Chapter 3 introduction

What we call a "philosophical" outlook on life and the world is the product of two factors: traditional religious and ethical concepts, and the kind of research that may be called "scientific," in the broadest sense of the word.The proportions of these two factors in the system of philosophers vary widely from philosopher to philosopher; but only a certain degree of simultaneous presence of both can be characteristic of philosophy. The word philosophy has been used in various ways, some more broadly, others more narrowly.I use the word in a very broad sense, so let me explain that now.

Philosophy, as I understand the word, is something between theology and science.Like theology, it includes human thinking about things that hitherto cannot be determined by exact knowledge; but like science, it appeals to human reason and not to authority, whether it is traditional authority. Or the authority of revelation.All definite knowledge—so I maintain—belongs to science; all dogma which deals with anything beyond definite knowledge belongs to theology.But between theology and science there is a no man's land that is attacked by both sides; this no man's land is philosophy.Almost all the questions that most interest the speculative mind are unanswerable to science; and the confident answers of the theologians are no longer as convincing as they were in past centuries.Is the world divided into mind and matter?If so, what is the heart?What is it?Is mind subordinate to matter?Or does it have independent capabilities?Does the universe have any unity or purpose?Is it evolving toward a certain goal?Are there any laws of nature?Or is our belief in natural law simply a matter of our natural order-loving nature?Is man what the astronomer sees him, a tiny lump of impure carbon and water impotently crawling on a small and unimportant planet?Or is he what Hamlet sees him?Maybe he was both at the same time?Is there one way of life that is noble and another that is base?Or is all the way of life all vain and meaningless?If there is a way of life that is noble, what does it contain?How can we achieve it?Must the good be eternal in order to be worthy of respect?

Or is it worth pursuing even if the universe is inexorably heading towards death?Is there such a thing as wisdom, or is what appears to be wisdom merely distilled stupidity?Answers to these questions cannot be found in the laboratory.All schools of theology have claimed to be able to give extremely certain answers, but it is their certainty that makes modern people look at them with suspicion.The study of these questions - if not their solutions - is the business of philosophy. You may ask, then why waste time on these unsolvable problems?To this question we can answer both as a historian and as an individual confronted with the horror of cosmic loneliness.

Answers by historians, to the best of my ability, will be presented in this book.Since human beings have been able to think freely, their actions have depended in many important respects on their theories about the world and life, about what is good and what is evil.This is as true today as it has ever been.To understand an age or a people we must understand its philosophy; to understand its philosophy we must be philosophers ourselves to some degree.There is a reciprocal causality here, the circumstances in which people live play a great part in determining their philosophies, but in turn their philosophies play a great part in determining their circumstances.This interaction throughout the centuries is the subject of this book.

However, there is also a more personal answer.Science tells us what we can know, but what we can know is very little; and if we forget how much we cannot know, we will lose sight of many things of great importance. Become insensitive.Theology, on the other hand, brings about the dogmatic belief that we have knowledge of things of which we are in fact ignorant, thus producing a kind of cocky arrogance with regard to the universe.Uncertainty before vivid hopes and fears is painful; but we must suffer this uncertainty if we hope to live without the support of consoling myths.It is useless to try to forget the questions that philosophy raises, or to claim that we have found definitive answers to them.Teaching people how to live in uncertainty without being troubled by doubts is perhaps the main thing that philosophy can still do for students of philosophy in our time.

Philosophy, as distinct from theology, began in Greece in the sixth century BC.After it passed through the course of antiquity, with the rise of Christianity and the fall of Rome, it was submerged again in theology.The second great period of philosophy, from the eleventh to the fourteenth century, was entirely dominated by the Catholic Church, with the exception of a few great rebels like the Emperor Friedrich II (1195-1250). with.This period ended with disturbances of which the Reformation was the final result.The third period, from the seventeenth century to the present day, has been more dominated by science than either of the two preceding periods; traditional religious beliefs still predominate, but feel the need to justify themselves ; and religion is always reformed whenever science seems to make reformation necessary.Few philosophers of this period were orthodox in their Catholic standpoint, and in their thinking the secular state was much more important than the church.

Social solidarity and individual liberty, like science and religion, have at all times been in a state of conflict or uneasy compromise.In Greece social solidarity was secured by loyalty to the city-state; even Aristotle (though in his time Alexander was making the city-state obsolete) could see no other institution can have more advantages.The degree to which individual liberty is curtailed by individual responsibility to the city varies widely.In Sparta the individual enjoyed as little liberty as in Germany or Russia at present; Great freedom.Greek thought up to the time of Aristotle was dominated by the religious and patriotic devotion of the Greeks to the city; its ethical system was adapted to the life of the citizens and had a great political influence. ingredients included.When the Greeks were first subjugated to the Macedonians and then to the Romans, the concepts appropriate to their years of independence no longer applied.This, on the one hand, loses its vitality by breaking with tradition, and on the other hand, produces a more personal and less social ethics.The Stoics believed that the virtuous life was a relationship of the soul to God, not that of the citizen to the state.Thus they prepared the way for Christianity, which, like Stoicism, was at first apolitical, and during its first three centuries its adherents had no influence on government.During the six and a half centuries from Alexander to Constantine, society was held together not by philosophy, nor by ancient fidelity, but by strength, first by the might of the armies, then by the might of the executive. , is guaranteed.Roman armies, Roman roads, Roman law, and Roman officials first created and then sustained a powerful centralized state.Nothing can be attributed to Roman philosophy, because there was no Roman philosophy at all.

During this long period the Greek ideas inherited from the age of freedom underwent a gradual transformation.Certain ancient ideas, especially those which we consider most religious, acquire relative importance; Other ideas, more rationalistic, were discarded because they no longer fit the spirit of the age.It was in this way that the later pagans sorted out the Greek tradition so that it could finally be absorbed into Christian teaching. Christianity popularized an important insight already contained in Stoicism, but foreign to the general spirit of antiquity.I mean the view that a man's duty to God is more necessary than his duty to the state.The view, as Socrates and the apostles said, that we should obey God rather than man, survived the conversion of Constantine, for the early Christian emperors were all Arius. The Sect tends to be Arianism.This view ceased when the emperor became orthodox.It still existed latent in the Byzantine Empire, as it did later in the Russian Empire, whose Christianity had originally come from Constantinople.But in the West, where the Catholic emperors were almost immediately (except in certain parts of Gaul) replaced by pagan barbarian conquerors, the idea of ​​the superiority of religious fidelity to political fidelity survived, and was To some extent it still survives.

The barbarian invasion interrupted Western European civilization for six centuries.But it persisted in Ireland until the Danes destroyed it in the ninth century; and there it produced a splendid man, Scotus Errigena, before its demise.In the Eastern Roman Empire Greek civilization continued in a decaying form, as if in a museum, until the fall of Constantinople in 1453.Yet apart from an artistic tradition and Justinian's Roman code, nothing of importance in the world came out of Constantinople. During the Dark Ages, from the end of the fifth century to the middle of the eleventh century, the Western Roman world underwent some very interesting changes.The conflict between duty to God and duty to the state brought about by Christianity took the form of a conflict between church and king.The papacy extended to Italy, France and Spain, Great Britain and Ireland, Germany, Scandinavia and Poland.At first, the Pope's control over the bishops and abbots was weak, except in Italy and the South of France; And effective control power.From that time the clergy formed a single organization all over Western Europe under the command of Rome, pursuing power skillfully and relentlessly; until after 1300 A.D. they were generally victorious in their struggles with secular rulers. of.The conflict between church and state is not just a conflict between priest and laity.It is also a reenactment of the conflict between the Mediterranean world and the barbarians of the north.The unity of the Church was the echo of the unity of the Roman Empire; its prayers were in Latin, and its chief figures were mainly Italians, Spaniards, and southern French.Their education (when it was restored) was also classical; their conceptions of law and government were more comprehensible to the Emperor Marcus Aurelius than, perhaps, to modern princes.At the same time, the church represents both the continuation of the past and the most civilized thing at that time.

Secular power, on the other hand, was in the hands of princes of Teutonic blood, who tried to preserve as best they could the institutions which they had brought from the Germanic forests. Absolute power is alien to these institutions; and so are those legal institutions which seem dull and lifeless to these vigorous conquerors.The king must share his power with the feudal nobles, but everyone wants to vent their passions in the form of war, murder, plunder, or adultery from time to time.Princes can also repent, because they are pious at heart, and repentance itself is, after all, a form of passion.But the Church could never give them that orderly good conduct which a modern employer requires, and usually obtains, from his employees.What's the use of conquering the world if they can't drink, kill, love when the spirits are high?And they have a brave army of knights, why should they obey the nerds who are sworn to celibacy and have no military power?Despite the disapproval of the church, they still preserved the methods of judging duels and tournaments, and they developed jousting and gallant love affairs.Sometimes they even killed eminent priests in fits of frenzy.

All armed forces were on the King's side, yet the church was victorious. The church triumphed, partly because it enjoyed an almost exclusive right to education, and partly because kings frequently fought one another; the power to hold the keys to heaven.The church could decide whether a king should go to heaven or hell for eternity; the church could absolve subjects of allegiance and thus encourage rebellion.In addition, the church represented a sufficient alternative to anarchy and thus gained the support of the emerging merchant class.In Italy especially, this last point is decisive. The Teutonic attempt to preserve at least part of the Church's independence manifested itself not only in politics but also in art, romance, chivalry, and warfare.But this was seldom seen in intellectual circles, for education was almost entirely confined to the clergy.The openly expressed philosophy of the Middle Ages was not an exact mirror of the times, but only the ideological mirror of a party.However, even among the clergy—especially the Franciscan monks—a considerable number disagreed with the Pope for various reasons.Moreover, culture spread to the laity many centuries earlier in Italy than north of the Alps.Friedrich II tried to found a new religion, which represented the extreme of the counterculture; Thomas Aquinas was born in the kingdom of Naples, where Frederick II had supreme authority, and has remained to this day. A typical interpreter of the philosophy of the Holy See.About fifty years later, Dante achieved a synthesis and made the only balanced development of the entire medieval world of ideas. After Dante, for various political and intellectual reasons, the synthesis of medieval philosophy collapsed.As long as medieval philosophy existed, it had a neat and compact quality, and every point addressed by the system was placed in a very precise relationship to the rest of its extremely limited universe. .But the Great Schism, the Synod movement, and the Holy See of the Renaissance eventually led to the Reformation, which destroyed the unity of Christendom and the pope-centered theory of government of the scholastics.In the Renaissance, new knowledge, whether of antiquity or of the surface of the earth, tires man out of theoretical systems; they are felt to be a prison of the soul.Copernican astronomy ascribed to the earth and to man a far more humble place than they had enjoyed in Ptolemy's theories.Among the intellectuals, the pleasure of the new replaced that of reasoning, analysis, and systematization; and though in art the Renaissance still favored order, in thought it loved a great abundance of disorder.In this respect, Montaigne is the most typical representative figure of this era. In political theory, as in everything but art, there has been a breakdown of order.The Middle Ages, turbulent as it was in fact, was intellectually dominated by a passion for legitimacy, by a very rigorous theory of power.All power comes after all from God; God has given to the pope power over sacred things, and power over earthly things to the emperor. But in the fifteenth century popes and emperors alike lost their importance.The Pope became merely a member of the Italian princes, who engaged in all kinds of incredibly complex and shameless activities in Italian power politics.In France, Spain, and England, the new monarchical nation-states enjoyed power in their own dominions which neither pope nor emperor was in a position to interfere with. The nation-state, mainly thanks to gunpowder, acquired an unprecedented influence on the minds and feelings of men, and gradually destroyed the faith in the unity of civilization inherited from Rome. This political confusion is represented in Machiavelli's The Prince.Politics no longer has any guiding principles, but has become a naked struggle for power; as for how to play this game successfully, the book "The King" also put forward very shrewd opinions.What happened in the great age of Greece, happened again in Renaissance Italy: the traditional moral constraints disappeared, because they were thought to be combined with superstition; exuberant and creative, which produced the rarest of geniuses; but the anarchy and intrigue which inevitably follow from moral corruption render the Italians collectively impotent, and they too Like the Greeks, they fell under the rule of other peoples who were far less civilized than themselves, but not so lacking in social solidarity. The end, however, was not so disastrous as in Greece, for many new and powerful peoples, with the exception of Spain, showed themselves to be as capable of great things as the Italians had been. From the sixteenth century onwards, the history of European thought was dominated by the Reformation. The Reformation was a complex, multifaceted movement that owed its success to a variety of causes.In general, it was a rebellion of the northern peoples against the resurgent Roman rule.Religion was once the power that conquered northern Europe, but religion has declined in Italy: the Holy See still exists as an institution, and draws a large amount of tribute from Germany and England, but these still pious peoples are against the Borgar family. There can be no respect for the Medici family, which, under the pretext of saving human souls from purgatory, spend their money on extravagance and immorality.National, economic, and moral motives all combined to intensify the rebellion against Rome.Moreover, the princes soon saw that they could control the church if the church in their own dominions became entirely national; powerful.For all these reasons, Luther's theological reform was popular with the rulers as well as the people in most of northern Europe. The Catholic Church has three sources: its religious history1 is Jewish, its theology is Greek, and its government and canon law are, at least indirectly, Roman.The Reformation eliminated the Roman element, diluted the Greek element, but greatly strengthened the Jewish element.It thus cooperates with the forces of nationalism. These nationalist forces were destroying the gains of social unity first created by the Roman Empire and then by the Roman Church.In Catholic doctrine, divine revelation does not end with the existence of the Holy Book, but continues from generation to generation through the medium of the Church; therefore, it becomes everyone's responsibility to submit their opinions to the Church.Protestants, on the other hand, deny that the church is a medium of revelation; truth can only be found in the Bible, and everyone can interpret the Bible for himself. If people's interpretations diverge, there is no authority appointed by the gods to resolve such differences.In effect the state has claimed rights that once belonged to the Church, but this is a usurpation.In Protestant theory, there should be no earthly intermediary between the soul and God. The effect of this change is extremely significant.Truth no longer needs to be confirmed by authority, it only needs to be confirmed by inner thoughts.There soon developed a tendency towards anarchism in politics and mysticism in religion.This has always been difficult to adapt to the orthodox system of Catholicism.There arose not only one Protestantism, but many denominations; Not one philosophy opposed to the scholastics, but as many philosophies as there are philosophers; not one emperor opposed to the pope, as in the thirteenth century, but a multitude of heretic kings.The result was a deepening subjectivism, both in thought and in literature; at first as an activity demanding total emancipation from spiritual slavery, but towards an individualism unfavorable to the health of society. Isolation tendencies have progressed steadily. Modern philosophy begins with Descartes. What he basically affirmed as reliable is the existence of himself and his thoughts, and the external world is deduced from it.This is only the first stage of a general development through Berkeley, Kant, and Fichte.When it came to Fichte, everything was just the overflow of the self.This was unhealthy; ever since, philosophy has attempted to escape from this extreme into the world of everyday common sense. Political anarchism and philosophical subjectivism go hand in hand.Already in Luther's lifetime some unpopular and unrecognized disciples had developed the doctrine of Anabaptism, which for a time ruled the city of Münster.The Anabaptists reject all laws, because they believe that good men are always led by the Holy Spirit, and that the Holy Spirit cannot be bound by any formula.From this premise they arrived at the conclusion of communism and interbreeding; thus, after a period of heroic resistance, they were finally annihilated.But their doctrines took a softer form and spread to Holland, England, and America; this is the historical origin of the Quakers.In the nineteenth century another, more violent form of anarchism, no longer associated with religion, arose.It has had considerable success in Russia, in Spain, and to a lesser extent in Italy; and to this day it remains a fearsome monster in the eyes of U.S. immigration authorities.This modern form, though anti-religious, still has much in the spirit of early Protestantism; it differs chiefly in turning Luther's hatred for the pope against the secular government. Once subjectivism is unleashed, it can only pour down to the bottom and cannot be restrained within any boundaries.The Protestant moral emphasis on the individual conscience is essentially anarchistic.But habit and custom are so powerful that, except for temporary outbursts like Munster's, the adherents of individualism still behave ethically in what is traditionally considered moral, but this is an unjust stable balance.The cult of "sensibility" in the eighteenth century began to upset this balance: an action was admired not because it had good consequences or because it corresponded to a moral dogma, but because it had the power to excite it. sentiment.From this attitude develops a hero-worship as manifested by Carlyle and Nietzsche, and a Byronic worship of any passion. The Romantic movement, in art, in literature, and in politics, is associated with this subjectivist way of judging man not as a member of a collective but as an aesthetic pleasant object of observation.A tiger is more beautiful than a sheep, but we would rather keep it in a cage.The typical romantics want to open the cage and enjoy the magnificent leap of the tiger when it kills the sheep.He encourages people to imagine themselves tigers, but if he succeeds, the results won't be entirely happy. There have been various reactions to the less healthy forms of modern subjectivism.First, there is a philosophy of compromise, the doctrine of liberalism, which attempts to assign spheres to government and to individuals.The modern form of this doctrine begins with Locke, who was as opposed to "enthusiasm" - the individualism of the Anabaptists - as to absolute authority and blind obedience to tradition.Another, more radical revolt led to the theory of the cult of the state, which gave to the state the same status that Catholicism had given to the church, and sometimes even to God.Hobbes, Rousseau, and Hegel represent different aspects of this theory, and their teachings are embodied in practice in Cromwell, Napoleon, and modern Germany.In theory, communism is very far away from these philosophies, but in practice it also tends to a social form that is very similar to the result of state worship. Throughout the long history of development from 600 BC to today, philosophers can be divided into those who want to strengthen social constraints and those who want to relax social constraints.There are other differences connected with this distinction.Disciplineists preach some system of dogma, new or old, and are therefore compelled to a greater or lesser degree to hate science, since their dogma cannot be empirically proven.They almost always teach that happiness is not the good, but that only "nobility" or "heroism" is desirable.They have a kind of sympathy for the irrational part of human nature, because they feel that rationality is not conducive to social unity.Liberals, on the other hand, are, with the exception of extreme anarchists, in favor of science, utility, and reason over passion, and are enemies of all deeper forms of religion.This conflict existed in Greece long before the rise of what we think of as philosophy, and was already prominent in early Greek thought.It has taken various forms and has persisted to this day, and will doubtless continue into ages to come. It is clear that in this debate—as in all debates that have survived a long time—each side is partly right and partly wrong.Social solidarity is necessary, but nowhere has humankind hitherto been able to strengthen solidarity by reasoned debate alone.Every society is threatened by two opposing dangers: on the one hand rigidity resulting from an excess of discipline and respect for tradition, and on the other hand the growth of individualism and individual independence making cooperation impossible Thus resulting in disintegration or submission to foreign conquerors. Generally speaking, important civilizations start from a strict and superstitious system, gradually loosen it, and reach a period of brilliant genius at a certain stage; At this time, the good things in the old tradition continue to be preserved, but the bad things contained in the disintegration have not had time to develop.But as the bad develops, it leads toward anarchism, and thus inevitably toward a new tyranny, with a new synthesis guaranteed by a new system of dogma.Liberal doctrine is an attempt to avoid this endless repetition.The essence of liberalism is the attempt to obtain a social order not based on irrational dogma, and to ensure social stability by no more constraints than are necessary for its preservation.Whether this attempt will be successful or not, only the future can tell.