Philosophy of life

In the late XIX - the first quarter of the XX century philosophical thought that declared life as the basic subject of philosophy became popular in Europe. Various versions of this philosophical trend were worked up by W.Dilthey, O.Spengler, A.Bergson, Z.Freud, G.Zimmel and the founder of it was F.Nietzsche. "Philosophy of Life" marked the turning to man, his problems and concerns. If the main thesis of classical philosophy was - "truth above all", in the philosophy of life it was changed into " man above all."Прослушать

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Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was a Classical scholar at the universities of Bonn and Leipzig, but was appointed to the Chair of Philosophy at Basel before even finishing his doctorate. He was there close to Richard Wagner, with whom, however, he later broke. In 1879 he left his Chair and lived at Saint-Maria and elsewhere in Switzerland and Austria in search of good health. He developed madness towards the end of his life and was treated in clinics in Basel and Jena. His major works were “Human”, “All-too-human” (1878-1879), “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” (1883-1885), “Beyond Good and Evil” (1886), “On the Genealogy of Morals” (1887), “The Twilight of the Idols” and “Ecce Homo” (1888). His book “The Antichrist” (1895) was part of a larger work he planed on the will to power, which he did not finish.

To some degree Nietzsche was indebted to Schopenhauer: his “will to power” is an adaptation of Schopenhauer’s Will. But he was most eager to split between the phenomenal and the noumenal. Above all he wished to reject the idea of transcendent or the “other world”. The will to power was not therefore a dark force living on the other side of the light of this world: it was rather an interpretation of the mode in which the universe manifests itself. Moreover, he thought that the development of philosophy in the nineteenth century had begun to show a most important thing, God is dead. If God is dead then the morality of God needs to be rejected too. He perceived two forms of ethics – the ethos of elite and liberated person (whom he called the superman or superior human being) and that of the masses. There is a master-morality and the slave-morality. The latter seeks as its criterion the conduciveness of virtues and rules to the preservation of the weak. The weak express fear and resentment at the strong and through Christian morality cut them to size. Because of belief in what lies beyond, Christianity comes to disvalue this world and the body. What is needed is a transvaluation of values in which human powers are integrated together. The superior human being can go beyond good and evil without collapsing into decadence. The danger is that when God is dead, men will turn to active nihilism and precipitate wars and destruction on a hitherto unknown scale.

A subsidiary motif in Nietzsche’s thinking is the idea of the eternal return or recurrence. The universe shuffles its pack again and again so those events will replicate themselves exactly over a long enough period. In this way the cosmos is completely closed in on itself. It seemed an idea, that haunted Nietzsche and gave him yet a kind of satisfaction.

Henri Bergson (1859-1941) bridges the world of the nineteenth century to the conquest of France by the Nazis. He was raised in Paris, and became a student and then later professor at the Ecole Normale. From 1900 to 1924 he taught at the College de France, and received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928. He was Jewish, though attracted by Catholicism. Among his books were “Time and Free Will” (1889), “Matter and Memory” (1896),”Laughter” (1900), “An Introduction to Metaphysics” (1903), “Creative Evolution” (1907), “The Two Sources of Morality and Religion” (1932) and “The Creative Mind” (1934). The last was a collection of essays.

Bergson was influenced by the need to put our understanding of ourselves and of nature in an evolutionary context. The world had had time to digest Darwin by the time he became a student. He saw consciousness as something continuous, not a series of discrete impressions in the style of British empiricism. As such, we are conscious of time as something dynamic and not as a series of discrete events. We are also aware of our own activity. So deterministic models of the human psyche are inappropriate and we are immediately and intuitively aware of our freedom in the process of coming to a decision. Bergson had interesting things to say about memory. He rejected central state materialism (identifying the brain and consciousness), and thought of it as a mechanism for simplifying consciousness and preventing all our memories from flooding back: a person who is active needs only a selection of what is available. As for evolution, he saw behind the real duration which we experience as elan vital, or living impulse, and he projected this drive upon the whole process of evolution, seeing that too as being God’s way of creating creators (he identified God with the living impulse). He appealed here to mystics whom he thought had an intuitive experience of the living force. The mystical spirit is typically hindered by the struggle of live, but its spread will be vital to the progress of the human race. He also made an interesting distinction between the closed and open societies. This had some influence later upon Popper. The closed society has dogmatic religion and a cohesive morality, the sort of thing indeed praised by the followers of Durkheim. The open society is richer, freer, more fluid and plural. It is full of freedom and spontaneity and expresses the mystical spirit. So the living impulse flowers there most manifestly.

Bergson had great influence in his time. He tried to put evolution at the center of his worldview, and had a great number of suggestive ideas related to time, memory, will, introspection and morality. But his work has since faded.

William Dilthey’s career was an exclusively academic one, culminating in his teaching at the University of Berlin from 1882 till 1905. Although he was an empiricist, wishing to banish both the noumenon and the Divine Being, he was one with a difference, since he was much concerned with meanings and understanding the inner life of humans. He had a keen sense of the richness and variety of life, and was interested in much more than sensations and perceptions, but with the interpretations made consciously and unconsciously of the content of our experience. He was as much concerned with religion and the genesis and function of legal systems as he was with perceptual knowledge. He became a vital theorist of the human sciences. He was especially concerned therefore with the philosophy of history, since human cultures manifest themselves at both the macro and the micro level in historical processes. Not only is history vital in this way, but it displays an epistemological characteristic of importance: in understanding an era or an individual we need to enter into their point of view - to consider what was taken to be of importance, etc. He also recognized that the historian is limited by the horizons of his own time. The meaning of the past is suspended, as it were, between its own time and the present.

The notion of entering into a point of view is the most important here. Of course, doing history employs a lot of the general techniques of the natural sciences. But in addition there is the method in which we understand some mental content. A major component of this is what may now be called empathy: to understand rage we need to have experienced it, and we bring that knowledge to bear in entering into another person’s experience (we of course learn to read the behavioral signs of rage). In addition it is vital to place a person’s experience, or the means of expression of it, into particular context. This in turn implies knowledge of the cultural systems in which actions and feelings are embedded.

Dilthey’s animadversions on method in history and therefore throughout the human sciences had a vital influence.

“Psychoanalyses” of Sigmund Freud and Neo-Freudism

An example of psychosocial approach in psychology is the work of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). Freud held than nothing we do is haphazard or coincidental; everything results from mental causes, most of which, we are unaware of. According to Freud the wind is not what is conscious or potentially conscious but also what is unconscious. This unconscious is a reservoir of human motivation comprised of instincts. In general most of what we think, believe and do is the result of unconscious urges, especially those, developed in the first five years of life in response to traumatic experiences.

A major psychic mechanism in Freudian theory is repression. Memories of events that were too powerful and traumatic are repressed - they are pushed down into the unconscious. This is not the same thing as forgetting - for the Freudian, we forget nothing. The memories are still there, and they are still active, but they influence our psychic state and our behaviors without our being aware of them. Thus, in later life, the events that occurred before we were five years old continue to influence us. Obviously the person who deals with other human beings as part of their life’s work, should have a great degree of insight into her own motivations, otherwise she might find herself reacting to others in ways that are inappropriate and relate more to her own childhood experiences rather than to the facts of the case as they stand now. This, according to another powerful Freudian concept, is because we project our own wishes and needs on to others - we are never able to break completely free of our own “Family Romance” and see others as they are.

The family drama has left us with a three-storey mind. The ego or the “me” rides upon the unconscious, says Freud, as a rider strives to dominate an unruly horse. The horse itself is made up of ail the unconscious and anarchic desires that the child has repressed - the “that” or the “id”. This dark beast can only be kept in check with great difficulty - and indeed, at night, when we are dreaming, it is unleashed to realize our most dangerous desires. The third part of the psyche is the “superego”: which is the fossilized moral injunctions of the parents - particularly the father - which subsist and which we often experience as our conscience. Mental illness occurs when the ego can no longer control either the id or the superego - in the one case, the mind is taken over by desire, and begins to act out its fantasies; in the other, the ego is paralyzed by the superego, and becomes incapable of seeking out the joys in life. A recent derivation of Freudian ideas, which has had a great deal of success in educational circles, is Transactional Analysis.

The Freudian vision is also suggestive in its picture of the psyche as a locus within which there is struggle, opposition, and hidden forces this is an advance on the rather bloodless model of man put forward by Enlightenment thinkers. The idea of the unconscious as a cunning and dangerous adversary is probably correct, although it is not likely that it works the way that Freud believed that it did.

Controversial ideas of psychoanalytic theory were the cause of criticism of Freud's worldview positions even on the part of his closest supporters and caused the development of new stream within psychoanalytic philosophy: notably "analytical psychology" of K.G. Jung, "individual psychology" of A. Adler, neo-Freudizm of E. Fromm, K. Horn, G. Salliven and others.

One of the first apostates of Freud’s psychoanalysis orthodox school was Karl Gustav Jung (1875-1961). He proposed a new methodological approach to the problem of interaction between conscious and unconscious and comprehension mechanisms "of the archetypes of the collective unconscious in individual development of a personality.

The most important feature of Jung’s conception was to introduce the concept of "collective unconscious", which was the key to comprehension of personality development. Without denying the importance of studying the dynamics of unconscious processes philosopher looked at the contents of the unconscious in a new, believing that fundamental error of Freud was to concern individual unconscious as a determining factor in personality’s development. According to K. Jung, there is a deeper level of "collective unconscious" - the scope of "archetypes", which reflects the history of mankind development, a natural world image, encoded in the experience of ancestors. The scope of "collective unconscious" he considered not dead sediment but a living system of reactions, creative, intelligent principle which unites an individual with all of humanity with nature and cosmos, with "a great spiritual heritage", which is reborn in each individual brain structure. These mental forces are just "collective unconscious that play a crucial role in motivating human actions, they are also a source of mythology, religion, art, culture, and through these forms of social consciousness they affect human society. So, applying the concept of "archetype" and "collective unconscious” K. Jung tried to free “unconscious "of his purely biological nature. This approach was more progressive than Freud's biological determinism to clarify the structure of personality and his or her transformation processes.

The concept of personality "individuation" is of particular interest in the theory of Karl Jung. "Individuation" is a higher level of man’s spiritual development, the center of crossing conscious and unconscious components of the human psyche, the entire development and the expression of all natural elements, the result of which should be self identity. K. Jung philosophical conception of "individuation", as a special form of personality’s evolution in the process of attaining "spiritual experience of mankind”, has more progressive character than conceptual statements of Freud’s metapsyhology about the processes of man’s individual adaptation in society.

The best known representative of neo-Freudism is Erich Fromm (1900-1980). Having analyzed critically Freud's biological determinism and "analytical psychology" of KG Jung the philosopher focused his efforts on creating a humanistic theory of "modes of being 'of individuals, which reflected the idea of personality’s integrity, which was rooted in the philosophy of classical humanism. Fromm’s aim was a comprehensive study of historical and existential needs of individual which distinguish human existence from the existence of other living organisms. That person who owns the spontaneous creativity that seeks to love and creative work, capable of self-expression and self-realization. This is an ideal of mature, integral personality, which is unattainable in a society where ideology of exploitation, market savings prevails. In E. Fromm’s philosophy the main hope rests on the healing of society through man’s healing. The pursuit of art helps man to overcome his own limitations and is one of the sources of love, art, religion and material production. This creative activity helps people achieve freedom and a sense of self- value.

So, in E. Fromm’s practical philosophy fundamental needs are not only a driving force of human history, but also a goal, the essence of which is to establish in future a new harmony with nature, other people and himself based on the development and realization of human essence, his or her inner creativity.

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