A History of Philosophy E-Book

Clement C. J. Webb

• Herausgeber: Librorium Editions
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

“Wise I may not call them; for that is a great name which belongs to God alone; lovers of wisdom or philosophers is their modest and befitting title.” So speaks Socrates in Plato’s Phædrus of the genuine teachers of mankind, who, whether they be poets or lawgivers or dialecticians like Socrates himself, know what they are talking about, and can distinguish what is really good from what is only apparently so, preferring what can be shown to be true to what is merely plausible and attractive. The word Philosophy has in the course of its long history been used now in a wider, now in a narrower sense; but it has constantly stood for inquiry not so much after certain particular facts as after the fundamental character of this world in which we find ourselves, and of the kind of life which in such a world it behoves us to live. Sometimes a distinction has been drawn between natural and moral philosophy, according as attention is directed to the world, or to our life in it. In English books of a  hundred years ago “philosopher” more often than not meant a “natural philosopher,” and “philosophy” what we should nowadays call “natural science.”

Leseprobe

A HISTORY

OF PHILOSOPHY

BY

CLEMENT C. J. WEBB

© 2023 Librorium Editions

ISBN : 9782385743130

CHAPTER I PHILOSOPHY AND ITS HISTORY

CHAPTER II PLATO AND HIS PREDECESSORS

CHAPTER III ARISTOTLE AND OTHER SUCCESSORS OF PLATO

CHAPTER IV PHILOSOPHY AND THE RISE OF CHRISTIANITY

CHAPTER V PHILOSOPHY DURING THE MINORITY OF MODERN EUROPE

CHAPTER VI PHILOSOPHY AT THE COMING OF AGE OF MODERN EUROPE

CHAPTER VII DESCARTES AND HIS SUCCESSORS

CHAPTER VIII LOCKE AND HIS SUCCESSORS

CHAPTER IX KANT AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES

CHAPTER X THE SUCCESSORS OF KANT

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. General Histories of Philosophy

II. Ancient Philosophy

III. Modern Philosophy

IV. Special Branches

INDEX

CHAPTER I PHILOSOPHY AND ITS HISTORY

“Wise I may not call them; for that is a great name which belongs to God alone; lovers of wisdom or philosophers is their modest and befitting title.” So speaks Socrates in Plato’s Phædrus of the genuine teachers of mankind, who, whether they be poets or lawgivers or dialecticians like Socrates himself, know what they are talking about, and can distinguish what is really good from what is only apparently so, preferring what can be shown to be true to what is merely plausible and attractive. The word Philosophy has in the course of its long history been used now in a wider, now in a narrower sense; but it has constantly stood for inquiry not so much after certain particular facts as after the fundamental character of this world in which we find ourselves, and of the kind of life which in such a world it behoves us to live.

Sometimes a distinction has been drawn between natural and moral philosophy, according as attention is directed to the world, or to our life in it. In English books of a hundred years ago “philosopher” more often than not meant a “natural philosopher,” and “philosophy” what we should nowadays call “natural science.” This may be explained by the fact that it was at that time a prevalent view in this country that, apart from what could be learned from a supernatural revelation, the inductive and mathematical methods used in the natural sciences were the only means we had for discovering the nature of the world; while (apart again from duties prescribed by supernatural authority) it was man’s chief task to be, in Bacon’s words, the “minister and interpreter” of that “Nature” whose ways by those methods he endeavoured to search out. On the other hand, in popular language a “philosopher” often means no more than a person who in the conduct of his life is not at the mercy of circumstance. It is, no doubt, suggested that this is so because he has come to know the sort of world he has to do with, and so is not to be taken by surprise, whatever happens to him; yet the stress is laid rather on his behaviour than on the knowledge which has made it possible. Nowadays, we do not so commonly speak of “natural philosophy” as of “natural science”; and an astronomer or a physicist, a chemist or a biologist, we should not call a philosopher, unless, over and above his special researches, he were also to engage in some speculation as to the fundamental nature of the one world in which there is mind as well as matter, unity as well as multiplicity, individuality as well as general laws, and were to put to himself such questions as these: How are matter and mind mutually related? How can what is one be also many, and what is many be also one? What is an individual? How can what is not individual be real? and yet how can we describe any individual at all except in terms which might at any rate be applicable to other individuals as well? Such questions may be provoked by the investigations of the natural sciences, but cannot be decided by the methods used in those investigations. So long as a scientific investigator does not raise questions of this kind, he cannot, in our sense of the word, be called a philosopher; though he may perhaps be so called, if, having raised them, he arrives after consideration at the conclusion that they are unanswerable and therefore not worth raising again.

Philosophy, says Plato, begins with wonder; and, certainly, no kind of animal could learn to philosophize but one whose nature it was not to take things as they come, but to ask after the why and the wherefore of each, taking for granted that each has a why and a wherefore, and seeing in whatever happens to him (though he might not put it in this language) no isolated fact, but an instalment of a single experience, a feature of a single encompassing reality, within which all else that had happened or might happen would also be included. But we should hardly call this wonder or curiosity by the name of Philosophy until it had passed beyond the childish stage at which it could find satisfaction in mere stories, such as we find in the mythologies of all nations, which explain the origin of the world on the analogy of processes familiar to us as happening within the world, but which we cannot conceive as taking place outside of the world. As Prof. Burnet has observed (Early Greek Philosophy, p. 10), the real advance made by the men whom we reckon as the founders of European philosophy “was that they left off telling tales. They gave up the hopeless task of describing what was when as yet there was nothing, and asked instead what all things really are now.”

The men of whom he is here speaking are the members of a school of inquirers who in the sixth century before our era flourished at Miletus, a prosperous city founded by Ionian Greeks on the coast of Asia Minor. It is with these men that our history of philosophy must begin. It is doubtful whether a philosophy properly so called, that is a systematic inquiry into the true nature of the world, set on foot merely for the sake of knowing the truth about it, can be shown to have originated anywhere independently of the ancient Greeks. Speaking of social life, Mr. Marett has said (Anthropology, p. 185): “To break through custom by the sheer force of reflection, and so to make rational progress possible, was the intellectual feat of one people, the ancient Greeks; and it is at least highly doubtful if, without their leadership, a progressive civilization would have existed to-day.” To the same people we owe, in like manner, that disuse of mere customary repetition of traditional explanations of the world’s origin and structure, in favour of free speculation and investigation, which has made possible science and philosophy, as we now understand those words. Hence we are justified in beginning our history of philosophy with the earliest group of Greek thinkers with whose theories we have any acquaintance. And even were there better evidence than there is of the existence of a genuine philosophy wholly independent of that which arose among the Greeks, it would still be impossible within the compass of the present book to attempt more than a description of that succession of thinkers who stand in a direct historical connexion with the development of modern European thought and knowledge; and the first in that succession are undoubtedly the ancient Greek philosophers.

With the Greek philosophers, therefore, our history will begin. From their time onward to our own, there has been carried on within the sphere of European civilization a constant discussion of the kind of problems which we call philosophical, with a conscious reference to the conclusions reached by the chief Greek thinkers. This discussion has been at different times carried on more or less actively, more or less freely, more or less strictly within the lines laid down by its originators. There have been, as Bacon has said, waste and desert tracts of time, wherein the fruits of civilization, philosophy among them, have not been able to flourish. During these the discussion of philosophical problems has flagged; those who carried it on at all have but repeated the old arguments, and even of the old arguments themselves many have been forgotten or misunderstood.

Again, the discussion has not always been carried on with perfect freedom, without fear of the issue, “whithersoever,” to use a phrase of Plato’s, “the argument may lead us.” It has sometimes been supposed that a supernatural authority has on certain points enlightened us with information which we could not contradict without committing the sin of disloyalty to a divine teacher. Sometimes, again, the very increase of knowledge as to the views of earlier philosophers has hindered those that came after from thinking questions out for themselves. Sometimes, on the other hand, new experiences, religious, moral, political, economic, scientific, æsthetic, have given a new direction to men’s thoughts, and turned their attention away from the teaching of their predecessors to the facts; whether to facts which those predecessors had also had before them, or to others which had not been within their ken. At such times there has often been loss as well as gain. Mistakes which had long ago been corrected have been revived; and old confusions have been given a new lease of life under new names.

Thus, this History of Philosophy, which we shall attempt to summarize, although it is the history of a discussion constantly carried on from the sixth century before the Christian era to the twentieth century after it, is not the history of a discussion in which every point made is made once for all, or every step taken is a step forward. Rather, it is the history of a discussion subject to interruption by practical affairs, interspersed with digressions more or less irrelevant to its main topic, conducted now slackly and now keenly, by disputants of very various abilities. Yet, when we survey it as a whole, we shall find that it is a discussion in which a real progress can be detected; and in which even interruptions and digressions have proved refreshing and suggestive.

CHAPTER II PLATO AND HIS PREDECESSORS

The problem upon which the philosophers of Miletus fixed their attention was that of change. Things were always coming into being and passing away, and yet they did not come from nothing, or pass away into nothing. The spectacle of the world was not a spectacle of new beginnings and utter vanishings; it was, rather, a spectacle of perpetual transformation—but transformation of what? What was this one thing which took so many various shapes? That was the question which the earliest Greek philosophers set themselves to solve.

The oldest of them whose name has come down to us, Thales, said that it was water. The next, Anaximander, said that it was a boundless or infinite substance out of which are segregated, so to speak, the different substances with which we have to do; not only water, which Thales had supposed to be the primary matter, but fire, which is its opposite and ever wages against it a truceless war. The third, Anaximenes, identified this primitive substance with air, or rather with mist or vapour, which could either be rarefied and heated into fire or condensed and cooled into water. All these three philosophers were citizens of Miletus, and all flourished in the sixth century before our era. Early in the next century, in the year 494 B.C., the invading Persians destroyed Miletus, and the Milesian school came to an end in its original home. But, at the not far distant city of Ephesus, there was then living a philosopher who must be reckoned as the successor of the Milesians. This was Heraclitus, whom later tradition called the “weeping philosopher,” because, it was said, he always found in human life matter for tears, whereas Democritus (of whom we have yet to speak) found rather matter for laughter.

Heraclitus saw in fire the primary substance. Do we not see how flame is perpetually nourished by fuel, and how it perpetually passes into smoke? The swiftness of flame, moreover, is so great that we may without absurdity think that man’s swift thought is of like nature with it; and the confusion introduced into our wits by overmuch liquor may seem to confirm the suspicion. “The dry soul is the best,” he said; and when we speak nowadays of the “dry light of science,” the phrase is an echo of this ancient theory. The mind in ourselves is, then, a part of the eternal fire; and to this eternal fire can thus be attributed the power of thinking which characterizes our minds. But the great importance of Heraclitus in the history of philosophy is not due to this new answer of his to the old question about the primary substance. It is due to the stress which he laid on the unceasing process of flux or change in which, as he held, all things were involved. As the hymn compares Time, so Heraclitus compared the course of nature to “an ever-rolling stream.” You cannot step twice, he said, into the same river; for the water into which you first stepped will by now have flowed on, and other water will have taken its place. Now, it is easy to see that this doctrine of a universal flux involves very serious consequences for any one who should, above all things, desire knowledge. For how is knowledge possible if there is nothing that abides as it is; if, as soon as any statement is made, nay, before it is out of the speaker’s mouth, it has ceased to be true? It was said that consistent Heracliteans renounced speech, and took to pointing instead. They criticized, we are told, their master Heraclitus himself as not having gone far enough in his saying that a man could not step twice into the same river; for, said they, he could not do it once, since not for one instant did it remain the same river.

It was to a certain Cratylus, who flourished a hundred years after Heraclitus himself, that these rigorous deductions from the doctrine of the universal flux are attributed; and of this Cratylus Plato (b. 427, d. 347) was in his youth a disciple. What he learned from this teacher concerning the flux in which all such things as can be perceived by the senses are involved, and concerning the consequent impossibility of really knowing them, stirred him up, it would seem, to seek elsewhere for something which should not be thus ever in process of becoming something else, but should admit of being known to be, essentially and permanently, of a certain nature. We must here note that Plato took the flux of Heraclitus to involve only such things as the senses could apprehend. This was because Heraclitus and his contemporaries had recognized no reality which was not corporeal. They were not, indeed, materialists, in the sense in which that word implies the express denial that there is any reality which is not corporeal; for no definite suggestion that such a reality exists had yet been made. They had not drawn a distinction which to us is apt to seem fundamental; they did not deny to mind the property of filling space, which belongs to matter; nor did they deny to matter the property of thinking, which belongs to mind. To Heraclitus the soul could be dry, and fire could be wise.

In what direction did Plato, in his dissatisfaction, a hundred years after Heraclitus, with the Ephesian philosopher’s doctrine of the universal flux, and the consequences, so unacceptable to an ardent aspirant after knowledge, which Cratylus deduced from it, look for an abiding object whereof there could be a true knowledge? He looked, we are told, in a direction which had been indicated to him by Socrates.

Socrates the Athenian (b. about 470, d. 399) was one of several among the greatest teachers of our race who have left no writings of their own behind them, and whose teachings are known to us only through the reports of others, reports which it is not always easy to reconcile with one another even in points of great importance. In the case of Socrates, the chief of these reports are a caricature by the comic poet Aristophanes in his play The Clouds, which was first represented when Socrates was about fifty years old; a book of reminiscences (usually called the Memorabilia) written after the death of Socrates by the distinguished soldier Xenophon, the leader and historian of the famous retreat of the ten thousand Greek mercenaries in 401 B.C. from the Persian highlands to the sea; and the Dialogues of Plato. Plato, like Aristophanes and Xenophon and Socrates himself, was a native of Athens. As quite a young man he had become a disciple of Socrates, and when, in later life, he composed the wonderful presentations of philosophical arguments in dramatic form which have made him immortal, he introduced his old master into most of them as the chief interlocutor, putting into his mouth (as we cannot doubt) not only what Socrates himself had said or might have said, but also the results to which, though Socrates himself might not have recognized them, Plato himself had been led in following up the trains of reflection which the talk of Socrates had started in his mind.

Of these three reports, the earliest makes fun of Socrates as the centre of a rationalistic movement, which, to the old-fashioned Athenian conservatives whose mouthpiece the poet makes himself, seemed, in its encouragement of novel theories about the nature of the universe and of a reckless delight in clever argument, no matter how unrighteous the cause which it was used to support, to be fraught with the utmost danger to religion and morality. In sharp contrast with this, Xenophon presents us with the picture of one whose death robbed all lovers of virtue of their most helpful friend, a man pre-eminent for piety and self-control, an enemy to all idle speculations which did not tend to make men good householders and good citizens. The more elaborate picture drawn by Plato helps us to understand how these two very different portraits might recall the same man to those who knew him. In an age of intellectual ferment none could be more fittingly taken as the representative of the spiritual unrest than this man of extraordinary originality and force, the effects of whose conversation could be compared to the electric shock given by the torpedo-fish, and whose personality, rough and ungainly though he was, had so strange an attraction for the most brilliant of the Athenian youth who in talk with him learned to be dissatisfied with commonplace ambitions and conventional acquiescence in things as they were. Yet those who kept company with him knew that he was no unprincipled dealer in idle and startling paradoxes; that, in carrying on as he did a rigorous cross-examination of all pretenders to knowledge, under which the most noted representatives of “advanced thinking” in his day were made to seem mere plausible praters about things of which they were ignorant, he was inspired by the conviction of a divine mission; while the simplicity of his own life presented to the world a noble pattern of victorious self-control and cheerful freedom from the tyrannous wants that make the worldly man’s life a perpetual slavery. In Plato’s Socrates we find at once the revolutionary impulse, proceeding from an awakened spirit of intellectual adventure, which we miss in Xenophon’s; and the moral inspiration which it was not in accordance with the purpose of Aristophanes to include in his picture of the arch-corrupter of ingenuous youth.

It was as a corrupter of youth, and as one who denied his country’s gods, that Aristophanes presented Socrates upon the stage; and it was in the same character that in 399 B.C., when he was over seventy years old, he was accused and sentenced to die by the drinking of a cup of hemlock. Very likely, he would not have been so condemned had he, according to the custom allowed by Athenian law, admitted a measure of guilt, and proposed for himself some lesser, yet considerable, punishment instead of the capital penalty proposed by his prosecutors; for, although a poor man himself, he had wealthy disciples, who would gladly have paid a heavy fine on his behalf. Nay, had he consented to let his friends contrive his escape from prison, it is likely that it could have been effected without difficulty, and he could have spent the remnant of his days in a comfortable exile. But he would not admit that he had deserved any penalty; though under protest he so far yielded to his friends’ entreaty as to name a fine (of no great amount), he plainly said that the treatment which was really due to him was an honourable provision at the public expense as a benefactor to his country; and when, after this refusal to declare himself against his conscience to be anything but innocent, the death sentence was pronounced, he would not by evading it turn his back in his old age on the duty, which he had ever thought and practised, of filial submission to his country’s laws. Of the closing scenes of his life Plato has given us in his Apology, Crito, and Phædo a picture which, as a pattern of piety and courage in the presence of death, is one of the spiritual treasures of our race.

It would seem that neither of the two charges brought against him was true in its most obvious sense; but there was plausibility in both. What were the grounds alleged for the accusation of irreligion, we have no distinct information. But although, according to our evidence, religious nonconformity was no characteristic of Socrates, yet—even apart from probable failure in the popular mind (as in the Aristophanic caricature) to distinguish between various forms of the movement of free thought, of which Socrates was the most conspicuous figure, and the consequent attribution to him of a destructive rationalism with which he had little sympathy—his talk of a divine mission and of supernatural warnings peculiar to himself might well suggest that he was not content with the religion of his neighbours. Possibly also there were rumours of friendly relations existing between him and circles known to profess initiation in religious mysteries or secret rites unconnected with the State system of worship. As to the corruption of the youth, we may well believe, on the word of those who knew the facts, that the remarkable influence exercised over boys and young men by Socrates was one which made for righteousness and self-control, and yet admit that suspicion might naturally be aroused by the intimate association with him in their youth of men (such as Alcibiades and Critias) who had afterwards become notorious for the unscrupulousness and disloyalty of their political careers. Nor, indeed, can the dissatisfaction with the failings of his own state, which, loyal citizen as he was alike in his life and in his death, Socrates certainly felt and expressed, have counted for nothing in unsettling his disciples’ allegiance to the standards recognized by their fellow countrymen. It is noteworthy that, of his two chief apologists, Plato in many respects preferred to the constitution of Athens that of her rival Sparta, and Xenophon actually passed from the Athenian into the Spartan service.

There are few among the celebrated men of history with whose personal appearance and habits we are so well acquainted as with those of Socrates. Some reference to these is not out of place even in so brief a history of philosophy as this; for in his person Plato, the greatest of writing philosophers, saw incarnate the ideal of the philosophic life. The contrast between his ugly exterior and the nobility of his spirit profoundly impressed a people like the Athenians, who were peculiarly susceptible—and none more so than Socrates himself—to the charm which is added to intercourse with a beautiful soul when it is housed in a beautiful body. In a famous passage of Plato’s Banquet, Alcibiades compares his master to an image of the grotesque and pot-bellied satyr Silenus, which, when opened, is found to contain the beautiful figure of some god. The same dialogue gives us a vivid account of Socrates’ extraordinary powers of endurance and self-control, which enabled him to endure without defeat alike the utmost rigours of military service and the sharpest temptations of the flesh; to remain at the end of a drinking bout, in which he had by no means abstained from his share of the wine to which his companions had succumbed, as sober and clear-headed as ever; and during a campaign to meditate in complete abstraction from all surroundings through a whole winter’s day and night. This singular capacity of rising above the weaknesses of other men was united in Socrates with a social charm, a keen humour, a critical perspicacity, which made it impossible to disregard him as an inhuman ascetic or an unpractical dreamer. His imposing personality, unaided as it was by rank or wealth or beauty, presented philosophy to the world in her native dignity; and the would-be philosopher, whether attracted more by the “rigour of the game” of thinking things out, or by the desire to be independent of the changes and chances of this mortal life, could find either ideal exemplified in the great Athenian.

We have now to consider how it was that Socrates (as has been said) showed Plato the way out of the doubt of the very possibility of true knowledge into which he had been plunged by his assent to the doctrine of Heraclitus that all things were in a perpetual flux. We have seen that Socrates was contemporary with, and was regarded at Athens as representative of, a widespread rationalistic movement. The leaders of this movement were a class of men of whom we generally speak collectively as “the Sophists.” The word “sophist,” which we now use to signify a dishonest reasoner, meant properly no more than a professor of wisdom or knowledge. To his contemporaries, Socrates was himself a “sophist”; and it is as the arch-sophist that he is caricatured by Aristophanes. But the title was one which Socrates did not care to claim. To the possession of wisdom he made no pretensions, only to the love of it; when an enthusiastic disciple told him on the authority of the Delphic oracle that he was the wisest of men, he was seriously perplexed; and the constant cross-examination, to which he proceeded to devote himself, of all pretenders to wisdom that he could find, he represented as undertaken from a sense of religious duty, in order to satisfy himself as to the meaning of the God. The result of this cross-examination was a conviction that these pretenders knew no more than himself; and he concluded that he was, as the oracle had said, wiser than other men, not because he knew more, but because he was aware, as they were not, of his own ignorance. Further, it seemed to him that, even if one had possessed wisdom, it would have been wrong to make of it a means of worldly profit. The profession of it in this way by his contemporaries had led them to prefer popularity to thoroughness. Living by the applause of the public, they must needs say what the public liked. The Public itself was the great Sophist, in the bad sense which his disciple Plato probably learned from him to give to the word, and which it still bears, of one who loves gainful plausibility rather than the genuine truth, which makes men free indeed, but not rich. He himself charged no fees for his instructions, and remained a poor man to the end.

Hence, while the world at large took Socrates for a notable sophist, his followers came to regard him as the great antagonist of those who could properly be so called. These were men who, for the most part, had detached themselves from civil ties and wandered from place to place (unlike Socrates who, except on military service, never left Athens), gathering pupils who hoped to learn from them the arts of persuasion by which they might achieve success in their respective commonwealths. Men associated with their instructions the spread of a notion that the distinction between right and wrong was not natural and permanent, but merely conventional, so that (as seemed, indeed, to be the case in view of the great variety of customs obtaining in different places) what was right in one region was wrong in another, and what was wrong under one set of circumstances became right when they were changed. It appeared impossible any longer to identify (as simple old-fashioned folk were apt to do) right conduct with a particular set of customary or traditional rules of behaviour, without being brought up at once against exceptional cases, in which the rules would not hold. This disquieting criticism of familiar ways of thinking could not be permanently checked by refusing to consider these exceptional cases. It was the distinctive feature of Socrates’ teaching that he sought by further thinking and discussion to heal the hurt that thinking and discussion had done to simple faith in moral principles. This is right, or just, or brave here and now—that there and then—the other under those other circumstances. Well and good; but, if these statements are to have any meaning at all, right, just, brave must mean the same in each case. We may, for example, admire some man’s honesty on some particular occasion; yet we should readily admit that we might be mistaken as to his motives, and that a fuller acquaintance with them might make it plain that there was nothing to admire. I thought (we should say) that he was honest; but I fear I was mistaken. But we should resent the suggestion that we did not know what honesty was; and, if we did not, how could we recognize it or even mistakenly think that we recognized it, in the particular case before us? Hence our great business is to make clear to ourselves what we mean by these predicates (as they are called in logic, a science which owes much to these discussions)—right, just, brave and the rest—and to fix our meaning by a definition of each.