Chapter Eight The Breakdown in Philosophy and Science
The point was made in chapter 1 that to understand where we are today in our intellectual ideas and in our day-to-day lives (including our culture and political lives), we must trace three lines: the philosophic, the scientific, and the religious. We have done this through the preceding chapters and now have arrived at the era of modern man. As we go on to what I call The Breakdown, we will here consider the philosophic and scientific sides and their interrelation.
Alfred North Whitehead has remarked that the entire history of European philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. That goes too far. Nevertheless, Plato did understand something crucial—not only in theoretical thought but in practical life. He saw that if there are no absolutes, then the individual things (the particulars, the details) have no meaning. By particulars we mean the individual things which are about us. The individual stones on a beach are particulars. The molecules that make up the stones are particulars. The total beach is a particular. I am made up of molecules and the molecules are particulars. And I as an individual and you as an individual are particulars.
Plato understood that regardless of what kind of particulars one talks about, if there are no absolutes—no universal—then particulars have no meaning. The universal or absolute is that under which all the particulars fit—that which gives unity and meaning to the whole. We can apply this in language. Apples come in many varieties, but we do not verbalize each time by running through the names of all the varieties of apples. We sum them up by the word apples. Likewise, there are many kinds of pears, and we sum them up with the word pears. On a higher level of generality there are many other varieties of fruit. But again we do not run through all these, we simply say fruit.
The problem, however, is not only in language but in reality: What will unify and give meaning to everything there is? Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980), the French existential philosopher, emphasized this problem in our own generation. His concept was that a finite point is absurd if it has no infinite reference point. This concept is most easily understood in the area of morals. If there is no absolute moral standard, then one cannot say in a final sense that anything is right or wrong. By absolute we mean that which always applies, that which provides a final or ultimate standard. There must be an absolute if there are to be morals, and there must be an absolute if there are to be real values. If there is no absolute beyond man’s ideas, then there is no final appeal to judge between individuals and groups whose moral judgments conflict. We are merely left with conflicting opinions.
But it is not only that we need absolutes in morals and values; we need absolutes if our existence is to have meaning—my existence, your existence, Man’s existence. Even more profoundly, we must have absolutes if we are to have a solid epistemology (a theory of knowing—how we know, or how we know we know). How can we be sure that what we think we know of the world outside ourselves really corresponds to what is there? And in all these layers, each more profound than the other, unless there is an absolute these things are lost to us: morals, values, the meaning of existence (including the meaning of man), and a basis for knowing.
Non-Christian philosophers from the time of the Greeks until just before our modern period had three things in common. First, they were rationalists. That is, they assumed that man (though he is finite and limited) can begin from himself and gather enough particulars to make his own universals. Rationalism rejects any knowledge outside of man himself, especially any knowledge from God.
The second point they had in common was that they took reason seriously. They accepted the validity of reason—that the mind thinks in terms of antithesis. That is, with their minds people can come to the conclusion that certain things are true while certain other things are not true, that certain things are right in contrast to other things that are wrong. The first lessons in classical logic were: A is A, and A is not non-A.
Third, in addition to being rationalists who believed in the validity of reason, non-Christian philosophers prior to the eighteenth century also were optimistic. They thought they could and would succeed in their quest to establish by reason alone a unified and true knowledge of what reality is. When that happened, satisfying explanations would be on hand for everything people encountered in the universe and for all that people are and all that they think. They hoped for something which would unify all knowledge and all of life.
But three shifts came, and it was these shifts that made modern man what he is and our modern societies what they are. First, we will look at the shift in science, then the shift in philosophy, and later at the shift in theology. We have already seen that the Scientific Revolution rested on a Christian base. The early modern scientists believed in the concept of the uniformity of natural causes in an open system. God and man were outside the cause-and-effect machine of the cosmos, and therefore they both could influence the machine. To them all that exists is not one big cosmic machine which includes everything. The shift from modern science to what I call modern modern science was a shift from the concept of the uniformity of natural causes in an open system to the concept of the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system. In the latter view nothing is outside a total cosmic machine; everything which exists is a part of it.
Scientists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries continued to use the word God, but pushed God more and more to the edges of their systems. Finally, scientists in this stream of thought moved to the idea of a completely closed system. That left no place for God. But equally it left no place for man. Man disappears, to be viewed as some form of determined or behavioristic machine. Everything is a part of the cosmic machine, including people. To say this another way: prior to the rise of modern science (that is, naturalistic science, or materialistic science), the laws of cause and effect were applied to physics, astronomy, and chemistry. Today the mechanical cause-and-effect perspective is applied equally to psychology and sociology.
Notice especially that the scientists who gave birth to the earlier great breakthroughs of science would not have accepted this concept. It arose not because of that which could be demonstrated by science, but because the scientists who took this new view had accepted a different philosophic base. The findings of science, as such, did not bring them to accept this view; rather, their worldview brought them to this place. They became naturalistic or materialistic in their presuppositions.
The German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872) was an early exponent of a philosophy of materialism, as was German physician Ludwig Büchner (1824–1899), whose book Force and Matter (1855) went into twenty-one editions and was translated into all the major languages. It is of more than passing interest that Richard Wagner (1813–1883), the German composer of opera, was reading Feuerbach as early as 1848. Wagner at this period of his life was deeply influenced by Feuerbach, and it was Wagner who encouraged Ludwig II of Bavaria to read Feuerbach. Thus the work of Feuerbach had its influence not only in abstract thought but also on the arts and on the state. Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), a biologist at the University of Jena, wrote The Riddle of the Universe at the Close of the 19th Century (1899), and it became a best seller too. In this work Haeckel posited that matter and energy are eternal and also assumed that the human mind or soul is to be explained on the basis of materialism. He saw where this would lead and accepted that people have no freedom of will.
When people began to think in this way, there was no place for God nor for man as man. When psychology and social science were made a part of a closed cause-and-effect system, along with physics, astronomy, and chemistry, it was not only God who died. Man died. And within this framework love died. There is no place for love in a totally closed cause-and-effect system. There is no place for morals in a totally closed cause-and-effect system. There is no place for the freedom of people in a totally closed cause-and-effect system. Man becomes a zero. People and all they do become only a part of the machinery.
In the humanism of the High Renaissance, flowing on to maturity through the Enlightenment, man was determined to make himself autonomous. This flow continues, and by the time we come to modern modern science man himself is devoured: man as man is dead. Life is pointless, devoid of meaning.
Büchner and Haeckel had said that matter and energy are eternal. Now the worldview of materialism went on to try to explain man by the uniformity of cause and effect in a closed system. Charles Lyell (1797–1875), in his Principles of Geology (1830–1833), was the one who especially opened the door to this by emphasizing the uniformity of natural causes in the field of geology. His idea was that there were no forces in the past except those that are active now.
Charles Darwin (1809–1882) extended Lyell’s concepts to the origin of biological life (see ). In his book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859), Darwin set forth the concept that all biological life came from simpler forms by a process called “the survival of the fittest.” Questions still exist in regard to this concept. Darwinism, Neo-Darwinism, and reductionism all have their problems explaining how the processes they postulate actually work. There are statistical problems as well, as has been pointed out by Murray Eden (1920–2020) in the 1967 article “Heresy in the Halls of Biology—Mathematicians Question Darwin” (Scientific Research, November 1967). This problem was also dealt with in a more technical way in Eden’s article “Inadequacies of Neo-Darwinian Evolution as a Scientific Theory,” which appeared in Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution (1967). Statistical studies indicate that pure chance (randomness) could not have produced the biological complexity in the world out of chaos, in any amount of time so far suggested. “Has there been enough time for natural selection, as it is seen through the eyepieces of Darwinism or Neo-Darwinism to operate and give rise to the observed phenomena of nature? No, say these mathematicians.” In fact, we can go further; the study of statistics raises the question of whether pure chance could ever produce an ongoing increased complexity. If chance alone operates, why should that which exists (including biological structure) move toward a consistent increase of complexity?
Plate 44 Charles Darwin (1809–1882). “. . . problems explaining how the processes they postulate actually work.” Photo courtesy of the Bettmann Archive.
Most importantly, no one has yet shown how man could have been brought forth from non-man solely by time plus chance. This position ends either in man’s being made non-man, or in a sudden romantic explosion into a flood of words. For example, Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974) ends his book The Ascent of Man (1973) with such a romantic outpouring of sentences as: “We are nature’s unique experiment to make the rational intelligence prove itself sounder than the reflex. Knowledge is our destiny. Self-knowledge, at last bringing together the experience of the arts and the explanation of science, waits ahead of us.” The humanist thinkers, beginning from themselves autonomously, either come to the conclusion that there are no values and meaning or suddenly try to produce values and meaning out of rhetoric. Thus, there are problems of both the how and the why. The concept of an unbroken line from molecule to man, on the basis of only time plus chance, leaves these crucial questions of how and why unanswered.
Darwin’s idea was popularized by Thomas Huxley (1825–1895). Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), who actually coined the phrase “survival of the fittest,” extended the theory of biological evolution to all of life, including ethics. Spencer said, “The poverty of the incapable . . . starvation of the idle and those shoulderings aside of the weak by the strong . . . are the decrees of a large, far-seeing benevolence.” There was no necessity to extend biological evolution to “social Darwinism.” But it was natural for these men to do this because of their desire to find a unifying principle that would enable autonomous man to explain everything through naturalistic science, that is, on the basis of the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system. This had become the frame of reference by which they attempted to give unity to individual things, the particulars, to the details of the universe and to the history of man. In Physics and Politics: Or Thoughts on the Application of the Principles of Natural Selection and Inheritance to Political Science (1872), Walter Bagehot (1826–1877) went even further than Spencer in applying these concepts to the advance of groups. Thus these concepts opened the door for racism and the noncompassionate use of accumulated wealth to be sanctioned and made respectable in the name of “science.”
Later, these ideas helped produce an even more far-reaching yet logical conclusion: the Nazi movement in Germany. Heinrich Himmler (1900–1945), leader of the Gestapo, stated that the law of nature must take its course in the survival of the fittest. The result was the gas chambers. Hitler stated numerous times that Christianity and its notion of charity should be “replaced by the ethic of strength over weakness” (see ). Surely many factors were involved in the rise of National Socialism in Germany. For example, the Christian consensus had largely been lost by the undermining from a rationalistic philosophy and a romantic pantheism on the secular side, and a liberal theology (which was an adoption of rationalism in theological terminology) in the universities and many of the churches. Thus biblical Christianity was no longer giving the consensus for German society. After World War I came political and economic chaos and a flood of moral permissiveness in Germany. Thus, many factors created the situation. But in that setting the theory of the survival of the fittest sanctioned what occurred.
Plate 45 Adolf Hitler (1889–1945). “. . . the ethic of strength over weakness.” Photo courtesy of Radio Times London.
The Nazi movement was not the last result of this way of thinking. In a quieter way, and yet just as importantly, some of today’s advocates of genetic engineering use the same arguments to support the position that the weak should not be kept alive through medical advances to produce a weaker next generation. Rather, they argue, genetic engineering should be used to propagate the fittest. Humanism had set out to make man autonomous; but its results have not been what the advocates of humanism idealistically visualized.
Having seen the shift that came in science, let us now examine the shift that came in philosophy. We have already noted that the older philosophic views were optimistic, for they assumed that people would be able through reason alone to establish a unified and true knowledge of what reality is, and that when this happened they would have satisfying explanations for everything encountered in the universe and for all that people are and think.
The history of this train of non-Christian philosophers could be pictured like this: One man would say, “Here is a circle which will give the unified and true knowledge of what really is: 〇.” The next man would say, “No!” and cross out the circle: ⊗. Then he would say, “Here is the circle: 〇.” A third would say, “No!,” cross out that circle ⊗, and say, “Here is the circle: 〇.” And so on through the centuries. Each one showed that the previous philosophers had failed and then tried to construct his answer, which future thinkers would again show to be inadequate to contain all of knowledge and all of life.
The older philosophers did not find the circle, but they optimistically believed someone would. Then the line of crossed-out circles was broken, and a drastic shift came. It is this shift that causes modern man to be modern man.
Many scholars name René Descartes (1596–1650) as the father of modern philosophy, and no one should minimize his importance. Yet it seems to me that he should be placed among the older philosophers for two reasons. First, he was supremely confident that by human thought alone one could doubt all notions based on authority and could begin from himself with total sufficiency (“I think, therefore I am”). Second, he believed that mathematics would provide a unity—as a model—for all kinds of investigation. He was optimistic that mathematics and mathematical analysis, with careful deductions from these, would provide a factor which would give a unity to all knowledge. Philosophical thought is a flowing stream, and certainly Descartes had an important part in preparing for what was to follow; but in my opinion the shift came in the next century, the eighteenth.
Four men directed the shift from this older optimistic view to the modern outlook in which this optimistic hope is lost. The shift came because the humanistic ideal had failed. After all the centuries of suggested circles, the humanistic expectation of autonomous man’s providing a unity to all of knowledge and all of life had stalled. People had gone round and round variations of the same answers—like going around and around a large, dark, circular room looking for a way out—and it was slowly dawning on them that there was no exit. That realization came in the eighteenth century, and with it the stance of humanistic man changed from optimism to pessimism. He gave up the hope of a unified answer.
The relative importance of these four men is open to question, but when the influence of these four together (with the extensions made by their followers) had been exerted, the old optimism of a unified and true knowledge on the basis of reason alone was gone. This has had an enormous effect on Western culture and society, down to the simplest man in the street. The four crucial men were Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, George Wilhelm Hegel, and Søren Kierkegaard.
The first, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), was a French-speaking Swiss from Geneva. You will remember that the humanism of the High Renaissance ran into problems because, with man’s beginning only from himself, there is tension between the individual things, the particulars, and any meaning for them. We could think of it like this:
UNIVERSALS, which give meaning to the particulars
PARTICULARS, including each of us as a person
By the time of Rousseau, this humanist problem developed further. With Rousseau the same problem was worded differently and may be expressed like this:
AUTONOMOUS FREEDOM
AUTONOMOUS NATURE
There were two parts to this new formulation of the old humanist problem. First, there were those who were aware that in the area of reason people were increasingly coming to the place where everything was seen as a machine, even people. At the end of his life Leonardo da Vinci had foreseen that beginning humanistically with mathematics one has only particulars and will never come to universals or meaning, but will end only with mechanics. It took humanistic thought 250 years to arrive at the place which Leonardo had foreseen, but by the eighteenth century it had arrived. Everything is the machine, including people.
Second, Rousseau himself viewed the tension specifically at the point of society, political life, and culture. He viewed primitive man, “the noble savage,” as superior to civilized man. He wrote, “If man is good by nature, as I believe to have shown him to be, it follows that he stays like that as long as nothing foreign to him corrupts him.” He had a kind of “conversion” in 1749 when he concluded that the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on reason and the arts and sciences, had caused people to lose more than they had gained. So he gave up his faith in “progress.”
Rousseau and his followers began to play down reason, and they saw the restraints of civilization as evils: “Man was born free, but everywhere he is in chains!” Rousseau saw the primitive as innocent and autonomous freedom as the final good. We must understand that the freedom he advocated was not just freedom from God or the Bible but freedom from any kind of restraint—freedom from culture, freedom from any authority, an absolute freedom of the individual—a freedom in which the individual is the center of the universe.
Theoretically this individual freedom would be perfectly reflected in the “general will” through the social contract. The utopianism of this concept was shown by the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, during which the purification of the general will meant not only the loss of freedom for the individual but the reign of the guillotine. Actually, one did not have to wait for the Reign of Terror to see the problem. It was already in Rousseau’s own writing.
Rousseau’s concept of autonomous freedom clashed with his own presentation when he moved from the individual to society. In The Social Contract (1762) he writes, “In order that the social compact may not be an empty formula, it tacitly includes the undertaking, which alone can give force to the rest, that whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body. This means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free.” Once more a humanistic utopianism ends in tyranny, whether in Rousseau’s writing or in the Reign of Terror, which carried his position to its conclusion. Robespierre, the “King of the Terror,” was a doctrinaire disciple of Rousseau and rationalized his actions on Rousseau’s base. It is interesting to note in this relationship of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution to Rousseau that in Voltaire’s château in Ferney two life-sized statues stand perfectly balanced on the two sides of the main doorway—statues of Voltaire and Rousseau (see ).
Plate 46 The Voltaire and Rousseau statues in Voltaire’s family home at Ferney, France. “. . . two life-sized statues stand perfectly balanced on the two sides of the main doorway.” Photo by Mustafa Arshad.
Rousseau’s concept of freedom showed itself in many forms. For example, in his Confessions (1782) he argued that the best education is virtually the absence of education. This had an impact on the later education theories of self-expression which are influential in our own day. We all have our inconsistencies, but it must be mentioned that while he wrote much on education, Rousseau sent the five children born to his mistress off to orphanages. His concepts were as utopian personally as they proved to be politically. Rousseau’s influence was carried not only by his prose tracts but by the operas he composed. Le Devin du Village (1752) played an important role in forming the style of French opéra comique, while his later work Pygmalion (produced in 1775) laid the foundation for melodrama. With his cry of “Let us return to nature,” Rousseau exerted a lasting influence on the music of his time as well as on the new movements in writing and painting.
In Rousseau and Revolution (1967) by Will and Ariel Durant, Rousseau is portrayed as the most important influence on modern thought, and thus their book commences with him. In this instance I think they are correct. Rousseau had a profound effect on the thoughts and the lives of those who followed him. His thinking influenced that of our own day in many ways. For this reason I will spend more time on his concepts and influence than on Kant, Hegel, and Kierkegaard.
Rousseau’s concept of autonomous freedom led to the Bohemian ideal, in which the hero is the man who fights all of society’s standards, values, and restraints. Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924) gave this operatic expression in his most popular opera, La Bohème (1896). And in our own recent past this Bohemian ideal was a factor leading expressly to the genuine part of the hippie world of the 1960s.
But Rousseau did not stand alone. In Britain the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) was working at exactly the same time. He, too, criticized reason as a method of knowing truth and defended the centrality of human experience and feeling. In his criticism of reason as a method of knowing, Hume questioned the existence of the cause-and-effect concept itself. Hume had a wide influence both on British philosophy and on the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, whom we will discuss below.
Returning to those standing in the flow of Rousseau, we should consider the German poet-philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). Goethe equated nature and truth. Goethe did not just substitute nature for the Bible; for him nature was God. Here we have the vague pantheism which dominated so much of the stream of thinking at this time. Goethe became pantheistic in a conscious attempt to find a universal for all observed particulars in reality, even though those particulars were often contradictory. For example, the atrocities of the French Revolution were committed in an especially good wine year! In his naturalism—which took a vaguely pantheistic direction instead of an open materialism—Goethe romantically hoped to leave a place for man. As Goethe expressed it, nature is the ultimate sanction for all man’s judgments.
Influenced by Rousseau, romanticism was born in Germany with Goethe, Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805), and Gotthold Lessing (1729–1781). All three of these men were at first followers of the Enlightenment before they turned aside to follow Rousseau. Reason was the hero of the Enlightenment; emotion became the hero of romanticism. Schiller’s line, “All creatures drink in joy from nature’s breast,” aptly sums up this school of thought.
Beethoven (1770–1827) followed in this stream, carrying its expression into music. Beethoven’s music, more than that of any composer before him, gives the impression of being a direct outpouring of his personality. In it we already feel the emphasis of modern man on self-expression. Beethoven’s last quartets (1825–1826) opened the door to twentieth-century music.
The English romantic poets William Wordsworth (1770–1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) were in the same stream. Wordsworth found his values in man’s instincts rather than in learning. The English painter John Constable (1776–1837) not only painted the trees and clouds, but in some way related the nature he saw to a concept of the moral grandeur of the universe, thus echoing Wordsworth, who wrote in “The Tables Turned,”
One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.
It also echoes Rousseau’s concept of the noble savage: That which is “natural” is morally good.
The attempt to make nature the basis of morals was also taken into the area of civil law, where it was called the Natural Law School of Jurisprudence. Its influence is still strongly felt in jurisprudence. It was an attempt in this eighteenth-century period to have principles of law, “even if there is no God.” These jurists thought that a complete and perfect system of law could be constructed upon principles of natural law. But there was a serious problem in trying to construct a system of law upon nature. Nature is cruel as well as noncruel.
Consider the dilemma faced by Rousseau’s follower Gauguin (1848–1903), the French painter who, in his hunt for total freedom, deserted his family and went to Tahiti where he tried to find it in the noble savage. After he had lived in Tahiti for a while, he found that the ideal of the noble savage was illusory. In his last great painting—Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897), which hangs in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts—he showed that man in himself has no answer to the ultimate questions—and this applies as much to primitive man as to civilized man (see ). He painted the title directly on this painting so that no one could miss its meaning. He wrote about this painting as he was working on it, and he called it a philosophical work, comparable to the gospel.
Plate 47 Paul Gauguin, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, 1897, oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. “. . . he found that the ideal of the noble savage was illusory.” Photo courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
But what a “gospel”! In the picture is a primitive old woman dying. And Gauguin himself writes in a letter to Daniel de Montfreid, “Whither? Close to the death of an old woman, a strange stupid bird concludes: What? O sorrow, thou art my master. Fate how cruel thou art, and always vanquished. I revolt.” What he found in Tahiti (where he went to find the uninhibited freedom of man, which to Rousseau and Gauguin was the “ought”), turned out to be death and cruelty. When he finished this painting, he tried to commit suicide, though he did not succeed.
Or, to illustrate in another way the problem of taking nature as the moral standard, we can consider Marquis de Sade (1740–1814), who well understood the logical conclusion of this deification of nature. He knew that if nature is all, then what is is right, and nothing more can be said. The natural result of this was his “sadism,” his cruelty, especially to women. He wrote in La Nouvelle Justine (1791–1797): “As nature has made us (the men) the strongest, we can do with her (the woman) whatever we please.” There are no moral distinctions, no value system. What is is right. Thus there is no basis for either morals or law.
It was one thing for the Dutch Reformation painters rejoicingly to paint the simple things of life, for they painted in a framework which had two parts: first, the creation of nature by a personal and a good God; second, the present abnormality of nature because of the Fall. But it was quite another thing to take nature as it is now and make it the measure of goodness. For if nature as it exists is the standard for men to live by, cruelty becomes equal to noncruelty.
It should be said again that Rousseau’s concept of autonomous freedom ran head-on into a conclusion which was to become increasingly dominant as time went on. It became clear that those who held the rationalistic position on the sole basis of their own reason increasingly were forced to conclude that everything, including man, is a machine. But one could not hold simultaneously the concept of everything’s being a machine and the ideal of a person’s having freedom. Thus, the concept of a unified knowledge of what reality is (on the basis of reason alone)—which almost all previous thinkers had as their aspiration—was under great strain. By the time of Rousseau and his followers there was a tendency for the concepts (everything as a machine and man’s autonomous freedom) to split apart and go marching off in divergent directions.
The second of the four crucial men who directed the shift from the older optimistic view of philosophy to the modern outlook where hope is lost was the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). His books which were so important in the thought of his day and ever since are Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and Critique of Judgment (1790). He worded the problem of his age differently from Rousseau, but it is still the same problem:
NOUMENAL WORLD—the concepts of meaning and value
PHENOMENAL WORLD—the world which can be weighed and measured, the external world, the world of science
Kant also tried to keep these two worlds together. In fact, much of the three books mentioned tried to solve this problem (this is especially so in Critique of Judgment), but he, like Rousseau, never found any way to produce unity. With his work, the hope of a unified knowledge was on the threshold of splitting into two parts, neither having a relationship with the other. The humanist dilemma which arose in the Renaissance—of the individual things, the particulars, versus meaning and values—was now ready to explode. There was no way beginning from man alone to bring the noumenal and phenomenal worlds together.
Romanticism, which had begun with the followers of Rousseau, now developed further with a strengthened desire to believe in something—to escape—even if to do so necessitated giving up the old non-Christian philosophers’ hope that people starting from themselves could by their reason find a unified answer to everything.
The third of the four significant men was another German, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). His most important books are The Phenomenology of Mind (1807), Science of Logic (1812–1816), Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1817), and Philosophy of Right (1821). From his writings it is clear that he understood the need for unity between the noumenal and phenomenal worlds. He struggled with this in a complex series of religious concepts, but he left us in reality only a flow of religious words. We can think of his words as given us by Walter Kaufmann (1921–1980) in his book Hegel: Reinterpretation, Texts, and Commentary (1965): “Not the Concept but the ecstasy, not the coldly progressing necessity of the subject matter but fermenting enthusiasm is held to be the best attitude and guide to the spread-out riches of the substance.”
Hegel’s intricate system puts great emphasis on the centrality of the state and the flow of history. In The Universe Next Door (1976), James W. Sire (1933–2018) summarizes Frederick Copleston’s (1907–1994) study of Hegel in Volume 7 of A History of Philosophy (1963). This summary is so succinct that I will quote it, insofar as Copleston’s treatment is too lengthy to quote in full:
According to Hegel, the universe is steadily unfolding and so is man’s understanding of it. No single proposition about reality can truly reflect what is the case. Rather, in the heart of the truth of a given proposition one finds its opposite. This, where recognized, unfolds and stands in opposition to the thesis. Yet there is truth in both thesis and antithesis, and when this is perceived a synthesis is formed and a new proposition states the truth of the newly recognized situation. But this in turn is found to contain its own contradiction and the process goes on ad infinitum. Thus the universe and man’s understanding of it unfolds dialectically. In short the universe with its consciousness—man—evolves.
The result is that all possible particular positions are indeed relativized. While it is an oversimplification of Hegel’s complete position, this has led to the idea that truth is to be sought in synthesis rather than antithesis. Instead of antithesis (that some things are true and their opposite untrue), truth and moral rightness will be found in the flow of history, a synthesis of them. This concept has not only won on the other side of the Iron Curtain; it has won on this side as well. Today not only in philosophy but in politics, government, and individual morality, our generation sees solutions in terms of synthesis and not absolutes. When this happens, truth, as people had always thought of truth, has died.
The last of the four crucial men was Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), a Dane. He wrote both devotional and philosophical books. The later include Either/Or (1843), Philosophical Fragments (1844), and The Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846). There can and will be a continuing discussion among scholars as to whether the secular and religious thinkers who built on Kierkegaard did him justice. However, what in these can be called secular and religious Kierkegaardianism did bring to full tide the notion that reason will always lead to pessimism. That is, one must try to find optimistic answers in regard to meaning and values on an “upper level” outside of reason. Through a “leap of faith” one must try to find meaning without reason.
You will remember that in the High Renaissance, humanistic man, starting only from himself, had problems concerning the meaning or value of things and of absolutes for morals. With Rousseau it became an AUTONOMOUS FREEDOM/AUTONOMOUS NATURE problem. With Kant it was NOUMENAL WORLD/PHENOMENAL WORLD. With Kierkegaardianism it went a step further and now became:
NONREASON = FAITH/OPTIMISM
REASON = PESSIMISM
So optimism will now always be in the area of nonreason.
Modern man is a man of dichotomy. By dichotomy we mean a total separation into two reciprocally exclusive orders, with no unity or relationship between them. The dichotomy here is the total separation between the area of meaning and values, and the area of reason. Reason leading to despair must be kept totally separate from the blind optimism of nonreason. This makes a lower and an upper story, with the lower story of reason leading to pessimism and men trying to find optimism in an upper story devoid of reason. At this point the older, rationalistic thinkers (with their optimistic hope of maintaining unity between the world of reason and that of meaning and values) were left behind. This is the mark of modern man.
In our day, humanistic reason affirms that there is only the cosmic machine, which encompasses everything, including people. To those who hold this view, everything people are or do is explained by some form of determinism, some type of behaviorism, some kind of reductionism. The terms determinism or behaviorism indicate that everything people think or do is determined in a machinelike way and that any sense of freedom or choice is an illusion. In one form of reductionism, man is explained by reducing him to the smallest particles which make up his body. Man is seen as being only the molecule or the energy particle, more complex but not intrinsically different.
I have never heard this expressed more clearly than when I was lecturing in Acapulco, Mexico. George Wald (1906–1997), a chemistry professor from Harvard University, was also there lecturing to the same group. He expressed with great force the modern concept that all things, including man, are merely the product of chance. After he had stressed over and over again that all things, beginning from the molecule and ending with man, are only a product of chance, he said, “Four hundred years ago there was a collection of molecules named Shakespeare which produced Hamlet.” According to these theories, that is all that man can be. Man beginning with his proud, proud humanism, tried to make himself autonomous, but rather than becoming great, he had found himself ending up as only a collection of molecules—and nothing more.
All this is related to the question of origins: What was the beginning of everything? Ultimately, there are not many possible answers to this question. First, we could say that everything came from nothing—that is, from really nothing, what I call nothing-nothing. This means that once there was no mass, no energy, no motion, and no personality. This is theoretically a possibility, but I have never heard anyone hold this view, for it seems to be unthinkable. It follows that if we do not hold that everything has come of nothing-nothing, then something has always existed.
Second, there is the possibility of a personal beginning—that everything else was made by a personality who could bring forth the universe (the space-time continuum) when it had not existed previously in any form. This is not out of nothing-nothing, but the personality would have existed previously.
Third, there is the possibility of an impersonal beginning—that some form of the impersonal has existed forever, even if in a form vastly different from that which we now know. This idea of an impersonal beginning has many variations, including the use of the word God to mean the ultimate impersonal, as in the case of pantheism. A more accurate word than pantheism to describe this position is pan-everythingism. The word pantheism slips in the connotation of personality, even though, by definition, the concept excludes it. In much modern thought, all begins with the impersonality of the atom or the molecule or the energy particle, and then everything—including life and man—comes forth by chance from that.
This is really very curious because Louis Pasteur (1822–1895), the French chemist, demonstrated the impossibility of the then-accepted concept of the spontaneous generation of life—that is, life springing from nonliving things. Pasteur showed in 1864 that if the nonliving things were pasteurized, then life could not come forth. In other words, what was previously considered spontaneous generation of life from nonliving things was mistaken—life always came from living things. When pasteurization killed all the elements of life, life never came forth from the nonliving things. But then the men of that same era returned to the concept of the spontaneous generation of life by adding a new factor: long reaches of time.
This equation of the impersonal plus time plus chance producing the total configuration of the universe and all that is in it, modern people hold by faith. And if one does in faith accept this, with what final value is he left? In his lecture at Acapulco, George Wald finished with only one final value. It was the same one with which English philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) was left. For Wald and Russell and for many other modern thinkers, the final value is the biological continuity of the human race. If this is the only final value, one is left wondering why this then has importance.
Now having traveled from the pride of man in the High Renaissance and the Enlightenment down to the present despair, we can understand where modern people are. They have no place for a personal God. But equally they have no place for man as man, or for love, or for freedom, or for significance. This brings a crucial problem. Beginning only from man himself, people affirm that man is only a machine. But those who hold this position cannot live like machines! If they could, there would have been no tensions in their intellectual position or in their lives. But even people who believe they are machines cannot live like machines, and thus they must “leap upstairs” against their reason and try to find something which gives meaning to life, even though to do so they have to deny their reason.
This was a solution Leonardo da Vinci and the men of the Renaissance never would have accepted, even if, like Leonardo, they ended their thinking in despondency. They would not have done so, for they would have considered it intellectual suicide to separate meaning and values from reason in this way. And they would have been right. Such a solution is intellectual suicide, and one may question the intellectual integrity of those who accept such a position when their starting point was pride in the sufficiency of human reason.