A History of Western Philosophy: And Its Connection with Political and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day

by Bertrand Russell

The romantic movement was not, in its beginnings, connected with philosophy, though it came before long to have connections with it. With politics, through Rousseau, it was connected from the first. But before we can understand its political and philosophical effects we must consider it in its most essential form, which is as a revolt against received ethical and aesthetic standards.

Very often they cut loose from actuality, either past or present, altogether. The Ancient Mariner is typical in this respect, and Coleridge’s Kubla Khan is hardly the historical monarch of Marco Polo. The geography of the romantics is interesting: from Xanadu to “the lone Chorasmian shore,” the places in which it is interested are remote, Asiatic, or ancient.

Jane Austen makes fun of the romantics in Nonhanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility (1797-8).

The romantic movement, in its essence, aimed at liberating human personality from the fetters of social convention and social morality.

CHAPTER XIX Rousseau JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU (1712-1778), though a philosophe in the eighteenth-century French sense, was not what would now be called a “philosopher.” Nevertheless he had a powerful influence on philosophy, as on literature and taste and manners and politics. Whatever may be our opinion of his merits as a thinker, we must recognize his immense importance as a social force. This importance came mainly from his appeal to the heart, and to what, in his day, was called “sensibility.” He is the father of the romantic movement, the initiator of systems of thought which infer non-human facts from human emotions, and the inventor of the political philosophy of pseudo-democratic dictatorships as opposed to traditional absolute monarchies.

The ideas of the first essay were elaborated in a second, a “Discourse on Inequality” (1754), which, however, failed to win a prize. He held that “man is naturally good, and only by institutions is he made bad” —the antithesis of the doctrine of original sin and salvation through the Church.

In theology he made an innovation which has now been accepted by the great majority of Protestant theologians. Before him, every philosopher from Plato onwards, if he believed in God, offered intellectual arguments in favour of his belief.II The arguments may not, to us, seem very convincing, and we may feel that they would not have seemed cogent to anyone who did not already feel sure of the truth of the conclusion. But the philosopher who advanced the arguments certainly believed them to be logically valid, and such as should cause certainty of God’s existence in any unprejudiced person of sufficient philosophical capacity. Modern Protestants who urge us to believe in God, for the most part, despise the old “proofs,” and base their faith upon some aspect of human nature—emotions of awe or mystery, the sense of right and wrong, the feeling of aspiration, and so on. This way of defending religious belief was invented by Rousseau. It has become so familiar that his originality may easily not be appreciated by a modern reader, unless he will take the trouble to compare Rousseau with (say) Descartes or Leibniz.

From this he goes on to develop the view that conscience is in all circumstances an infallible guide to right action. “Thanks be to Heaven,” he concludes this part of his argument, “we are thus freed from all this terrifying apparatus of philosophy; we can be men without being learned; dispensed from wasting our life in the study of morals, we have at less cost a more assured guide in this immense labyrinth of human opinions.” Our natural feelings, he contends, lead us to serve the common interest, while our reason urges selfishness. We have therefore only to follow feeling rather than reason in order to be virtuous.

For my part, I prefer the ontological argument, the cosmological argument, and the rest of the old stock-in-trade, to the sentimental illogicality that has sprung from Rousseau. The old arguments at least were honest: if valid, they proved their point; if invalid, it was open to any critic to prove them so. But the new theology of the heart dispenses with argument; it cannot be refuted, because it does not profess to prove its points. At bottom, the only reason offered for its acceptance is that it allows us to indulge in pleasant dreams. This is an unworthy reason, and if I had to choose between Thomas Aquinas and Rousseau, I should unhesitatingly choose the Saint.

Rousseau’s political theory is set forth in his Social Contract, published in 1762.

Its doctrines, though they pay lip-service to democracy, tend to the justification of the totalitarian State.

The Social Contract became the Bible of most of the leaders in the French Revolution, but no doubt, as is the fate of Bibles, it was not carefully read and was still less understood by many of its disciples. It reintroduced the habit of metaphysical abstractions among the theorists of democracy, and by its doctrine of the general will it made possible the mystic identification of a leader with his people, which has no need of confirmation by so mundane an apparatus as the ballot-box. Much of its philosophy could be appropriated by HegelV in his defence of the Prussian autocracy. Its first-fruits in practice was the reign of Robespierre; the dictatorships of Russia and Germany (especially the latter) are in part an outcome of Rousseau’s teaching. What further triumphs the future has to offer to his ghost I do not venture to predict.

CHAPTER XX Kant A. GERMAN IDEALISM IN GENERAL PHILOSOPHY in the eighteenth century was dominated by the British empiricists, of whom Locke, Berkeley, and Hume may be taken as the representatives.

In their temper of mind they were socially minded citizens, by no means self-assertive, not unduly anxious for power, and in favour of a tolerant world where, within the limits of the criminal law, every man could do as he pleased. They were good-natured, men of the world, urbane and kindly.

But while their temper was social, their theoretical philosophy led to subjectivism. This was not a new tendency; it had existed in late antiquity, most emphatically in Saint Augustine; it was revived in modern times by Descartes’s cogito, and reached a momentary culmination in Leibniz’s windowless monads.

Leibniz believed that everything in his experience would be unchanged if the rest of the world were annihilated; nevertheless he devoted himself to the reunion of the Catholic and Protestant Churches. A sim...

In Locke, the inconsistency is still in the theory. We saw in an earlier chapter that Locke says, on the one hand: “Since the mind, in all its thoughts and reasonings, hath no other immediate object but its own ideas, which it alone does or can contemplate, it is evident that our knowledge is only conversant about them.” And: “Knowledge is the perception of the agreement or disagreement of two ideas.” Nevertheless, he maintains that we have three kinds of ...

Berkeley took an important step towards ending this inconsistency. For him, there are only minds and their ideas; the physical external world is abolished.

Hume shrank from nothing in pursuit of theoretical consistency, but felt no impulse to make his practice conform to his theory. Hume denied the Self, and threw doubt on induction and causation.

Rousseau, coming at a moment when people were, in turn, getting tired of reason, revived “enthusiasm,” and, accepting the bankruptcy of reason, allowed the heart to decide questions which the head left doubtful. From 1750 to 1794, the heart spoke louder and louder; at last Thermidor put an end, for a time, to its ferocious pronouncements, so far at least as France was concerned. Under Napoleon, heart and head were alike silenced.

In Germany, the reaction against Hume’s agnosticism took a form far more profound and subtle than that which Rousseau had given to it.

Kant, Fichte, and Hegel developed a new kind of philosophy, intended to safeguard both knowledge and virtue from the subversive doct...

In Kant, and still more in Fichte, the subjectivist tendency that begins with Descartes was carried to new extremes; in this respect, there...

The critique of knowledge, as a means of reaching philosophical conclusions, is emphasized by Kant and accepted by his followers.

There is a vehement rejection of utilitarian ethics in favour of systems which are held to be demonstrated by abstract philosophical arguments.

There is a scholastic tone which is absent in the earlier French and English philosophers; Kant, Fichte, and Hegel were university professors, addressing learned audiences, not gentlemen of leisure addressing amateurs.

The lives of all of them were exemplary and academic; their views on moral questions were strictly orthodox. They made innovations in theology, but they did so in the interests of religion.

OUTLINE OF KANT’S PHILOSOPHY Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is generally considered the greatest of modern philosophers.

Throughout his whole life, Kant lived in or near Königsberg, in East Prussia.

He was educated in the Wolfian version of Leibniz’s philosophy, but was led to abandon it by two influences: Rousseau and Hume.

Hume, by his criticism of the concept of causality, awakened him from his dogmatic slumbers—so at least he says, but the awakening was only temporary, and he soon invented a soporific which enabled him to sleep again.

Although he had been brought up as a pietist, he was a Liberal both in politics and in theology; he sympathized with the French Revolution until the Reign of Terror, and was a believer in democracy.

His philosophy, as we shall see, allowed an appeal to the heart against the cold dictates of theoretical reason, which might, with a little exaggeration, be regarded as a pedantic version of the Savoyard Vicar.

Kant’s most important book is The Critique of Pure Reason, (ist edition 1781 ; 2nd edition 1787.) The purpose of this work is to prove that, although none of our knowledge can transcend experience, it is nevertheless in part a priori and not inferred inductively from experience. The part of our knowledge which is a priori embraces, according to him, not only logic, but much that cannot be included in logic or deduced from it.

An “analytic” proposition is one in which the predicate is part of the subject; for instance, “a tall man is a man,” or “an equilateral triangle is a triangle.”

A “synthetic” proposition is one that is not analytic. All the propositions that we know only through experience are synthetic. We cannot, by a mere analysis of concepts, discover such truths as “Tuesday was a wet day” or “Napoleon was a great general.”

But Kant, unlike Leibniz and all other previous philosophers, will not admit the converse, that all synthetic propositions are only known through experience. This brings us to the second of the above distinctions.

An “empirical” proposition is one which we cannot know except by the help of sense-perception, either our own or that of some...

An “a priori” proposition, on the other hand, is one which, though it may be elicited by experience, is seen, when known, to have a basis other than experience.

Hume had proved that the law of causality is not analytic, and had inferred that we could not be certain of its truth. Kant accepted the view that it is synthetic, but nevertheless maintained that it is known a priori. He maintained that arithmetic and geometry are synthetic, but are likewise a priori. He was thus led to formulate his problem in these terms: How are synthetic judgements a priori possible? The answer to this question, with its consequences, constitutes the main theme of The Critique of Pure Reason.

In the preface to the first edition he says: “I venture to assert that there is not a single metaphysical problem which has not been solved, or for the solution of which the key at least has not been supplied.” In the preface to the second edition he compares himself to Copernicus, and says that he has effected a Copernican revolution in philosophy.

According to Kant, the outer world causes only the matter of sensation, but our own mental apparatus orders this matter in space and time, and supplies the concepts by means of which we understand experience.

Space and time are subjective, they are part of our apparatus of perception. But just because of this, we can be sure that whatever we experience will exhibit the characteristics dealt with by geometry and the science of time.

Similarly, since you always wear spatial spectacles in your mind, you are sure of always seeing everything in space.

Space and time, Kant says, are not concepts; they are forms of “intuition.”

The twelve categories are divided into four sets of three: (i) of quantity: unity, plurality, totality; (2) of quality: reality, negation, limitation; (3) of relation: substance-and-accident, cause-and-effect, reciprocity; (4) of modality: possibility, existence, necessity.

As regards cause, however, there is an inconsistency, for things in themselves are regarded by Kant as causes of sensations, and free volitions are held by him to be causes of occurrences in space and time. This inconsistency is not an accidental oversight; it is an essential part of his system.

A large part of The Critique of Pure Reason is occupied in showing the fallacies that arise from applying space and time or the categories to things that are not experienced.

In the first, the thesis says: “The world has a beginning in time, and is also limited as regards space.” The antithesis says: “The world has no beginning in time, and no limits in space; it is infinite as regards both time and space.”

The fourth antinomy proves that there is, and is not, an absolutely necessary Being. This part of the Critique greatly influenced Hegel, whose dialectic proceeds wholly by way of antinomies.