The Nose Dive of Philosophy
Posted: Sun Mar 07, 2021 10:37 am
I’m trying to pull together some of the strands of western philosophy that seem to have tied themselves in knots. As I’m coming from a VERY superficial understanding of these, I’ll try to keep it at a surface level and see if anyone thinks the underlying details really do change the story.
I want to focus on the influence of analytic philosophy, so I’ll skip through the history before that very quickly, and ignore some fundamental strands like stoicism. So in this story you have Plato and Aristotle. The focus tends to be on the differences between them, but it’s clear Aristotle is heavily influenced by Plato, and maybe the overlap gets a bit lost at times. Classical, Muslim, Jewish and then Scholastic philosophers corrected, clarified and expanded (and sometimes confused), but essentially around the framework of Plato and Aristotle.
Jump to Descartes, and he tries to separate mind and matter in a way that would not have made any sense to pretty much all the philosophers from before then. Jump to the german idealists, and they called out the mistake of Descartes and his successors (they also try to reduce god to a substance or process in a way that would not have made sense to those before Descartes, but I won’t go into that here). Idealism is then picked up by the British idealists such as F.H.Bradley, who are well respected in their time. This included the idea that you needed to understand something of the whole, and a rejection of the fundamental distinction between thought and object.
These strands all then seem to be turned upside down by Bertrand Russell, who rejected idealism and created analytic philosophy, where you focus on atomising reality much like Descartes original mistake, and focus on ‘accurate use of language’ to describe the separate parts. In some ways this seems to be a rejection of philosophy itself, certainly it’s tradition of trying to understand the whole, those foundational elements which go ‘beyond physics’. Instead of trying to understand reality and the ideas describing reality, the focus is on logic, and on language and words which can only ever be pointers to the reality. The abstraction became the thing, more than it ever did even with Descartes.
My intuition that this move was against the fundamental aim of philosophy as seen by the great philosophers that came before, seems to be supported by the fact that analytic philosophy then developed into logical positivism. To the logical positivists, philosophy no longer had a subject matter, it was simply a technique for clarifying thoughts. The whole great adventure of man seeing how far he could understand his existence through reason was reduced to tidying up the rules of logic.
Logical positivism has largely been rejected now, but mainstream philosophy still seems to be stuck in the mind of Bertrand Russell and his analytic philosophy. The German idealists - despite most of them believing in god at some level - reduced god from the foundation to the content (although Schelling seems to have later gone against this). Then Russel replaced the contents with the description of the contents. Is it any surprise that the next development was postmodernism and it’s extreme relativism, as there is no longer a foundation, nor any reality other than description?
I want to focus on the influence of analytic philosophy, so I’ll skip through the history before that very quickly, and ignore some fundamental strands like stoicism. So in this story you have Plato and Aristotle. The focus tends to be on the differences between them, but it’s clear Aristotle is heavily influenced by Plato, and maybe the overlap gets a bit lost at times. Classical, Muslim, Jewish and then Scholastic philosophers corrected, clarified and expanded (and sometimes confused), but essentially around the framework of Plato and Aristotle.
Jump to Descartes, and he tries to separate mind and matter in a way that would not have made any sense to pretty much all the philosophers from before then. Jump to the german idealists, and they called out the mistake of Descartes and his successors (they also try to reduce god to a substance or process in a way that would not have made sense to those before Descartes, but I won’t go into that here). Idealism is then picked up by the British idealists such as F.H.Bradley, who are well respected in their time. This included the idea that you needed to understand something of the whole, and a rejection of the fundamental distinction between thought and object.
These strands all then seem to be turned upside down by Bertrand Russell, who rejected idealism and created analytic philosophy, where you focus on atomising reality much like Descartes original mistake, and focus on ‘accurate use of language’ to describe the separate parts. In some ways this seems to be a rejection of philosophy itself, certainly it’s tradition of trying to understand the whole, those foundational elements which go ‘beyond physics’. Instead of trying to understand reality and the ideas describing reality, the focus is on logic, and on language and words which can only ever be pointers to the reality. The abstraction became the thing, more than it ever did even with Descartes.
My intuition that this move was against the fundamental aim of philosophy as seen by the great philosophers that came before, seems to be supported by the fact that analytic philosophy then developed into logical positivism. To the logical positivists, philosophy no longer had a subject matter, it was simply a technique for clarifying thoughts. The whole great adventure of man seeing how far he could understand his existence through reason was reduced to tidying up the rules of logic.
Logical positivism has largely been rejected now, but mainstream philosophy still seems to be stuck in the mind of Bertrand Russell and his analytic philosophy. The German idealists - despite most of them believing in god at some level - reduced god from the foundation to the content (although Schelling seems to have later gone against this). Then Russel replaced the contents with the description of the contents. Is it any surprise that the next development was postmodernism and it’s extreme relativism, as there is no longer a foundation, nor any reality other than description?