Nineteenth-Century Philosophy

Nineteenth-century philosophy is the thought of the century between the French Revolution and the First World War, a period in which Europe was remade by industry, nationalism, science and empire. It opened in the small university towns of Germany, where a generation of thinkers tried to complete the revolution in philosophy begun by Immanuel Kant, and it closed with philosophers in Britain, the United States and Germany turning towards logic, psychology and the methods of the natural sciences. In between came some of the most influential and contested ideas in modern history: Hegel's view of history as the progress of freedom, Marx's theory of class struggle, utilitarianism, positivism, the existential protest of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche's announcement of the death of God, and American pragmatism.

The era inherited the hopes and the disappointments of the Enlightenment. The Revolution had shown that reason could overturn an old order, and the Terror and the Napoleonic Wars that followed had shown how hard it was to build a new one. Much nineteenth-century thought can be read as an attempt to understand that experience: to find reason at work in history, to discover the laws of society, or to defend the individual against the claims of systems, states and crowds. Its last decades laid the foundations of both analytic philosophy and continental philosophy.

In 1800 there was no German state. The Holy Roman Empire, a patchwork of kingdoms, duchies and free cities, was dissolved by Napoleon in 1806, and the same year his armies crushed Prussia at the battle of Jena. Defeat prompted Prussian reforms, including the founding in 1810 of the University of Berlin, model of the modern research university. German philosophy was largely written by professors, and its centres were Jena, Berlin, Heidelberg and, for Schelling, Munich.

Britain, by contrast, was the workshop of the world. The Industrial Revolution had made London the largest city on earth and Manchester the symbol of factory labour, and British philosophy was preoccupied with reform: of Parliament, of the law, of the poor laws and of education. France oscillated between monarchy, empire and republic, and its thinkers sought a science that could end the cycle of revolution. Across the Atlantic, the United States emerged from the American Civil War with an expanding university system and a philosophy of its own.

Kant had argued that we can know only things as they appear to us, shaped by the mind's own forms of space, time and causality, and that things as they are in themselves remain unknowable. Many of his readers found this division unstable. If the thing in itself is unknowable, how can we even say it exists, let alone that it causes our sensations? The movement that tried to overcome the division is called German idealism, because its members held that reality is in some sense the product or expression of mind or reason. It overlapped with early Romanticism, and both flourished in the 1790s around the university of Jena and the nearby court of Weimar, where Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a minister.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the son of a poor ribbon weaver, became famous when his first book was mistaken for an anonymous work by Kant. Appointed at Jena in 1794, he tried to derive the whole of experience from a single starting point, the activity of the self, the "I" that posits itself and, in doing so, sets up a world of objects as the field of its moral striving. Accused of atheism in 1798–99, he lost his post and moved to Berlin. There, in the winter of 1807–08, with the city under French occupation, he delivered his Addresses to the German Nation, which called for a national education to revive the German people and became an early text of German nationalism.

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, a prodigy who was a professor at Jena by twenty-three, objected that Fichte left nature as a mere obstacle for the self. Schelling's philosophy of nature treated the natural world as itself alive and purposive, a kind of slumbering mind, and his philosophy of identity held that nature and spirit are two expressions of one absolute. Art, he argued, gives the clearest glimpse of that unity. Schelling lived long enough to see a younger friend eclipse him, and in 1841 he was called to Berlin to counter that friend's influence. His lectures there drew an extraordinary audience, including Kierkegaard, Engels and the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, most of whom left disappointed.

The friend was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who had shared a room with Schelling and the poet Friedrich Hölderlin at the Protestant seminary in Tübingen, where the three are said to have celebrated the French Revolution. Hegel finished his first major book, the Phenomenology of Spirit, in Jena in 1806 as the French army took the town. In a letter he described seeing Napoleon ride through, calling him the world-soul on horseback.

The Phenomenology traces the development of consciousness through a series of shapes, from simple sense perception through self-consciousness, social life, morality and religion to what Hegel called absolute knowing. Each stage proves inadequate on its own terms and is overcome by a richer one that preserves what was true in it. This pattern of development through contradiction is what Hegel meant by dialectic; the triad of thesis, antithesis and synthesis often attributed to him is not his own terminology.

Hegel's mature system, set out in the Science of Logic (1812–16) and the Encyclopaedia, presented reality as the self-unfolding of reason, which he called spirit. History, in his lectures, is the story of freedom coming to consciousness of itself: in the ancient East one person, the despot, was free; among the Greeks and Romans some were; in the modern Christian world all are recognised as free. His Philosophy of Right (1820), written while he was professor at Berlin from 1818, argued that freedom is realised not in isolated individuals but in institutions, the family, civil society and the state. His preface contained the line that what is rational is actual and what is actual is rational, which admirers and critics have argued over ever since. Hegel's lectures on history also placed Africa outside history altogether, a judgement later critics have treated as a stark example of European prejudice. When he died of cholera in 1831, he was the most influential philosopher in Germany.

Arthur Schopenhauer, the son of a Danzig merchant, despised Hegel and once scheduled his own Berlin lectures at the same hour as Hegel's; almost no one came. His masterpiece, The World as Will and Representation, published at the end of 1818 with the date 1819, took Kant's division in a darker direction. The world as we experience it is representation, a picture shaped by our minds. But from the inside, in our own bodies, we know what the world is in itself: will, a blind, aimless striving that drives everything from gravity to sexual desire. Because the will is never satisfied, life swings between pain and boredom.

Schopenhauer saw escape in three places: in art, especially music, which lets us contemplate the world without desire; in compassion, which recognises that all beings share the same suffering will; and in ascetic renunciation. He was among the first Western philosophers to take Indian philosophy seriously, reading the Upanishads in a Latin translation of a Persian version and finding parallels with the teaching of the Buddha. Ignored for decades, he became famous only in the 1850s, and his pessimism shaped composers, novelists and the young Nietzsche.

After Hegel's death his followers divided. The Right Hegelians read his philosophy as a defence of Christianity and the Prussian state. The Left or Young Hegelians, a circle of students and journalists in Berlin, used his method to criticise both. David Friedrich Strauss's Life of Jesus (1835) argued that the Gospels were myths expressing the ideas of the early Christian community. Ludwig Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity (1841) went further: God is a projection of humanity's own best qualities, and theology is really anthropology. Max Stirner's The Ego and Its Own (1844) rejected every cause, from God to humanity, in favour of the individual self.

Karl Marx, born in Trier in 1818, joined this circle as a student and edited a radical newspaper in Cologne until the authorities closed it in 1843. In Paris he met Friedrich Engels, the son of a textile manufacturer, whose Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) described life in industrial Manchester. Marx accepted Feuerbach's critique of religion but argued that it did not go far enough. In his notes known as the Theses on Feuerbach he wrote that philosophers had only interpreted the world, and the point was to change it.

Marx and Engels developed what came to be called historical materialism. Hegel had seen history as the development of ideas; Marx turned this around and held that the way a society produces its material life, its technology and its relations of ownership, shapes its laws, politics, religion and philosophy. History is driven by conflicts between classes, and capitalism, which had swept away feudalism, created a class of propertyless workers whose labour produces more value than they are paid for. Marx predicted that competition and crisis would push capitalism towards its own overthrow. The Communist Manifesto, written in Brussels and published in London in February 1848, appeared on the eve of revolutions across Europe. After their defeat Marx settled in London, where he wrote Capital, whose first volume appeared in 1867. He died in 1883, and Engels edited the remaining volumes. Through the socialist parties of the late century and, later, Vladimir Lenin and the Russian Revolution, Marx became one of the most consequential thinkers of the modern world.

In Copenhagen, Søren Kierkegaard mounted a very different attack on Hegel. Born in 1813, he broke off his engagement to Regine Olsen in 1841 and then produced a torrent of books, many under pseudonyms that allowed him to present outlooks he did not share. Either/Or (1843) set the life of a pleasure-seeking aesthete beside that of a judge committed to marriage and duty, leaving the reader to choose. Fear and Trembling (1843) meditated on Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac, arguing that genuine faith cannot be reduced to ethics or explained by reason.

Kierkegaard's target was the idea that a philosophical system could absorb the individual. A system might explain world history, but it could not tell a single person how to live or what to believe. Truth that matters, he wrote in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), is subjectivity: a matter of passionate personal commitment rather than detached knowledge. He described despair, anxiety and the leap of faith with a psychological depth that later readers found startlingly modern. In his last years he attacked the established Danish Church for turning Christianity into a comfortable formality, and he died in 1855 aged forty-two. Largely unknown outside Denmark until the twentieth century, he was then hailed as the father of existentialism.

In Britain the leading philosophy was utilitarianism, the view that the right action is the one that produces the greatest happiness. Jeremy Bentham, a London lawyer, set out its principles in An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789). Pleasure and pain, he argued, are the only things good or bad in themselves, and they can in principle be measured by their intensity, duration and certainty. Laws and institutions should be judged by their effects on the happiness of everyone affected, each person counting for one. Bentham turned this principle against the unreformed Parliament, cruel punishments and legal fictions, and designed a model prison, the panopticon, in which every inmate could be watched from a central tower.

John Stuart Mill, the son of Bentham's ally James Mill, was given an extraordinary education, learning Greek at three, and at twenty suffered a breakdown in which, he later wrote, he found that the reformer's goals no longer moved him. Poetry, especially Wordsworth's, helped him recover, and he spent his life broadening Bentham's creed. In Utilitarianism (1861) he argued that some pleasures are higher than others, so that it is better to be a dissatisfied human than a satisfied pig. In On Liberty (1859), written in partnership with his wife Harriet Taylor Mill, he defended the harm principle: society may restrict an individual's conduct only to prevent harm to others, never merely for that person's own good or because the majority dislikes it. The Subjection of Women (1869) argued for full legal and political equality between the sexes, and as a member of Parliament he proposed votes for women in 1867. His System of Logic (1843) set out rules for scientific reasoning from experience.

In France, Auguste Comte, once secretary to the social reformer Henri de Saint-Simon, offered a philosophy of science and history he called positivism. His Course in Positive Philosophy (1830–42) proposed a law of three stages: every branch of knowledge passes from a theological stage, explaining events by gods, through a metaphysical stage, explaining them by abstract forces and essences, to a positive stage, which seeks only the laws that connect observable facts. The sciences reach this stage in order, from mathematics and astronomy through physics, chemistry and biology to the last and most complex, the science of society, for which Comte coined the word sociology. In later life he founded a religion of humanity, with its own calendar of secular saints. Positivism spread widely, and the motto on the flag of Brazil, order and progress, is taken from Comte.

Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) was a work of biology, but its philosophical consequences were immense. By showing how natural selection, acting on small inherited variations over vast stretches of time, could produce organisms exquisitely adapted to their environments, Darwin removed the strongest support for the argument from design, the claim that the fitness of living things proves a designing God. The Descent of Man (1871) placed humans firmly within the animal kingdom and offered a natural history of the moral sense.

Philosophers responded in very different ways. Herbert Spencer, who coined the phrase survival of the fittest, built a system of evolutionary philosophy that was enormously popular in Britain and America and was used, often crudely, to justify competition between individuals, classes and races under the label social Darwinism. Darwin's defender Thomas Henry Huxley replied that ethics means resisting the struggle of nature, not imitating it. For the American pragmatists, evolution suggested that thinking itself is a tool by which organisms adapt to their surroundings.

Friedrich Nietzsche, the son of a Lutheran pastor in Saxony, was appointed professor of classical philology at Basel in Switzerland in 1869, at twenty-four. His first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), argued that Greek tragedy arose from the union of two impulses, the Apollonian love of form and order and the Dionysian frenzy that dissolves the self, and it linked his study of ancient Greek philosophy and drama to his enthusiasm for Schopenhauer and the composer Richard Wagner. Ill health forced him to resign in 1879, and he spent the next decade writing in Swiss and Italian lodgings.

In The Gay Science (1882) a madman announces that God is dead and that we have killed him. Nietzsche meant that belief in the Christian God had become impossible for educated Europeans, and that the morality built on it would collapse too, leaving the threat of nihilism, the sense that nothing has value. Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–85) offered the figure of the Übermensch, an overhuman who creates new values, and the thought of eternal recurrence, a test of whether one could affirm one's life so fully as to will its endless repetition. On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) argued that Christian morality, with its praise of meekness and pity, had originated in the resentment of the weak against the strong. Nietzsche attacked German nationalism and antisemitism, but after his collapse in Turin in January 1889 his sister Elisabeth controlled his papers, compiled a book from his notes called The Will to Power and promoted him to nationalist circles. That legacy made it easier for the Nazis to claim him, a reading most scholars regard as a distortion. He died in Weimar in 1900, and his influence on Martin Heidegger, existentialism and later continental thought was profound.

The first distinctively American philosophy took shape in the early 1870s in a discussion group in Cambridge, Massachusetts, near Boston, that its members called the Metaphysical Club. One of them, the logician and scientist Charles Sanders Peirce, proposed in How to Make Our Ideas Clear (1878) that the meaning of an idea consists in its conceivable practical effects. To call something hard, for instance, is to say that many other substances will not scratch it. Peirce saw inquiry as a communal process by which doubt is settled, and truth as the opinion investigators would eventually agree on if inquiry continued long enough.

William James, a Harvard physician turned psychologist and philosopher, made pragmatism famous. His Principles of Psychology (1890) described the mind as a stream of consciousness, and in a lecture at Berkeley in 1898 he introduced the word pragmatism to a wide public, crediting Peirce. James argued that true ideas are those that work, that guide us successfully through experience, and in The Will to Believe (1896) he defended the right to religious faith where evidence cannot settle the question. Peirce, uneasy with James's looser version, later renamed his own view pragmaticism, a word he hoped was ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers.

John Dewey, who began as a Hegelian, moved to the new University of Chicago in 1894 and there developed his instrumentalism, the view that ideas are tools for solving problems in a changing environment. His Laboratory School, opened in 1896, put into practice his conviction that children learn by doing and that education is preparation for democratic life. Most of his influential work came in the twentieth century.

At the end of the century, philosophy in Germany was dominated by the neo-Kantians, who had called for a return to Kant, and in Britain by idealists such as F. H. Bradley, who were indebted to Hegel. Yet a quieter development would prove more decisive. At Jena, Gottlob Frege, a mathematician almost unknown in his lifetime, published the Begriffsschrift, or concept-script, in 1879. It offered a symbolic language in which the logic of arguments could be represented exactly, including statements about all or some things, which Aristotle's logic had handled only in limited forms. It is generally regarded as the most important advance in logic since Aristotle.

Frege's aim was to show that arithmetic could be derived from logic alone. The Foundations of Arithmetic (1884) attacked the idea that numbers are mental images or physical things, and his essay On Sense and Reference (1892) distinguished what an expression refers to from the way it presents that object, explaining how "the morning star is the evening star" can be informative though both names refer to Venus. In 1902, as the second volume of his Basic Laws of Arithmetic was going to press, Bertrand Russell wrote to point out a contradiction in its foundations. The problem did not destroy Frege's influence. Through Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, his logic and his philosophy of language became the starting point of analytic philosophy.

By 1900 the grand systems of the century's opening had lost their hold. Hegelianism survived in Britain for a while but would soon be attacked by Russell and G. E. Moore. Nietzsche's work was just beginning to be widely read, Kierkegaard was about to be rediscovered, and in 1900–01 Edmund Husserl, trained like Frege as a mathematician, published the Logical Investigations that launched phenomenology. The questions that divided these thinkers, about logic and meaning, about science and value, and about the individual facing a world without fixed foundations, passed directly into the analytic and continental traditions of the twentieth century.