important influence on Naess’s thinking.
AFTER
1984 Zen master and teacher Robert Aitken Roshi combines deep ecology with the ideas of the Japanese Buddhist philosopher D¯ogen.
The injunction to think like a mountain has become closely associated with the concept of “deep ecology”—a term coined in 1973 by the Norwegian philosopher and environmental campaigner, Arne Naess. He uses the term to stress his belief that we must first recognize we are part of nature, and not separate from it, if we are to avoid environmental catastrophe. But the notion of thinking like a mountain goes back to 1949, when it was expressed by American ecologist Aldo Leopold in The Sand County Almanac.
Working as a forester in New Mexico in the early part of the 20th century, Leopold shot a female wolf on the mountainside. “We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes,” he wrote. “I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain.” It was from this experience that Leopold came to the idea that we should think like a mountain, recognizing not just our needs or those of our fellow humans, but those of the entire nat
ural world. He implies that often we miss the broader implications of our actions, only considering the immediate benefits to ourselves. To “think like a mountain” means identifying with the wider environment and being aware of its role in our lives.
"The thinking for the future has to be loyal to nature."
Arne Naess
Harmonizing with nature
Naess takes up Leopold’s idea by proposing his “deep ecology.” He states that we only protect our environment by undergoing the kind of transformation of which Leopold writes. Naess urges us to move toward seeing ourselves as part of the whole biosphere. Instead of viewing the world with a kind of detachment, we must find our place in nature, by acknowledging the intrinsic value of all elements of the world we inhabit.
Naess introduces the “ecological self”, a sense of self that is rooted in an awareness of our relationship to a “larger community of all living beings.” He claims that broadening our identification with the world to include wolves, frogs, spiders, and perhaps even mountains, leads to a more joyful and meaningful life.
Naess’s “deep ecology” has had a powerful effect on environmental philosophy and on the development of environmental activism. For those of us who live in cities, it may seem hard or even impossible to connect with an “ecological self.” Nevertheless, it may be possible. As the Zen master Robert Aitken Roshi wrote in 1984, “When one thinks like a mountain, one thinks also like the black bear, so that honey dribbles down your fur as you catch the bus to work.”
The natural world, for Naess, is not something that we should strive to control and manipulate for our own gain. Living well involves living as an equal with all the elements of our environment.
ARNE NAESS
Widely acknowledged as the leading Norwegian philosopher of the 20th century, Arne Naess became the youngest-ever full professor at the University of Oslo at the age of 27. He was also a noted mountaineer and led a successful expedition to the summit of Tirich Mir in northern Pakistan in 1950.
It was only after Naess retired from his teaching post in 1970 that he actively developed his thinking about the natural world and became involved in direct action on environmental issues. In 1970, he chained himself to the rocks by the Mardalsfossen Waterfall in Norway to protest against the building of a nearby dam. Elected as chairperson of Greenpeace Norway in 1988, he was knighted in 2005.
Key works
1968 Scepticism
1974 Ecology, Society and Lifestyle
1988 Thinking Like a Mountain (with John Seed, Pat Fleming and Joanna Macy)
2002 Life’s Philosophy: Reason and Feeling in a Deeper World
See also: Laozi • Benedictus Spinoza • Friedrich Schelling
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Epistemology
APPROACH
Existentialism
BEFORE
1843 Søren Kierkegaard explores the idea of the absurd in his book, Fear and Trembling.
1864 Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky publishes Notes from the Underground, which has existentialist themes.
1901 Friedrich Nietzsche writes in Will to Power that “our existence (action, suffering, willing, feeling) has no meaning.”
1927 Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time lays the ground for the development of existential philosophy.
AFTER
1971 Philosopher Thomas Nagel argues that absurdity arises out of a contradiction within us.
Some people believe that philosophy’s task is to search for the meaning of life. But the French philosopher and novelist Albert Camus thought that philosophy should recognize instead that life is inherently meaningless. While at first this seems a depressing view, Camus believes that only by embracing this idea are we capable of living as fully as possible.
Camus’ idea appears in his essay The Myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus was a Greek king who fell out of favor with the gods, and so was sentenced to a terrible fate in the Underworld. His task was to roll an enormous rock to the top of a hill, only to watch it roll back to the bottom. Sisyphus then had to trudge down the hill to begin the task again, repeating this for all eternity. Camus was fascinated by this myth, because it seemed to him to encapsulate something of the meaninglessness and absurdity of our lives. He sees life as an endless struggle to perform tasks that are essentially meaningless.
Camus recognizes that much of what we do certainly seems meaningful, but what he is suggesting is quite subtle. On the one hand, we are conscious beings who cannot help living our lives as if they are meaningful. On the other hand, these meanings do not reside out there in the universe; they reside only in our minds. The universe as a whole has no meaning and no purpose; it just is. But because, unlike other living things, we have consciousness, we are the kinds of beings who find meaning and purpose everywhere.
Recognizing the absurd
The absurd, for Camus, is the feeling that we have when we recognize that the meanings we give to life do not exist beyond our own consciousness. It is the result of a contradiction between our own sense of life’s meaning, and our knowledge that nevertheless the universe as a whole is meaningless.
Camus explores what it might mean to live in the light of this contradiction. He claims that it is only once we can accept the fact that life is meaningless and absurd that we are in a position to live fully. In embracing the absurd, our lives become a constant revolt against the meaninglessness of the universe, and we can live freely.
This idea was further developed by the philosopher Thomas Nagel, who said that the absurdity of life lies in the nature of consciousness, because however seriously we take life, we always know that there is some perspective from which this seriousness can be questioned.
Sisyphus was condemned eternally to push a rock up a hill, but Camus thought he might find freedom even in this grim situation if he accepted the meaninglessness of his eternal task.
"The struggle towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart."
Albert Camus
ALBERT CAMUS
Camus was born in Algeria in 1913. His father was killed a year later in World War I, and Camus was brought up by his mother in extreme poverty. He studied philosophy at the University of Algiers, where he suffered the first attack of the tuberculosis which was to recur throughout his life. At the age of 25 he went to live in France, where he became involved in politics. He joined the French Communist Party in 1935 but was expelled in 1937. During World War II he worked for the French Resistance, editing an underground newspaper and writing many of his best-known novels, including The Stranger. He wrote many plays, novels, and essays, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. Camus died in a car crash aged 46, having discarded a train ticket to accept a lift back to Paris with a friend.
Key works
1942 The Myth of Sisyphus
1942 The Stranger
1947 The Plague
1951 The Rebel
1956 The Fall
See also: Søren Kierkegaard • Friedrich Nietzsche • Martin Heidegger • Jean-Paul Sartre
INTRODUCTION
The closing decades of the 20th century were notable for accelerating advances in technology and the subsequent improvement in communications of all kinds. The increasing power of the mass media, especially television, since the end of World War II had fuelled a rise in popular culture with its associated antiestablishment ideals, and this in turn was prompting political and social change. From the 1960s onward, the old order was being questioned in Europe and the US, and dissent gathered momentum in Eastern Europe.
By the 1980s, relations between the East and West
were thawing, and the Cold War was coming to a close; the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 offered hope for the new decade. But the 1990s was a period of ethnic and religious unrest, culminating in the US declaring a “War on Terror” at the start of the new millennium.
Elitist philosophies
Culture in the West went through similarly significant changes. The gap between popular and “high” culture widened after the 1960s, as the intellectual avant-garde often decided to disregard public taste. Philosophy followed a similarly elitist path, particularly after the death of Jean-Paul Sartre, whose Marxist existentialism—beloved of 1960s intellectuals—now had less of an audience.
Continental philosophy was dominated in the 1970s and 80s by structuralism, a movement that grew from literature-based French philosophy. Central to this movement was the notion of “deconstructing” texts and revealing them to be inherently unstable, with many contradictory meanings. The theory’s principal proponents—French theorists Louis Althusser, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault—linked their textual analyses with left-wing politics, while the analyst Jacques Lacan gave structuralism a psychoanalytic perspective. Their ideas were soon taken up by a generation of writers and artists working under the banner of “postmodernism”, which rejected all possibility of a single, objective truth, viewpoint, or narrative.