Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism

            Utilitarianism is a movement in Ethics and Political Philosophy in 19th Century England, which proposed "the greatest good for the greatest number" as the overriding rule in all moral decision.

            Utilitarianism is the idea that the moral worth of an action is solely determined by its contribution to overall utility in maximizing happiness or pleasure as summed among all people, i.e. the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. It starts from the basis that pleasure and happiness are intrinsically valuable, that pain and suffering are intrinsically disvaluable, and that anything else has value only in its causing happiness or preventing suffering. See the section on doctrine of Utilitarianism for more details.

            This focus on happiness or pleasure as the ultimate end of moral decisions, makes Utilitarianism a type of Hedonism (and it is sometimes known as Hedonistic Utilitarianism), and its origins are often traced back to the Epicureanism of the followers of the Greek philosopher Epicurus. It can be argued that David Hume and Edmund Burke were proto-Utilitarians.

            As a specific school of thought, however, Utilitarianism is generally credited to the English philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham. Bentham found pain and pleasure to be the only intrinsic values in the world, and from this he derived the rule of utility: that the good is whatever brings the greatest happiness to the greatest number of people. Bentham himself, however, attributed the origins of the theory to Joseph Priestley (1733 - 1804), the English scientist, theologian and founder of Unitarianism in England.

            Bentham's foremost proponents were James Mill (1773 - 1836) and his son John Stuart Mill, who was educated from a young age according to Bentham's principles. In his famous 1861 short work, "Utilitarianism", Mill both named the movement and refined Bentham's original principles. He argued that cultural, intellectual and spiritual pleasures are of greater value than mere physical pleasure as valued by a competent judge (which, according to Mill, is anyone who has experienced both the lower pleasures and the higher).

            In his essay "On Liberty" and other works, Mill argued that Utilitarianism requires that any political arrangements satisfy the liberty principle (or harm principle), according to which the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community against his will, is to prevent harm to others, a cornerstone of the principles of Liberalism and Libertarianism. Some Marxist philosophers have also used these principles as arguments for Socialism.

            Other notable Utilitarians, after Bentham and Mill, include Henry Sidgwick (1838 - 1900), G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, Richard Hare (1919 - 2002), J. J. C. Smart (1920 - 2012) and Peter Singer (1946 - ).

Transcendentalism

Transcendentalism

            Transcendentalism (often called American Transcendentalism) is a philosophical movement centered in the New England region of the United States during the mid-19th Century, grounded in the claim that divine truth could be known intuitively. Its ideas were applied to literature, religion and culture in general, as well as philosophy. It is unconnected with Transcendentalism in classical philosophy, which is the idea that God transcends the manifest world and surpasses physical existence.

            American Transcendentalism began as a protest against the general state of American culture and society at the time, and in particular the state of intellectualism at Harvard University and the doctrines of the influential Unitarian Church. To some extent, it can also be seen as a nationalistic movement in the wake of American independence from Britain, and it is sometimes referred to as the American Renaissance.

            It built on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, the German Idealists and the Romanticists, as well as on ancient Indian Vedic thought. At its core is the belief in an ideal spiritual state that "transcends" the physical and empirical, and is only realized through the individual's intuition, rather than through the doctrines of established religions. It specifically rejected the British Empiricism of the Age of Reason.

            Prominent Transcendentalists include Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller (1810 - 1850), Bronson Alcott (1799 - 1888), Orestes Brownson (1803 - 1876), William Ellery Channing (1818 - 1901), Frederick Henry Hedge (1805 - 1890), Theodore Parker (1810 - 1860), George Palmer Putnam (1814 - 1872), Elizabeth Peabody (1804 - 1894) and Sophia Peabody (1809 - 1871). For some of these, Transcendentalism was a purely individual and (likely unattainable) idealist project, while for some it was a way towards utopian social change or Socialism.

            Transcendentalism first became a major movement in 1836 with the publication of Emerson's essay "Nature" and the founding of the Transcendental Club in Cambridge, Massachusetts by prominent New England intellectuals including Emerson, Putnam and Hedge. The American Transcendentalists were largely unacquainted with the German philosophy in the original, relying primarily on the writings of English and French commentators like Thomas Carlyle (1795 - 1881), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 - 1834), Victor Cousin (1792 - 1867) and Germaine de Staël (1766 - 1817) for their knowledge of it. The mystical spiritualism of the 18th Century Swedish scientist and theologian Emanuel Swedenborg (1688 -1772) was another major influence.

Structuralism

Structuralism

            Structuralism is a 20th Century intellectual movement and approach to the human sciences (it has had a profound effect on linguistics, sociology, anthropology and other fields in addition to philosophy) that attempts to analyze a specific field as a complex system of interrelated parts. Broadly speaking, Structuralism holds that all human activity and its products, even perception and thought itself, are constructed and not natural, and in particular that everything has meaning because of the language system in which we operate. It is closely related to Semiotics, the study of signs, symbols and communication, and how meaning is constructed and understood.

            There are four main common ideas underlying Structuralism as a general movement: firstly, every system has a structure; secondly, the structure is what determines the position of each element of a whole; thirdly, "structural laws" deal with coexistence rather than changes; and fourthly, structures are the "real things" that lie beneath the surface or the appearance of meaning.

            Structuralism is widely regarded to have its origins in the work of the Swiss linguistic theorist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857 - 1913) in the early 20th Century, but it soon came to be applied to many other fields, including philosophy, anthropology, psychoanalysis, sociology, literary theory and even mathematics. In the early 20th Century, Saussure developed a science of signs based on linguistics (semiotics or semiology). He held that any language is just a complex system of signs that express ideas, with rules which govern their usage. He called the underlying abstract structure of a language, "langue", and the concrete manifestations or embodiments, "parole". He concluded that any individual sign is essentially arbitrary, and that there is no natural relationship between a signifier (e.g. the word "dog") and the signified (e.g. the mental concept of the actual animal).

            Unlike the Romantic or Humanist models, which hold that the author is the starting point or progenitor of any text, Structuralism argues that any piece of writing (or any "signifying system") has no origin, and that authors merely inhabit pre-existing structures ("langue") that enable them to make any particular sentence or story ("parole"), hence the idea that "language speaks us", rather than that we speak language. Structuralism was also to some extent a reaction against Phenomenology in that it argued that the "depth" of experience could in fact only be an effect of structures which are not themselves experiential.

            Although they would probably all have denied being part of this so-called movement, the philosopher Michel Foucault, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908 - 2009), the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901 - 1981), the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget (1896 - 1980), the linguists Roman Jakobson (1896 - 1982) and Noam Chomsky (1928 - ), the literary critic Roland Barthes (1915 - 1980) and the Marxist theorists Louis Althusser (1918 - 1990) and Nicos Poulantzas (1936 - 1979) were all instrumental in developing the theory and techniques of Structuralism, most of this development occurring in France.

            Barthes, in particular, demonstrated the way in which the mass media disseminated ideological views based on its ability to make signs, images and signifiers work in a particular way, conveying deeper, mythical meanings within popular culture than the surface images immediately suggest (e.g. the Union jack signifies the nation, the crown, the empire, "Britishness", etc).

            By the 1960s, it had become a major force within the overall Continental Philosophy movement in Europe, and came to take Existentialism’s pedestal in 1960s France. In the 1970s, however, it came under increasing internal fire from critics who accused it of being too rigid and ahistorical, and for favoring deterministic structural forces over the ability of individual people to act, and schools like Deconstructionism and Post-Structuralism attempted to distinguish themselves from the simple use of the structural method and to break with structuralistic thought. In retrospect, it is more these movements it spawned, rather than Structuralism itself, which commands attention.

Romanticism

Romanticism

            Romanticism is a philosophical movement during the Age of Enlightenment which emphasizes emotional self-awareness as a necessary pre-condition to improving society and bettering the human condition. Like the German Idealism and Kantianism with which it is usually linked in a philosophical context, Romanticism was largely centered in Germany during the late 18th and early 19th Century. It stands in opposition to the Rationalism and Empiricism of the preceding Age of Reason, representing a shift from the objective to the subjective.

            Romanticism in general was a reaction against the scientific rationalization of Nature during the Age of Reason, which left little room for the freedom and creativity of the human spirit, and it stressed strong emotion as a source of aesthetic experience. It was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature, but it also had a counterpart in philosophical thought.

            Philosophical Romanticism holds that the universe is a single unified and interconnected whole, and full of values, tendencies and life, not merely objective lifeless matter. The Romantic view is that reason, objectivity and analysis radically falsify reality by breaking it up into disconnected lifeless entities, and the best way of perceiving reality is through some subjective feeling or intuition, through which we participate in the subject of our knowledge, instead of viewing it from the outside. Nature is an experience, and not an object for manipulation and study, and, once experienced, the individual becomes in tune with his feelings and this is what helps him to create moral values.

            The roots of Philosophical Romanticism can be found in the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant. Rousseau, (who is credited with the idea of the "noble savage", uncorrupted by artifice and society), thought that civilization fills Man with unnatural wants and seduces him away from his true nature and original freedom. Kant's theory of Transcendental Idealism (see the section on Idealism) posited that we do not directly see "things-in-themselves"; we only understand the world through our human point of view, an idea developed by the American Transcendentalism of the mid-19th Century.

            The German Idealists who followed on from Kant and adapted and expanded his work with their own interpretations of Idealism, can all be considered Romanticists in their outlook. Among these the most important were Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Schelling, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and (arguably) Arthur Schopenhauer. Hegel was perhaps the most influential of the German Idealist philosophers, and his idea that each person's individual consciousness or mind is really part of the Absolute Mind (Absolute Idealism) had far-reaching effects. After his death, however, the Hegelians were split between the "Old Hegelians" who uncritically accepted Hegel's Romantic views, and the "Young Hegelians" who wanted to continue the revolution of ideas using his concept of dialectics.

            Their ideas influenced a generation of Romantic writers, such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832), William Blake (1757 - 1827), Samuel Coleridge (1772 - 1834), William Wordsworth (1770 - 1850), Lord Byron (1788 - 1824), John Keats (1795 - 1821), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 - 1822) and Victor Hugo (1802 - 1885); artists such as John Constable (1776 - 1837), Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775 - 1851), Théodore Géricault ( 1791 - 1824) and Eugène Delacroix (1798 - 1863); and composers such as Ludwig van Beethoven (1770 - 1827), Franz Schubert (1797 - 1828), Hector Berlioz (1803 - 1869), Frédéric Chopin (1810 - 1849), Robert Schumann (1810 - 1856), Franz Liszt (1811 - 1886), and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840 - 1893).

Rationalism

Rationalism

            Rationalism is a philosophical movement which gathered momentum during the Age of Reason of the 17th Century. It is usually associated with the introduction of mathematical methods into philosophy during this period by the major rationalist figures, Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza. The preponderance of French Rationalists in the 18th Century Age of Enlightenment, including Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Charles de Secondat (Baron de Montesquieu) (1689 - 1755), is often known as French Rationalism.

            Rationalism is any view appealing to intellectual and deductive reason (as opposed to sensory experience or any religious teachings) as the source of knowledge or justification. Thus, it holds that some propositions are knowable by us by intuition alone, while others are knowable by being deduced through valid arguments from intuited propositions. It relies on the idea that reality has a rational structure in that all aspects of it can be grasped through mathematical and logical principles, and not simply through sensory experience.

            Rationalists believe that, rather than being a "tabula rasa" to be imprinted with sense data, the mind is structured by, and responds to, mathematical methods of reasoning. Some of our knowledge or the concepts we employ are part of our innate rational nature: experiences may trigger a process by which we bring this knowledge to consciousness, but the experiences do not provide us with the knowledge itself, which has in some way been with us all along. See the section on the doctrine of Rationalism for more details.

            Rationalism is usually contrasted with Empiricism (the view that the origin of all knowledge is sense experience and sensory perception), and it is often referred to as Continental Rationalism because it was predominant in the continental schools of Europe, whereas British Empiricism dominated in Britain. However, the distinction between the two is perhaps not as clear-cut as is sometimes suggested, and would probably not have even been recognized by the philosophers involved. Although Rationalists asserted that, in principle, all knowledge, including scientific knowledge, could be gained through the use of reason alone, they also observed that this was not possible in practice for human beings, except in specific areas such as mathematics.

            It has some similarities in ideology and intent to the earlier Humanist movement in that it aims to provide a framework for philosophical discourse outside of religious or supernatural beliefs. But in other respects there is little to compare. While the roots of Rationalism may go back to the Eleatics and Pythagoreans of ancient Greece, or at least to Platonists and Neo-Platonists, the definitive formulation of the theory had to wait until the 17th Century philosophers of the Age of Reason.

            René Descartes is one of the earliest and best known proponents of Rationalism, which is often known as Cartesianism (and followers of Descartes' formulation of Rationalism as Cartesians). He believed that knowledge of eternal truths (e.g. mathematics and the epistemological and metaphysical foundations of the sciences) could be attained by reason alone, without the need for any sensory experience. Other knowledge (e.g. the knowledge of physics), required experience of the world, aided by the scientific method - a moderate rationalist position. For instance, his famous dictum "Cogito ergo sum" ("I think, therefore I am") is a conclusion reached a priori and not through an inference from experience. Descartes held that some ideas (innate ideas) come from God; others ideas are derived from sensory experience; and still others are fictitious (or created by the imagination). Of these, the only ideas which are certainly valid, according to Descartes, are those which are innate.

            Baruch Spinoza expanded upon Descartes' basic principles of Rationalism. His philosophy centered on several principles, most of which relied on his notion that God is the only absolute substance (similar to Descartes' conception of God), and that substance is composed of two attributes, thought and extension. He believed that all aspects of the natural world (including Man) were modes of the eternal substance of God, and can therefore only be known through pure thought or reason.

            Gottfried Leibniz attempted to rectify what he saw as some of the problems that were not settled by Descartes by combining Descartes' work with Aristotle's notion of form and his own conception of the universe as composed of monads. He believed that ideas exist in the intellect innately, but only in a virtual sense, and it is only when the mind reflects on itself that those ideas are actualized.

            Nicolas Malebranche is another well-known Rationalist, who attempted to square the Rationalism of René Descartes with his strong Christian convictions and his implicit acceptance of the teachings of St. Augustine. He posited that although humans attain knowledge through ideas rather than sensory perceptions, those ideas exist only in God, so that when we access them intellectually, we apprehend objective truth. His views were hotly contested by another Cartesian Rationalist and Jensenist Antoine Arnauld (1612 - 1694), although mainly on theological grounds.

            In the 18th Century, the great French rationalists of the Enlightenment (often known as French Rationalism) include Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Charles de Secondat (Baron de Montesquieu) (1689 - 1755). These philosophers produced some of the most powerful and influential political and philosophical writing in Western history, and had a defining influence on the subsequent history of Western democracy and Liberalism.

            Immanuel Kant started as a traditional Rationalist, having studied Leibniz and Christian Wolff (1679 - 1754) but, after also studying the empiricist David Hume's works, he developed a distinctive and very influential Rationalism of his own, which attempted to synthesize the traditional rationalist and empiricist traditions.

            During the middle of the 20th Century there was a strong tradition of organized Rationalism (represented in Britain by the Rationalist Press Association, for example), which was particularly influenced by free thinkers and intellectuals. However, Rationalism in this sense has little in common with traditional Continental Rationalism, and is marked more by a reliance on empirical science. It accepted the supremacy of reason but insisted that the results be verifiable by experience and independent of all arbitrary assumptions or authority.