| 18.00: The paradigm of change: intellectual life in the 19th century |
THE PARADIGM OF CHANGE
To understand this you need to listen to a good chunk of Beethoven, especially the 9th symphony (Ode to Joy - Schiller);
Fideleo; The Prisoner's Chorus "Oh rise mighty spirit of freedom! eternal fire"
The Eroica (Napoleon until proclaimed himself Emperor).
More about Beethoven - this is captures it very well - this is a brilliant clip. It emphasises that Beethoven waqs deaf when composing 9th Ode toi Joy, and thus in Kantian terms was closer to the noumenal (true, non-sensible, eternal) essence of music; and less bound by the phenomena of mere sound, etc. Maybe this whole biopic is worth watching. I have not seen it, it is new.
Contemporary with Romanticism in politics and the arts (Rouseau, Beethoven, Byron,
Shelley - Ozymandius - the mighty shall fall.
Mary Shelley - The Modern Prometheus
Keats - Ode to a Grecian Urn surely perfect poetic capture of the philo outlook of Idealism.
Schiller, Goethe, etc, etc)
Hegel
Darwin
(Dickens)
((Heraclitus))
‘GERMAN’ IDEALISM
Metaphysics as a possible/ worthwhile activity
[contra Hume]
Kant (psychologism) -> Freud, Einstein (also ‘deontological’ ethics)
Hegel (historicism) -à Marx
Schopenhauer (ontology, phenomenology existentialism) -> Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre
[contrary to all this is the tradition from Hume (‘analytic’ philosophy or ‘Anglo-Saxon Empiricism’ from Hume to JS Mill, Utilitarianism, anti-metaphysics, American pragmatism, Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Logical Positivism.
- HEGEL (this is not chronological order, Kant comes first and Hegel and Schopenhauer are his pupils, and they were rivals. Hegel though was dominant, as dominant in 19th European philosophy as Aristotle had been in the middle ages. He is like Beethoven, Schopenhauer is more like Schubert.
- Change as the only constant, (Heraclitus)
- Persistence of objects as they change - ‘soul’ or ‘geist’ (Ship of Theaseus)
- ‘Universal Soul’ - persistence of the noumenal (Kant) through time
- Universal Soul is ‘Geist’ -
- The nature of Geist is to known itself -
- The Fall
- Alienation as the motive force of change - the Geist striuggles to know itself
- Dialetcial reasononing, the dialectic of history
- The role of the Reformation, Renaissance, French Rev and Prussian state
- Thesis, Anti-Thesis and Synthesis (as historical events)
- Judeao Christian ‘linear’ historicism - The “Organic State”
- “The spirit of freedom” - Berlin Wall, etc. EU as Hegelian project.
- “God’s big plan’
- ‘Geist’ satarised by Karl Marx - ‘there is a ghost haunting Europe’
“The owl of Minerva does not spread her wings until the parting of the day” (and Chou En Lai on the French Revilution, anecdote,
KANT -
The famous gravestone inscription - “My life has been guided by two great mysteries - the starry heavens above and the moral law within”
The critique of pure reason and ‘the prologomena’
Hume - the impossibility of metaphysics
Hume’s fork - “matters of fact” (aposteriori - can be investigated by the senses) vs “relations of ideas” - apriori - are true by defination)
Hume’s definition of apriori - a proposition that cannot be deny without contradiction - eg “a circle is not round”
Kant’s definition of apriori is more permissive - proposition is a priori if it can be “figured out” without reference to experience but at the same time is not true by definition.
His example is “all physical objective have some weight” - This is “scientific knowledge” which is known apriori - it is “synthetic apriori”. Thus inference is not merely supersition or ‘habit of mind’ as Hume thought (ie ignorance of the facts of the matter).
Also arithmetic is synthetic a-priori - 5+7 = 12 (is the example)
Geometry however is analytic apriori knowledge. 
THE SYNETHIC APRIORI PROOF OF THE REALITY OF SPACE AND TIME
Space and time are necessary pre-conditions for existence, nothing could exist that does not existence - not even nothing (God is the only thing that could exist outside of space and time; so God is moved by Kant to the realim of agnosticism - he way or may not exist, there is no need for a necessary God (Liebnitz) or a creator or first cause - because cause and effect are mental phenomena - there is no cause and effct in nature.
Kant synthesises Hume;s materialism/ empiricism with Descartes idealism and rationalism
Contra Descartes and contra skepticism -the world is BOTH a mental phenomena and a ‘thing in itself.
PHENOMENA is mental and is the creation of the mind.
NOUMENA (from the Greek - Nouse) is the real “thing in itself” - it is the “unperceived object” - impact on art.
This is the Copernican revolution in philosophy. Previously it was assumed that objects (created by God or having a first cause) existed unprecieveid, and it was the function of the mind to represent these objects to the mind itself.
Kant says according to Anthony Kenny
“Instead of asking how our knowledge can conform to objects, we must start from the supposition that objects must conform to our knowledge.”
Knowledge = the modes of knowledge (APRIORI and APOSTERIORI) and the categories of possible ideas (there are 12 types).
Ideas depend on cognitive apparatus (eg the type of eyes) and the transcendental necessary categorites which are inferred by means of synthetic apriori reasoning.
(Eistein and the two dimensional being).
SCHOPENHAUER
The noumena of the universe as a thing in itself - the “will” - the world as will and representation (more Schopenhauer later).
[more on Schopenhauer later, with Nietzsche].
further observations...
RUSSELL - up to and including chapter 21 -
19th century - paradigm of change - Khun - The Structure of Scientific Revolution (1962)
19th century - transition from the enlightenment of the 17th/18th (clockwork and mechanistic paradigm - above all Newton) to the paradigm of change and organism (above all Darwin).
Geology, Biology, Organic Chemistry - empire and exploration. Contact with eastern civilization, non-Ibrahimic religions and new concepts of the age of the earth and the universe (especially Hindu’ism). The impact of Hindu’ism ultimately profound on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche - a pathway to modernism.
From science to mass production - the factory system
- destruction of the peasantry in Great Britain
- impoverishment of Ireland rural England (Cobbett)
- migration to the cities; migration to the colonies (Dickens)
- The new poor law (1844) and the workhouse (Dickens)
- Dickens and illegitimacy, inheritance (Bleak House)
Conditions of the English working classes
Malthus and population (but Malthus is more a figure of the mechanistic materialism]
German intellectual leadership - Hegel and teleological historicism (also Marx) - the battle of nations as a force in history (Hegel); the battle of classes (Marx).
Contrast the static mechanism of the empiricists with the dynamism of Hegel - a pathway to relativity.
The metaphor of evolution in Liberal social policy - population growth, Victorian social reform; liberal democracy and Imperialism, socialism and social reform, origins of the modern industrial estate, especially in Germany - Max Weber, and sociology.
Darwin himself - collected species - the tradition of empiricism and the scientific method - the British Museum and the Natural History Museum.
- evolution by natural selection; the descent of man from common ancestors
- survival of the fittest (key concept of cumulative causation - ef in economics - contra smith).
Inpact on religion - the biblical criticism movement from Germany 1830s onwards - for example Fuerbach
The idea of progress and perfectability and growing human power on the world (the effect on the imagination of machine power) - Russell.