Non-Classical Philosophies

Another type of revolt was a rationalistic one. Intellectual life of the XIX century was more complex than that of any previous age. This was due to several causes. First the area concerned was larger than ever before; America and Russia made important contributions, and Europe became more aware than formerly of Indian philosophies, both ancient and modern. Second, science, which had been chief source of novelty since the seventeenth century, made new conquests, especially in geology, biology and organic chemistry. Third, machine production profoundly altered the social structure, and gave men a new conception of their powers in relation to the physical environment. Fourth, a profound revolt, both philosophical and political, against traditional systems in thought, in politics and in economics gave rise to attacks upon many beliefs and institutions that had hitherto been regarded as unassailable.

The rationalistic revolt began with the French philosophers of the Revolution, passed on, somewhat softened, to the philosophical radicals in England, and then acquired a deeper form in Marx and Lenin.

So far, the philosophies that we have been considering have had an inspiration, which was traditional, literary, or political. But there were two other sources of philosophical opinion, namely science and machine production. The second of these began its theoretical influence with Marx, and has grown gradually more important ever since. The first has been important since the seventeenth century, but took new forms during the nineteenth century.

What Galileo and Newton were to the seventeenth century, Darwin was to the nineteenth. Darwin’s theory had two parts. On the one hand, there was the Doctrine of Evolution, which maintained that the different forms of life had developed gradually from a common ancestry. The second part of Darwin’s theory was the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest. This part of the Darwin’s theory has been much disputed, and is regarded by most biologists as subject to many important qualifications.

The prestige of biology caused men whose thinking was influenced by science to apply biological rather than mechanistic categories to the world. Everything was supposed to be evolving, and it was easy to imagine an immanent goal. In spite of Darwin, many men considered that evolution justified a belief in cosmic purpose. The conception of organism came to be thought the key to both scientific and philosophical explanations of natural laws, and the atomic thinking of the eighteenth century came to be regarded as out of date. This point of view has at last influenced even theoretical physics. In politics it leads naturally to emphasis upon the community as opposed to the individual. This is in harmony with the growing power of the state; also with nationalism, which can appeal to the Darwin’s doctrine of survival of the fittest applied, not to individuals, but to nations.

While biology has militated against a mechanistic view of the world, modern economic technique has had an opposite effect. Until about the end of the eighteenth century, scientific technique, as opposed to scientific doctrines, had no important effect upon opinion. It was only with the rise of industrialism that technique began to affect men’s thought. And even then, for a long time, the effect was more or less indirect. Men who produce philosophical theories are, as a rule, brought into very little contact with machinery. The romantics noticed and hated the ugliness that industrialism was producing in places hitherto beautiful, and vulgarity (as they considered it) of those who had made money in “trade”. The socialists welcomed industrialism, but wished to free industrial workers from subjection to the power of employers. They were influenced by industrialism in the problems that they considered, but not much in the ideas that they employed in the solution of their problems.

The most important effect of machine production on the imaginative picture of the world is an immense increase in the sense of human power. This is only an acceleration of a process, which began before the dawn of history, when men diminished their fear of wild animals by the invention of weapons and their fear of starvation by the invention of agriculture. But acceleration has been so great as to produce a radically new outlook in those who wield the powers that modern technique has created.

Though many still believe in human equality and theoretical democracy, the imagination of modern people is deeply affected by the pattern of social organizations suggested by the organization of industry in the nineteenth century, which is essentially undemocratic. On the one hand, there are captains of industry, and on the other the mass of workers. Ordinary citizens in democratic countries do not yet acknowledge this disruption of democracy from within. But it has been a preoccupation of most philosophers from Hegel onwards, and the sharp opposition, which they discovered between the interests of the many and those of the few, has found practical expression in Fascism. Of the philosophers, Nietzsche was unashamedly on the side of the few, Marx whole heartedly on the side of the many.

To formulate any satisfactory modern ethics of human relationships it will be essential to recognize the necessary limitations of men’s power over the non-human environment, and the desirable limitations of their power over each other.

The twentieth century has seen the persistence of the older religions and at the same time in the West the solidification of humanism as a worldview, very often through the efforts of philosophers such as Moore, Russell, Schlick and Habermas. But undoubtedly the major force in the twentieth century has been nationalism. This managed in Nazism to combine with racial theories, and in fascism, for instance in Italy, with certain “corporate motifs”. Nationalism has retained its impetus because of the late emergence of so many peoples from the colonial era. The high degree of Personalism in existentialist thinking created ambiguities towards the State, and depressions, both psychological and economic, caused by World War l, halted for a while the successful progress of liberal and social democratic ideals. Perhaps because of its internal conflicts, and no doubt too because of the conservatism of higher education, which takes a long time adapting, especially in the humanities, European thought has been remarkably self-centered.

Of all that we have surveyed, it is difficult to resist the thought the XIX century have been the richest and most stimulating. But we see there too a divergence. Kant, John Stuart Mill and some other took humanity in the direction of individualism and human rights. But Hegel and Marx took us towards differing forms of collectivism.

Meanwhile in America we see the evolution of a technical philosophy, and we can perceive there rather more clearly than in Europe the shape of the struggles to adapt traditional religions to the modern world, and the presence of psychoanalysis as a vital movement too. It has been an area of great pioneering which has affected Europe and the wider world – forms of mass air transport, the universality of the automobile, supermarkets, personal computers as a norm, agribusiness: these and many other commonplaces of modern living have been developed there. All this undoubtedly influenced thinking. It was Feuerbach who pioneered non-classical philosophy of Western Europe, he who inspired the main paradigms of the XX century such as Sociocentrism, Voluntarism and Psychoanalysis.

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