The Nose Dive of Philosophy

[Simon Adams]

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?

[SanteriSatama]

Not a bad summary. Brought to mind also this classic take on history of philosophy:

[Shaibei]

It's all thanks to Kant. Even Schopenhauer, as far as I know, argued that there might be something else, a thing in itself, beyond the will. (Just recalled the infinite in my new profile image)

[Simon Adams]

Not a bad summary. Brought to mind also this classic take on history of philosophy:

Lol ... I presume sarcasm?

I do appreciate that it’s an almost ridiculous oversimplification. I’m also sure there are useful lessons in each of the branches/frameworks/movements/ontologies etc. But when you get to the point where different groups are writing things that are so specialised as to be almost illegible to anyone outside that area, and the broader areas often fundamentally conflicting with each other, isn’t high level simplification where the discussion needs to be? Even within these specialised areas there are problems, as Alan Sokal in the 1990s and Peter Boghossian in the last couple of years have shown. If complete nonsense can so clearly get through peer review, surely something has gone wrong?

[Simon Adams]

It's all thanks to Kant. Even Schopenhauer, as far as I know, argued that there might be something else, a thing in itself, beyond the will. (Just recalled the infinite in my new profile image)

I think the thing-in-itself was Kant’s invention, his description of the noumenal we can’t know versus the phenomenal we can. A Buddhist would probably turn that on it’s head, which seems to be more the direction Schopenhauer took. Kant and the other ‘german idealists’ are often very different to each other and I know I shouldn’t lump them all together, but from the broad brush summary approach they do also seem to have a lot in common..

[AshvinP]

You may have left out 19th-20th century existentialism and phenomenology, which overlaps with German idealism but I think deserves it own mention. Heidegger, for ex., focused on logic and language as well, but mostly on the essence of language and how words speak to us of deep metaphysical meaning. I would also mention American pragmatism, which is a rather unique strand of philosophy and adopted a 'Darwinian' approach to Truth. Then you have the various depth psychologists, like Jung, and uncategorized philosophers, such as Rudolf Steiner and Owen Barfield (they could be placed in just about any of the other categories mentioned before). Although someone like Jung would claim he is a scientist and empirical researcher first and foremost, the explicit and implicit philosophical implications of his work are sweeping.

[Simon Adams]

Yes fair point, and there are definitely philosophers like these that are more of a development of what went before, and that definitely includes the likes of Heidegger, Jung, Barfield, Steiner etc.

I guess I’m curious whether this is a valid way of seeing the way the mainstream of philosophy has moved. All of the individual’s are completely unique and so trying to smooth it out into a single story is always going to be a slightly absurd venture. Someone like Nietzsche is always going to be a bump that sticks out on any line like that

I originally thought it was the Foucault, Derrida, Sartre etc who had fundamentally changed what philosophy was trying to do, and of course they were at least partially influenced by Marx who I missed out completely, and is definitely a big part of the story of philosophy changing it’s own telos. But I’m curious whether Russell is this big turning point as he seems to me. I guess in some ways his approach is like a reinvention of skepticism, but he seems to have caused a big change in direction from my simplistic outside view?

(PS. I’m prepared to accept that it’s just too interrelated to build a simple narrative like this... but I do think it’s worth understanding why idealism and related ontologies have been pushed to the fringes)

[dkpstarkey]

I'm not sure the term 'mainstream' works in describing 20th-century philosophy of mind. There are several competing streams and there have been for a long time. I don't see Russell as a turning point in philosophy; that would describe Whitehead more fittingly. Whitehead is hard to grasp but he has more followers now than he did 50 years ago, I think. I was put off by his writing at an early age but got over that.

[AshvinP]

Yes fair point, and there are definitely philosophers like these that are more of a development of what went before, and that definitely includes the likes of Heidegger, Jung, Barfield, Steiner etc.

I guess I’m curious whether this is a valid way of seeing the way the mainstream of philosophy has moved. All of the individual’s are completely unique and so trying to smooth it out into a single story is always going to be a slightly absurd venture. Someone like Nietzsche is always going to be a bump that sticks out on any line like that

I originally thought it was the Foucault, Derrida, Sartre etc who has fundamentally changed what philosophy is trying to do, and of course they were at least partially influenced by Marx who I missed out completely, and is definitely a big part of the story of philosophy changing it’s own telos. But I’m curious whether Russell is this big turning point as he seems to me. I guess in some ways his approach is like a reinvention of skepticism, but he seems to have caused a big change in direction from my simplistic outside view?

I have faith that the Nietzsche, Heidegger, Jung, Steiner, Gebser, Barfields of the world are going to prove the most influential and pivotal in the long run. I think we see signs of that already happening with renewed interest in all of them, but certainly Marx, Foucault, Derrida etc. also have renewed interest and not in a good way.

[Simon Adams]

I'm not sure the term 'mainstream' works in describing 20th-century philosophy of mind. There are several competing streams and there have been for a long time. I don't see Russell as a turning point in philosophy; that would describe Whitehead more fittingly. Whitehead is hard to grasp but he has more followers now than he did 50 years ago, I think. I was put off by his writing at an early age but got over that.

I’m surprised as Whitehead seems to me to have roots in idealism - although it’s not idealism it’s certainly anti-materialism, and anti-cartesian. Whereas Russell seems to me to be a materialist, with the positivists that followed being extreme materialists. I guess you could say that Russell is a development of Hume, and so both are continuing different strands and taking them in different directions, but it seems to me that modern philosophy has been more influenced by Russell than Whitehead?