The History of Philosophy: From the Greeks and Christians to Moderns and Postmoderns
Paul Krause
INTRODUCTION & THE RISE OF REASON – THE GREEKS The beginning of philosophy isn’t philosophy. Rather, it is poetry. Greek poetry to be specific. While we know the names of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, they did not arise in a vacuum. It is also true that the pre-Socratics existed, some you may know: Heraclitus, Pythagoras,…
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INTRODUCTION & THE RISE OF REASON – THE GREEKS

The beginning of philosophy isn’t philosophy. Rather, it is poetry. Greek poetry to be specific. While we know the names of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, they did not arise in a vacuum. It is also true that the pre-Socratics existed, some you may know: Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Thales. The pre-Socratics and Socratics can be assessed for their visions of philosophy, both already contained in the poetic tradition. The poetic tradition concerned itself with man and the cosmos, human nature and cosmogony to be more specific. These were the issues dealt later by the first philosophers: the pre-Socratics were concerned with the nature of the cosmos and the Socratics concerned with human nature—though we can say with Plato that he was also concerned with the nature of the cosmos just like Aristotle would be in his Metaphysics. But why does philosophy begin with poetry?

Greek poetry deals with the human condition and the cosmos that the human condition inhabits. That is what philosophy is about: the human condition and the environment that it finds itself inhabiting, the cosmos. The history of philosophy is the history of human inquiry into our nature and the world around us, from the Greeks and Christians to the moderns and postmoderns. This is the story of the rise of reason with the Greeks, the integration of reason and love with Christianity, the eclipse of reason and the turn to human sentiment and pragmatism (modern science) with the moderns, whom we may also know as the Enlightenment philosophers. Then comes the demolition of the entire inquiry into reason, love, and pragmatic science by the postmoderns.

In this lecture, the first of four dealing with this history, we begin with the Greeks and the rise of reason out of poetry. As already mentioned, poetry deals with the human condition and the cosmos, any reader of Hesiod, Homer, or Aeschylus can readily see this. The early Enlightenment Italian humanist and philosopher Giambattista Vico, in the New Science, articulated the vision that origins and evolution of philosophy that we will follow: the birth of human thinking begins with human imagery and stories, the images and stories found in poetry, which eventually give way to the rise of rationality. Rationality, then, has its beginnings in imagery and stories, what we sometimes call “myth,” a word, which in Greek, means proclamation—or “to tell.” In other words, myth means story. And story is how conceptual thinking begins. For in a story we have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. We who live in a nominal Christian culture in the west are familiar with those famous first words. But that’s not how the Greeks understood their cosmos. The God of Reason and Love envisioned by Christianity who created the universe out of love and endowed it with rational understanding is not the cosmos of Hesiod. If we can imaginatively rearticulate Hesiod’s beginning, in the Theogony, we can say: In the beginning was Chaos, and Chaos ruled over the heavens and the earth. Chaos is the beginning of everything according to Hesiod. Chaos is the beginning of philosophy. The fundamental question of philosophy can be reduced to this: how do we make order from chaos? The Greeks, the Christians, the moderns, and the postmoderns will all give us answers—and the answers given is the story of philosophy.

Let us return to Hesiod’s Theogony and hear the origins of the cosmos:

…at the first Chaos came to be, but next wide-bosomed Earth, the ever-sure foundations of all the deathless ones who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus, and dim Tartarus in the depth of the wide-pathed Earth, and Eros (Love), fairest among the deathless gods, who unnerves the limbs and overcomes the mind and wise counsels of all gods and all men within them. From Chaos came forth Erebus and black Night; but of Night were born Aether and Day, whom she conceived and bare from union in love with Erebus.

As we can hear, Chaos is the beginning as we just said. Chaos rules over everything. And out of this Chaos will come the gods: the Titans born of Uranus and Gaia, the most famous of them being Cronus, who will castrate his father for his tyrannical raping of Mother Earth, whose castrated phallus will fall into the sea and give birth to Aphrodite and the Olympians, the most famous of them being Zeus. Zeus, assuming the leadership of the Olympians, will rally the newly born gods against the Titans. This is the war of the gods, known to us as the Titanomachy. Cronus and the Titans are overthrown and Zeus ascends Olympus as the supreme deity.

Hesiod’s Theogony is a violent poem. Chaos necessitates power. And the most powerful are the ones who bring order to the world. Thus, Hesiod sings praises of Zeus, the most powerful of all the deities in the epic. Hesiod and the muses sing praise to Zeus simply because Zeus is the most powerful. The most powerful is worthy of being admired for out of that power comes the order of the world that brings life.

Hesiod’s primitive philosophy is this: In the beginning is chaos. Chaos is bad. Chaos is represented most especially by the god Uranus. Chaos is tyrannical. Chaos is sexual. Uranus rapes Gaia. Order is good. Order is the antithesis to Chaos. Order is represented by Power. Power is manifested most clearly in Zeus. Chaos and Power, Uranus and Zeus do battle, Power (Zeus) emerges victorious from which Order is brought to the world.

This, however, doesn’t seem to be a very good world to live in. It’s a world of chaos. Confusion. Sex. Lust. Violence. War. Readers of Plato will find overtures of Hesiod in Thrasymachus, who in The Republic explains justice as the rule of the strong. Zeus is the strongest of the gods and thus is worthy of praise.

Plato’s Republic also sets an early contrast between the old cosmos of power and the new cosmos of rationality right from the beginning:

[Socrates]: I went down to the Piraeus yesterday with Glaucon, son of Ariston, to pray to the goddess; and, at the same time, I wanted to observe how they would put on the festival, since they were now holding it for the first time. Now, in my opinion, the procession of the native inhabitants was fine; but the one the Thracians conducted was no less fitting a show. After we had prayed and looked on, we went off toward town.

Catching sight of us from afar as we were pressing homewards, Polemarchus, son of Cephalus, ordered his slave boy to run after us and order us to wait for him. The boy took hold of my cloak from behind and said, “Polemarchus orders you to wait.”

And I turned around and asked him where his master was. “He is coming up behind,” he said, “just wait.”

“Of course we’ll wait,” said Glaucon.

A moment later Polemarchus came along with Adeimantus, Glaucon’s brother, Niceratus, son of Nicias, and some others—apparently from the procession. Polemarchus said, “Socrates, I guess you two are hurrying to get away to town.”

“That’s not a bad guess,” I said.

“Well,” he said, “do you see how many of us there are?”

“Of course.”

“Well, then,” he said, “either prove stronger than these men or stay here.”

“Isn’t there still one other possibility.” I said, “our persuading you that you must let us go?”

“Could you really persuade,” he said, “if we don’t listen?”

Listen again. After Polemarchus sends his slave boy to forcibly hold Socrates against his will, and later when Polemarchus catches up and he converses with Socrates, Polemarchus brags that he has more people than Socrates and therefore has more power to force Socrates to do what he wants. “Well then, either prove stronger than these men or stay here,” Polemarchus says. “Isn’t there still one other possibility,” Socrates responds. “Our persuading you that you must let us go.” Power vs. Persuasion. Force vs. Reason. This is the dialectic that Plato inaugurates for us. This is what Greek philosophy is all about, reason and persuasion as the basis of the cosmos and not power and violence as was the case with the poets. The rest of The Republic is really a giant dialogue of power, advocated by the Sophists, in contest with rationality, articulated by Socrates.

The cosmos of reason offered up by Plato reaches its climax in The Timaeus. The Demiurge doesn’t create through brute force or war as the case in Hesiod. Rather, the Demiurge establishes all things through rational order. Timaeus’s long-winded discourses in the dialogue that bears his name has him then discuss mathematics as a necessary manifested of rational order—math proves the cosmos to be rationally ordered and rationally understandable.

Even though Platonism is sometimes called the philosophy of intelligibility, the intelligible world that we can know from rational thought, the soul, which exists within us, Platonism’s application isn’t inwardly but outwardly. Plato’s Forms exist beyond and above the material world. But we are still contemplating the cosmos and what lies beyond it: outward nature.

Plato’s most famous student, Aristotle, picks up where Plato left off. But rather than look beyond the cosmos for the rational order of all things, Aristotle looks to nature itself—the material world. Aristotle’s most famous gift to philosophy is the idea that we are manifestations of the material world, of material nature, that we grow into the nature that we are endowed with. To understand ourselves we must understand nature because we are nature. As with Plato, though augmented, Aristotle’s philosophical empiricism is one of outward contemplation: the contemplation of observable nature.

This idea of contemplating observable nature to understand ourselves is continued with the Stoics. The cosmos is rationally determined by fixed patterns and movement. The Stoics were cosmic determinists, but they believed we had the power to control our emotions and how we respond to the world of movement. We can be more like the cosmos, accepting the movement of nature and being happy as a result, or we can fight against nature and be miserable. The Stoics, as we can see, share in the Platonic-Aristotelian tradition of looking outward at the world in order to better understand about ourselves: this is what rational living is all about – the observation of the movement of nature, recognizing we are a part of nature, accepting that we are part of nature, and then growing into that nature. This produces our happiness.

The Greek philosophical tradition of reason, then, is premised on a cosmos of rationality. In order to understand reason we must observe nature then live by the nature we observe. Greek rationalism is contemplative, it is the contemplation of outward things, of outward nature. It also takes a negative view of love, of the emotions, which is associated with chaos and the violence of the poets. Any reader of the Stoics is familiar with the negativity the Stoics place on the emotions: the emotions are irrational, following the emotions leads to bad decisions, and to live by one’s emotions is to be enslaved to pathos. To be free is to live rationally, in conformity with the observable nature of the universe.

This tension, however, between reason and love was unresolved by Greek philosophy. This is the world that Christian philosophy emerged into, a world where reason and love were pitted against each other and a world where understanding the self was through understanding the outer world. The Christian revolution in philosophy changed all of that. Although it shares with Greek philosophy a priority of the contemplative, its emphasis would turn inward. Christianity would try to reconcile the tension between reason and love by turning away from the outer world to the inner world, to the world of the human heart.

CHRISTIANITY AND THE RISE OF THE SELF

The most monumental shift in the history of philosophy is one that is the least known and the most misunderstood: Christianity. People with no knowledge of philosophy or theology are, sadly, the people who most often speak on the subject matter. One can think of imbeciles like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, or Neil deGrasse Tyson as a few examples. But in philosophy and history, Christianity proved to be the most significant development in human consciousness, providing for the birth of the self and the philosophies of individuality that we have 2,000 years later. How did this happen?

We previously explained how out of the Greek poetic tradition the philosophic traditions of Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Stoicism all emerged. What united the Greek philosophies was their emphasis on understanding the outer world, their primacy of reason over love, of rational observation instead of pathological eroticism. The erotic world was associated with Hesiod, Homer, and the playwrights. That was a world that ultimately led to violence, the irrational, and death and destruction writ large. But by observing the order and movement of the cosmos, the Greek philosophers argued, we would realize the poets were wrong and could escape the chaos and violence around us.

Christianity rejected this view. By its own theology it had to: God is not just Truth and Reason as was the case in Greek philosophy. God was also, and primarily, Love. God is Love itself. Christianity, then, attempts to bridge the gap between rationality and love, between the rational cosmos we can know and the human passions that stir and govern the human heart. You are probably familiar with this dichotomy. Saint Thomas Aquinas, for instance, the most famous of the Scholastics, giving all of his rational arguments for the existence of God and how we can know everything about the world. Then there are the Renaissance Humanists, like Nicholas Cusa, turning our mind back to the human heart, inner nature, and the self, a celebration of human nature and human love which led to the Renaissance artists and their paintings and sculptures. The history of Christianity oscillates between the celebration of God as Reason (Thomas and the Scholastics) and the celebration of God as Love (Dante and the Renaissance Humanists).

The one figure who is the most important to the history of Christian philosophy is the man who influenced both the Scholastics and Humanists, then later the Protestant Reformers: Saint Augustine. For it was Saint Augustine who declared, in De Trinitate, that the soul is “the rational intellect” and the rational intellect in man was the image of God in us. But it was also Augustine who said the most radical statement in western cultural and intellectual history, one that we are still living in the wake of: dilectio Deus est. Love is God. Love is Divine. In Latin, if you literally translated one word at a time: Love God is. In his homilies on the epistles of John, Augustine extended the formulation of “God is Love” (1 John 4:16), he literally said that all love is Divine and wherever love is found, God is found. In the Confessions, he also famously remarked “I was in love with the idea of love.” Augustine was obsessed with love.

In the beginning, Love created the heavens and the earth. That was Augustine’s understanding of Genesis 1. Love is the beginning of everything, not chaos. Love is also knowable, knowable through experience but not rational observation. Thus, with Augustine, and the rest of Christianity influenced by him, Christianity becomes the philosophy of love, and the philosophy of love is found in people, in the human heart, and in our relations and interactions with others and the world. Christianity lays the seeds for the philosophies of existentialism, phenomenology, even psychology, since it is principally concerned with the world of human experience.

The most famous question asked by Augustine in the Confessions was mihi quaestio factus sum: I have become a question even to myself.

Augustine asserted many things in his life that are worth knowing: That God is an Artist, that the cosmos is a poetic creation, that our souls are notes in the music of existence. All, though, are simply expressions of love. Love is the basis of all things.

But in trying to understand the nature of love, the rational trying to understand the irrational, Augustine goes beyond the Platonism that saved him from Manichaeism. The Greek philosophical tradition, as we explained in episode one, ultimately looked outward for answers. Even Platonism, though it can be described as the philosophy of the intelligible world (which is why Platonism always had a close relationship to Christianity), looked outward to the Realm of the Forms. Aristotelianism looked outward to the world of immediate nature, the material world that we ourselves are imitative creatures of. Stoicism looked outward to the cosmos, recognizing that we cannot control the movement of the heavens, that everything was in flux, and that once we accepted this principle, we could conform to the movement of the cosmos and control our own passions—the only thing we have direct control over. Christianity’s revolution in philosophy is the creation of the self, as William Barrett explained in Irrational man. Why? Because Christianity turned inward and not outward for its answers. Rather than looking outward for God and Reason, Augustine turned inward, looking into the heart, into the soul, into the mind. As he also famously said in the Confessions, when he discovered God he discovered God within him, it was only after turning inward that God was found. God was not a body to be found in the universe. This is why even Slavoj Zizek explains Christianity and Augustine as the beginning of “psychological interiority,” and why other noted scholars and psychologists have said the rise of modern psychology is Christianity without its concern for God.

Reason itself, since God is Reason, is found within us. Reason doesn’t exist in the realm of the Forms as it does in Plato. Reason is found in our minds, for our mind is the soul and the soul possesses reason—a vestige ruin of the God who created us in love. Augustine explained this in De Trinitate, that the image of God in man is found in his mind: God is Reason and God is Truth is found in the soul and memory of the human mind. God is Love and Love is God is also to be found in the human heart. To know reason and to know love we must turn inward and try and unite the mind (the soul) and the heart (love).

Augustine, therefore, begins his wrestling with rationality and love, the two great poles that occupy Christian philosophy. Moreover, because humans possess rationality and are also erotic, loving, animals, this tension between reason and love is the tension that defines human existence. And since Love, God, is found in humans and not out there in the material world, Christianity primarily becomes concerned with the question of humanity: what does it mean to be human?

We should now begin to see the dramatic turn in philosophy that Christianity begets. Plato looked to the realm of the Forms. Aristotle to the material world. The Stoics to the heavens. Augustine turned to himself, to us, to human beings. Christianity, as a result, looked to the answers of philosophy within human beings, human actions, and what motivates them rather than the outer world of the universe and observable nature. As Hannah Arendt said of Augustine, “he was the only philosopher the Romans ever produced.” Why? Because he was unique, original, innovative. The other Roman philosophers, like Cicero and Seneca, were just Roman variations of Platonism and Stoicism. Augustine, Arendt reminds us, was a philosopher of the heart, of the will, thus begetting the tradition of voluntarism to the Western tradition to which more famous modern philosophers like Nietzsche and Foucault also belong.

The inward turn to the self, the incurvatus in se as Augustine called it, is what would eventually lead to the proliferation of the liberal arts in late medieval Europe with the Scholastics and Renaissance Humanists. The discovery, or rediscovery, of the classics told us about ourselves which the Scholastics endless poured over because these were works of the human heart and mind that we could unlock to learn about ourselves. The dialogue and engagement with Islam, one of the positive and unintended outcomes of the Crusades, caused the Renaissance Humanists to look into their own hearts and the hearts of Muslims to try and discover the universal human nature that unites all human beings regardless of religious confession and devotion. Christianity became the philosophy of us whereas Greek philosophy was the philosophy of the cosmos; Christianity gave us theories of the self, the soul, the body, sin, love, goodness, and sanctification. It also led to the rise of a new form of empiricism, radically different than the empiricism of the Greeks.

In De Veritate, or On Truth, Saint Anselm declared that “since God is Truth” God could be known by our senses. Anselm turns the attention of understanding human sensations inward to us rather than the material world. He is not concerned with why the objects of the world move or sound the way they do, he isn’t concerned with why certain things smell the way they do, he is concerned with the how and why we interpret these senses the way we do. Sensations, although caused by the material world, are interpreted by us. Sensations are otherwise irrelevant without humans to experience and interpret them. If tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? This is one of the silly questions of medieval philosophy but now you can understand why it is asked: Christian philosophy isn’t about the world it is about us, so if we’re not around to hear sounds then sounds is an irrelevant subject matter. Because of this, the true study of empirical science is actually a study of humanity. Humans do the interpreting. Can interpretations be wrong? Of course, Anselm tells his pupil in the dialogue. However, Anselm also asserts that this is a deficiency in human reasoning and not the senses themselves. The senses are never wrong, properly speaking, only the human interpretation of the senses are—when we smell the smell is real, when we hear, the hearing is real—whether we smelled the proper scent or heard the music from the right direction didn’t have to do with the senses but how we interpreted them. The eye sees, the ear hears, the tongue tastes. But whether we see properly, or hear the music from the correct direction, or whether the tongue tastes the correct ingredients, is a product of rational interpretation.

But to end with are summarizing of Christian philosophy: God is Reason and God is Love. This God of Reason and God of Love is found in us rather than the outer world. Christianity creates the philosophy of the self, of inner subjectivity and inner nature. Christianity’s concern is the self, that inner subjectivity and inner nature that contains the residue of God, the image of the Divine. The attempt to square the rational and the erotic is found, ultimately, in God. Without God there is no rationality and no true love; there is only be the irrational and lust.

Christianity, then, attempted to bridge the gap between reason and love, the reason extoled by the Greek philosophers and the love sung of by the Greek poets. This is why Dante unites reason and poetry in The Divine Comedy. It attempted to do so by not looking to the outer world but the inner world, the inner world of human nature. However, Christianity’s invention of the self, its concentration on the human being, turned our attention away from the material world. The rise of modern philosophy with Machiavelli, Francis Bacon, and the so-called Enlightenment thinkers, would rise in opposition to this insular philosophizing of Christianity. The end of Christian philosophy is marked by the rise of modern science, the philosophy of scientific conquest and investigation by Francis Bacon, and that is what we shall explore next. No longer would philosophy be concerned with questions of the self and inner subjectivity and inner nature, but with the material world and outer nature, the nature of things and objects, thus giving rise to the explosive revolutions of industry, science, and commerce that defined the modern world. The rise of practical philosophy is next.

THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY

The greatest lie people are told about the Enlightenment is that it was about science and reason. When people say this, they wield the terms “science” and “reason” as magical abracadabra words, words of propaganda, as if just by saying these two words listeners are supposed to be stupefied with awe. As any real student of philosophy knows, this is patently false. Greek and Christian philosophy were already involved with these issues. Rather, Enlightenment philosophy was about a particular kind of science and a particular kind of reason and rationality: practical science and practical reason, a science and reason that was related to the material world rather than the human subject. Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum is the classic explanation of this outlook: modern philosophy turned away from the inward questions of Christianity and to the outward questions of the material world. The goal, as Bacon said, was to create “the empire of man” and the “relief of man’s estate.”

What separates modern science from Greek science is the belief in the transformation of nature. If you recall from our covering of Greek philosophy, Greek philosophical rationality and its outward observations made humans part of nature: humanity and nature were one. This is what Aristotle and the Stoics taught: we are outgrowths of nature and grow into our nature over time. This is what classical teleology is about. Modern philosophy rejects this. Through human will, practical science, industry, commerce—in other words, technology—humans can remake the world, remake nature, and, ultimately, remake ourselves for a comfortable and secure existence in a world that is often “nasty, brutish, and short.” Thus, modern philosophy marks the separation of man from nature, creating the perennial problem that future modern philosophy wrestled with: the crisis of dualism. Modern philosophy also asserts that nature is malleable, changeable, and is in no way fixed. We can ultimately change nature to our liking. You are probably familiar with these ideas because you probably believe them too.

When Bacon proclaimed the new science and new philosophy as aiming to achieve the “relief of man’s estate,” he drew on the theologies of vocation from Martin Luther and John Calvin, both of whom proclaimed that fidelity to God was active labor in this life. What becomes clear, then, when entering the modern era of philosophy is the practical turn away from the contemplative philosophies of the Greeks and medieval Christian tradition. Rational contemplation of the outer world of nature was the highest philosophical pursuit of the Greeks and the contemplation of the inner world of the human heart and human nature the highest philosophical pursuit of medieval, or Catholic, Christianity. The Protestant Reformation, to which modern philosophy is an odd child of, grew out of the rejection of this intellectual contemplation and the embrace of labor, commerce, and the practical application of reason.

Thomas Hobbes, a later contemporary of Francis Bacon, declared reason simply to be the rational calculation to more easily and efficiently obtain bodily needs in the Leviathan. John Locke, who followed Hobbes, also argued for practical philosophy in his writings, especially The Two Treatises. Both followed Bacon in this regard.

While there are superficial similarities between modern philosophical rationalism and classical Greek philosophical rationalism, the differences should be becoming more apparent: Greek rationalism was contemplative, modern rationalism is pragmatic; Greek rationalism believed nature to be fixed and that we are products of a fixed nature; modern rationalism believes nature to be fluid and changeable; Greek rationalism wanted to know about ourselves through the study of nature, modern rationalism wants to make our life comfortable through the transformation of nature; the Greek understanding of reason is grounded in contemplative thought, modern rationalism sees the purpose of reason as leading to action.

Modern philosophy becomes practical science. This is something all students of philosophy come to learn through the study of philosophy. This is something that we ought to realize and recognize how profound this transformation is. The movement of modern philosophy to becoming practical science is what allows imbeciles like Neil deGrasse Tyson and Richard Dawkins, and so many more practical scientists who wield the abracadabra wand of “SCIENCE” can belittle philosophy even though philosophy is what gave birth to their discipline.

Modern philosophy, beginning with Francis Bacon, is about the scientific conquest and control of nature. A little bit later, another famous English philosopher emerged. He was a philosopher before he was remembered as a scientist: Isaac Newton. Newton’s discovery of physics had a profound effect on philosophy. It confirmed modern philosophy! Or so the modern philosophers thought. Thus, after Newton’s discovery of the laws of physics, modern philosophy blends Bacon and Newton together. This is the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes: we are matter in motion. Everything is just matter in motion. Thus, modern philosophy drifts towards materialism and determinism. The materialism, determinism, and the belief that science and industry can remake nature, form the basis for utilitarianism: the understanding of everything as ultimately being reduced to practical material decision-making. The questions of good and evil that preoccupied the Greeks and Christians is now resolved simply by whatever is pleasing to the body and whatever can bring the most pleasure to the most bodies because humans are nothing but material bodies!

This, however, marks the end of rational contemplation. Yes, unlike the propagandist shills of the Enlightenment—like Steven Pinker—modern philosophy actually marks the end of rational contemplation and thinking because we know the answers to all the questions of philosophy through bodily utility and the materialist determinism that comes with the blending of Bacon and Newton. Science has arrived and is the only game in town, philosophy is now obsolete. Science is king.

Not everyone agreed with this. The “Counter-Enlightenment” in philosophy and the Romantic philosophical tradition protested this sterile understanding of the universe and humanity. As Rousseau famously declared in Discourses on Inequality, science is not making us more moral but immoral, science is not helping humanity but harming humanity. The Romantics, too, famously storming onto the scene after Immanuel Kant, rediscovered the inner world of human passions and the human heart. The German Idealists wanted to recover the spirit of inner subjectivity given to us by Christianity but synthesize it with the new discoveries of modern science. They wanted to resolve the dilemma of dualism and save us from the crude and vulgar materialism of utilitarianism.

We have thus far said that modern philosophy becomes practical science. In this story we have also said that modern philosophy turns away from intellectual contemplation in favor of bodily action. The Idealist answer to the problems that have arisen in modern philosophy is to see inner nature and human subjectivity as a product of action, of activity: this is the defining foundation of the most famous German Idealists like Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. Schelling would go as far as to say Nature is Action, and since humanity is also action, humanity and nature are one—thus resolving, in Schelling’s mind anyway, the separationist dualism of modern philosophy. Action, too, leads to the rise of human consciousness per Fichte and Hegel. It is not the sterile contemplation of the self that leads to our understanding of ourselves but the fusing of all human action and interaction that leads to our understanding: to understand ourselves, Hegel asserts, we must understand human action and activity.

This is why German Idealism is still modern rather than a return to Greek or Christian philosophy. Though most of the German Idealists were schooled in the classics and theology, some of them being Protestant clergymen, they took from the Greeks the theme of observable nature, they took from the Christians the theme of the self, and they took from modern philosophy the theme of practical action and the discoveries of Newtonian physics and tried to tie all of it together into a systematic whole. German Idealism attempted to marry intellectual contemplation with practical action.

Eventually, though, German Idealism floundered. The materialism of Bacon, Newton, and utilitarianism overran and outlasted what Tim Blanning calls the “Romantic Revolution.” But a part of the Idealist thesis that consciousness springs from human action was carried forward by the new materialists: Feuerbach, Marx, and Nietzsche. Modern philosophy is still the philosophy of practical science, but now it is becoming the philosophy of consciousness through practical science. The most famous representative of this idea is Marx, who asserted that all human understanding derives from practical labor: economics.

The ascendancy of Marx over the German Idealist tradition turned German Idealism into German Materialism. This, Marx left to the world in two books: Capital and The German Ideology. The materialization of German Idealism by Feuerbach, Stirner, Marx, Nietzsche, and others, ensured the death of the Romantic Revolution and its concern for inner subjective consciousness. It also ensured that modern philosophy would be defined by two poles: the practical utilitarianism of the Anglo-Scottish philosophies and the materialist consciousness of German or Continental philosophy. These two philosophical schools, read through Marxist terms, would produce capitalism and scientific socialism, bourgeois liberalism and proletariat communism. In fact, from Marx, the world of materialist forces acting upon humanity and the scientific transformation of nature bifurcated humanity into two groups: the capitalist and proletariat, the haves and the have-nots, the oppressor and the oppressed.

This, though, ironically marked the return of human contemplation. No more would philosophy simply be the practical application of science and industry to better improve our material comfort and security as in utilitarianism. Philosophy would be concerned with understanding how materialist forces split humanity into two groups, the dialectic of Marxist class conflict. So while utilitarianism marks the end of philosophy and the triumph of practical science, Marx’s materialization of subjective consciousness stolen from Fichte and Hegel would drive the rise of postmodern philosophy, which we shall cover next.

But to summarize the modern period of philosophy, philosophy is no longer about the contemplative life as it was for the Greeks and Christians. Nor is philosophy about the self and inner world of human nature, as it was for Christianity. Philosophy is about the practical application of human reasoning to enhance one’s material pleasure and comfort, the “relief of man’s estate” and the desire to establish the “empire of man” as Francis Bacon said through the rise of science, industry, and commerce. Modern philosophy becomes practical, and in becoming practical, modern science—which is practical science—overtakes philosophy. Not everyone was happy with this direction. Those who were not happy rebelled; these are the Romantics and Idealists whose famous names include Rousseau, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. But the Romantic and German Idealist attempt to recover the questions of nature and the self failed with the rise of the German Materialists: most famous being Feuerbach and Marx. But what the German Materialists salvaged form their Idealist forebears would lead to the final stage of philosophy: postmodernism and the deconstruction of practical science.

THE END OF PHILOSOPHY – NIHILISM AND POSTMODERNISM

Welcome to the end. Not the apocalypse. Not the end of history. But the end of philosophy. We have thus far covered the history of philosophy in three stages: the rise of reason with the Greeks, the creation of the self with Christianity, and the rise of practical science in the modern period. We are now entering the fourth and final stage of philosophy: nihilism and postmodernism.

The triumph of practical science, which is what occurred in modern philosophy, marked the end of intellectual contemplation. Reason is no longer concerned with understanding ourselves through the observation of nature as it was for the Greeks or the discovery of inner nature and the human heart as it was for the Christians. Reason is concerned with the most efficient ways to obtain what the body needs to live and thrive. This is modern rationalism which gave way to a materialist understanding of everything, materialist determinism, which eventually gave birth to utilitarianism: the philosophy that believes all questions can be solved by the answer of practical benefits to the body.

Even though some modern philosophers, like the German Idealists, rejected this hollow vision of the cosmos and humanity, practical science triumphed. Even in Marx practical science is the normative governing understanding—hence “scientific socialism” and why socialism will inevitably triumph: it is materially determined just like how all science is materially determined per the discoveries of Newton. However, Marx also gave room for the rediscovery of thought within this materialist prison, why, if all human action is based on pragmatic materialism, is there inequality between people? This question, the only question that is permitted in the Marxist framework, the question of inequality, allowed for the last hurrah of philosophy. This is why the question of inequality is now the final question of philosophy.

Because the world of materialist causality ultimately has no meaning, nihilism emerged in the mid and late nineteenth century beginning with Max Stirner and Friedrich Nietzsche. Nihilism, however, is much more than the philosophy of nothingness or the belief that there is no inherent meaning to life and the cosmos. Yes, that is true in a crude sense. But this fails to explain why people live by meaning. According to Nietzsche, that’s because people create their meaning to live by. This becomes the basis of existentialism: the self-creating self in a world of nothingness as Jean-Paul Sartre would explain in Being and Nothingness.

The Nihilists, then, articulated a philosophy of constant creation and struggle against the emptiness of life. To live is to struggle, to create, where there is nothing to ultimately accept or grow into. Nihilism rejects the teleological understanding of nature offered by the Greeks. Nihilism also rejects the idea of an inner reality belief in God as Truth and Love offered by Christianity. Instead, Nihilism posits that all reality is self-constructed. You may know this idea through another term: social construction.

Social construction does not mean something is not “real.” It just means something is not determined by nature. All values are socially constructed and socially constructed values help create laws and institutions. These laws and institutions that are socially constructed by the values that people created for themselves are, therefore, unnatural in the sense that they cannot be found in nature. Those who attempt to explain laws and institutions as defending “laws of nature” or “natural rights” are guilty of the naturalistic fallacy. There is no fixed nature. This is the discovery of modern philosophy. All things are fluid and malleable. Values change because new values are created by people who lack power and influence in the world of human action.

This becomes the foundation for what we call postmodernism in philosophy. The essence of postmodernism, pardon the pun that any postmodernist would reject since there are no essences, is that there are no essence! Essence does not precede existence. Existence precedes essence. Even though the world is causally determined by materialist forces for practical bodily desires (this postmodernism shares with modern philosophy), the fact that humans create values and laws and institutions to benefit themselves over others is what explains the inequalities that Marx observed.

Why are there inequalities? People created and took for themselves to empower themselves at the expense of others.

These inequalities then become embedded in the world of human creation. Because humans are not the same as nature (an inheritance from modern philosophy), and because humans create their own world (something postmodernism also shares with the modern philosophical idea of creating the “empire of man” and “relief of man’s estate”), the task of philosophy is aimed at the deconstruction of these inequalities that exist in the socially constructed world. Postmodern philosophy is principally a philosophy of critique, of deconstruction—that famous phrase you have most likely heard used in the 21st century by everyone from political activists and journalists to philosophers and scientists.

Postmodernism, then, far from a rejection of modern philosophy, is actually a continuation of the modern project with just a rejection of the pragmatism of the Enlightenment—postmodernism, therefore, attempts to return to questions and skepticism which has always been part of the philosophical tradition. In its rejection of practical philosophy, however, postmodernism casts doubt over the principal narrative that emerged from Enlightenment philosophy: progress through science, technology, and economics. Postmodern deconstruction started as a deconstruction of the modern narrative of progress but has since developed into a deconstruction of all meta-narratives in philosophy, culture, religion, etc.

At its root, though, postmodernism shares with Marxism the concern for an oppressor-oppressed dialectic. With Nihilism, postmodernism shares the assumption that all values and realities are socially constructed. This is how we get down to what we said earlier, postmodernism rejects the idea of essences. Whereas the Greeks asserted essence precedes existence, a view that would have been shared by Christianity, postmodern philosophy turns this paradigm on its head: existence precedes essence and all forms of essentialism are simply social constructions and are, therefore, manifestations of “bad faith” to use the term from Sartre.

The problem with postmodernism is that even though it attempts to carve out space for a return to questioning that was jettisoned by the practical materialism of Enlightenment philosophy, it is, in fact, very narrow-minded and dogmatic (ironically) in that the schools of philosophy that would assert essence before existence, objectivity over subjectivity, truth over relativity, are bad faith questions or beliefs to hold and cannot be tolerated. So postmodernism ends up imposing its monopoly over the realm of questions. One must accept the postmodern credo: thus, the reopening of the western philosophical mind after its closure by the pragmatism of the Enlightenment also brought about its second closure in postmodernism: the answers to philosophy have been answered – all things are socially constructed and all social constructions that have thus far existed in history (itself a social construct) have resulted in some sort of oppressor-oppressed dialectic. Any deviation from this narrative is considered anathema.

What, then, can we summarize through the history of philosophy?

Philosophy actually begins with poetry. Greek poetry asserted the cosmos was one of chaos and violence and that human nature was a mirror image of that chaos and violence. Philosophy, the birth of reason, challenged this view: the cosmos was rationally ordered and humans, possessing a soul (which is the rational part of the mind) can conform to the nature of the cosmos. Greek philosophy and Greek reason is outwardly focused on the imitation of nature (the most famous argument of Aristotle and also shared by the later Stoics).

The unity of human nature with the natural world was the product of Greek philosophy. The next stage in the evolution of western philosophy was the birth of the self which began with Christianity. Christianity inherited many of the Greek philosophical assumptions—which is why, particularly in Catholic philosophy, Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics still predominate and are concerned foundational for Catholic philosophy which has elicited strong jeers by the children of Protestantism accusing Catholics as being “pagan.” Those shallow polemics aside, the revolution in Christian philosophy is the concern it has for love: love of self, love of neighbor, love of the world, love of God. Christian philosophy began the inward turn to the self and the rise of subjectivity. Whereas Greek philosophy looked outward to the observation and imitation for the answers of human nature, Christianity turned inward for the answers of human nature by probing the depth of the human psyche and heart.

Greek and Christian philosophy are, therefore, concerned with the questions of human nature. Modern philosophy, beginning with the Enlightenment, is no longer concerned with the questions of human nature but with human power. Reason is no longer to be employed to understand the self in relation to the cosmos or the self in relation to ideas of love or God. Reason is simply the practical thought process of material beings attempting to acquire the material goods necessary for life. The Enlightenment marks the ascendancy of pragmatic philosophy with its belief in materialist determinism as humans are simply manifestations of the same physics that govern the universe: matter in motion. The Enlightenment philosophy isn’t about reason in the why abracadabra magicians like Steven Pinker assert. Instead, Enlightenment philosophy represents the eventual transformation into practical science as per Francis Bacon: the scientific, industrial, and economic conquest and transformation of the world to improve the material conditions of life. Philosophy is now concerned with the material conditions of life instead of the questions of human nature, metaphysics, and ontology that preoccupied the Greeks and Christians.

This, however, was not satisfactory to all. The Romantics and German Idealists, especially, rebelled against this materialization of life and the cosmos. They realized that, if true, there could be no morality and no freedom since freedom is found in moral choice. Kant, then, inaugurates the reaction to Enlightenment determinism, materialism, and practical reason. Hence, Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of Practical Reason. The German Idealists revive the concern of the self from Christianity and the concern for nature from the Greeks and fuse these earlier beliefs with the new discoveries of modernity and give rise to the philosophies of consciousness that we find in Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel.

The German Idealist project, however, collapsed under the weight of practical materialism. The German Materialists replaced the Idealists who asserted that consciousness is not the byproduct of the self or nature as proclaimed by Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, but by the determinative material forces that govern the universe. The most famous of these philosophers was ultimately Karl Marx. Eventually, modern philosophy concluded with the rise of nihilism – the belief that all values and all beliefs were socially constructed by the struggle against the meaningless of the cosmos.

At long last we arrive at postmodernism, as we just covered, which took over the German Materialist and Nihilist traditions of philosophy: the world is socially constructed which has produced the oppressor-oppressed classes we witness today. Postmodernism is concerned with the practical material conditions of existence, just like modern philosophy is, but it is doubtful over the narrative of progress offered by the Enlightenment. Instead of becoming freer and more prosperous, postmodernism eventually came to belief that we were becoming enslaved and poorer. Those who disagreed were wrong and could not be tolerated.

However, with more and more people returning to the questions of first principles (metaphysics), the self, and human nature the questions of philosophy are reemerging in the 21st century. The end of philosophy that we are witnessing today is also becoming the rebirth of philosophy before our very eyes. Those who have been indoctrinated in the modern and postmodern mindset, however, are terrified of the prospects of everything they’ve been told to believe have been lies. But that is what philosophy is in its purest form: a questioning of the inherited beliefs that came before us. Some of us may agree with those beliefs. Others may be skeptical of them. Others more may find wisdom in those beliefs while adding new wisdom from the more recent past. But so long as some agree and others do not, the dialectic of philosophy remains and philosophy remains. Philosophy, to put it simply, concerns itself with the questions of the human condition: who we are and the world we inhabit. And while answers have always been given, the fact that we still have questions proves the invaluable reality of philosophy: the open mind, to which we are all called to consider.

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Hesiod, Paul Krause in real life, is the editor-in-chief of VoegelinView. He is writer, classicist, and historian. He has written on the arts, culture, classics, literature, philosophy, religion, and history for numerous journals, magazines, and newspapers. He is the author of Finding Arcadia, The Odyssey of Love and the Politics of Plato, and a contributor to the College Lecture Today and Making Sense of Diseases and Disasters. He holds master’s degrees in philosophy and religious studies (biblical studies & theology) from the University of Buckingham and Yale, and a bachelor’s degree in economics, history, and philosophy from Baldwin Wallace University.

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