by Colin Wilson
The consequence of all this is that the thinker or artist of today finds himself in a room that contains the accumulated rubbish of two hundred years; every occupant seems to have added to the muddle. All the traditions seem to have reached a state of hopeless confusion. The novelist, for example, discovers that Flaubert, Henry James, Proust, Joyce and Robbe-Grillet have backed the novel into a cul-de-sac and overturned it in a ditch. In all likelihood, he hurries away from the mess and writes a conventional novel that might have been written a hundred years ago. The composer finds that Wagner, Mahler, Schoenberg and Boulez have left music in the same situation; he then has the alternative of going a step further than Webern, or being condemned as 'unprogressive'.
But the person who finds himself in the worst situation is the philosopher. And since the aim of the present book is to suggest a basis for a new existentialism, it is important to understand how this came about.
FROM THE GREEKS TO GALILEO
The problem of the human situation is the problem of the clash between man's inner world and the alien world 'out there'. The Greeks solved the problem in a simple manner—by rejecting the world out there. They were intoxicated with the power of thought, with the beautiful certainty of logic and mathematics. But the real world is irritatingly unmathematical; it is full of violence and uncertainty. So Greek thought declared that the real world is unimportant, an illusion. Reality lies in the world of ideas. Before a carpenter can make a chair, he must have an idea of a chair; consequently, the idea must be more important than the actual chair. One can destroy the chair, and it is easy enough to make another; but if the idea were destroyed no chairs could be made. The idea is like the mould in which all real things are cast. Somewhere behind the façade of reality, according to Plato, there is a world in which these moulds are kept. This real world can be glimpsed behind the everyday world of change if one stares hard enough. The everyday world is like a fence with small cracks between each board. If you apply your eye to the crack, you will see only a narrow strip of the world on the other side. But if you ride past the fence on a bicycle, all the cracks seem to merge together, as if the fence were semi-transparent, and you can see everything that lies behind it. But speed is essential. And in the same way, one needs speed in a mental sense—intellectual vitality and curiosity—to see the eternal world of ideas that lies behind the changing face of the material world.
There is obviously a basic truth in this. But Greek thought threw out the baby with the bath water. Since the philosopher spends his life trying to ignore the real world and study the world on 'the other side of the fence', he will achieve final freedom in death. This is the argument with which Socrates comforts his friends on the day of his execution, and the reason he gives for not escaping while he had the chance. He does not explain why, in that case, he did not commit suicide as soon as he decided to be a philosopher.
The world-rejection of Greek thought dominated philosophy for the next two thousand years. In Europe, it happened to fit in very well with the world-rejection of Christianity. Then its weaknesses began to appear. Aristotle was regarded as the great scientist and realist, in contrast to Plato's idealism. But Aristotle, like Plato, felt rather contemptuous of the material world; he was inclined to make assertions without testing them. He declared, for example, that an object dropped from the mast of a moving ship will fall behind the mast; he also believed that heavier bodies fall faster than lighter ones.[1] He was aware of the theories of earlier thinkers that the earth revolves round the sun, and that it has an axial rotation, but he rejected them in favour of the idea that the earth is the centre of the universe.
The great revolution came nearly two thousand years later, with Galileo. He proved that all bodies fall at the same speed. He invented a telescope and discovered the moons of Jupiter, confirming the theory of Copernicus that the sun is the centre of our system. He rolled weights down an inclined plane and concluded that a moving body will continue to move unless something stops it. Galileo practised what Aristotle only preached—close observation of nature.
THE SOURCE OF CONFUSION – DESCARTES
Modern philosophy begins with a contemporary of Galileo, René Descartes. Descartes was a mathematician and a scientist, and he asked what he considered to be the fundamental question: What can we know for certain? Descartes began with the principle that one must doubt everything, then went on to ask: Can I be certain that I am sitting here in this chair? No, for it is possible that I might be dreaming. What, then, do I know for certain? I know that I exist, because I am thinking.
Descartes' principle of 'radical doubt' was accepted by all subsequent philosophers. It is the application to philosophy of Galileo's principle: 'Test everything.' But the principle had an unfortunate consequence; it divided science from philosophy. Science is bound to take the material world for granted; but according to Descartes, we can never be as certain of the existence of the world as we can of our own existence; the scientist studies the physical world, but the philosopher had better study the mind. Only the mind can get to the truth underlying appearances.
Descartes was carried away by enthusiasm for the scientific method, which, after two thousand years, was now revolutionizing human knowledge. Science examines the world through a magnifying glass; so Descartes naïvely proceeded to examine the human situation through a magnifying glass, trying to reduce everything to reason. Oddly enough, he did not apply his principle of doubt to his religion, and continued to regard himself as a good Catholic. So it is not surprising that his system should be confused and self-divided, with religious dogma on the one hand, and naïve rationalism on the other.
His rationalism led him to decide that animals are complicated machines without a soul. This led to a difficult problem. If animals are really clockwork, how do we know that men are not also clockwork? 'Because', Descartes replied, 'I know I have a soul. I think, therefore I am.' But if an animal can go through all the motions of being alive without really being alive, then is there any need for a soul to drive the human clockwork? Plainly not. The soul, Descartes said, lives in the brain, and can indirectly influence the body. Descartes' disciple Geulincx saw the inconsistencies in this theory, and took it to an extreme. The soul has no influence on the body at all. It is true that if you want to raise your arm, you can do so; but it is only because the soul and the body are like two clocks that have been synchronized by God. One of them shows the hour, and the other strikes. We imagine that they are connected, but this is an illusion.
Geulincx's 'improvement' of Descartes is typical of modern philosophy. A theory is self-contradictory; but instead of checking the premises, another theorist takes the contradictions to an extreme, and reduces the whole thing to absurdity—but also to consistency. If Descartes had been bold enough, he would have taken his own radical doubt to an extreme and declared that men are also machines, that consciousness is an illusion produced by the body, and that all religion is a product of ignorance. Later thinkers took these steps. Comte founded the school of positivism, that declared religion to be nonsense; Ernst Mach declared that consciousness is merely a series of sensory impressions; the leader of the Behaviourist group of psychologists, J. B. Watson, wrote '. . . no behaviourist has observed anything that he can call consciousness, sensation, imagery, perception or will'.
Yet another group of philosophers took Descartes' principle of doubt still further, and continued the work of reducing man to a machine. Locke argued that all our knowledge is derived from experience. This was the first total rejection of Plato's ideas. In the Meno, Socrates persuades a slave to reason out a geometrical problem, and goes on to argue that the slave already possessed the knowledge inside himself; it is only a question of getting it out into consciousness. All knowledge is inside us, Plato argues. Reason and imagination are the instruments of knowledge, and a man who spent his life in a dark room could, in theory, learn everything about the world outside if he used his mind properly. Locke dismissed this idea of 'innate knowledge'.
It can be seen that, in this final conclusion, Berkeley is as inconsistent as the rest. David Hume, twenty-six years younger than Berkeley, made the usual attempt to push these conclusions to the absurd limit of consistency. He did this by blending together the essence of Descartes, Locke and Berkeley. He began with Descartes' principle of doubting everything, then proceeded to agree with Locke and Berkeley that all knowledge is derived from experience, and that there are no general ideas. Next he denied the 'self' (i.e., the soul), declaring that consciousness is just a flow of perceptions, and that men are bundles of perceptions (psychologically speaking). Finally, he went further than any previous philosopher and denied that cause and effect have any necessary connection. 1 + 1 = 2 may be a valid example of cause and effect, but in nature, 'every effect is a distinct event from its cause', and 'It could not, therefore, be discovered in the cause'.
After Hume, philosophy faced a blank wall. Descartes at least had left a basis for certainty: 'I think, therefore I am.' Hume replied: "That does not prove that you exist at all.' Berkeley had got rid of the outside world; now Hume got rid of the mind as well. Reason had proved to be a kind of forest fire that ended by consuming everything. Descartes' principle of doubt left nothing standing.
The task of rescuing philosophy from Hume's total scepticism was undertaken by Kant. Kant, like all the rest, accepted Descartes' premise, and followed roughly the same line of reason as Berkeley and Hume. The main problem, as Kant saw it, was to re-establish Plato's idea that all knowledge can be found inside man—not just mathematical knowledge. Kant's aim was excellent, but his means were not entirely honest. And his first step seems to be only another concession to Locke and Hume. Nobody had ever doubted that 1 + 1 = 2 is a 'necessary' truth, as opposed to a statement like 'It is snowing because it is cold', which is logical enough, but may not be true. Kant declared that 5 + 7 = 12 is no more 'necessary' than the connection of cause and effect, because the idea of 12 is not 'contained' in the idea of 5 + 7. At first sight, it may seem that Kant was only giving away more ground to Hume. But this was essential to his plan, for he goes on to propose a theory of the mind which is the reverse of Hume's. For Hume, the mind is almost nothing, a machine set going by perceptions. For Kant, the mind is everything. For not only does the mind embellish nature with colours and textures and smells—not to mention cause and effect—but it also adds space and time. Kant agrees with Descartes that we can never know the external world, but only our impressions of it. In that case, what is the external world like? We can never know. The mind adds practically everything to what we perceive; these additions are divided into twelve categories, which include colour, shape, size, smell and causality. The only way we can understand our impressions is to sort them out into these categories, and arrange them tidily in the order of space and time. The categories are like a pair of coloured spectacles that we can never remove; we can never hope to see the Ding an sich, things as they really are. Reality remains unknowable.
It has been pointed out that Kant failed to follow his arguments to their extremes, like Descartes and Berkeley. For why should we bother to postulate a 'reality' out there, if the mind can do so much? Worse still, if my mind can create the whole world, how do I know that it is not also creating other people, and that I am not the only person in the universe? But Kant slips past these objections, and proceeds quickly to less bewildering matters. If the mind creates the world (and we can now see why Kant asserted that 1 + 1 = 2 is not a 'necessary' truth), then we can no longer dismiss our moral and religious feelings as delusions simply because they are in the mind. In one sweep, Kant had managed to reinstate religion.
The meaning of Kant's achievement can be seen if we view it in historical perspective—and also its inevitability. Galileo had started the process when he talked about primary and secondary qualities. Shape and size and mass are primary qualities which really belong to nature; secondary qualities, such as colour, texture, smell, may be added by the mind. Berkeley went on to argue that even the primary qualities are added by the mind, because a square seen from an odd angle may appear to be a parallelogram. But still, space and time remained stubbornly 'out there'. Kant simply took space and time into the mind. The 'out there' vanished altogether, and everything was simple again—except that Kant's conclusions seemed a dead end. For where could philosophy go from there?
It seems astounding that no eminent thinker simply challenged the premises of Descartes' philosophy—total doubt—or felt intuitively that reason, applied in this sweeping way to the living world, was only producing destruction. In fact, one friend of Kant's did feel this, but he was unfortunately not an eminent thinker or a man of influence. This was J. G. Hamann, a passionately convinced Christian, who believed that Kant was leading philosophy into a cul-de-sac. Hamann asserted that the world is far too complex to submit to such clumsy reason, and that to try to apply scientific reason to the human situation is like using a fishing net as a tea strainer. Kant thought Hamann a crank and a dogmatist, and made no attempts to understand his objections. Kant can hardly be blamed; although Hamann published several books about his ideas, he was no thinker; his reaction was instinctive, and badly expressed.
The importance of Hamann, in the present context, is the influence he exerted on a young Danish thinker of the nineteenth century, Søren Kierkegaard, who is generally regarded as the founder of existentialism. This distinction should perhaps go to Hamann.
But there is yet another thinker whose work is, in many respects, an anticipation of existentialism—a man who usually receives only brief notice in the histories of philosophy. And yet, it might be contended, he produced some of the most exciting ideas of the nineteenth-century. This is Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Kant's disciple and thirty-eight years his junior. Fichte accepted completely Kant's view that the mind creates all the laws we know—the laws of nature, the laws of reason and logic. It is, of course, almost impossible for philosophy to go further in this direction. But Kant had proceeded from his examination of pure reason to the study of practical affairs, and concluded that man possesses free will which is more important than any moral laws. Only common sense and social necessity bid us to do unto others as we would have them do to us. (This is the famous 'categorical imperative'.) It was this aspect of Kant that struck Fichte as a way out of absolute doubt and despair. In one of his best books, The Vocation of Man (1800), Fichte states the whole problem with a splendid clarity worthy of Nietzsche, It is in three books. The first shows Fichte looking at the universe as a philosopher, and being overwhelmed by the problem of 'values in a universe of chance' (to use Pierce's phrase). Man thinks he is free, but as soon as he examines the problem, he finds that his freedom is an illusion. He can do nothing without a 'reason' from outside; he is a mere penny in the slot machine, and it is nature that puts in the pennies. In the second book, a spirit appears to him (probably inspired by Goethe's Faust, of which the first fragment had been published a few years before) and expounds to him Kant's philosophy—that nature itself is a figment of his brain; the mind creates everything, including the 'laws of nature'. This plunges the philosopher into even deeper despair. What is to prevent him from falling into total solipsism—believing that he is the only person in the universe?[1] 'You yourself have the answer to that' says the spirit, and disappears. And in the third book, Fi
chte addresses himself, and recognizes that, indeed, he does hold the answer. The answer—which is of considerable importance for existentialism—is that philosophers make the mistake of supposing that their only task is to know the universe; but just as important as knowing is doing. 'Not for idle contemplation of yourself are you here, not for brooding over devout sensations—no, for action you are here; action, and action alone, determines your worth.'
At first, this might sound a somewhat disappointing conclusion. It is important to grasp the spirit behind it. Descartes sat in his armchair and wondered what he could know. Philosophy accepted his way of propounding the question, and stayed in its armchair, until Hume managed to doubt the whole world out of existence. Then came Kant, and reversed the procedure. The mind, he said, creates the universe and its laws. True, there is an unknowable reality 'out there'—the noumena, but it is unknowable precisely because it does not need to obey our laws, and so cannot enter our perceptions, or even our reason. Now Fichte plunged into the next stage. Why bother about the noumena? he asked; let us forget about it. What is left is Man in a universe of his own creating. Here a minor problem arises. Can I 'create' the universe, and yet not be aware that I am doing so? Well, Kant said so, and his arguments sound convincing. So there must be two 'me's'. One of them is Descartes' 'I think', which sits in its armchair. And plainly, there is a subconscious 'me' that does the work of creating—behind the back, as it were, of the other 'me'.
The full implication of Fichte's argument can now be seen. In Book One, the philosopher despaired because it seemed that he had no free will, only consciousness. In Book Two, the spirit showed him that what he thought was 'implacable nature' was actually his subconscious 'I' busily creating the world and its laws. This is a situation rather like the one in Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday where the detective who is spying on the anarchists finally discovers that all the anarchists are detectives who think they are spying on anarchists. The enemies are friends after all. A certain problem remains, as Chesterton saw. Who created the confusion? Who is responsible for the practical joke? Fichte is not concerned about this; he is too delighted by the realization that the enemy has turned out to be a friend. Man can stop worrying. We are cautious animals who basically distrust the world, and the philosopher is perhaps the most cautious of all. That is why Descartes decided to sit in an armchair and think. Now we have thought ourselves beyond mistrust we can act in the certainty that it will turn out all right.