Kant and Freedom

In Kant's  philosophy, Freedom is defined as a concept which is involved in the moral domain, at the question: what should I do?

In summary, Kant says that the moral law is only that I know myself as a free person. Kantian freedom is closely linked to the notion of autonomy, which means law itself: thus, freedom falls obedience to a law that I created myself. It is therefore respect its commitment to compliance with oneself.

Practical Reason and Freedom

Practical reason legislates (makes laws and requirements) of free beings, or more precisely the causality of free beings. Thus, practical reason is based on freedom, it is freedom.

Phenomena, in the Kantian thought, are subject to the law of natural causality: each event is the effect of another, and so on to infinity. Unlike the phenomenon of man, in the moral rule is free, ie, it has the power to self-start condition.

Kant ethics is mainly based on the concept of free will and autonomy.

Traditional Freedom

The traditional sense of freedom, is one’s ability to righteously act, speak, and or think the way they wish. Below is the definition that’ll appear after a quick google search.

“The power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint.”

Philosophers all throughout history, argued that this is the state in which man is most willing to live in. Of course, it is that principle that lead to the declaration of new nations, through self determination.

The ideals that lead to the birth of democratic governments, where the people have the opportunity, and obligation, to rule themselves. Above all else, freedom fuels our desire to actively seek the abolishment of tyranny, liberating those enslaved under it’s rule.

Although many, if not all of these freedoms are positive, it wasn’t the case profound philosophers were asserting. This may be surprising to some, but it’s true. Many free thinkers did indeed advocate for democracy, self determination, and liberation.

However, on top of that, many of these thinkers went on to separate freedom into different categories. Some, even opine that the notions of our traditional freedom are completely backwards!

Kant on  Freedom

The average person, assumes that when presented with alternative choices, would have the freedom to choose one over the other, on the basis of individual desire.

This is what Kant called “The Idea of Freedom”. It is also more commonly known today as libertarian freedom. Kant however, saw freedom differently, and perhaps in a more sophisticated manner.

Libertarians would state that one is free when they can choose what they want. Kant in contrast to that, believes that choosing what you want isn’t freedom. He insisted that acting on the basis of desire is being governed, not by one’s reason, but by their primitive, animalistic instincts.

Kant’s perception of freedom, is the ability to govern one’s actions on the basis of reason, and not desire. This can all be reduced to the concept of Autonomy.

The word Autonomy, derives from Greek, literally translating to self legislator. So the idea, is not to live by one’s animalistic nature imposed on them from birth, but rather to live by the laws you impose on yourself.

So in Kant’s view, libertarian freedom isn’t real, but in reality, is just enslavement of oneself to their desire.

Postmodernism

 That postmodernism is indefinable is a truism. However, it can be described as a set of critical, strategic and rhetorical practices employing concepts such as difference, repetition, the trace, the simulacrum, and hyperreality to destabilize other concepts such as presence, identity, historical progress, epistemic certainty, and the univocity of meaning.

The French philosophers , for example, work with concepts developed during the structuralist revolution in Paris in the 1950s and early 1960s, including structuralist readings of Marx and Freud. For this reason they are often called “poststructuralists.” They also cite the events of May 1968 as a watershed moment for modern thought and its institutions, especially the universities. The Italians, by contrast, draw upon a tradition of aesthetics and rhetoric including figures such as Giambattista Vico and Benedetto Croce. Their emphasis is strongly historical, and they exhibit no fascination with a revolutionary moment. Instead, they emphasize continuity, narrative, and difference within continuity, rather than counter-strategies and discursive gaps. Neither side, however, suggests that postmodernism is an attack upon modernity or a complete departure from it. Rather, its differences lie within modernity itself, and postmodernism is a continuation of modern thinking in another mode.

Habermas argues that postmodernism contradicts itself through self-reference, and notes that postmodernists presuppose concepts they otherwise seek to undermine, e.g., freedom, subjectivity, or creativity. He sees in this a rhetorical application of strategies employed by the artistic avant-garde of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, an avant-garde that is possible only because modernity separates artistic values from science and politics in the first place. On his view, postmodernism is an illicit aestheticization of knowledge and public discourse. Against this, Habermas seeks to rehabilitate modern reason as a system of procedural rules for achieving consensus and agreement among communicating subjects. Insofar as postmodernism introduces aesthetic playfulness and subversion into science and politics, he resists it in the name of a modernity moving toward completion rather than self-transformation

Moral Philosophy & Ethics

The importance of moral philosophy in philosophy

Moral Philosophy is one of the major schools of philosophy. Moral philosophy relates to practical philosophy, while metaphysics refers to theoretical philosophy. Morality thus speaks of action (and answers questions such as “May war be fair? Is the death penalty moral?), Some focusing on intentions that preside over actions, others on the consequences of our actions.

Moral philosophy ultimately attempts to answer the following question: What should I do?

Moral Philosophy or Ethics?

We must distinguish moral philosophy from ethics. If the first refers to intersubjectivity (the relation to others), the second refers to personal actions, to the relation of the subject to himself. We often use one for the other in a wrong way.

In some thinkers, ethics is a philosophy derived from ontology (Plato, Sartre), in others derived from politics (Aristotle). Some even reverse the theoretical/practical relationship: moral philosophy is the first philosophy (Levinas), it is from it that the other branches of philosophy must flow.

The origin of morality

There are two ways to look at the source of morality:

the heteronomous theory of morality: the man receives morality from elsewhere that of himself (God, moral law, society). This is the position of St. Thomas, Kant (Critique of Practical Reason), Schopenhauer, Bergson or Durkheim.

the autonomous theory of morality: man creates, invents himself the principles of his action (Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus)

Schools of moral philosophy

Here is a brief overview of the main branches of moral philosophy, from ancient times to the present day.

Formalism or Deontology: Kant’s practical philosophy is related to this current. Formalism asserts that the morality of an act depends on the form of the act, and not on its content.

Individualism: Individualism, in morality, posits the primacy of the individual over the social totality: values emanate from the individual. Nietzsche or Dumont are representatives of moral individualism.

Eudemonism: According to eudemonism, the goal of action is the search for happiness.

Pessimism: Pessimism, in morality, consists in thinking evil prevails over good, so man is condemned to act badly.

Utilitarianism: Utility must be the criterion of action. According to the utilitarians, the principle of utility supposes a calculated search for pleasures (arithmetic of pleasures). In both quantitative and qualitative terms.

Hedonism: Happiness is immediate pleasure. Happiness is enjoyment.

Stoicism: It is the concept of destiny (fatum) that governs the morality of the Stoics. The actions of man must be guided by the acceptance of destiny. The man only mastering his view of things, not the things themselves.

Epicureanism Epicurean morality consists in satisfying only the natural and necessary pleasures.

Consequentialism: Only the consequences of an act make it possible to qualify it in terms of moral or immoral.

Cynicism: Cynicism consists of despising morals, conventions or even traditions.

Ethical Relativism: The relativists consider that no morality can claim to the universal, that the cultures have a proper morality, equivalent to each other.

Altruism: Altruism affirms that only moral acts guided by disinterestedness and the love of others.

Nihilism: Nihilism defends a conception according to which there is no absolute, transcendent morality.

Existentialism: Man invents his way and his morality freely. The bastard, on the contrary, guided by the spirit of seriousness, hides behind a legacy morality.

Hume, Impressions vs Ideas

David Hume’s philosophy is entirely based on this principle that experience causes our ideas : hence Hume is a empiricist. Hume differentiates between impressions or the immediate result of the experience and ideas, or the result of impressions.

Impressions or Ideas ?

Impression is the result of direct experience both internally and externally, is engraved in the soul with great vivacity. By idea, it means the image of these impressions weakened (the faint image of These), used in the Judgement and Reasoning. While the impression is received from outside, the idea is a simple copy, a reproduction of the spontaneous impression. The object is printed twice in the subject: one way in the bright but fleeting sense organs, and in a way lower but more stable in the mind.

Hume follows from these definitions that ideation in the role of the mind is purely passive, and in this sense that Hume can be considered the founder of empiricism, of  more than Roger Bacon, or Locke , who had kept in mind one’s own activity. The result is that the system still banned all metaphysical ideas about the substance, cause and God, or, at least, these ideas become mere nominal form, without objective value. The experience is moving in a narrow field: a specific and concrete in nature, it can not go beyond the individual and the concrete, if the mind is devoid of any clean energy, he will never open the horizons of generality and transcendence.

Hume : Simple Ideas vs Complex Ideas

Simple ideas, and heard, combine in an automatic process, called the association. The association is a kind of attraction that unites and makes mental representations by virtue of their natural affinity. This affinity is manifested in three forms, which are the laws of association: resemblance, contiguity in time and space, and causality in Hume attaches special meaning to the word. Again, the principle of union among ideas is not the energy of the mind, this principle is simple qualities which nature has marked some thoughts as a special sign, and predestined them to spend in a complex. Hume’s philosophy is not an agent of his forces, from inside to outside, it proceeds from outside to inside: it is the perceptions and combinations that make up the minds and perceptions have their own history in qualities of external objects. It would be easy to show that Hume’s arguments have no demonstrative value, but this is not the subject of this work, we merely recall briefly the basic principles of his philosophy, and we try to show the great influence they have exerted on contemporary English school.

Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America

 Democracy in America: A philosophical adventure

Alexis de Tocqueville is one of the heads of liberalism. During his trip to the United States, Tocqueville was able to describe the awakening democracy. His approach is totally original compared to a normative philosophy that prevailed in Classics (Montesquieu, Rousseau and the Greeks), Tocqueville rather use a descriptive and clinical approach.

The issue at the heart of the book Democracy in America is this: How can we protect the people from himself? In the first part of Democracy in America, Tocqueville considers the public more as a means of coercion of people by the people than as a guarantor of rationality and freedom. In the second part, the questioning moves to protect people from the despotic democratic state.

Democracy and the power source

American democracy, Tocqueville said, is based on the absoluteness of popular sovereignty. This is the source of legislative power, exercised through elected representatives and renewed frequently. Two key ideas are at the heart of democracy: equality and freedom. In a democracy, the pursuit of equality prevails over that of freedom. This dialectic of democratic principles creates the possibility of self-destruction of the entire democratic system.

The excesses of democracy

It is this potential risk inherent in any democracy, which explains the ambivalence of judgments, both enthusiasts and critics, de Tocqueville. It diagnoses the ills of democracy and attempts to discern, even within the existing system, the remedies that can stop them. The healing of these evils do not occur from the outside, but the trends already present in democracy. Tocqueville observed that the three main threats to the American system are: the tyranny of the majority, individualism and despotism state.

Tocqueville and The tyranny of the majority

Paradoxically, the tyranny of the majority comes from public space. Public opinion, the result of free discussion between citizens within the public space, is in fact the majority opinion. However, this majority, which could be described as rational and legitimate, has a coercive force on minority views and lead them to comply with the prevailing opinion. Thus was born of freedom, public opinion denies thereafter. This tyranny of the majority comes from the absolute sovereignty of the people, which gives him, he believes, “the right to do anything,” the belief in its omnipotence. Therefore, to ensure that minorities are not brought to heel, forced conformism and self-righteousness, we must erect a barrier to this omnipotence. This remedy against the first evil watching democracy is the political association. Tocqueville distinguishes the civil association, whose purpose is different. This second type relates to private affairs of individuals, including religious, commercial or legal, not a political cause. The political association, it has always relative to a public cause. It can be defined as the gathering of individuals around common public interest. In this framework can only express opinions repressed by the majority, the political association gives the scope to be the voice of him who is alone. It is the guarantee unlimited freedom of thought and expression, respect for the rights of citizenship for dissent: they prevent the stigmatization and rejection of views considered deviant and those who defend them. Contrary to despotism, tyranny, democracy is not physical in nature, but immaterial: it is the deviant “a foreigner”. 

Associations have therefore dedicated to “normalize” free thinkers. In addition, the need for its existence is that it can be oppressive, since it is still a minority, according to Tocqueville. 

In fact, an association that would become the majority ceases to be one. Besides being a principle of social and political change, they are also a principle of stability. Since they introduce, of course, factions within the society, but by allowing all opinions to find a place for expression, they prevent the organization of plots or conspiracies. In this, Tocqueville is in line with Kant, because it defends the principle of publicity. Another reason “Kantian” in this observer of American democracy: political associations promote the critical use of reason. Public opinion is the product of reflection, but “once [the majority] is irrevocably pronounced, everyone is silent,” while discussions continue within these institutions, making permanent political activity. They therefore express a struggle against the Democratic gregariousness and silence of reason.

However, political associations pose a danger, that of anarchy. Their proliferation may in fact cause an infinite partition of popular sovereignty, so that it would be impossible to legislate on the basis of a majority. But this danger is thwarted by their benefits. Political associations are therefore, in this respect, a force of resistance to oppression of the majority, not only against state power. Nevertheless, Tocqueville does not make them the major legislative body of democracy: if they “have the power to attack [the existing law] and to make advance what must exist,” they do not the power to legislate.

Democracy and individualism

This awakening of the spirit, made possible by political associations, is also a revival of “public spirit” of reason. The second evil which threatens democracy is indeed individualism. He calls this tendency of individuals born from the destruction of the hierarchy of links that united in the monarchical system, to lose interest in the great society and retreat to the limited company. This evil is of democratic origin, since equality “breaks the chain and severs every link of it.” So reclusive in their private sphere, citizens directly endanger democracy, one of whose principles is participation in power. Therefore, the associations, but not all types, sanctions, here too, the role of remedy a negative trend for democracy. Indeed, the proliferation civil associations is harmful because they divert public governance. Political associations, on the contrary, “pulling people out of themselves, struggling against the fragmentation of the group and allow them to participate in public life. Paradoxically, therefore democracy is through political associations, which can save individualism, while it was she who gave birth.

Political Philosophy - Summary

A definition of political philosophy:

Political philosophy is the study of social organization and human nature.

Political philosophers are considering the following questions:

What is the ideal form of government? Is it aristocracy, monarchy, theocracy, democracy, a mixture of different systems, or the government of all ?

What is the best economic system? The capitalist system, socialist, or a mixture of both?

How did they men before the advent of the state? Does the state of nature can be considered as a pre-political paradise?

How to cure society of its ills?

Main Political Philosophers:

In the early days, political philosophy was a branch of philosophy, practiced by philosophers key-on (Plato, Aristotle) ​​before specializing in modern times (Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Rawls, … ):

– Plato: Plato is the first political philosopher. Almost all of his dialogues have a political dimension. These include The Republic and The Laws as political works of Plato.

– Aristotle: Politics is at the heart of Aristotle’s thought. Politics and the Nicomachean Ethics put politics at the heart of society. Aristotle assigns to the politic make citizens happy.

– St. Tomas Aquinas: God made his entry into politics with Thomas Aquinas. He advocates a theocratic regime, a divine right monarchy. Somme against the Gentiles expose most political theories of Thomism.

– Machiavelli: The Prince of Machiavelli is an enormous contribution to political philosophy. Political modernity invented by Machiavelli in that it separates God from politics, and introduces realism.

– Hobbes: The English philosopher invented the concept of sovereignty in Leviathan. He also conceptualized the social contract, agreement among members to abandon part of their will, in exchange for their safety.

– Locke: Other English philosopher, founder of political liberalism. According to John Locke, we compiled quotations major modern states must be based on the law and not arbitrary or force His political work is the Treatise of Civil Government.

– Montesquieu: Montesquieu is the thinker of the moderation of power, based on the separation of powers. His book The Spirit of the Laws invented the tripartite division between the executive, the judiciary and the legislature. “Everywhere, the power to stop the power” can be summarized his political thought.

– Rousseau: contractualist, Rousseau is a descendant of Hobbes. In the Social Contract, he invented the concept of the general will as the touchstone of democracy (direct democracy).

– Kant: His political thinking is focused on the issue of peace and the relationship between states. Wanting to leave states in the war of all against all, the perpetual peace project, political utopia, inspired the tradition of cosmopolitanism.

– Marx: Marx has a philosophy based on denunciation of the modern state as an instrument of domination of the propertied classes of the proletarian classes. His political thinking is to eliminate all forms of inequality (socialism and communism) and is a guide for the revolution of the people against the ruling classes.

– Bakunin : thinker of anarchism.

– Rawls : Rawls is the thinker of social democracy. He sought, in A Theory of Justice, to reconcile liberalism of our societies with the law, to make compatible economic efficiency and social justice

– Habermas: Marxist thinker early career and liberal retirement. His theory of the public sphere is one of the greatest contributions to contemporary political philosophy.

Epicurus Philosophy Summary

Epicurus Philosophy: Happiness, Death and Desire

The philosopher Epicurus (341-270 BC.) has lived in Greece at trouble times, when the Hellenic cities have declined.

He will leave an immense work, but we only retrived the following letters:

– A Letter to Herodotus

– A Letter to Pythocles

– A Letter to Menoeceus

– … And a few maxims

Lucretia, Epicurus disciple, inherits essentially ideas that he revered as equal to God, as he tells us himself in the De Natura Rerum (On the Nature of things). Only the concept of clinamen seems to differentiate the two works (although the issue is very controversial).

Epicurus and Lucretius are great representatives of ancient materialism: according to them, everything is material, including the human soul.

Epicurs and Senses

The starting point of the doctrine of the Epicureans is the canonical set of canons of thought, that is to say, criteria or rules for the truth.

– Are the criteria of true feelings, sensitive performances, direct and exact truth.

– In the eyes of Epicurus, all that is seen, far from being subjective and relative, is the contrary true, real and truthful.

– The feeling born of an encounter and contact with simulacra, a kind of fine particulate matter or effluvia emitted by the body.

Epicurus is sensationalist: it attaches to the sensitive portrayal a crucial role in knowledge formation.

– However, it also involves prolepses, also called preconceptions or expectations of perception.

– When a feeling or sense experience is repeated several times, it leaves an imprint in us, reminiscent of earlier sensations, which allows us to anticipate any new feel and recognize objects.

Epicurus and Physics: an atomistic doctrine

The physical centerpiece of the doctrine of the Epicureans assume a representation of nature.

– Developed based on the teachings of Leucippus and Democritus pre Socratic two thinkers, she adopts as explanatory principles of various aspects of reality, gaming and various combinations of atoms, elements immutable, indivisible and infinite in number forming the body compounds.

– The movements of atoms in the infinity of emptiness, their gravity and shocks give the key to all the phenomena of the universe.

– So, are eliminated various mythological, which now leaves room for a rational doctrine based on reason.

Finally, the Epicurean doctrine involves the notion of clinamen (no one knows who is really the author):

– The clinamen means the spontaneous movement by which the atoms are able to deviate from the line of fall caused by gravity.

– There is a kind of mechanical freedom using physical basis of human freedom.

 By their clinamen or declination, the atoms take the initiative of a movement “breaking the laws of destiny,” as Lucretius wrote precisely.

The soul, too, is a material composed of atoms, a very subtle spread throughout the body.

– It’s a part of the body like the feet or ears.

Finally, the gods, simple aggregates of atoms, are tangible realities and blissful living in interworlds. Thus the atom constitutes Does the center of the Epicurean doctrine.

Epicurus, wisdom and morality:

This opens the materialistic physical paths of peace and serenity, ataraxia, namely the absence of disorder and anxiety.

First, we need not fear the gods, who are blessed and immortal beings. But we must also penetrate the idea that death does not concern us at all.

– That means, in fact, dead? dissolution and the permanent loss of sensitivity, a single episode that does not physically disturb us.

– Being dead is to be dissolved, that is to say, be devoid of feeling.

– But we have no reason to experience the anxiety about a simple physiological fact.

– Death is the death of death, since, once dead, we do not think of.

The only real thing before us is the pleasure, enjoyment stable and painless, with roots in the body and in the flesh.

– “The pleasure we have in mind is characterized by the absence of bodily pain and disorders of the soul.”

– The pleasure is at rest and in equilibrium: the search for natural pleasures wise and necessary, generating a stable enjoyment, natural and peaceful.

Here sits a distinction famous Epicurean ethics. There are three types of desires:

– The natural desires and requirements:

The only people who should be selected, which represent the movement lead us to fulfill in accordance with nature (to be free of physical needs, eating bread, water …)

– The natural desires and unnecessary:

 Correspondent to search for various objects, refined (eg, fine drinks, exquisite food …)

– The desires that are neither natural nor necessary:

Are the tensions of the soul to the opinions or judgments hollow or empty (eg the desire for glory and fame …)

The wise man is content only natural and necessary pleasures.

Thus emerges the fig of Epicurean Wise, enjoying peace, stability and quiet pleasure. He acquired a perfect peace of soul, having banished the vain fears of the gods and death.

– The wise man is one whose rule of reason judgments and that suffices to itself.

– Everything is material, he thinks he professes and materialism opens to spiritual peace.

Philosophy means in this context, not a pure science and theoretical, but an action to grow the life at its climax.

Jealousy in Philosophy

Philosophy has fairly treated jealousy as such, but rather literature and psychoanalysis has themed it as a subject of analysis.

The concept of jealousy may refer to a feeling or emotional state:

Despite feeling experienced when seeing others possess objects or benefits that do not have or that we would hold exclusively (definition close to envy in the sense that it does not have the desired thing)

The emotional state of the person who wants to possess exclusively the beloved, layout accompanied by worry and suspicion. Unlike envy, jealous “owns” a person but feels that “possession” in danger.

The concept of jealousy in some philosophers

We can consider the whole work of Proust as dealing with jealousy, both object and starting point.

Proust, in Search of Lost Time, says about suspicions it poses to Albertine:

It is better not to know, to think as little as possible, do not provide to jealousy any concrete detail

Freud himself, presents jealousy as a normal emotional state. In essence, Freud thinks if it is not present in a subject, whereas it is suppressed and therefore the more active. These are cases of “abnormally enhanced jealousy” encountered in the analysis that Freud designates under the terms of jealousy “competitive” or normal, “projected” envy and jealousy “delusional.”

Here is an excerpt from On some neurotic mechanisms in jealousy, paranoia and homosexuality:

On normal jealousy he has little to say about the analytical point of view. It is easy to see that it consists essentially of mourning, the pain caused by the love object that is believed to have lost, and narcissistic humiliation, provided that the latter element is separate from the other leaves ; she still has feelings of hostility directed against the rival who was preferred, and a contribution of more or less critical self that wants to blame the loss of my own love.

Sartre in Being and Nothingness says we are jealous because others, by its unconditional freedom still eludes objectification (we would not be jealous of a table), but specifically being jealous is a try, unsuccessfully, to transcend the freedom of the loved one:

“I make myself desire. Desire is a spell. This is because I can not grasp the Other that in its objective factuality, to ensnare his freedom in this facticity must be that it be “taken” as one says of a cream that it is taken, so that the To-Self of Others is flush to the surface of his body, it extends all through his body and by touching this body, I finally coming of subjectivity ‘other. This is the true sense of the word possession. Such is the impossible ideal of desire to possess the transcendence of the other as pure transcendence and yet as a body”

Skepticism vs. Cynicism

 Barbara Ehrenreich, in her book Bright Sided, argues that not only is optimism not realistic, but it is the cause of a multitude of problems, including the 2007 economic meltdown. Ms. Ehrenreich opines that optimism is based in delusion and a false belief that we can control the world with our thoughts.

She might be right. But then again, she might not be. Definitive proof is lacking either way. But for the sake of discussion, let’s say she’s right, and we can’t control the world by thinking good thoughts. Is this reason enough to be pessimistic?

All agree that viewing things realistically is important, but let’s not confuse “realistic” with “pessimistic”. Most of the time, we do not have all the information necessary to definitively decide what’s realistic and what isn’t.

That’s where Skepticism comes in. A skeptical, challenges ideas and tests  points of view. But too often, it’s easy to slip into Cynicism. I differentiate between the two as follows:

Skepticism means we have doubts, questions, concerns, but the door is open to information that will help me make up my mind.

Cynicism means  our door is closed, locked and nailed shut. We are  not questioning, we are  not looking for information, we are  not open to new ideas.

Cynicism is a block to improvement and progress. Cynics are the skunks at the picnic, the ones who can tell you why every idea is a bad one, every change will be disastrous and every point of view (other than theirs) is delusional and unrealistic.

The original Cynics were Greeks who believed that virtue was the greatest good, and they hung around in the streets like a pack of dogs (“Cynic” comes from the Greek word for  dog), watch the passing crowd, and ridicule anyone who seemed pompous, pretentious, materialistic or downright wicked. The most famous of the ancient Cynics was Diogenes, who reportedly took up residence in a tub to demonstrate his freedom from material wants.

Today’s cynics are found in meetings, taking potshots at the ideas of others, firm in the belief that only they have the straight scoop on what’s what.

The Philosophical Materialism

Materialism is one the most spread philosophical schools, represented by Epicurus, Marx or Hobbes. It is opposed to idealistic philosophy.

Definition

As most commonly understood in philosophy, the term denotes the doctrine that whatever exists is either matter, or entirely dependent on matter in its existence. The precise meaning and status of this doctrine are, however, far from clear.

What are the properties of that matter in the relevant sense must, could, or could not possess ? Is matter to be regarded simply as that which is extended in both space and time ? Or if not, what further properties are essential to it ? Is there a relevant distinction to be drawn here between existence or occurence and being, and reality ? And how exactly are the space and time in which matter extends, the forces moving it, and the consciousness perceiving it, dependent on it ?

The range of possible anwsers makes materialism in effect a somewhat ill-defined group of doctrines rather than one specific thesis.

Further, even supposing the content of the doctrine is sufficiently clarified, why should it be accepted ? There are certainly no observational or analytical methods it as true.

Materialist philosophers

Forms of materialism appear in the history of thought as far back at least as Democritus and Epicurus, who attempted to describe natural processes and human experience in terms of arrangements and rearrangements of changeless atoms, or indivisibles material particles, in empty space. Despite inevitable religious opposition there have been various revivals of such ideas, beginning in the 17th century in cunjunction with the new physics of Galileo, and later, Nexton.

Hobbes produced a drastic and brilliant account of such materialism and the promise of an all-explaining scientific world-view was pursued, by, for example, Holbach and La Mettrie.

Recently, marxist thinkers have replaced such mechanistic materialism by their dialectical materialism, containing contradictions which procide the motive force for change.

Bergson Philosophy Summary

Henri Bergson: a rationalist and Cartesian philosopher

Hostile to the materialistic positivism, Henri Bergson, a French vitalist philosopher, has opertated a return to the immediate data of consciousness.

Bergson’s intuition:

Bergson’s influence was considerable, especially on Sartre or Heidegger. At the end of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, he questioned both the intellectualist philosophies, who claimed access to the real exercise of intelligence and “scientists” solutions, according to which knowledge only provides valid science.

However, how could the intelligence grasp reality?

– It is in the mold of the action it was cast.

– It does not refer originally a purely speculative possibility, but an active power.

– Seen in what appears to be the first step, it is to build artificial objects and vary in manufacturing.

– Homo Faber before Homo sapiens, the human being has first tried to dominate nature to serve his purposes.

Intelligence also allows it to effectively plan and organize action.

– But when a philosopher proposes to enter the Absolute (which is perfect in that it is exactly what he is, which does not depend on any symbol), it does not take another route and try to abstract methods and approaches essentially adapted to the world of action? (Eg, analysis, operation bringing the object to elements already known, redial …)

– The science was based on intelligence and applied to the material processes of measurement and calculation.

– In doing so, it builds useful diagrams and extended into a practice, but it has not exceeded the realm of the relative.

– It has built scientific laws, that is to say constant relations between magnitudes that vary without obviously penetrate the Absolute.

In what way can we hope to attain the Absolute?

– We must repudiate not only intelligence, but the language, which is closely linked.

– Instrument of intelligence, language is a set of verbal signs not noticing things that their most common and most trivial signs fixing and freezing what changes and varies.

– Linguistic signs are only labels on things.

– The words denote kinds, general ideas for a group of beings with common characteristics. 

They can not express the real objective psyche or profound as intelligence, they are instruments of action.

Therefore, the view does not have the immediacy does not take precedence over those of the concept of discourse and discursive?

– By way of immediate knowledge, direct, by making us sympathy coincide with what has been unique and indescribable in a word, by intuition, we enter the deep being real.

– Intuition represents a return to oneself and to what we are authentically return takes place without intermediaries.

Bergson and the inner life: life, liberty, memory

That’s life inner intuition will first allow us to discover. And, indeed, the intuitive knowledge that we find the term pure form are states of consciousness when our ego lets him live, when it refrains from establishing a separation between the present and previous states.

– Conduct fluid, pure heterogeneity, qualitative fusion, duration represents the very fabric of our self.

– A continuous becoming is what reveals a metaphysical investigation based on intuition.

However, it is still qualitative become unpredictable. For me the key, that we reveal the “immediate data of consciousness” is freedom.

– If the superficial self, the part of our psyche and shaped by the conventions of society, boils, often a result of automation, our authentic inner life, our life are deep, freedom.

When are we free?

– When we go beyond the surface crust of the linguistic sign, words, social, when our actions emanate from our whole personality and express it.

– Freedom is experienced in contact with our inner self, a real agreement with it.

– This is me then going back down to the surface. Freedom is one with the burst of self.

Finally, our inner life is memory. Here takes place the famous distinction of the two memories.

– There is a memory-usually made Automation and motor mechanisms: when I learn a text by heart, and I repeat, I made a number of gestures known; memory usually refers to a real-body mechanism.

– In contrast to these automation pure memory is that of my history: past lives within me, as memories pure, unchangeable, independent body. Pure memory contains our past and our spiritual essence is true.

Bergson and the ‘élan vital’:

Intuition gives us not only our spiritual dynamism, but also the duration of the universe and the great breath of life.

As well as our inner experience is made of time and qualitative changes, as it is woven by son who grow constantly, so the reality is becoming and evolution.

But how to understand this development?

– Bergson rejects both the doctrines and tenets of Darwin as mechanistic teleology.

– In the first case (mechanism), psycho-chemical explanation is supposed to suffice, but the mechanism is blind to the pressure of living, weather, dynamism. With the mechanism, everything is given and the momentum of life is in parentheses.

– But the finalist doctrine (which refers to a plan and a purpose in actualizing life), is also the time to get creative and brackets: she, too, as if everything was initially given by advance. For a preformed explain everything.

Therefore, it is the original idea of ​​a momentum that is offered to us, the living species that diverged from this momentum.

– The ‘élan vital’ means an unpredictable creative process, a current flowing through the body it organizes.

– Thus, the original impulse of creation she invents forms more complex.

– To understand the essence of this life force, think of pure duration, which is creative spontaneity.

– The momentum is also vital, invention: he creates new instincts, bodies that did not exist, creating, with its spontaneity, complex and unexpected forms, mere mechanical combinations can not explain.

Thus, all analyzes led Bergson to see life in a creative movement and an effort to go back down the slope area.

Bergson, morality, religion, and art:

The same dynamic perspective illuminates the moral phenomena, religious and artistic. Is here the key word “open”

– Is “open” all together escaping the suffocation of a circle of rigid rules opening the momentum of life and creation.

– Thus, in open morality, is a spiritual work.

– While closed morality means only a fixed set of requirements with a binding, simple products organized society, open morality is dynamic: it expresses, not a rigid system of social obligations, but a moral invention, an appeal related to a spiritual energy.

– Similarly, dynamic religion, that of the great mystics, imbued with a dash of love, the soul carries well beyond itself and beyond so much static religion, invention of mankind to defend and protect against dissolving the idea of ​​death and ensure its conservation.

– dynamic religion, entering a contact duration creative experience is immediate, the mystical soul, the Divine and God.

Finally, as an open morality, religion as dynamic, authentic art means a coincidence with the immediate reality, an unveiling of reality itself, a direct vision of what is beyond symbols practically useful.

If Bergson’s voice is not always heard in contemporary culture and the world, however, his philosophy, mystical inspiration, enlightened, a limpid prose, deep and spiritual dynamics refers to a metaphysical experience complete. What, in this context, that philosophy? Be placed in the object by an effort of intuition and coincide with it.

EMPIRICISM : DEFINITION AND THEORY

Basics and Meaning :

Usually defined as the thesis that all knowledge or at least all knowledge of matters of fact as disctinct from that of purely logical relations between concepts – is based on experience.

The popular appeal of empiricism depends in interpreting the key xord ‘experience’ in tis everyday understanding, in which a claim to have had dealings with mind-independent realities down on the farm. But philosophers often so construed this key term that merely to have dreams or hallucinations of cows would constitue having experience of cows.

Empiricism vs rationalism :

Empiricism can perhaps be better characterized in terms of what it denies. To begin with, it is a rejection of platonism and idealism (forms of rationalism), that when the human mind first encounters the world it is already furnished with a range of ideas or concepts, that accordingly owe nothing to experience.

By contrast, empiricists maintain that at birth the mind is, as Locke put is, “white papaer, void of all characters” (tabula rasa), and that only experience can provide it with ideas. Granted that ideas, the raw material of knowledge, originate thus, some epmiricists, though not all, have claimed that the thruth of factual statements can only be established inductively from particular experiences, and have denied any intuition or cartesian “natural light” which enables us to grasp general thruths about rality independantly of experience. The inductive method can, in its turn, be variously interpreted either, more liberally as justifying claims to thruth and knowledge for statements about a mind-independant reality, or more strictly, as justifying only statements about the immediate data of experience. Understood in this latter fashion, empiricism leads to a radical scepticism about many of our ordinary claims to knowledge, as is manifested in Hume and the logical positivist school.

Forms of empiricism

The development in the 17th and the 18th centuries of what became known as the british empiricist school of philosophy, with Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, was closely linked with the steadily increasing success and importance of experimental science, and its gradual discovery of its own identity as something distinct from pure mathematics and other disciplines.

As a result, empiricism has seen the acquisition of knowledge as a slow, piecemeal process, endlessly self-correcting and limited by the possibilities of experiment and observations, and has been sceptical about the claims of all-embracing metaphysical systems.