Culture

A Short History of European Philosophy and What It Means for Us

Philosophy has always been important in Europe, especially on the continent. Until recently, philosophy was one of the pillars of continental European education. Greek-Latin in the Lycee was the education of choice for future elites and technocrats  since Roman times. Much of what comes down to us in these languages comes from the written or spoken words of philosophers. The educated in Europe, whatever their language, had numerous points of reference with their peers around the continent.

Around 1975, things started to change. Math and Science began to replace Greek-Latin as the main focus of the Lycee. Philosophical communication lost its common idiom. Intellectual discourse on subjects other than science became more fragmented. Nevertheless, a nod to philosophy was still made in the baccalaureate programs of many countries.

Many of the major themes of philosophy in the continental tradition came directly from Plato and Aristotle. These themes in metaphysics, ontology and epistemology focused on creating a clear definition of our world through knowledge. Such knowledge was guaranteed by the existence of a deity who assured the rationality of the world, our perception of it and our place in existence. This tradition was vastly dominant, to the detriment of any other until the time of Kant.

Change Comes With Kant

With the thought of Kant (1724 -1804) the reliability of our sensual perception of the universe began to be challenged.  In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant found it necessary to postulate ideas as common as space and time, as a priori. These were not given to our senses to discover or experience, but innately given to us. Kant’s historic departure meant that reason, aided by God, was no longer sufficient to know the world.  Even though an older Kant tried to bring things back to God’s purview, the genii was out of the box.

English philosophy, which had up until this point marched in lock step with continental traditions, began to diverge. The English tried to keep intact the paradigm of a rational knowable universe and began relying more and more on the scientific tradition, excluding speculative and theoretical philosophy. Philosophers in the Anglo Saxon tradition, like the Irishman George Berkeley, were the exception. In Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge he denied pre-Kant any existence beyond perception. Aside from these exceptions, English philosophy remained firm in the traditional beliefs and progressively lost all interest in philosophy, replacing it with logic and analytics, as the much celebrated Bertrand Russell.

Immanuel Kant's Philosophy
Immanuel Kant

Post-Kant philosophy saw important traditions emerge on the continent. They set our ideas of the universe topsy-turvy and turned back western thought towards the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers, away from Plato and Aristotle.  These ideas developed slowly over the 19th century but blossomed fully between the two World Wars and thereafter.

The 19th Century itself was a rich philosophical period. Hegel and the young Hegelians spawned movements providing justification for the revolutions spanning all across the century and later leading to the development of Marxism.  Both Hegel and Marx’s philosophies were constructed on schemas of knowledge drawing from the Aristotelian. Unlike their model of inspiration, though, they replaced static ideas with those of the dialectic. It’s only several years later that reformed Hegelian Schelling, along with Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard, began to prepare the way for the post-Kantian revolution in thought.

The News of the 20th Century

Phenomenology was one of the first major post-Kantian breaks with the traditional paradigms of knowledge. Husserl (1859-1938) broke with mathematics, his first discipline, to attempt to re-envisage the rapport between man and nature. He emphasized the uniqueness of the observed phenomenon as the first step in attaining knowledge. In France Merleau Ponty (1908 – 1961) embraced Phenomenology in turn.

Between the two wars and during World War II the intellectual upheaval in Europe was on par with that of the wars. Heidegger’s Being and Time (Zein und Zeit) turned his attention away from metaphysics and transcendence to focus on the immediate and phenomenal.  Phenomenology inspired Heidegger and in turn took inspiration from him, placing emphasis on the observation and uniqueness of the individual phenomenon.

Heidegger replaced the traditional philosophical notion of being (Zein) with being there (DaZein), “being as we find it where it is being”.  He did not pretend that any universal truth existed, rejecting them as did the pre-Socratics. In the famous teaching of the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus: you can’t step into the same river twice”. The nature of all things in the universe is eternally changing. Nothing is constant, a view diametrically different to Plato and Aristotle.

The relativization of thought and existence was to be given a boost by the scientific discoveries and theories of the period.  Heisenberg revolutionary theories in quantum mechanics, circa 1927, stated the impossibility of determining  place and mass simultaneously, as they were in constant flux on the particle level.  More science followed, with string theory and parallel universes found necessary to render Newton’s theory of gravitation consistent.  But although these scientific confirmations were welcomed, they did not seem to be the point of the new/old speculative philosophy.

An Impact on Language

Language itself was to suffer from the assault on traditional ways of knowing. Wittgenstein worked with English Positivists and logicians in London and Cambridge. Despite this, he made a one hundred eighty degree turn from his early writings in Tractus Philosophicus. In his youth, he tried to establish the logical structure of language and thought. He came to believe, in the posthumously published Philosophical Investigations, in spite of Russell and the positivists at Cambridge, that language was a “game”. As such, it had multiple meanings and approximations dominating any clear notion of what we can even try to say.

As Wittgenstein’s very radical observations were becoming more popular,  semiology, deconstruction and other schools of French criticism began to break down traditional schemas for seeing the world.  Notable leading figures include Barthes, Derrida, Deleuze and Foucault, among many others. These schools of criticism sought to deconstruct many of the traditional paradigms into their constituents or phenomenological parts.

Wittgenstein's philosophy
A diagram from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus logicus philosophicus, which goes to show the complexity of modern research into language

Post-War Philosophy

After the wars, in addition to the fertile schools of French criticism, ‘existentialism’ further unabated these tendencies.  Sartre set the tone in Being and Nothingness (1943). He placed experience and human agency at the center of existence and fate. In the meantime, Simone de Beauvoir furthered the advance of feminism in the journals Les Temps Modernes and through personal activism.

Older rationalist traditions spawned from Hegel, like Marxism or Structuralism, found it necessary to adapt. Within the Marxist canon philosophers like Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks (Quaderni del carcere) relativized traditional, rigidly deterministic, materialistic ideas.

Schools of sociology sought to demonstrate how ideas of domination moved through and disseminated within social and class structures. The Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory sought to explain the interplay of ideology and class in its dominant but indeterminate nature. Amongst the representatives of this school, which departed from traditional Marxism, we can remember Adorno, Habermas, Horkheimer, and Marcuse.

Baudrillard, Bourdieu, and Lyotard in France, already liberated from traditional Marxism, developed further theories of social interaction. These new sociologists replaced observed and predetermined events with events codetermined with human agency, in unending feedback loops.

Frankfurt school's philosophy
Horkheimer and Adorno in Heidelberg, April 1964

Meanwhile, in the Anglosphere

The Anglo-Saxon world was not completely immune to all that was going on in thought.  Karl Popper, though of Vienese origins, lectured and taught in England for most of his career, having fled there before the war. Popper is best known in popular thought for his Open Society and Its Enemies and the anti-Hegelianism that he developed when he rejected his youth’s Marxism.

Regarding philosophy of science, he tried to introduce the uncertainity that had developed since Kant into Anglo-Saxon thought – if only partially. He replaced Kant’s a priori ideas, time and space, with their equivalent as working scientific hypothesis. The belief in a firmly grounded reality, if not entirely proveable, lurked under Popper’s notion of science.

It did so too in sociology, although Popper refused to accept what many felt were the implications of his thought: the impossibility of sociology as an unproveable endeavour. He preferred to embrace the limited cases where experimentation was possible. Foucault’s idea of the projection of interpretation onto social and historical reality fell short for him. Most Anglo-Saxon thinkers followed his thought, also detaching from experimental reality.

By the time Fukuyama published The End of History in the US in 1992, his Hegelian interpretation of the ‘age of democracy’ as the final stage of history, had become totally absurd.  He was the last one to find out, as earlier political philosophers like Benedetto Croce in History, Its Theory and Practice (Selected Essays) had long ago debunked any rational interpretation of history and in particular that of Hegel.  Though democracy appeared triumphant at the time, history had already proven that it was not to be kept in the ‘reason’s’  box.

Karl Popper
Karl Popper

Where do We Go From Here?

A purely rational or materialistic understanding of the universe now seems dead. With Nietzsche announcing the ‘death of God’ as early as the end of the 19th century in The Gay Science and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the icing on the cake of doubt was spread.

It is hard to believe in the spiritual in the age of science, when almost all would prefer the choice of medical treatment to prayer. But in doing away with spiritual forces, the light only shone more brightly on the deficiencies of reason. At least in European philosophy, reason has not stood the test.

The new theories and interpretations of human perception, though less reassuring to many, do open the door to enormous possibilities.  There is no Church or Science to guide us. We have become free to observe the splendid variety of phenomena that appear in front of us daily. One has also become free to impose interpretation, subject only to real world constraint and the reversals of fortune.

Philosophy has unchained imagination, available now to construct new ways of doing and experiencing things. This has already occurred with the definition and practice of human sexuality.  The interplay between the ‘real’ and the ‘as of yet unsubstantiated possibilities’ as was the case with additional sexual identities, like XXY, beyond the previously limited ‘XY’, ‘XX’, is a complex field.  Since we can not ‘know’ reliably according to the new philosophies, additional possibilities remain open. But since reality imposes ever changing constraints, we are not totally free to impose our will or vision. We are in a relationship with our universe that is mutually deterministic in a unique new way.

We find ourselves in an exciting period of exploration. On the continent of Europe, the Church, religion, science and tradition are all behind us; the human and the unexplored remain.

 

About the Author: Stephen Sposato speaks a number of European languages (English, French, Dutch and some German). He has read and inquired about philosophy since his adolescence.  He has managed to read and enjoy most of the philosophical classics over a lifetime, while practicing a career in economic development.

 

If you liked this article you may also like: The Roman Concept of “Humanitas” or The idea of Cosmopolitanism in European philosophical tradition.

Tags

Guest Author

This article was written by a guest. The content does not necessarily reflect the official opinion of My Country? Europe. Responsibility for the information and views expressed therein lies entirely with the author.

Related Articles

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Back to top button
Close
Close