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METAPHYSICS, MEANING AND
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There is a legend in Estonia that the god of song Wannemunne once descended onto the Domberg, and there, in a sacred wood, played and sang music of divine beauty. All creatures were invited to listen, and they each learned some fragment of the celestial sound: the forest learned its rustling, the stream its roar; the wind caught and learned to re-echo the shrillest tones, and the birds the prelude of the song. The fish stuck their heads as far as the eyes out of the water, but left their ears below the surface; they saw the movements of the god's mouth, and imitated them, but remained dumb. Man alone grasped it all, and therefore his song pierces into the depths of the heart, and mounts upwards to the dwellings of the gods. Philip Wheelwright, The Burning Fountain The Discovery of Human ProgressWhat is truth? Is there a direction in human affairs? If human society is progressing, is there some way to increase the speed of that progress? In the 18th century Enlightenment the notion spread in Europe and America that human social progress was possible. Thinkers began to believe that social development beyond monarchy was possible, especially if human beings began to use their powers of reason to evaluate all knowledge. They began to believe, too, that increasing the sum of human knowledge would bring about progress and reform. French philosopher and politician Marie Jean Antoine Nicholas de Caritat, the Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794) wrote a work, Sketch of the Intellectual Progress of Mankind (1795), which outlined the progress of the human race from primitivism through ten stages of development; the tenth reached perfection through education. After Condorcet, the early French socialist Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon (1760-1825) believed that industrialization (a word he had coined) would bring about human progress. Society could expect that industrialization would bring about the end of war and poverty, and prosperity and justice. Society should therefore be organized on a Christian basis under the guidance of councils of wise industrialists and scientists. (A brief but interesting digression. Saint-Simon's ideas seem to have been taken up by Herbert George Wells (1866-1946), the British novelist and advocate of Fabian socialism best known today for science fiction novels like The Invisible Man (1897) and The War of the Worlds (1898). Wells advocated science councils to run society, just as did Saint-Simon. Of course, Wells's councils were not necessarily Christian. One can see the kind of thing Wells wanted in the film he wrote (based on one of his books, The Shape of Things to Come, 1933), Things to Come (1936). The organization Wings Over the World in that film is clearly one of Saint-Simon's wise councils of industrialists and scientists. So, by the way, is the Science Council of Krypton in the Superman comic books, which began in 1938; and this is because the early writer of these comics, American teenager Jerry Siegel, was a science fiction fan who had read Wells. Wells's vision also inspired a short-lived American movement called Technocracy. In 1934 Technocrats got into their uniform gray cars and drove by the hundreds to, um, Washington I think. They wanted councils of engineers to take over society and devise an end to the Great Depression. Nothing came of this movement.) Interest in Human Progress Stimulates Interest in History and Natural ScienceSaint-Simon's secretary, the French philosopher and creator of sociology Auguste Comte (1798-1857), inspired by his master, was concerned with how to increase progress in the sciences. He therefore worked out a philosophy he called positivism in a six-volume work he called The Course of Positive Philosophy (1830-1842). According to Comte, human development had been in three stages. ("Because of the nature of the human mind, each science or branch of knowledge passes through 'three different theoretical states: the theological or fictitious state; the metaphysical or abstract state; and, lastly, the scientific or positive state.' "Comte, Auguste," Microsoft® Encarta® Encyclopedia 2000.). In the first stage, the theological period, said Comte, explanations of natural events involved gods. Explanations in the second, the metaphysical period, involved metaphysical or abstract theories. In the third stage, the present or positive scientific era, absolute explanations should be foregone; concentration should be focused on the relations of phenomena, so as to work out empirically verifiable theories. Comte's positive philosophy was inspiring. It seemed to suggest humanity had made great progress, and, by careful work, could make much more. The positive movement affected the way in which natural science was seen, giving new meaning to the very word "science." Formerly, "science" was just knowledge, systematic knowledge of any kind. (In Germany the word for science, wissenschaft, continued to mean this into the 20th century.) But as the 19th century progessed in the English-speaking countries, "science" began to mean only natural science, especially when that knowledge of natural science came through careful, precise experiments. To progressive persons such experiments constituted positive science (the best kind) and made positive sense indeed. (Incidentally, the word "scientist" in its modern sense was coined by the English medical researcher William Whewell (1794-1866) in the 1830s.) So the word "positive" took on, so to speak, a positive, progressive and evolutionary connotation. It came to contrast with the word metaphysical, which continued to connote arbitrary speculation. Now English philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) was much influenced by Comte's positive philosophy. (He wrote a very interesting essay on it.) But in his later years, believing in the necessity of religion to regulate society, Comte began to change the positive philosophy. Comte attempted to turn positivism into a religion of humanity in The System of Positive Polity (1851-54). (Comte's religion affected the design of the flag of Brazil, and created a religion called Cao Dai that enjoyed a following of thousands in 1960s Vietnam.) Because Comte's philosophy's became a religion, it lost some of its scientific followers. They persisted in efforts to perfect scientific method and to attain greater, more certain scientific truth. Throughout the remainder of the 19th century work went ahead on attempts to understand the philosophy of natural science, to improve it and make science more effective and powerful. American Interest in Scientific Method Creates PragmatismAmerican philosopher and physicist Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) was vitally interested in scientific method. He was concerned to infuse scientific thinking into philosophy and society. Peirce was also interested in clarifying the meaning of scientific concepts in order to improve scientific method. In his paper "How We Can Make Our Ideas Clear" (1876) Peirce dealt with the meaning of scientific concepts and theories; he held that the meaning of a concept was not some internal formula but its consequences in reality. "For Peirce, the only rational way to increase knowledge was to form mental habits that would test ideas through observation, experimentation, or what he called inquiry." (Microsoft® Encarta® Encyclopedia 2000.) Peirce thus pioneered a new philosophy called pragmatism. Logical PositivismBut others, interested in perfecting scientific method, continued on from Comte. They attempted to improve Comte's earlier positive philosophy. One such attempt was Positivism's early 20th century development, the philosophy of Logical Positivism (as it came to be called). Logical Positivism narrowed its concern from the philosophy of science to the philosophy of language. It was concerned with how we can know statements to be meaningful, true, and valuable. Exemplars of the philosophy of Logical Positivism were the Austrian philosopher Moritz Schlick (1889-1936) and the British philosopher Alfred Jules Ayer (1906-1989). Ayer's Language, Truth, and Logic (1936) put forward a criterion of meaningfulness: statements (i.e., logical propositions) which failed this standard Ayer regarded as meaningless or, to use the contemptuous term he employed, "metaphysical." The Decline of MetaphysicsReaders of these essays will remember that the branch of philosophy known as metaphysics had fallen into obloquy in recent centuries. Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) had seemed to undercut metaphysics. He had undercut or demolished notions of causality and the self; these were important doctrines in traditional metaphysics. In addition, German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) had dismissed the German metaphysics of his own eighteenth century as "dogmatic" in his book The Critique of Pure Reason (1781). In it Kant replaced dogmatic metaphysics, the metaphysics of Leibniz and his follower Woolf, with a new critical philosophy. However, later philosophers then criticized Kant's philosophy and put forward new metaphysical schemes. New 19th Century German Metaphysical SchemesAmong these schemes was the idealistic philosophy of nature promulgated by German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775-1854) intended to justify traditional Christianity. This system was at first pantheistic, under the influence of the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677). Later, however, under the influence of Comte and G.W.F. Hegel, it became what Schelling called a positive philosophy. But a more prominent and important new metaphysical philosophy than Schelling's was the philosophic system that partly inspired his later philosophy. This was the metaphysical system of German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1832). This was metaphysical indeed. Hegel's metaphysical philosophy of absolute idealism inspired many later philosophers, but was dismissed by Hegel's admirer Karl Marx (1818-1883) as "upside-down". To set Hegel's philosophy properly on its feet was Marx's goal. By this Marx meant to turn it from a philosphy of idealism into a philosophy of materialism. In Germany, however, Hegel's philosophy declined in importance in the late 19th century, and neo-Kantianism surged back into prominence. At the Beginning of the 20th Century, Skepticism
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