The Philosophy Book
Page 38
1953 Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations introduces and explores his concept of “forms of life.”
1964 Arthur Danto publishes his philosophical essay The Artworld, which analyzes artistic endeavor from an institutional viewpoint.
AFTER
1969 American philosopher George Dickie develops further the institutional theory of artistic creativity in his essay Defining Art.
The British philosopher of art, Richard Wollheim, believes that we should resist the tendency to see art as an abstract idea that needs to be analyzed and explained. If we are to fully understand art, he believes, we must always define it in relation to its social context. By describing art as a “form of life”, in Art and its Objects (1968), he uses a term coined by the Austrian-born philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein to describe the nature of language. For Wittgenstein, language is a “form of life”, because the way we use it is always a reflection of our individual experiences, habits, and skills. He is attempting to resist the tendency of philosophy to make simplistic generalizations about language and instead is pointing to the many different roles language plays in our lives.
Social setting
Wollheim is making the same point as Wittgenstein, but in relation to works of art. Artists, he states, are conditioned by their context—their beliefs, histories, emotional dispositions, physical needs, and communities—and the world that they interpret is a world of constant change. For Wollheim, one implication of this is that there can be no general “artistic impulse” or instinct for the creation of art that is totally independent of the institutions in which it operates.
What we consider art may depend on the context in which we view it. Andy Warhol’s 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans creates fine art from images usually associated with commerce.
See also: Plato • Ludwig Wittgenstein
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Philosophy of science
APPROACH
Analytic philosophy
BEFORE
1934 In The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Karl Popper defines “falsifiability” as a criterion for any scientific theory.
1962 Thomas Kuhn introduces the idea of “paradigm shifts” in science in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
1960s and early 1970s Feyerabend develops his ideas in discussion with his friend and fellow philosopher of science, Imre Lakatos.
AFTER
From 1980s Feyerabend’s ideas contribute to the theories of the mind proposed by American philosophers Patricia and Paul Churchland.
Born in Austria, Feyerabend became a student of Karl Popper at the London School of Economics, but he went on to depart significantly from Popper’s rational model of science. During his time at the University of California in the 1960s and 1970s, Feyerabend became friendly with the German-born philosopher Thomas Kuhn, who argued that scientific progress is not gradual, but always jumps in “paradigm shifts” or revolutions that lead to whole new frameworks for scientific thinking. Feyerabend goes even further, suggesting that when this occurs, all the scientific concepts and terms are altered, so there is no permanent framework of meaning.
Anarchy in science
Feyerabend’s most famous book Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge, was first published in 1975. Here he sets out his vision of what he calls “epistemological anarchism.” Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that deals with questions and theories about knowledge, and Feyerabend’s “anarchism” is rooted in the idea that all of the methodologies used in the sciences are limited in scope. As a result, there is no such thing as “scientific method.” If we look at how science has developed and progressed in practice, the only “method” that we can discern is that “anything goes.” Science, Feyerabend maintains, has never progressed according to strict rules, and if the philosophy of science demands such rules, it will limit scientific progress.
"Science and myth overlap in many ways."
Paul Feyerabend
See also: Karl Popper • Thomas Kuhn
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Epistemology
APPROACH
Postmodernism
BEFORE
1870s The term “postmodern” is first used in the context of art criticism.
1939–45 Technological advances in World War II lay the ground for the computer revolution of the 20th century.
1953 Ludwig Wittgenstein writes in his Philosophical Investigations about “language games”—an idea that Lyotard uses to develop his idea of meta-narratives.
AFTER
1984 American literary critic Fredric Jameson writes Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
From 1990s The World Wide Web offers unprecedented access to information.
The idea that knowledge is produced to be sold appears in Jean-François Lyotard’s book The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. The book was originally written for the Council of Universities in Quebec, Canada, and the use of the term “postmodern” in its title is significant. Although Lyotard did not invent the term, which had been used by various art critics since the 1870s, his book was responsible for broadening its range and increasing its popularity. His use of the word in the title of this book is often said to mark the beginning of postmodern thought.
The term “postmodernism” has since been used in so many different ways that it is now hard to know exactly what it means, but Lyotard’s definition is very clear. Postmodernism, he writes, is a matter of “incredulity towards meta-narratives.” Meta-narratives are overarching, single stories that attempt to sum up the whole of human history, or that attempt to put all of our knowledge into a single framework. Marxism (the view that history can be seen as a series of struggles between social classes) is an example of a meta-narrative. Another is the idea that humanity’s story is one of progress toward deeper knowledge and social justice, brought about by greater scientific understanding.
Externalized knowledge
Our incredulity toward these meta- narratives implies a new scepticism. Lyotard suggests that this is due to a shift in the way we have related to knowledge since World War II, and to the huge change in the technologies we use to deal with it. Computers have fundamentally transformed our attitudes, as knowledge has become information that can be stored in databases, moved to and fro, and bought and sold. This is what Lyotard calls the “mercantilization” of knowledge.
This has several implications. The first, Lyotard points out, is that knowledge is becoming externalized. It is no longer something that helps toward the development of minds; something that might be able to transform us. Knowledge is also becoming disconnected from questions of truth. It is being judged not in terms of how true it is, but in terms of how well it serves certain ends. When we cease to ask questions about knowledge such as “is it true?” and start asking questions such as “how can this be sold?”, knowledge becomes a commodity. Lyotard is concerned that once this happens, private corporations may begin to seek to control the flow of knowledge, and decide who can access what types of knowledge, and when.
When knowledge becomes data it is no longer the indefinable matter of minds, but a commodity that can be transferred, stored, bought, or sold.
JEAN-FRANÇOIS LYOTARD
Jean-François Lyotard was born in Versailles, France in 1924. He studied philosophy and literature at the Sorbonne, Paris, becoming friends with Gilles Deleuze. After graduating, he taught philosophy in schools for several years in France and Algeria.
Lyotard became involved in radical left-wing politics in the 195
0s, and was a well-known defender of the 1954–62 Algerian revolution, but his philosophical development ultimately led him to become disillusioned with the meta-narratives of Marxism. In the 1970s he began working as a university professor, teaching philosophy first at the Sorbonne and then in many other countries around the world, including the US, Canada, Brazil, and France. Lyotard retired as Professor Emeritus at the University of Paris VIII, and died of leukemia in 1998.
Key works
1971 Discourse, Figure
1974 Libidinal Economy
1979 The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge
1983 The Differend
See also: Immanuel Kant • Georg Hegel • Friedrich Nietzsche • Ludwig Wittgenstein • Martin Heidegger • Gilles Deleuze
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Political philosophy
APPROACH
Existentialism
BEFORE
4th century BCE Aristotle argues in the Nicomachean Ethics that slavery is a natural state.
19th century Africa is partitioned and colonized by European countries.
1930s The French négritude movement calls for a unified black consciousness.
AFTER
1977 Steve Biko, an anti-apartheid activist inspired by Fanon, dies in police custody in South Africa.
1978 Edward Said, influenced by Fanon’s work, writes Orientalism, a post-colonial study of Western perspectives on the Middle East in the 19th century.
P hilosopher and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon first published his psychoanalytic study of colonialism and racism, Black Skin, White Masks, in 1952. In the book Fanon attempts to explore the psychological and social legacy of colonialism among non-white communities around the world.
In saying that “for the black man, there is only one destiny”, and this destiny is white, Fanon is saying at least two things. First, he says that “the black man wants to be like the white man”; that is, the aspirations of many colonized peoples have been formed by the dominant colonial culture. European colonial cultures tended to equate “blackness” with impurity, which shaped the self-view of those who were subject to colonial rule, so that they came to see the color of their skin as a sign of inferiority.
The only way out of this predicament seems to be an aspiration to achieve a “white existence”; but this will always fail, because the fact of having dark skin will always mean that one will fail to be accepted as white. For Fanon, this aspiration to achieve “a white existence” not only fails to address racism and inequality, but it also masks or even condones these things by implying that there is an “unarguable superiority” to white existence.
At the same time, Fanon is saying something more complex. It might be thought that, given this tendency to aspire to a kind of “white existence”, the solution would be to argue for an independent view of what it means to be black. Yet this, too, is subject to all kinds of problems. Elsewhere in his book, Fanon writes that “the black man’s soul is a white man’s artefact.” In other words, the idea of what it means to be black is the creation of patterns of fundamentally racist European thought.
Here Fanon is, in part, responding to what was known in France as the négritude (or “blackness”) movement. This was a movement of French and French-speaking black writers from the 1930s who wanted to reject the racism and colonialism of mainstream French culture, and argued for an independent, shared black culture. But Fanon believes that this idea of négritude is one that fails to truly address the problems of racism that it seeks to overcome, because the way that it thinks about “blackness” simply repeats the fantasies of mainstream white culture.
"There is a fact: White men consider themselves superior to black men."
Frantz Fanon
Human rights
In one sense, Fanon believes that the solution can only come when we move beyond racial thinking; that if we remain trapped within the idea of race we cannot ever address these injustices. “I find myself in the world and I recognize that I have one right alone,” Fanon writes at the end of his book; “that of demanding human behavior from the other.” Fanon’s thought has been of widespread importance in anti-colonial and anti-racist movements, and has influenced social activists such as anti-apartheid campaigner Steve Biko and scholars such as Edward Said.
The inferiority associated with being black led many colonized people to adopt the “mother country’s cultural standards”, says Fanon, and even to aspire to a “white existence.”
FRANTZ FANON
Frantz Fanon was born in 1925 in Martinique, a Caribbean island that was at that time a French colony. He left Martinique to fight with the Free French Forces in World War II, after which he studied both medicine and psychiatry in Lyon, France. He also attended lectures on literature and philosophy, including those given by the philosopher Merleau-Ponty. The young Fanon had thought of himself as French, and the racism he encountered on first entering France surprised him. It played a huge role in shaping his philosophy, and one year after qualifying as a psychiatrist in 1951, he published his book Black Skin, White Masks.
In 1953 Fanon moved to Algeria where he worked as a hospital psychiatrist. After two years of hearing his patients’ tales of the torture they endured during the 1954–62 Algerian War of Independence, he resigned his government-funded post, moved to Tunisia, and began working for the Algerian independence movement. In the late 1950s, he developed leukemia. During his illness, he wrote his final book, The Wretched of the Earth, arguing for a different world. It was published in the year of his death with a preface by Jean-Paul Sartre, a friend who had first influenced Fanon, then been influenced by him.
Key works
1952 Black Skin, White Masks
1959 A Dying Colonialism
1961 The Wretched of the Earth
1969 Toward the African Revolution (collected short works)
See also: Aristotle • Jean-Paul Sartre • Maurice Merleau-Ponty • Edward Said
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Epistemology
APPROACH
Discursive archaeology
BEFORE
Late 18th century Immanuel Kant lays the foundation for the 19th-century model of “man.”
1859 Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species causes a revolution in how we understand ourselves.
1883 Friedrich Nietzsche, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, announces that man is something to be surpassed.
AFTER
1985 American philosopher Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto attempts to imagine a post-human future.
1991 Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained calls into question many of our most cherished notions about consciousness.
The idea that man is an invention of recent date appears in The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences by French philosopher Michel Foucault. To understand what Foucault means by this, we need to know what he means by archaeology, and why he thinks that we should apply it to the history of thought.
Foucault is interested in how our discourse—the way in which we talk and think about things—is formed by a set of largely unconscious rules that arise out of the historical conditions in which we find ourselves. What we take to be the “common sense” background to how we think and talk about the world is in fact shaped by these rules and these conditions. However, the rules and conditions change over time, and consequently so do our discourses. For this reason, an “archaeology” is needed to unearth both the limits and the conditions of how people thought and talked about the world in previous ages. We cannot take concepts that we use in our present context (for example,
the concept of “human nature”) and assume that they are somehow eternal, and that all we need is a “history of ideas” to trace their genealogy. For Foucault, it is simply wrong to assume that our current ideas can be usefully applied to any previous point in history. The ways in which we use the words “man”, “mankind”, and “human nature”, Foucault believes, are examples of this.
The roots of this idea lie firmly in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, who turned philosophy on its head by abandoning the old question “Why is the world the way it is?” and asking “Why do we see the world the way we do?” We take our idea of what it is to be human as fundamental and unchanging, but it is in fact only a recent invention. Foucault locates the beginning of our particular idea of “man” at the beginning of the 19th century, around the time of the birth of the natural sciences. This idea of “man” is, Foucault considers, paradoxical: we see ourselves both as objects in the world, and so as objects of study, and as subjects who experience and study the world—strange creatures that look in two directions at once.
The human self-image
Foucault suggests that not only is this idea of “man” an invention of recent date, it is also an invention that may be close to coming to its end—one that may soon be erased “like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea.”
Is Foucault right? In a time of rapid advances in computing and human-machine interfaces, and when philosophers informed by cognitive science, such as Daniel Dennett and Dan Wegner, are questioning the very nature of subjectivity, it is hard not to feel that, even if the face in the sand is not about to be erased, the tide is lapping alarmingly at its edges.