The Story of Philosophy

May 17, 2025·
Chia-Lun Tsai
Chia-Lun Tsai
· 45 min read

I’ve been reading this book for six months and finally finished it. This book introduces many of the most important Western philosophers and has given me much more complete understanding of the development of Western philosophy.

I’ve found that the chapters I read often influence how I view my daily life. For example, when I was reading Plato, I found aristocracy very compelling and tend to interpret things through that lens. When I got to Kant, I became more aware of the limits of reason and found myself more able to appreciate emotional experiences. I think this shows how important personal interests can be (maybe?)

This book has accompanied me through a major transition period in my life. I’m grateful that I took the time to read it – it has helped me keep moving forward amid all the noise and chaos.

Everyone is multifaceted, and so are philosophers. Each of them has different views on different topics, so this note may seem a bit scattered. I’ve selected what I believe to be the most representative sentences from each philosopher. The words are here, and the deeper insights are left for the reader to discover.

1. Plato

  • Importance
    • The father of European philosophy
    • The republic, Laws
  • Equal education, strengthen body
  • Politics
    • Philosopher rules (aristocracy)
    • Guardians, soldiers and normal people
      • Filtering through education
      • Guardians rules
      • soldiers protect country
        • both of guardians and soldiers have no self property, communism-like
      • others have self property
  • Justice is the effective harmony of whole
  • Criticism
    • Loves order exclusively, lacks flux and change, want to arrange everything

2. Aristotle

  • Background
    • Alexander’s teacher
    • Unstable political environment in his late
  • Achievements
    • introduced logic, which is the art and method of correct thinking.
    • definition: 1.put into a group shared general characteristics 2. point out differ parts
    • syllogism (major premise, minor premise, conclusion)
  • Science
    • Before Aristotle, science is more like theology, the Greeks used supernatural power to explain the unexplainble operations of nature
    • Abandon the ideas of predecessors
    • Started biology and embryology
  • Metaphysics
    • Grew out of his biology
    • Anything wants to become something greater than it is
    • God: do nothing because god is perfect and is the essence of things
  • Psychology
    • Immortal soul is “pure thought”
  • Ethics
    • Happiness is the most important
    • Can achieve through “Golden Mean” and friendship
  • Politics
    • Criticize Plato’s communism “when people owns everything no one will take care of anything”
    • Look down manual labor and hope everything can work by its own
    • Man should marriage younger woman for reproducability
    • Men need learn virtue, or will be the most unholy and savage animals
    • Constitutional government is the mean of democracy and aristocracy (golden mean again!)
  • Criticism
    • Insistence on logic
    • But no other mind had for so long time ruled the intellectual mankind
  • Works
    • Organon

3. Francis Bacon

  • Background
    • “the most powerful mind of modern times”
    • Criticized Aristotelian philosophy (scholastic tradition), more aligned with Epicurus and Lucretius in materialistic views
    • Went to politics
  • The Essays
    • ends the scholaticism, which divorces knowledge from use and observations, and emphasis on experience and results
    • showed his love between politics and philosophy
    • moral
      • doesn’t admire contemplative life
      • advises a judicious mixture of dissimulation with honesty, like an alloy that will make the purer but softer metal capable of longer life
      • believe all religions
      • value friendship more than love
      • young should create, old should govern
    • politics
      • wants strong central power
      • avoid revolution: distribute of wealth
  • The great reconstruction
    • The advancement of learning
      • Nature cannot be commanded except being obeyed
      • Attaches great importance to physiology and medicine, invented social psychology
      • Government should help fund universities to research and organize research
    • The New Organon
      • Renew philosophy: destroy the Idols of the mind
      • Fallacies of Aristotle’s methods (Organon)
        • Idols of the Tribe: fallacies natural to humanity in general
        • Idols of the Cave: errors peculiar to the individual man
        • Idols of the Marketplace: from the commerce and association of men with one another
        • Idols of the Theatre: various dogmas of philosophers and wrong laws of demonstration
      • Induction
        • must include a technique for the classification of data and the elimination of hypotheses
        • by the progressive canceling of possible explanations one only shall at last remain
    • The Utopia of Science
      • Written in “New Atlantis”
      • People guided in peace and modest plenty by their wisest men
      • “The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bound of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.”
  • Criticism
    • Not correct in current science, we uses “hypothesis, deduction, and experiment”, he ignores the importance of hypothesis
    • But Bacon become the model of English Royal Society and French Enlightenment

4. Spinoza

  • Background
    • Portugese-Jewish, grow up in Holland
    • Studied Bruno (all reality is one in substance), and Descartes (a homogeneous “substance” underlying all forms of matter, and another in mind)
    • Excommunicated by Amsterdam synagogue of Jews
    • Died at 44 years old
  • The Treatise on Religion and the State (Tractatus Theologico-Politicus)
    • God and the processes of nature are the one
  • The Improvement of the Intellect
    • Mode of life for pursuing truth
      • Speak comprehensible to the people, do for them everything not preventing us from attaining our ends
      • Only enjoy pleasures helps to our health
      • Seek only enough money for life and health, comply customs not opposed to what we seek
    • In series of mutable things (temporal order), eternal things (eternal order) must be find, and without eternal things, mutable things won’t exist
  • The Ethics
    • Nature and God
      • “All is in God; all lives and moves in God”
      • Good and bad are relative to the human and often individual tastes and ends, and have no validity for a universe in which individuals are ephemera.
      • “The mind of God is all the mentality that is scattered over space and time, the dffused consciousness that animates the world.”
    • Matter and Mind
      • There is but one entity, seen now inwardly as mind, now outwardly as matter, but in reality an inextricable mixture and unity of both.
      • Mind and body do not act upon each other, because they are not other, they are one.
      • Will (should be called desire) is the very essence of man. (“Each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being.” (Ethics, III, Prop. 6))
      • Pleasure and pain are not the causes of our desires, but their results; we do not desire things because they give us pleasure, but they give us pleasure because we desire them.
      • There is no free will. The necessities of survival determine instinct, instinct determines desire, and desire determines thought and action.
    • Intelligence and Morals
      • Happiness (幸福) is the goal of conduct, which is the presence of pleasure and the absence of pain.
      • Pleasure is a transition from lesser state of “perfection/completeness/fulfillment” to greater, and pain is from greater to lesser.
      • “By virtue and power I mean the same thing.” A virtue is a power of acting, a form of ability. The more a man can preserve his being and seek what is useful to him, the greater is his virtue.
      • “He who repents is twice unhappy and doubly weak.”
      • To hate is to acknowledge our inferiority and our fear; we do not hate a foe whom we are confident we can overcome.
      • Passion without reason is blind, reason without passion is dead.
      • “The endeavor to understand is the first and only basis of virtue.” And in the end there is no virtue but intelligence.
      • To be a superman is to be free not from the restraints of social justice and amenity, but from the individualism of the instincts.
      • To be great is not to be placed above humanity, ruling others, but to stand above the partialities and futilities of uninformed desire, and to rule one’s self. (“A free man is he who lives under the guidance of reason alone.” (Ethics, IV, Prop. 67))
      • Determinism makes for a better moral life, fortifies us to expect and to bear both faces of fortune with an equal mind; we remember all things follow by the eternal decrees of God.
    • Religion and Immortality
      • The greatest good is the knowledge of the union which the mind has with the whole nature.
      • Blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself. And perhaps immortality is not the reward of clear thinking, it is clear thought itself.
      • All excellent things (here means the freedom of the mind) are as difficult as they are rare.
  • The Political Treatise
    • Imperfect draft of his thought, while writing the chapter on democracy he died.
    • All political philosophy must grow out of a distinction between the natural and the moral order.
    • Part of the individual’s natural might, or sovereignty, is handed over to the organized community, in return for the enlargement of the sphere of his remaining powers.
    • Freedom is the goal of the state because the function of the state is to promote growth, and growth depends on capacity finding freedom.
    • Laws against free speech are subversive of all law; for men will not long respect laws which they may not criticize.
    • Supports democracy, universal military service, single tax
    • Equality of power is a unstable condition; men are by nature unequal; “he who seeks equality between unequals seeks an absurdity.”
  • The influence of Spinoza
    • “Spinoza did not seek to found a sect, and he found none”; yet all philospohy after him is permeated with his thought.
    • Although Hegel objected Spinoza’s system, he still said “to be a philosopher one must be a Spinozist.”
    • After death, his name was held in abhorrence; it was Lessing restored him to repute

5. Voltaire and the French Enlightenment

  • Wrote Œdipe at Paris, had immediate success, established his reputation
  • Spent time in London, studied Isaac Newton and political institutions
  • Written romances (Micromegas, Zadig, etc.) while living at Cirey with his lover
  • Went to Potsdam to serve Frederick the Great, but was later expelled from Prussia and exiled by France, so moved to Geneva (Les delices)
  • Published The Essay on Morals, laid the basis of modern historical science
  • Wrote “Candide” at Ferney, countering Lebniz’s “all is for the best” philosophy and Rousseau’s reply to the Lisbon earthquake
  • Took part in writing the Encyclopédie and wrote Philosophical Dictionary, feeling “I did not know at all”. We should calculate, weigh, measure, observe, this is natural philosophy.
  • Witnessed religious presecution, said “Ecrasez l’infame”, combat religious fanaticism
  • Rejected atheism, had reasoned toward Spinozist pahtheism but then recoils from it as almost atheism, and in later days he began to put more store on happiness and life than on truth.
  • “The theist is a man firmly persuaded of the existence of a supreme being as good as he is powerful, who has formed all things…; who punished, without cruelty, all crimes, and recompenses with goodness all virtuous actions. To do good is his worship; to submit to God is his creed.” It is the simple worship of a God preceded all the systems of the world.
  • Not interested in forms of government, almost indifferent to nationalities, distrusts common people, and think war is the greatest of all crimes.
  • Voltaire believed in reason, while Rousseau desired action; Voltaire thought Rousseau’s idea were terrible, but said “I do not agree with a word that you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
  • “He gave the human mind a great impetus; he prepared us for freedom.”

6. Immanuel Kant and German Idealism

  • (this chapter is hard)

  • Roads to Kant

    • Background
      • His philosophy dominated the thought of nineteenth century.
      • “Critique of Pure Reason” is his most significant work
        • Schopenhauer: “the most important work in German literature”
    • From Voltaire to Kant
      • Voltaire means the Enlightment, the Encyclopedia, the Age of Reason
      • Spinoza: universe was a mathematical system
      • Should we dealing out death so lavishly to every ancient hope?
    • From Locke to Kant
      • John Locke: matter must be the material of mind (only material)
      • George Berkeley: All matter is a mental condition (kill material, only mind exists)
      • David Hume: “There is no mind, we perceive merely separate ideas, memories, feelings, etc.” “We never perceive causes, or laws, we perceive events and sequences, and ==infer== causation and neccesity.” (kill mind)
      • Were both science and faith to be surrendered to the sceptic?
    • From Rousseau to Kant
      • Rousseau: Instinct and feeling are more trustworthy than reason.
      • Why should we not trust in instinct here, rather than yield to the despair of an arid scepticism?
    • Kant
      • Put these threads of argument together
      • To save religion from reason, and at the same time to save science from scepticism.

  • Kant Himself

    • Born at Konigsberg, Prussia, 1724
    • Wrote books about pedagogy, physics, anthropology
    • Profoundly influenced by his favorite enemy, Hume
    • “The Philosopher’s walk”: half-past-three o’clock every day

  • The Critique of Pure Reason

    • Background
      • Not attacking “pure reason”, but to show its limitations
      • Question: “What we can hope to achieve with reason, when all the material and assistance of experience are taken away?”
      • Answer: “For the mind of man is not passive wax upon which experience and sensation write their absolute and yet whimsical will; nor is it a mere abstract name for the series or group of mental states; it is an active organ which moulds and coordinates sensations into ideas, an organ which transforms the chaotic multiplicity of experience into the ordered unity of thought.”
    • Transcendental Esthetic
      • Esthetic: sensation or feeling
      • Sensation: the awareness of a stimulus
      • Perception: various sensations group themselves about an object in space and time
      • From sensation to thought: two stages
        • First stage: the coordination of sensations through space and time – perception
        • Second stage: the application of the “categories” of thought to perceptions – conception
      • Space and time are not things perceived, but modes of perception, ways of putting sense into sensation; space and time are organs of perception and they are ==a priori==.
      • Is causality too a priori? (Yes, below)
    • Transcendental Analytic
      • Just as perceptions arranged sensations around objects in space and time, so conception arranges perceptions (objects and events) about the ideas of cause, unity, reciprocal relation, necessity, contigency, etc; these and other “categories” are the structure into which perceptions are received, and by which they are classified and moulded into the ordered concepts of thought. These are the very essence and character of the mind; mind is the coordination of experience.
      • Sensation is unorganized stimulus, perception is organized sensation, conception is organized perception, science is organized knowledge, wisdom is organized life: each is a greater degree of order, and sequence, and unity.
      • Locke: “There is nothing in the intellect except what was first in the senses.” Leibnitz: “Nothing, except the intellect itself.” Kant: “Perceptions without conceptions are blind.”
      • The laws of thought are also the laws of things, for things are known to us only through this thought that must obey these laws, since it and they are one.
    • Transcendental dialectic
      • This highest generalizations of logic and science is limited and relative: limited strictly to the field of actual experience, and relative strictly to our human mode of experience.
      • The “thing-in-itself” maybe an object of thought or inference (a “noumenon”), but it cannot be experienced,–for in being experienced it would be changed by its passage through sense and thought.
      • Schopenhauer: “Kant’s greatest merit is the distinction of the phenomenon from the thing-in-itself.”
      • The understanding can never go beyond the limits of sensibility.
        • Transcendental science: antinomies (e.g. The world has a beginning vs. The world is eternal)
        • Transcendental theology: paralogisms
    • Summary
      • Try to save the absoluteness of science and the essential truth of religion
      • Instead, destroyed the naive world of science and limited it; argued that religion could never be proved by reason (or “saved”?)

  • The critique of Practical Reason

    • If religion cannot be based on science and theology, on what then? On morals.
    • The moral imperative which we need as the basis of religion must be an absolute, a categorical imperative.
    • It is the categorical imperative in us, the unconditional command of our conscience, to “act as the maxim of our action were to become by our will a universal law of nature”.
    • The only thing unqualifiedly good in this world is a good will–the will to follow the moral law, regardless of profit or loss for ourselves. But in reality, not every villain is punished, and not every act of virtue is rewarded. So we postulate the existence of God and an afterlife to ensure that moral order ultimately prevails.
    • Our reason leaves us free to believe that behind the thing-it-itself there is a just God; our moral sense commands us to believe it.

  • On Religion and Reason

    • The external beauty of nature is not a conclusive proof of Providence.
    • Since religion must be based not on the logic of theoretical reason, but on the practical reason of the moral sense, it follows that any Bible or relevation must be judged by its value for morality, and cannot itself be the judge of a moral code.
    • Criticized the church for becoming an instrument in the hands of the government

  • On Politics and Eternal Peace

    • “Without qualities of an unsocial kind, men might have led an Arcadian shepherd life in complete harmony, contentment, and mutual love; but in that case all their talents would have forever remained hidden in the germ.”
    • Rejects war, militarism, and imperialism; advocates republic
    • Called equality: not of ablilty, but of opportunity for the development and application of ability.

  • Criticism and Estimate

    • Critics
      • Modern physics said time and space are forms of perception
      • All science, even the most rigorous mathematics, is relative in its truth.
      • Morals are not absolute; they are a code of conduct more or less haphazardly developed for group survival, and varying with the nature and circumstances of the group.
    • Estimate
      • Greatest achievement: have shown the external world is known to us only as sensation, and that the mind is no mere the inactive victim of sensation, but a positive agent, selecting and reconstruction experience as experience arrives.
      • The marvel in Kant’s philosophy is his vigurous revival, in the second Critique, of those religious ideas of God, freedom, and immortality, which the first Critique had apparently destroyed.
      • “The Critique of Pure Reason has been proclaimed by the dogmatists as the attempt of a sceptic who undermines the certainty of all knowledge; by the sceptics as a piece of arrogant presumption that undertakes to erect a new form of dogmatism upon the ruins of previous systems; by the supernaturalists as a subtly plotted artifice to displace the historical foundations of religion, and to establish naturalism without polemic; by the naturalists as a new prop for the dying philosophy of faith; by the materialists as an idealistic contradiction of the reality of matter; by the spiritualists as an unjustifiable limitation of all reality to the corporeal world, concealed under the name of the domain of experience.” In truth the glory of the book lay in its appreciation of all these points of view; and to an intelligence as keen as Kant’s own, it might well appear that he had really reconciled them all, and fused them into such a unity of complex truth as philosophy had not seen in all its history before.
      • Philosophy will never again be so naive as in her earlier and simpler days; she must always be different hereafter, and profounder, because Kant lived.

  • A note on Hegel

    • His work is confusing and complicated when it should be clear and direct
    • The most pervasive of “categories” from Kant is Relation; every idea is a group of relations; we can think of something only by relating it to something else, and perceving its similarities and its differences.
    • Of all relations, the most universal is that of contract or opposition. Every condition of thought or of things–every idea and every situation in the world–leads irresistibly to its opposite, and then unites with it to form a higher or more complex whole.
    • His “dialectical movement” followed old thought of Aristotle “golden mean”
    • No condition is permanent; in every stage of things there is a contradiction which only the “strife of opposities” can resolve
    • He began to think of the Hegelian system as part of the natural laws of the world; he forgot that his own dialectic condemned his thought to impermanence and decay

7. Schopenhauer

  • The Age

    • Poets and composers in the first half of 19th century were pessimistic, also Schopenhauer
    • France & Europe: Napoleon had been defeated, the Bourbon monarchy was restored, adn war left scars of ravage on the face of every country
    • England: workers lived in poor conditions
    • It was hard to believe the planet in 1818 was held in the hand of an intelligent and benevolent God. Was it the vengeance of a just God in the Age of Reason and unbelief?
    • Some people turned back to God, but some others – including Schopenhauer – think that the chaos of Europe reflected the chaos of the universe, that there was no divine order after all, nor ant heavenly hope; that God, if God there was, was blind, and Evil brooded over the face of the earth.

  • The Man

    • Born at Danzig, 1788
    • Had no mother (bad relationship), no wife, no child, no family, no country
    • His masterpiece is “The World as Will and Idea(Representation)(Presentation)”, didn’t get recognized until his later age

  • The World as Representation

    • The book was rejected partly because it attacked the university teachers, who could have given it publicity. (Hegel)
    • Attacked materialism: we can’t explain mind as matter when we know matter only through mind.
    • It is impossible to solve the metaphysical puzzle, to discover the secret essence of reality, by examining matter first, and then proceeding to examine thought: we must begin with that which we know directly and intimately – ourselves. “We can never arrive at the real nature of things from without. However much we may investigate, we can never reach anything but images and names.”
    • If we can ferret out the ultimate nature of our own minds we shall perhaps have the key to the external world.

  • The World as Will

    • The will to Live
      • Almost without exception, philosophers have placed the essence of mind in thought and consciousness.
      • However, consciousness is the mere surface of our minds. Under the conscious intellect is the conscious or unconscious will, a striving, persistent vital force, a spontaneous activity, a will of imperious desire.
      • We do not want a thing because we have found reasons for it, we find reasons for it because we want it; we even elaborate philosophies and theologies to cloak our desires.
      • The will is the only permanent and unchangeable element in the mind; it is the will which gives unity to consciousness and holds together all its ideas and thoughts, accompanying them like a continuous harmony.
      • The agitated strife of men for food, mates, or childres is from will; character lies in the will; even the body is the product of the will; the intellect tires, the will never.
      • The will is a will to live, and a will to maximum life; and its eternal enemy is death. But perhaps it can defeat even death? (It can, by reproduction)
    • The will to Reproduce
      • Every normal organism hastens, at maturity, to sacrifice itself to the task of reproduction. Reproduction is the ultimate purpose of every organism, and its strongest instinct; for only so can the will conquer the death.
      • Youth without beauty has still always attraction; beauty without youth has none.
      • In every case of falling in love, what alone is looked to is the production of an individual of a definite nature, is premarily confirmed by the fact that the essential matter is not the reciprocation of love, but possession.
      • Only in space and time do we seem to be separate beings; and space and time are illusion hiding the unity of things. In reality there is only the species, only life, only will. “To understand clearly that the individual is only the phenomenon, not the thing-in-itself”, to see in “the constant change of matter the fixed permanence of form,” – this is the essence of philosophy.
      • The alternation of death and reproduction is as the pulsebeat of the species. Throughout and everywhere the true symbol of nature is the circle, because it is the schema or type of recurrence.
      • Will as a whole is free, for there is no other will beside it that could limit it; but each part of the universal Will – each species, each organism, each organ – is irrevocably determined by the whole (we get the inescapable reality of determinism).

  • The world as evil

    • If the world is will, it must be a world of suffering, because will itself indicates want, and its grasp is always greater than its reach.
    • Life is evil because pain is its basic stimulus and reality, and pleasure is merely a negative cessation of pain. Aristotle was right: the wise man seeks not pleasure, but freedom from care and pain. The better is enemy of the good.
    • Life is evil because “as soon as want and suffering permit rest to a man, ennui(boredom) is at once so near that he necessarily requires diversion,” – i.e., more suffering. “Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and ennui.”
    • Life is evil because the higher the organism the greater the suffering. The growth of knowledge is no solution.
    • Finally, and above all, live is evil because life is war. Every species fights for the matter, space, and time of the others.
    • The total picture of life is almost too painful for contemplation; life depends on our not knowing it too well. “After its attainment he was no better off than before.” To be happy, one must be as ignorant as youth.
    • The fear of death is the beginning of philosophy and the final cause of religion. Just as theology is a refuge from death, so insanity is a refuge from pain. We can survive certain experiences or fears only by forgetting them.
    • The final refuge is suicide, but it is a vain and foolish act, for the thing-in-itself – the species, and life, and will in general – remains unaffected. Misery and strife continue after the death of the individual, and must continue, so long as will is dominant in man.

  • The wisdom of life

    • Philosophy
      • A life devoted to the acquisition of wealth is useless unless we know how to turn it into joy, and this is an art that requires culture and wisdom. Not wealth but wisdom is the way.
      • Knowledge, though born of will, may yet master the will. This power of the intellect over the will permits of deliberate development; desire can be moderated or quieted by knowledge; and above all by a determinist philosophy which recognizes everything as the inevitable result of its antecedents.
      • So philosophy purifies the will. But philosophy is to be understood as experience and thought, not as mere reading or passive study. Two counsels: Life before books; Text before commentary.
      • The happiness which we receive from ourselves is greater that that which we obtain from our surroundings. Aristotle is right: “To be happy means to be self-sufficient.”
      • Most men never rise above viewing things as objects of desire – hence their misery; but to see things purely as objects of understanding is to rise to freedom.
    • Genius
      • Genius is simply the completest objectivity – mostly knowledge and little will.
      • Hence the unsociability of the genius; he is thinking of the fundamental, the universal, the eternal; others are thinking of the temporary, the specific, the immediate; his mind and theirs have no common ground, and never meet.
      • The man of genius has his compensations, and doesn’t need company too much as people who live in perpetual dependence on what is outside them.
    • Art
      • This deliverance of knowledge from servitude to the will, this forgetting of the individual self and its material interest, this elevation of the mind to the will-less contemplation of truth, is the function of art.
      • The effect of music is more powerful and penetrating than the other atrs, for they speaks only only of shadows, while it speaks of the things itself. It differs too from other arts because it affects our feelings directly, and not through the medium of ideas; it speaks to something subtler than the intellect.
    • Religion
      • His theory of art – as the withdrawal of the will, and the contemplation of the eternal and universal – was also a theory of religion.
      • Christanity is pessemistic; Judaism and heathenism are both optimistic.
      • Buddhism is profounder than Christinity, because it makes the destruction of the will the entirety of religion, and preaches Nirvana as the goal of all personal development.
      • The Hindus were deeper than the thinkers of Europe, because their interpretation of the world was internal and intuitive, not external and intellectual; the intellect divides everything, intuition unites everything; the Hindus saw that the “I” is a delusion; that the individual is merely phenomenal, and that the onlu reality is the Infinite One – “That art thou”.
      • The ultimate wisdom, then, is Nirvana: to reduce one’s self to a minimum of desire and will.

  • The wisdom of death

    • The only final and radical conquest of the will must lie in stopping up the source of life – the will to reproduce.
    • Let men recognize the snare that lies in women’s beauty, and the absurd comedy of reproduction will end.
    • The development of intelligence will weaken or frustrate the will to reproduce, and will theerby at last achieve the extinction of the race.

  • Criticism

    • Critics
      • He became cynical and solitary. He advises a quiet, monotonous, hermit life; he fears society, and has no sense of the values or joys of human association. But happiness dies when it is not shared.
      • In truth the world is neither with us nor against us; it is but raw meterial in our hands, and can be heaven or hell according to what we are.
      • Everywhere he saw strife; he could not see, behind the strife, the friendly aid of neighbors, the rollicking joy of children and young men, the dances of vivacious girls, the willing sacrifices of parents and lovers, the patient bounty of the soil, and the renaissance of spring.
      • The growth of knowledge increases sorrow, but increases joy as well.
      • Is pleasure negative? Would deathlessness delight us? How should a man avoid pessimism who has lived almost all his life in a boarding-house?
      • How can suicide even occur? How can the intellect achieve independence as servant of the will? What if the proper function of intellect and philosophy is not the denial of the will but the coordination of desires into a united and harmonious will? What if “will” itself is an abstration like “force”?
    • Praises
      • Opened the eyes of psychologists to the subtle depth and omnipresent force of instinct.
      • Intellectualism – the conception of man as above all a thinking animal, consciously adapting means to rationally chosen ends – fell sick with Rousseau, took to its bed with Kant, and died with Schopenhauer.
      • Revealed our secret hearts to us, showed us that our desires are the axioms of our philosopies, and cleared the way to an understanding of thought as no mere abstract calculation of impersonal events, but as a flexible instrument of action and desire.
      • Taught us again the necessity of genius, and the value of art.
      • With all his faults he succeeded in adding another name to heroes.

8. Herbert Spencer

  • Comte and Darwin

    • Every field could observe a Law of Three Stages: theological, metaphysical, positive (scientific)
    • Spencer suggested the application of Darwin’s evolution idea to every field of study
    • The background of philosophic thought: 17th.C mathematics -> 18th.C psychology -> 19th.C biology

  • The Development of Spencer

    • Received little formal education
    • His arguments are mostly based on observation rather than reading
    • His First Principles wasn’t support by people at first, but later J.S. Mill, his greatest rival, supported his continued writing.

  • First Principles

    • The Unknowable
      • Every theory of the origin of the universe drives us into inconceivabilities.
      • Truth generally lies in the coordination of antagonistic opinions. Let science admit that its “laws” apply only to phenomena and the relative; let religion admit that its theology is a rationalizing myth for a belief that defies conception.
      • Mind and matter are equally relative phenomena, the double effect of an ultimate cause whose nature must remain unknown.
    • Evolution
      • “Evolution is an integration of matter and a concomitant dissipation of motion; during which the matter passes from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a defenite, coherent heterogeneity; and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation.”
      • The cycle of evolution and dissolution will be complete.

  • Biology: The Evolution of Life

    • “Life is the continuous adjestment of internal relations to external relations.”
    • In general, then, there is an opposition of individuation and genesis, or individual development and fertility. The more highly developed the species or the group, the lower will its birth-rate be. But it holds for individuals too.

  • Psychology: The Evolution of Mind

    • There is of course an evolution of mind; a development of modes of response from simple to compound to complex, from reflex to tropism to instinct, through memory and imagination to intellect and reason.
    • A rational action is simply an instinctive response which has survived in a struggle with other instinctive responses aroused by a situation; “deliberation” is merely the internecine strife of rival impulses. At bottom, reason and instinct, mind and life, are one.
    • Will is an abstract term which we give to the sum of our active impulses, and a volition is the natural flow of an unimpeded idea into action.
    • “Forms of thought” can be explained by “the inheritance of continually-accumulating modifications”.

  • Sociology: The Evolution of Society

    • Men prepare themselves with life-long study before becoming authorities in physics or chemistry or biology; but in the field of social and political affairs every grocer’s boy is an expert, knows the solution, and demands to be heard.
    • Society, he believes, is an organism, having organs of nutrition, circulation, coordination and reproduction, very much as in the case of individuals.
    • The integration of the heterogeneous applies to every field of social phenomena, from religion and government to science and art.
    • Industry makes for democracy and peace; peace at home becomes the first need of prosperity. The contrast between the militant and the industrial types of society is indicated by “inversion of the belief that individuals exist for the benefit of the State into the belief that the State exists for the benefit of the individuals”. So the contrast between the industrial type and the type likely to be evolved from it is indicated by inversion of the belief that life is for work into the belief that work is for life.

  • Ethics: The Evolution of Morals

    • The formula of justice should be “Every man is free to do that which he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man.”
    • Altruism will become instinctive through their natural selection for social utility.

  • Criticism

    • First Principles
      • The assertion that anything in unknowable already implies some knowledge of the thing
      • The definition of evolution doesn’t explain anything
      • Too quick to assume the intelligence of primitive men
      • His method is too deductive and a priori, observe, make hypotheses, but didn’t experiment
    • Biology and Psychology
      • His ideas of evolution were based on Lamarck’s theory
      • His psychology obscures where it should clarify
    • Sociology and Ethics
      • He exaggerated the virtues of industrial regime and almost blind to the brutal exploitation that flourished in England before the state interfered to mitigate it.
      • He ignores the point that why a state should protect its citizens from unsocial physical strength and refuse protection against unsocial economic strength. (feels government intervention in economy distorts natural social evolution)

  • Conclusion

    • Spencer’s fame vanished almost as suddenly as it had come.
    • He was incorrigibly sincere, and offended every group by speaking candidly on every subject.
    • His Synthetic philosophy summed up his age as no man had ever summed up any age since Dante; and he accomplished so masterly a coordination of so vast an area of knowledge that criticism is almost shamed into silence by his achievement. (GPT said Spencer was a highly influential figure, but his fame did fade, and his ideas were later challenged by new intellectual developments.)

9. Friedrich Nietzsche

  • The Lineage of Nietzsche
    • “Nietzsche was the child of Darwin and the brother of Bismarck.”
    • If life is a struggle for existence in which the fittest survive, then strength is the ultimate virtue, and weakness the only fault. Good is that which survives, which wins; bad is that which gives way and fails.
  • Youth
    • Born at Rocken, Prussia, 1844
    • At 18 he lost his faith in the God, and found one in the Superman.
    • In 1865 he discovered Schopenhauer’s “World as Will and Representation”, the dark color of Schopenhauer’s philosophy impressed itself permanently upon his thought.
  • Nietzsche and Wagner
    • Nietzsche initially admired Wagner but later turned to criticize him for his embrace of Christianity and Germanic nationalism.
  • The song of Zarathustra
    • His book “Thus Spake Zarathustra” was his philosophical masterpiece
    • “My formula for greatness is Amor fati: … not only to bear up under every necessity, but to love it.”
    • Live dangerously. And remember to disbelieve.
    • Critique of religion: “Is godliness not just that there are Gods, but no God?”
    • Superman: “Dead are all Gods; now we will that superman live… Man is a something that shall be surpassed. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what can be loved in man is that he is a transition and a destruction.”
    • Eternal Recurrence: would you affirm life if all things will recur infinitely?
    • Yea-saying: acceptance of life without resentment
  • Hero-Morality
    • There are two contradictory valuations of human behavior: a morality of master and a morality of herd.
    • Morality of master is from Romans: manhood, courage, enterprise, bravery.
    • Morality of herd is from Asia: subjection breeds humility, helplessness breeds altruism – which an appeal for help. Behind all this “morality” is a secret will to power; humility is the protective coloration of the will to power.
    • The role of consciousness has been senselessly over-estimated; in strong men there is very little attempt to conceal desire under the cover of reason; their simple argument is, “I will”.
    • The whole of the morality of Europe is based upon the values which are useful to the herd.
    • The best thing in man is strength of will, power, and permanence of passion; without passion one is mere milk, incapable of deed. … We must beware of being too good; “man must become better and more evil.”
    • The ultimate ethic is biological; we must judge things according to their value for life; we need a physiological “transvaluation of all values”.
  • Superman
    • Just as morality lies not in kindness but in strength, so the goal of human effort should be not the elevation of all but the development of finer and stronger individuals.
    • “To what purpose then are the machines, if all individuals are only of use in maintaining them?”
    • Superman is the superior individual rising precariously out of the mire of mass mediocrity.
    • What is good? To be brave is good. What is good? All that increases the feeling of power, the will of power, power itself, in man. What is bad(schlecht)? All that comes from weakness.
    • The man who does not wish to be merely one of the mass only needs to cease to be easy on himself.
    • To have a purpose for which one can be hard upon others, but above all upon one’s self; to have a purpose for which one will do almost anything except betray a friend, that is the final patent of nobility, the last formula of the superman.
  • Decadence
    • Nietzsche believes the road to the superman must lie through aristocracy, and democracy must be eradicated before it is to late. “English utilitarianism and philistinism are the nadir of European culture.” He likes the power of Germany and Russia and the culture of France.
  • Aristocracy
    • Democracy means the worship of mediocrity, and the hatred of excellence.
    • “Men are not equal. We wish to possess nothing in common.”
    • The problem of politics is to prevent the business man from ruling. For such a man has the short sight and narrow grasp of a politician, not the long view and wide range of the born aristocrat trained to statesmanship.
    • The ideal society would be divided into three classes: producers (farmers, working class and business men), officials (soldiers and functionaries), and rulers. Plato was right – philosophers are the highest men.
  • Criticism
    • He wins us with his imagination rather than with his logic; he offers us not a philosophy merely, nor yet only a poem, but a new faith, a new hope, a new religion.
    • We acknowledge the need of asking men to be braver, and harder to themselves, almost all ethical philosophies have asked that; but there is no urgent necessity for asking people to be clueler and “more evil”, surely this is a work of supererogation?
    • Nietzsche fails to recognize the place and value of the social instincts; he thinks the egoistic and individualistic impulses need reinforcement by philosophy.
    • It is a common delusion that the great periods of culture have been ages of hereditary aristocracy; on the contrary, the creative work in literature and art was done not by aristocratic families but by the offspring of the middle class, like Socrates (son of a midwife), Voltaire (son of an attorney), and Shakespeare (son of a butcher). Lte us be ruled by all the best.
    • He spoke with bitterness, but with invaluable sincerity; and his thought went through the clouds and cobwebs of the modern mind like cleansing lightning and a rushing wind.The air of European philosophy is clearer and fresher now because Nietzsche wrote.
  • Finale
    • “I love him who willeth the creation of something beyond himself, and then perisheth,” said Zarathustra.
    • He died in 1900. Seldom has a man paid so great a price for genius.

10. Contemporary European Philosophers

Henri Bergson

  • The Revolt Against Materialism
    • The industrialization of Western Europe drove thought away from thought and in the direction of material things
    • Spencer’s system was more truly the reflex and exponent of industrialism
    • It was Schopenhauer who first, in modern thought, emphasized the possibility of making the concept of life more fundamental and inclusive than that of force; it is Bergson who in our own generation has taken up this idea, and has almost converted a sceptical world to it by the force of his sincerity and his eloquence.
    • Born in Paris in 1859, has major works: Time and Free-Will, Creative Evolution
    • “If mind was matter, and every mental act a mechanical resultant of neural states, of what use was consciousness?”
    • “Was determinism any more intelligible than free will?”
  • Mind and brain
    • Bergson argues we naturally incline to materialism, because we tend to think in terms of space; we are geometricians all. But time is as fundamental as space; and it is time, no doubt, that holds the essence of life, and perhaps of all reality. What we have to understand is that time is an accumulation, a growth, a duration.
    • “Consciousness seems proportionate to the living being’s power of choice, It lights up the zone of potentialities that surrounds the act. It fills the interval between what is done and what might be done.”
    • “For a conscious being, to exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating one’s self endlessly. Perhaps all reality is time and duration, becoming and change?”
    • “Free will is a corollary of consciousness; to say that we are free is merely to mean that we know what we are doing.”
    • “In principle, consciousness is coextensive with life.”
    • The part of our minds which we call the “intellect” is a constitutional materialist; it is at home with solids, inert things, it sees all becoming as being, as a series of states; it misses the connective tissue of things, the flow of duration that constitutes their very life, which we called mind. The direct perception to our inner reality is “intuition”.
    • The intellect retains its normal function of dealing with the material and spatial world, and with the material aspects or spatial expressions of life and mind; intuition is limited to the direct feeling of life and mind, not in their external embodiments but in their inner being.
  • Creative Evolution
    • There is a design in things; but in them, not outside, an entelechy, an inward determination of all the parts by the function and purpose of the whole.
    • Our struggles and our sufferings, our ambitions and our defeats, our yearnings to be better and stronger than we are, are the voice and current of the Elan Vital in us, that vital urge which makes us grow, and transforms this wandering planet into a theatre of unending creation.
  • Criticism
    • Bergson presumes too much is supposing that the intellect catches only the states, and not the flux, of reality and life.
    • He thinks of the world and the spirit, of body and soul, of matter and life, as hostile to each other; but matter and body and the “world” are merely the materials that wait to be formed by intelligence and will. And who knows that these things too are not forms of life, and auguries of mind? Perhaps here too, as Heraclitus would say, there are Gods.
    • We need Bergson’s emphasis on the elusive contingency of things, and the remoulding activity of mind. Before him we are cogs and wheels in a vast and dead machine; now, if we wish it, we cah help to write our own parts in the drama of creation.

Benedetto Croce

  • The Man
    • Bergson is a French Jew who inherits the traditions of Spinoza and Lamarck; Croce is an Italian Catholic who has kept nothing of his religion except its scholasticism and its devotion to beauty.
    • Croce provides the spectacle, not usual in ancient Rome, but rather unique in our day, of a man who can be a senator and a philosopher at the same time.
  • The Philosophy of the Spirit
    • For Croce is an idealist, and recognizes no philosophy since Hegel’s. All reality is idea; we know nothing except in the form it takes in our sensations and our thoughts. Hence all philosophy is reducible to logic; and truth is a perfect relationship in our ideas.
    • He mixes his idealism with a certain hardness of attitude towards tender beliefs: he rejects religion; he believes in the freedom of the will, but not in the immortality of the soul; the worship of beauty and the life of culture are to him a substitute for religion.
    • Croce recognizes the difficulty of finding out the actual past, and quotes Rousseau’s definition of history as “the art of choosing, from among manay lies, that one which most resembles the truth.”
  • What is Beauty?
    • His greatest book is his Esthetic (1902). He prefers are to mataphysics and to science: the sciences give us utility but the arts give us beauty.
    • “Art is ruled uniquely be the imagination. Images are its only wealth. It does not classify objects, it does not pronounce them real or imaginary, does not qualify them, does not define them; it feels and presents them – nothing more.”
    • Beauty is the mental formation of an image (or a series of images) that catches the essence of the thing perceived. The beauty belongs, again, rather to the inward image than to the outward form in which it is embodied.
    • “It is always our own intuition we express when we are enjoying a beautiful work of art.”
  • Criticism
    • His works (Spirit, Practical, On History) are as clear as a starless night; and not wiser than it should be.
    • How do we know what the inward image was, in the artist’s mind, or whether the work that we admire realizes or misses his idea?

Bertrand Russell

  • The Logician
    • Before WWI, he emphasized the virtues of logic, and make a divinity of mathematics.
    • The world’s woes, he felt, were largely due to mysticism, to culpable obscurity of thought; and the first law of morality should be, to think straight.
    • The aim of philosophy should be to equal the perfection of mathematics by confining itself to statements similarly exact, and similarly true before all experience. “Philosophical propositions must be a priori.”
  • The Reformer
    • When WWI came, he let the world shocked that he was a man of infinite courage, and a passionate lover of humanity.
    • Freedom is the supreme good; for without it personality is impossible. Life and knowledge are today so complex, that only be free discussion can we pick our way through errors and prejudices to that total perspective which is truth. Let men, let even teachers, differ and debaet; out of such diverse opinions will come an intelligent relativity of belief which will not readily fly to arms; hatred and war come largely of fixed ideas or dogmatic faith. Freedom of thought and speech would go like a cleansing draught through the neuroses and supersitions of the “modern” mind.
    • Our schools are the open sesame to Utopia.
  • Epilogue
    • All this, of course, is rather optimistic, though it is better to err on the side of hope than in favor of despair.

11. Contemporary American Philosophers

George Santayana

  • Old America: more European-like
  • Biographical
    • Born at Madrid in 1863, moved to America from 1872 to 1912
    • Great pieces: The sense of Beauty, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, The Life of Reason, Scepticism and Animal Faith
  • Scepticism and Animal Faith
    • He is willing to doubt almost everything. Only one thing seems certain to him, and that is the experience of the moment – this color, this form, this taste, this odor, this quality; these are the “real” world, and their perception constitutes “the discovery of essence”.
    • “Animal faith” may be faith in a myth, but the myth is a good myth, since life is better than any syllogism.
    • “No modern writer is altogether a philosopher in my eyes, except Spinoza. I have frankly taken nature by the hand, accepting as a rule, in my farthest speculation, the animal faith I live from day to day.”
  • Reason in Science
    • Reason “is the happy marriage of two elements – impulse and ideation – which, if wholly divorced, would reduce man to a brute or a maniac”. The Life of Reason bases itself frankly on science, because “science contains all trustworthy knowledge.”
    • He likes Democritus and Aristotle: “In Aristotle the conception of human nature is perfectly sound: everything ideal has a natural basis, and everything natural an ideal development. His ethics, when thoroughly digested and weighed, will seem perfectly final. The Life of Reason finds there its classic explication”
    • “I believe there is nothing immortal. No doubt the spirit and energy of the world is what is acting in us, as the sea is what rises in every little wave; but it passes through us; and, cry out as we may, it will move on. Our privilege is to have perceived it as it moved.”
    • Scorns Bergson: “What is this elan vital that a little fall in temperature would banish altogether from the universe?”
  • Reason in Religion
    • “Religion is human experience interpreted by human imagination. The idea that religion contains a literal, not a symbolic, representation of truth and life is simply an impossible idea. Matters of religion should never never be matters of controversy. We seek rather to honor the piety and understand the poetry embodied in these fables.”
  • Reason in Society
    • The patriotism of the people; they know that the price they pay for government is cheaper than the cost of chaos. Santayana wonders whether such patriotism does more harm than good.
    • The great evil of the state is its tendency to become an engine of war. Santayana thinks that no people has ever won a war.
    • He thinks that such culture as the world has known has always been the fruit of aristocracies.
    • He dislikes the ideal of equality, and argues with Plato that the equality of unequals is inequality. The only equality subsisting would be equality of opportunity.
    • Only the best would rule, but every man would have an equal chance to make himself worthy to be numbered among the best – it is Plato again, the philosopher-kings of the Republic appearing inevitably on the horizon of every far-seeing political philosophy.
  • Comment
    • Perhaps this constant memento mori is a knell to joy; to live, one must remember life more than death; one must embrace the immediate and actual thing as well as the distant and perfect hope.
    • The end is happiness, and philosophy is only a means; if we take it as an end we become like the Hindu mystic whose life-purpose is to concentrate upon his navel.

William James

  • Personal
    • His speech and phrase are American
    • Born in NYC in 1842, went school in France, back to Harvard
    • Greatest pieces: The Principles of Psychology (1890), Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912)
  • Pragmatism
    • Consciousness is not an entity, not a thing, but a flux and system of relations; it is a point at which the sequence of events and the relationship of thoughts coincide illuminatingly with the sequence of events and the relationship of things.
    • The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief.
    • Scholasticism asked, What is the thing, and lost itself in “quiddities”; Darwinism asked, What is its origin? and lost itself in nebulas; pragmatism askes, What are its consequences? and turns the face of thought to action and the future.
  • Pluralism
    • Men accept or reject philosophies, then, according to their needs and their temperaments, not according to “objective truth”; they do not ask, Is this logical? – they ask, What will the actual practice of this philosophy mean for our lives and our interests? Arguments for and against may serve to illuminate, but they never prove.
    • James believes that pluralistic theism affords us a synthesis of tender minded philosophy such as free will, and the tough-minded philosophy such as materialism.
    • The value of a multiverse, as compared with a universe, lies in this, that where there are cross-currents and warring forces our own strength and will may count and help decide the issue; it is a world where nothing is irrevocably settled, and all action matters.
    • In such a world we can be free; it is a world of chance, and not of fate; everything is “not quite”, and what we are or do may alter everything.
  • Comment
    • It is part of the modern war between science and religion; another effort, like Kant’s and Bergson’s, to rescue faith from the universalized mechanics of materialism. Pragmatism has its roots in Kant’s “practical reason”; in Schopenhauer’s exaltation of the will; in Darwin’s notion that the fittest (and therefore also the fittest and truest idea) is that which survives; in utilitarianism, which measured all goods in terms of use; in the empirical and inductive traditions of English philosophy; and finally in the suggestions of the American scene.
    • He knew that he had found no solution for the old questions; he frankly admitted that he had expressed only another guess, another faith.

John Dewey

  • Education
    • Born in Vermont in 1859, spent 20 years in the Middle West
    • He wrote the philosophy not on one New-English state, but of the continent
    • Greatest pieces: Democracy and Education
    • “Real education comes after we leave school, and there is no reason why it should stop before our death.”
  • Instrumentalism
    • “We must unlearn our ideas about an unchangeable human nature and an omnipotent environment. There is no knowable limit to change or growth; and perhaps there is nothing impossible but hinking makes it so.”
  • Science and Politics
    • What Dewey sees and reverences as the finest of all things, is growth; so much so, that he makes this relative but specific notion, and no absolute “good”, his ethical criterion. “Not perfection as a final goal, but the ever-enduring process of perfecting, maturing, refining, is the aim in living. The bad man is the man who, no matter how good he has been, is beginning to deteriorate, to grow less good. The good man is the man who, no matter how morally unworthy he has been, is moving to become better. Such a conception makes one severe in judging himself and humane in judging others.”
    • Unlike most philosophers, Dewey acceps democracy, though he knows its faults. Dewey distrusts the state, and wishes a pluralistic order, in which as much as possible of the work of society would be done by voluntary associations.

Conclusion

“Perhaps there are greater souls than Shakespeare’s, and greater minds than Plato’s, waiting to be born. When we have learned to reverence liberty as well as wealth, we too shall have our Renaissance.”

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Chia-Lun Tsai
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Chia-Lun Tsai
I am Chia-Lun (Charles) Tsai, a master’s student in Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).