Chapter 70 Chapter 21: Trends of Thought in the Nineteenth Century

The intellectual life of the nineteenth century was more complex than that of any previous age.This is due to several reasons.First, the area concerned is larger than before; the United States and Russia made important contributions, and Europe paid more attention than before to ancient and modern Indian philosophy.Second, the new victories of the sciences which had been the main source of innovation since the seventeenth century, especially in geology, biology, and organic chemistry.Third, machine production profoundly altered the social structure, giving man a new conception of his capabilities with respect to the natural environment.Fourth, there has been a profound philosophical and political revolt against traditional systems in thought, politics, and economics, giving rise to attacks on many beliefs and institutions that have been seen as irrefutable.There are two distinct forms of this rebellion, the romantic and the rationalist. (I use both terms broadly).

The revolt of Romanticism evolved from Byron, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche to Mussolini and Hitler; the revolt of rationalism began with the French philosophers in the era of the Great Revolution, and passed to the philosophical radicals of England after a little moderation. Then a deeper form was obtained from Marx, resulting in the result of Soviet Russia. Germany's intellectual superiority was a new factor starting with Kant.Leibniz, though a German, almost always wrote in Latin or French, and was hardly influenced by Germany in his philosophy.Conversely, the German idealism after Kant, like the later German philosophy, was deeply influenced by German history; many seemingly peculiar things in German philosophical thought reflect a country that has been deprived of its natural power due to historical accidents. The state of mind of a strong nation.

Germany once relied on the Holy Roman Empire to achieve international status, but the Holy Roman Emperor gradually lost control of his nominal subjects.The last powerful emperor was Charles V, whose power depended on his holdings in Spain and the Lowlands. The Reformation Movement and the Thirty Years' War destroyed the unification of Germany, leaving behind many weak duchies who depended on France.In the eighteenth century only one German state, Prussia, succeeded in resisting the French; it was for this reason that Friedrich was called "the great king."But Prussia itself was not able to withstand Napoleon, and the Battle of Jena was a complete defeat.The revival of Prussia under Bismarck appeared to be a restoration of the heroic past of Alaric, Charlemagne, and Barbarossa. (For Germans, Charlemagne is German, not French.) Bismarck said: "We are not going to Canossa," which betrayed his historical conception.

However, while Prussia was politically superior, it was less culturally advanced than most of West Germany; this explains why many famous Germans, including Goethe, did not resent Napoleon's victory at Jena.At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Germany was an unusually heterogeneous country, culturally and economically.Serfdom still survived in East Prussia; most of the rural nobles were immersed in ignorance, and the laborers did not even have the most elementary education.West Germany, on the other hand, had been partly subordinate to Rome in antiquity; it had been under the influence of France since the seventeenth century;Some of the lords were very intelligent, and they imitated the lords of the Renaissance at their courts, as rewarders of the arts and sciences; the most famous example was Weimar, the Grand Duke of Weimar, the benefactor of Goethe.The lords were of course mostly opposed to German unification as it would undermine their independence.So they are anti-patriotic, and so are many of the famous people who are attached to them. In their minds, Napoleon is the messenger of spreading a culture superior to German culture.

During the nineteenth century, the culture of Protestant Germany gradually became more and more Prussian.King Friedrich the Great was a free thinker and admirer of French philosophy. He had devoted himself to building Berlin into a cultural center; The victim of Voltaire's desperate ridicule.Friedrich's efforts, like those of other enlightened despots of the time, included no economic or political reforms; what they achieved was nothing more than a collection of hired intellectuals.After his death, most of the cultural people can only be found in West Germany. German philosophy has a deeper relationship with Prussia than German literature and art.Kant was a subject of King Friedrich the Great; Fichte and Hegel were professors at the University of Berlin.Kant was hardly influenced by Prussia; indeed, he got into trouble with the Prussian government over his liberal theology.But both Fichte and Hegel were the mouthpieces of Prussia's philosophy, and they did a great deal to prepare the patriotism of the Germans for the union with Prussian worship.What they have done in this respect has been continued by the great German historians, especially Mommsen and Treichick.Bismarck finally persuaded the German nation to accept unity under Prussia, thus triumphing for the less internationalist elements of German culture.

Throughout the period after Hegel's death, most academic philosophy remained traditional and therefore of little importance.English empiricist philosophy prevailed in England until towards the end of the nineteenth century, and in France until somewhat earlier; then Kant and Hegel gradually conquered the French and This is true for teachers of specialized philosophy here.However, the general educated public has hardly been affected by this movement, so this movement has not many adherents among scientists.Writers who continued the academic tradition—John Stuart Mill on the empiricist side, Lotzer, Zigwart, Bradley, and Bauzankert on the German idealist side— —None of the philosophers is quite first-rate, in other words, they generally adopt someone's system, and they themselves are not equal to him.Academic philosophy used to be often out of touch with the most vigorous thought of the day, for example in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when academic philosophy was still mainly scholastic.Whenever this is the case, historians of philosophy speak less of professors than of lay heretics.

Most of the philosophers of the time of the French Revolution combined science with beliefs associated with Rousseau.Helvetius and Condorcet can be seen as typical in their combination of rationalism and fanaticism. Helvetius (1715-71) had the honor of having his book De L'Esprit (1758) condemned by the University of Sobourne and burned by the hangman.Bentham read his work in 1769, and at once resolved to devote his life to the principles of legislation.He said: "Helvetius is to morality what Bacon is to nature. So morality has its Bacon, but its Newton has yet to come." James Mill in his son John Stuart In Yate's education, Helvetia was regarded as a model.

Helvetius believed in Locke's doctrine that "the mind is a tabularasa (blank board)" and that the differences among individuals were entirely due to differences in education: each man's talents and his morals are what he has received. result of teaching.Genius, Helvété argues, is often accidental: had Shakespeare not been caught poaching, he would have been a woolen merchant.Helvetius' interest in legislation arose from the doctrine that the chief teachers of youth were the constitution and the customs which arose from it.Man is born ignorant, but not dull; education makes him dull.

In ethics, Helvetius is a utilitarian; he considers pleasure to be good.In religion he was a Deist, a fierce anti-clerical. In terms of epistemology, he adopted a simplified version of Locke's philosophy: "Because of Locke's teachings, we know that our ideas, and thus our spirit, are derived from the senses." He said that the sensibility of the body is our actions, The sole cause of our thoughts, our feelings, and our sociability.He disagrees with Rousseau about the value of knowledge, because he values ​​knowledge very highly. His doctrine is the doctrine of optimism, for a perfect education is all that is needed to make a man a perfect man.He suggested that a perfect education would be easy to obtain if the clergy were eliminated.

Condorcet (1743-94) had a view similar to that of Helvetius, but was more influenced by Rousseau.He said that all human rights are deduced from the following truth: Man is a sentient being, capable of reasoning and acquiring moral concepts, so man cannot be divided into rulers and ruled, liars and deceived By. "This principle, for which the noble Sydney gave his life, Locke attached the prestige of his name to it, and Rousseau later developed it more rigorously." He said that Locke was the first to point out the limits of human cognition.His "method soon became that of all philosophers, and it was by applying it to ethics, politics, and economics that they were at last able to follow in these sciences a path almost as sure as that of the natural sciences."

Condorcet greatly admired the American Revolutionary War. "Simple common sense teaches the inhabitants of the British colonies that an Englishman born on the other side of the Atlantic holds exactly the same rights as an Englishman born on the Greenwich Meridian." The war made human rights known throughout Europe from the Neva to the Guadalquivir.However, the principles of the French Revolution were "more pure, more refined, and more profound than those that have guided the Americans."These words were written while he was hidden from Robespierre's eyes and ears; soon after he was arrested and imprisoned.He died in prison, but the circumstances of his death are unknown. Condorcet was a believer in the equality of women.He is also the founder of Malthus's population theory, but this theory does not have the bleak conclusions that Malthus said, because his population theory and the necessity of birth control are mentioned at the same time.Malthus's father was a disciple of Condorcet, so Malthus knew the theory of population. Condorcet was even more fanatical and optimistic than Helvetius.He believed that, by virtue of the general circulation of the principles of the French Revolution, all the chief evils would soon be wiped out.It may have been his luck that he did not live past 1794. Less fanatical and much more rigorous, the teachings of the revolutionary philosophers of France were brought to England by the philosophical Radicals, of whom Bentham was the acknowledged leader.At first Bentham was almost exclusively concerned with jurisprudence; as he grew older his interests broadened and his insights became increasingly subversive. After 1808, he was a republican, believer in equal rights for women, enemy of imperialism and uncompromising democrat.Some of these opinions he got from James Mill.Both believe that education is omnipotent.Bentham adopted the principle of "the greatest happiness of the greatest number" out of democratic sentiments, but this was bound to oppose the theory of human rights, so he bluntly called the theory of human rights "nonsense". The philosophical radicals differ in many respects from men like Helvetius and Condorcet.Temperamentally, they are patient people who like to work out their theories in detail.They are very economical and believe they have developed economics as a science.In Bentham and John Stuart Mill there is a tendency towards fanaticism, but not in Malthus or James Mill; the fanatic tendency is strictly checked by this "science", It is especially strictly checked by Malthus's bleak account of population, according to which, except immediately after the plague, the majority of wage earners must always earn the minimum amount necessary to sustain themselves and their families.Another major point of disagreement between the Benthamites and their French predecessors was the violent conflict between employers and wage-earners in industrialized Britain that gave rise to trade unionism and socialism.In this conflict, the Benthamists generally sided with the employers against the working class.Their last representative, however, John Stuart Mill, gradually loosened his father's austere dogma, and as he grew older he became less hostile to socialism and less convinced of classical economics. It is eternal truth.According to his autobiography, this softening process began with reading Romantic poets. The Benthamists, although at first quite mildly revolutionary, gradually became less so, partly because of their success in turning the British government to some of their views, partly because of the growing opposition to socialism and trade unionism. power.We have already mentioned that there are rationalists and romantics who rebel against tradition, although in people like Condorcet there are elements of both.The Benthamites were almost entirely rationalist, as were the socialists who rebelled against the existing economic order as much as they did.This socialist movement did not acquire a complete philosophy until Marx, whom we shall deal with in a later chapter. The Romantic and the Rationalist forms of rebellion, though both arose from the philosophers of the French Revolution and shortly before it, were very different.Romantic forms are seen in Byron, wrapped in non-philosophical cloaks, but in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche it acquires philosophical terms.This rebellious tendency emphasizes the will at the expense of the intellect, falls short of the shackles of reason, and glorifies certain kinds of violence.In practical politics it is important as an ally of nationalism.It tends to be decidedly hostile to what is commonly called reason, if not always in practice; and it is often anti-scientific.Some of its most extreme forms were found in the Russian anarchists, but it was the rationalist form of resistance that finally prevailed in Russia.Germany has always been more susceptible to Romanticism than any other country, and it was Germany that provided a political outlet for the anti-rational philosophy of naked will. The schools of philosophy we have examined so far have always been inspired by tradition, literature, or politics.But philosophical insights have two other roots, namely, science and machine production.The academic influence of the second source began with Marx, and has gradually become more important since then.The first source has been important since the seventeenth century, but took on various new forms in the nineteenth century. Darwin was to the nineteenth century what Galileo and Newton were to the seventeenth century. Darwin's theory is divided into two parts.On the one hand, there is the theory of evolution, which maintains that all living things are gradually developed from a common ancestor.This theory is now generally accepted by everyone, and it was not new at the time.Not to mention Anaximander; both Lamarck and Darwin's grandfather Erasmus had argued for it.Darwin provided an enormous amount of evidence for this theory, and in the second part of his theory he believed he had discovered the cause of evolution.In this way he made the theory more popular than ever before, and acquired a scientific power which had not been there before; but by no means did he originate the theory of evolution. The second part of Darwin's theory is the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest.All plants and animals multiplied too rapidly for nature to be able to support them; therefore many of each generation died before reaching reproductive age.What determines which will survive?Of course, some of it is pure luck, but there is another more important reason.Generally speaking, animals and plants are not exactly the same as their parents. In every measurable quality, there may be more or less, or slightly different.In a certain environment, individuals of the same species compete for survival, and those who adapt best to the environment have the greatest chance of survival.Among the various accidental variations, therefore, the favorable ones will predominate in each generation of mature individuals.So, generation after generation, deer run faster, cats sneak closer to live food, and giraffe necks grow longer and longer.Darwin argued that, given sufficient time, this mechanistic process could account for the entire long development from protozoa to homosapiens (humans). This part of Darwin's theory has always been very controversial, and most biologists believe that there are many important restrictions attached.This, however, has little to do with historians writing the history of ideas in the nineteenth century.From a historical point of view, it is interesting that Darwin extended to the totality of living things the economics characteristic of the philosophical radicals.According to him, the prime mover of evolution is a biological economy in a world of free competition.It was Malthus' population theory extended to the animal and plant kingdoms that prompted Darwin to think of the competition for survival and the survival of the fittest as the root of evolution. Darwin himself was a liberal, but his theory had some unfavorable conclusions to traditional liberalism.The doctrine that all men are created equal and that differences among adults are solely due to education is incompatible with his emphasis on innate differences among individuals of the same species.If, as Lamarck maintained, and Darwin himself was willing to admit, that the acquisition of physical qualities was hereditary, as Lamarck maintained, and Darwin himself was willing to admit, this opposition to a view like Helvetius would have been somewhat moderated; Certain insignificant exceptions are not counted. It seems that only congenital traits are inherited.Therefore, the innate differences between people have a fundamental significance. There is another conclusion to the theory of evolution that has nothing to do with the particular mechanism process proposed by Darwin.If man and animals have a common ancestor, if man has developed through such slow stages that there have been creatures we do not know whether to classify as human, then the question arises: at what stage of evolution , human beings (or human half-human ancestors) start to be equal? Would Pithecanthropus erectus have done as well as Newton had he been properly educated?Would the Piltdown people have written Shakespeare had they been accused of poaching?A staunch egalitarian who answers in the affirmative to these questions will find himself compelled to regard apes and humans as equals.And why stop at apes?I don't see how he can argue against the argument that oysters have a vote.Believers in the theory of evolution should insist that not only the doctrine of human equality must be condemned as anti-biological, but also the doctrine of human rights must be condemned as anti-biological, because it distinguishes human beings from animals too sharply. Liberalism has another side, because It is the belief in progress that has been greatly strengthened by the theory of evolution.For this reason, and because it presented new arguments against orthodox theology, evolution was welcomed by liberals as long as world conditions permitted optimism.Although Marx's teachings were in some points pre-Darwinian, he himself wanted to dedicate the title of his book to Darwin. The prestige of biology prompts those whose minds are influenced by science to apply to the world not mechanistic but biological categories.Thinking that everything is evolving, an inner goal is easy to imagine.Many people ignore Darwin, believing that evolution justifies the belief that the universe has a purpose.The concept of organisms was considered the secret to scientific and philosophical explanations of the laws of nature, and the eighteenth-century atomistic thought was considered obsolete.This view eventually even influenced theoretical physics.In politics, of course, it creates a society that emphasizes the opposition to the individual.This is in harmony with the gradual growth of state power; it is also in harmony with nationalism, which can quote Darwin's theory of the survival of the fittest and apply it to nations rather than to individuals.But here we come to the sphere of non-scientific views of the masses, inspired by imperfectly understood scientific doctrines. While biology has always been unfavorable to the mechanistic worldview, modern economic technology has had the opposite effect.Until nearly the end of the eighteenth century, science and technology, as opposed to scientific doctrine, had no significant influence on human opinion.It was with the rise of industrialism that technology began to affect people's minds.Even then, this influence has long been more or less indirect.People who propose philosophical theories generally have little contact with machines.The Romantics noticed the ugliness that industrialism was producing where it had always been beautiful, and the vulgarity (in their opinion) of those who made their fortunes in "business" and hated it.This pits them against the middle classes, and sometimes they enter into a sort of alliance with the fighters of the proletariat.Engels praised Carlyle without understanding that what Carlyle wanted was not the emancipation of the wage-earners, but their submission to the kind of masters they had had in the Middle Ages.Socialists welcomed industrialism, but wanted to liberate industrial workers from subordination to the power of their employers.They were influenced by industrialism in the problems they considered, but not so much in the ideas with which they were solved. The most important impact of machine production on people's imaginary worldview is to increase the sense of human power a hundredfold.This is nothing more than the acceleration of a process that has begun since prehistoric times when man invented weapons to allay the fear of wild beasts, and invented agriculture to allay the fear of starvation.But the acceleration has always been so great that it has brought a fresh perspective to those who have mastered the powers created by modern technology. In the past, mountain waterfalls were all natural phenomena; but now, obstructive mountains can be removed, and convenient waterfalls can also be created.In the past, there were deserts and fertile villages; but now, as long as people think it is worth doing, they can make the deserts bloom like roses, and fertile villages have been turned into deserts by optimists with insufficient scientific spirit.Once upon a time, peasants lived as their parents and grandparents lived and believed in what their parents and grandparents believed in; the pagan rites could not be eradicated with all the power of the church, so they had to be linked to the local saints , thus giving them a Christian cloak.And now the authorities are able to dictate what the children of the peasantry should learn in school, and within one generation to change the state of mind of the farmer; presumably this has already been done in Russia. Thus a new belief in power arose among men in charge, or in contact with those in charge: first, the power of man in his struggle with nature, and secondly, the power of rulers over those They endeavored, by scientific propaganda, and especially by education, to dictate the convictions and aspirations of those men.As a result, there is less fixity; nothing seems impossible to change. Nature is the raw material; so is that part of the human race which does not take a powerful part in domination.There are certain old concepts that represent a belief in human limitations; two major ones are "God" and "Truth." (I don't mean that the two are logically related).The concept has a tendency to disappear; even if it is not explicitly repudiated, it loses its significance, and only superficially remains.This set of views is entirely new, and it is impossible to say how humans will adapt to it.It has produced great changes, and will certainly produce other great changes in the future.Building a philosophy that can cope with those reveling in the prospect of almost unlimited power, and at the same time cope with the disenchantment of the powerless, is the most urgent task of our time. While there are many who still genuinely believe in human equality and theoretical democracy, the modern imagination is deeply shaped by the forms of social organization that the radically undemocratic industrial system of the nineteenth century enabled.On the one hand, there are the industrial magnates, and on the other, the masses of workers.This internal split in democracies is not yet recognized by ordinary people in democracies, but it has been the chief problem of most philosophers since Hegel, and they have to decide between the interests of the many and the interests of the few. The sharp antagonisms found have found practical expression through fascism.Among philosophers, Nietzsche unashamedly sided with the minority, Marx sincerely sided with the majority.Bentham was, perhaps, the only person of importance who attempted to reconcile the conflicting interests; thus he attracted the enmity of both parties. In elaborating any kind of satisfactory modern ethics concerning human relations, the most important thing is to recognize the necessary limits of man's power over the environment beyond the human sphere, and the proper limits of man's power over one another.