Ethical egoism is the normative ethical position that moral agents ought to act in their own self-interest. It differs from psychological egoism, which claims that people can only act in their self-interest. Ethical egoism also differs from rational egoism, which holds that it is rational to act in one's self-interest. Ethical egoism holds, therefore, that actions whose consequences will benefit the doer are ethical.
Ethical egoism contrasts with ethical altruism, which holds that moral agents have an obligation to help others. Egoism and altruism both contrast with ethical utilitarianism, which holds that a moral agent should treat one's self (also known as the subject)
with no higher regard than one has for others (as egoism does, by
elevating self-interests and "the self" to a status not granted to
others). But it also holds that one is not obligated to sacrifice one's
own interests (as altruism does) to help others' interests, so long as
one's own interests (i.e. one's own desires or well-being)
are substantially equivalent to the others' interests and well-being,
but he has the choice to do so. Egoism, utilitarianism, and altruism are
all forms of consequentialism, but egoism and altruism contrast with utilitarianism, in that egoism and altruism are both agent-focused forms of consequentialism (i.e. subject-focused or subjective). However, utilitarianism is held to be agent-neutral (i.e. objective and impartial):
it does not treat the subject's (i.e. the self's, i.e. the moral
"agent's") own interests as being more or less important than the
interests, desires, or well-being of others.
Ethical egoism does not, however, require moral agents to harm
the interests and well-being of others when making moral deliberation;
e.g. what is in an agent's self-interest may be incidentally
detrimental, beneficial, or neutral in its effect on others. Individualism
allows for others' interest and well-being to be disregarded or not, as
long as what is chosen is efficacious in satisfying the self-interest
of the agent. Nor does ethical egoism necessarily entail that, in
pursuing self-interest, one ought always to do what one wants to do;
e.g. in the long term, the fulfillment of short-term desires may prove
detrimental to the self. Fleeting pleasure, then, takes a back seat to protracted eudaimonia. In the words of James Rachels, "Ethical egoism ... endorses selfishness, but it doesn't endorse foolishness."
Ethical egoism is often used as the philosophical basis for support of right-libertarianism and individualist anarchism.
These are political positions based partly on a belief that individuals
should not coercively prevent others from exercising freedom of action.
Forms
Ethical egoism can be broadly divided into three categories: individual, personal, and universal. An individual ethical egoist would hold that all people should do whatever benefits "my" (the individual's)self-interest; a personal ethical egoist would hold that they should act in their self-interest, but would make no claims about what anyone else ought to do; a universal ethical egoist would argue that everyone should act in ways that are in their self-interest.
History
Ethical egoism was introduced by the philosopher Henry Sidgwick in his book The Methods of Ethics, written in 1874. Sidgwick compared egoism to the philosophy of utilitarianism,
writing that whereas utilitarianism sought to maximize overall
pleasure, egoism focused only on maximizing individual pleasure.
Philosophers before Sidgwick have also retroactively been
identified as ethical egoists. One ancient example is the philosophy of Yang Zhu (4th century BC), Yangism, who views wei wo, or "everything for myself", as the only virtue necessary for self-cultivation. Ancient Greek philosophers like Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics were exponents of virtue ethics,
and "did not accept the formal principle that whatever the good is, we
should seek only our own good, or prefer it to the good of others." However, the beliefs of the Cyrenaics have been referred to as a "form of egoistic hedonism", and while some refer to Epicurus' hedonism as a form of virtue ethics, others argue his ethics are more properly described as ethical egoism.
Justifications
Philosopher James Rachels, in an essay that takes as its title the theory's name, outlines the three arguments most commonly touted in its favor:
"The first argument," writes Rachels, "has several variations, each suggesting the same general point:
"Each of us is intimately familiar with our own individual wants
and needs. Moreover, each of us is uniquely placed to pursue those
wants and needs effectively. At the same time, we know the desires and
needs of others only imperfectly, and we are not well situated to pursue
them. Therefore, it is reasonable to believe that if we set out to be
'our brother's keeper,' we would often bungle the job and end up doing
more mischief than good."
To give charity to someone is to degrade him, implying as it does
that he is reliant on such munificence and quite unable to look out for
himself. "That," reckons Rachels, "is why the recipients of 'charity'
are so often resentful rather than appreciative."
Altruism, ultimately, denies an individual's value and is therefore
destructive both to society and its individual components, viewing life
merely as a thing to be sacrificed. Philosopher Ayn Rand
is quoted as writing that, "[i]f a man accepts the ethics of altruism,
his first concern is not how to live his life but how to sacrifice it."
Moreover, "[t]he basic principle of altruism is that man has no right
to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only
justification for his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest
moral duty, virtue or value." Rather, she writes, "[t]he purpose of
morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself
and live."
All of our commonly accepted moral duties, from doing no harm unto
others to speaking always the truth to keeping promises, are rooted in
the one fundamental principle of self-interest.
It has been observed, however, that the very act of eating
(especially, when there are others starving in the world) is such an act
of self-interested discrimination. Ethical egoists such as Rand who
readily acknowledge the (conditional) value of others to an individual,
and who readily endorse empathy for others, have argued the exact
reverse from Rachels, that it is altruism which discriminates: "If the
sensation of eating a cake is a value, then why is it an immoral
indulgence in your stomach, but a moral goal for you to achieve in the
stomach of others?" It is therefore altruism which is an arbitrary position, according to Rand.
Criticism
It
has been argued that extreme ethical egoism is self-defeating. Faced
with a situation of limited resources, egoists would consume as much of
the resource as they could, making the overall situation worse for
everybody. Egoists may respond that if the situation becomes worse for
everybody, that would include the egoist, so it is not, in fact, in
their rational self-interest to take things to such extremes. However, the (unregulated) tragedy of the commons and the (one off) prisoner's dilemma are cases in which, on the one hand, it is rational for an individual to seek to take as much as possible even though
that makes things worse for everybody, and on the other hand, those
cases are not self-refuting since that behaviour remains rational even though
it is ultimately self-defeating, i.e. self-defeating does not imply
self-refuting. Egoists might respond that a tragedy of the commons,
however, assumes some degree of public land. That is, a commons
forbidding homesteading requires regulation. Thus, an argument against
the tragedy of the commons, in this belief system, is fundamentally an
argument for private property rights and the system that recognizes both
property rights and rational self-interest—capitalism.
More generally, egoists might say that an increasing respect for
individual rights uniquely allows for increasing wealth creation and
increasing usable resources despite a fixed amount of raw materials
(e.g. the West pre-1776 versus post-1776, East versus West Germany, Hong
Kong versus mainland China, North versus South Korea, etc.).
It is not clear how to apply a private ownership model to many
examples of "Commons", however. Examples include large fisheries, the
atmosphere and the ocean.
Some perhaps decisive problems with ethical egoism have been pointed out.
One is that an ethical egoist would not want ethical egoism to be
universalized: as it would be in the egoist's best self-interest if
others acted altruistically towards him, he wouldn't want them to act
egoistically; however, that is what he considers to be morally binding.
His moral principles would demand of others not to follow them, which
can be considered self-defeating and leads to the question: "How can
ethical egoism be considered morally binding if its advocates do not
want it to be universally applied?"
Another objection (e.g. by James Rachels) states that the
distinction ethical egoism makes between "yourself" and "the rest" –
demanding to view the interests of "yourself" as more important – is
arbitrary, as no justification for it can be offered; considering that
the merits and desires of "the rest" are comparable to those of
"yourself" while lacking a justifiable distinction, Rachels concludes
that "the rest" should be given the same moral consideration as
"yourself".
Notable proponents
The term ethical egoism has been applied retroactively to philosophers such as Bernard de Mandeville and to many other materialists
of his generation, although none of them declared themselves to be
egoists. Note that materialism does not necessarily imply egoism, as
indicated by Karl Marx, and the many other materialists who espoused forms of collectivism. It has been argued that ethical egoism can lend itself to individualist anarchism such as that of Benjamin Tucker, or the combined anarcho-communism and egoism of Emma Goldman, both of whom were proponents of many egoist ideas put forward by Max Stirner.
In this context, egoism is another way of describing the sense that the
common good should be enjoyed by all. However, most notable anarchists
in history have been less radical, retaining altruism and a sense of the
importance of the individual that is appreciable but does not go as far
as egoism. Recent trends to greater appreciation of egoism within anarchism tend to come from less classical directions such as post-left anarchy or Situationism (e.g. Raoul Vaneigem). Egoism has also been referenced by anarcho-capitalists, such as Murray Rothbard.
Philosopher Max Stirner, in his book The Ego and Its Own,
was the first philosopher to call himself an egoist, though his writing
makes clear that he desired not a new idea of morality (ethical
egoism), but rather a rejection of morality (amoralism), as a nonexistent and limiting "spook"; for this, Stirner has been described as the first individualist anarchist. Other philosophers, such as Thomas Hobbes and David Gauthier,
have argued that the conflicts which arise when people each pursue
their own ends can be resolved for the best of each individual only if
they all voluntarily forgo some of their aims—that is, one's
self-interest is often best pursued by allowing others to pursue their
self-interest as well so that liberty is equal among individuals.
Sacrificing one's short-term self-interest to maximize one's long-term
self-interest is one form of "rational self-interest"
which is the idea behind most philosophers' advocacy of ethical egoism.
Egoists have also argued that one's actual interests are not
immediately obvious, and that the pursuit of self-interest involves more
than merely the acquisition of some good, but the maximizing of one's chances of survival and/or happiness.
Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche suggested that egoistic or "life-affirming" behavior stimulates jealousy or "ressentiment" in others, and that this is the psychological motive for the altruism in Christianity. Sociologist Helmut Schoeck similarly considered envy
the motive of collective efforts by society to reduce the
disproportionate gains of successful individuals through moral or legal
constraints, with altruism being primary among these. In addition, Nietzsche (in Beyond Good and Evil) and Alasdair MacIntyre (in After Virtue) have pointed out that the ancient Greeks did not associate morality with altruism in the way that post-Christian Western civilization has done.
Aristotle's view is that we have duties to ourselves as well as to other people (e.g. friends) and to the polis as a whole. The same is true for Thomas Aquinas, Christian Wolff and Immanuel Kant,
who claim that there are duties to ourselves as Aristotle did, although
it has been argued that, for Aristotle, the duty to one's self is
primary.
Ayn Rand
argued that there is a positive harmony of interests among free,
rational humans, such that no moral agent can rationally coerce another
person consistently with his own long-term self-interest. Rand argued
that other people are an enormous value to an individual's well-being
(through education, trade and affection), but also that this value could
be fully realized only under conditions of political and economic
freedom. According to Rand, voluntary trade alone can assure that human
interaction is mutually beneficial. Rand's student, Leonard Peikoff
has argued that the identification of one's interests itself is
impossible absent the use of principles, and that self-interest cannot
be consistently pursued absent a consistent adherence to certain ethical
principles. Recently, Rand's position has also been defended by such writers as Tara Smith, Tibor Machan, Allan Gotthelf, David Kelley, Douglas Rasmussen, Nathaniel Branden, Harry Binswanger, Andrew Bernstein, and Craig Biddle.
Philosopher David L. Norton
identified himself an "ethical individualist", and, like Rand, saw a
harmony between an individual's fidelity to his own self-actualization,
or "personal destiny", and the achievement of society's well-being.
Walden (/ˈwɔːldən/; first published in 1854 as Walden; or, Life in the Woods) is a book by American transcendentalist writer Henry David Thoreau. The text is a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings. The work is part personal declaration of independence, social experiment, voyage of spiritual discovery, satire, and—to some degree—a manual for self-reliance.
Walden details Thoreau's experiences over the course of two years, two months, and two days in a cabin he built near Walden Pond amidst woodland owned by his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, near Concord, Massachusetts.
Thoreau makes precise scientific observations of nature as well
as metaphorical and poetic uses of natural phenomena. He identifies many
plants and animals by both their popular and scientific names, records
in detail the color and clarity of different bodies of water, precisely
dates and describes the freezing and thawing of the pond, and recounts
his experiments to measure the depth and shape of the bottom of the
supposedly "bottomless" Walden Pond.
Background information
There
has been much guessing as to why Thoreau went to the pond. E. B. White
stated on this note, "Henry went forth to battle when he took to the
woods, and Walden is the report of a man torn by two powerful and
opposing drives—the desire to enjoy the world and the urge to set the
world straight", while Leo Marx noted that Thoreau's stay at Walden Pond was an experiment based on his teacher Emerson's "method and of nature" and that it was a "report of an experiment in transcendental pastoralism".
Likewise others have assumed Thoreau's intentions during his time at Walden Pond
was "to conduct an experiment: Could he survive, possibly even thrive,
by stripping away all superfluous luxuries, living a plain, simple life
in radically reduced conditions?" He thought of it as an experiment in "home economics".
Although Thoreau went to Walden to escape what he considered
"over-civilization", and in search of the "raw" and "savage delight" of
the wilderness, he also spent considerable amounts of his time reading
and writing.
Thoreau used his time at Walden Pond (July 4, 1845 – September 6, 1847) to write his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849). The experience later inspired Walden,
in which Thoreau compresses the time into a single calendar year and
uses passages of four seasons to symbolize human development.
By immersing himself in nature, Thoreau hoped to gain a more objective understanding of society through personal introspection. Simple living and self-sufficiency were Thoreau's other goals, and the whole project was inspired by transcendentalist philosophy, a central theme of the American Romantic Period.
Plot
I
went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only
the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to
teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I
did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I
wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to
live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and
Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad
swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its
lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole
and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if
it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true
account of it in my next excursion.
Part memoir and part spiritual quest, Walden opens with the
announcement that Thoreau spent two years at Walden Pond living a simple
life without support of any kind. Readers are reminded that at the time
of publication, Thoreau is back to living among the civilized again.
The book is separated into specific chapters, each of which focuses on
specific themes:
Economy: In this first and longest chapter, Thoreau
outlines his project: a two-year, two-month, and two-day stay at a
cozy, "tightly shingled and plastered", English-style 10' × 15' cottage
in the woods near Walden Pond.
He does this, he says, to illustrate the spiritual benefits of a
simplified lifestyle. He easily supplies the four necessities of life
(food, shelter, clothing, and fuel) with the help of family and friends,
particularly his mother, his best friend, and Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Waldo
Emerson. The latter provided Thoreau with a work exchange: he could
build a small house and plant a garden if he cleared some land on the
woodlot and did other chores while there.
Thoreau meticulously records his expenditures and earnings,
demonstrating his understanding of "economy", as he builds his house and
buys and grows food.
Henry David Thoreau
Where I Lived, and What I Lived For: Thoreau recollects thoughts of places he stayed at before selecting Walden Pond, and quotes Roman Philosopher Cato's advice "consider buying a farm very carefully before signing the papers".
His possibilities included a nearby Hollowell farm (where the "wife"
unexpectedly decided she wanted to keep the farm). Thoreau takes to the
woods dreaming of an existence free of obligations and full of leisure.
He announces that he resides far from social relationships that mail
represents (post office) and the majority of the chapter focuses on his
thoughts while constructing and living in his new home at Walden.
Reading: Thoreau discusses the benefits of classical literature, preferably in the original Greek or Latin,
and bemoans the lack of sophistication in Concord evident in the
popularity of unsophisticated literature. He also loved to read books by
world travelers. He yearns for a time when each New England village supports "wise men" to educate and thereby ennoble the population.
Sounds: Thoreau encourages the reader to be "forever on the alert" and "looking always at what is to be seen".
Although truth can be found in literature, it can equally be found in
nature. In addition to self-development, developing one's
perceptiveness can alleviate boredom. Rather than "look abroad for
amusement, to society and the theatre", Thoreau's own life, including
supposedly dull pastimes like housework, becomes a source of amusement
that "never ceases to be novel".
Likewise, he obtains pleasure in the sounds that ring around his
cabin: church bells ringing, carriages rattling and rumbling, cows
lowing, whip-poor-wills singing, owls hooting, frogs croaking, and cockerels crowing. "All sound heard at the greatest possible distance," he contends "produces one and the same effect".
Solitude: Thoreau reflects on the feeling of
solitude. He explains how loneliness can occur even amid companions if
one's heart is not open to them. Thoreau meditates on the pleasures of
escaping society and the petty things that society entails (gossip,
fights, etc.). He also reflects on his new companion, an old settler who
arrives nearby and an old woman with great memory ("memory runs back
farther than mythology").
Thoreau repeatedly reflects on the benefits of nature and of his deep
communion with it and states that the only "medicine he needs is a
draught of morning air".
Visitors: Thoreau talks about how he enjoys
companionship (despite his love for solitude) and always leaves three
chairs ready for visitors. The entire chapter focuses on the coming and
going of visitors, and how he has more comers in Walden than he did in
the city. He receives visits from those living or working nearby and
gives special attention to a French Canadian born woodsman named Alec
Thérien. Unlike Thoreau, Thérien cannot read or write and is described
as leading an "animal life".
He compares Thérien to Walden Pond itself. Thoreau then reflects on the
women and children who seem to enjoy the pond more than men, and how
men are limited because their lives are taken up.
The Bean-Field: Reflection on Thoreau's planting
and his enjoyment of this new job/hobby. He touches upon the joys of his
environment, the sights and sounds of nature, but also on the military
sounds nearby. The rest of the chapter focuses on his earnings and his
cultivation of crops (including how he spends just under fifteen dollars
on this).
The Village: The chapter focuses on Thoreau's
reflections on the journeys he takes several times a week to Concord,
where he gathers the latest gossip and meets with townsmen. On one of
his journeys into Concord, Thoreau is detained and jailed for his
refusal to pay a poll tax to the "state that buys and sells men, women, and children, like cattle at the door of its senate-house".
Walden Pond, discussed extensively in chapter The Ponds
The Ponds: In autumn, Thoreau discusses the countryside
and writes down his observations about the geography of Walden Pond and
its neighbors: Flint's Pond (or Sandy Pond), White Pond, and Goose
Pond. Although Flint's is the largest, Thoreau's favorites are Walden
and White ponds, which he describes as lovelier than diamonds.
Baker Farm: While on an afternoon ramble in the
woods, Thoreau gets caught in a rainstorm and takes shelter in the
dirty, dismal hut of John Field, a penniless but hard-working Irish
farmhand, and his wife and children. Thoreau urges Field to live a
simple but independent and fulfilling life in the woods, thereby freeing
himself of employers and creditors. But the Irishman won't give up his
aspirations of luxury and the quest for the American dream.
Higher Laws: Thoreau discusses whether hunting wild
animals and eating meat is necessary. He concludes that the primitive,
carnal sensuality of humans drives them to kill and eat animals, and
that a person who transcends this propensity is superior to those who
cannot. (Thoreau eats fish and occasionally salt pork and woodchuck.) In addition to vegetarianism, he lauds chastity, work, and teetotalism.
He also recognizes that Native Americans need to hunt and kill moose
for survival in "The Maine Woods", and eats moose on a trip to Maine
while he was living at Walden. Here is a list of the laws that he mentions:
One must love that of the wild just as much as one loves that of the good.
What men already know instinctively is true humanity.
The hunter is the greatest friend of the animal which is hunted.
No human older than an adolescent would wantonly murder any creature which reveres its own life as much as the killer.
If the day and the night make one joyful, one is successful.
The highest form of self-restraint is when one can subsist not on
other animals, but of plants and crops cultivated from the earth.
Brute Neighbors: This chapter is a simplified version of one of Thoreau's conversations with William Ellery Channing,
who sometimes accompanied Thoreau on fishing trips when Channing had
come up from Concord. The conversation is about a hermit (himself) and a
poet (Channing) and how the poet is absorbed in the clouds while the
hermit is occupied with the more practical task of getting fish for
dinner and how in the end, the poet regrets his failure to catch fish.
The chapter also mentions Thoreau's interaction with a mouse that he
lives with, the scene in which an ant battles a smaller ant, and his
frequent encounters with cats.
House-Warming: After picking November berries in
the woods, Thoreau adds a chimney, and finally plasters the walls of his
sturdy house to stave off the cold of the oncoming winter. He also lays
in a good supply of firewood, and expresses affection for wood and
fire.
Former Inhabitants; and Winter Visitors: Thoreau
tells the stories of people who formerly lived in the vicinity of Walden
Pond. Then, he talks about a few of the visitors he receives during the
winter: a farmer, a woodchopper, and his best friend, the poet Ellery Channing.
Winter Animals: Thoreau amuses himself by watching wildlife during the winter. He relates his observations of owls, hares, red squirrels, mice, and various birds as they hunt, sing, and eat the scraps and corn he put out for them. He also describes a fox hunt that passes by.
The Pond in Winter: Thoreau describes Walden Pond
as it appears during the winter. He says he has sounded its depths and
located an underground outlet. Then, he recounts how 100 laborers came
to cut great blocks of ice from the pond to be shipped to the Carolinas.
Spring: As spring arrives, Walden and the other
ponds melt with powerful thundering and rumbling. Thoreau enjoys
watching the thaw, and grows ecstatic as he witnesses the green rebirth
of nature. He watches the geese winging their way north, and a hawk
playing by itself in the sky. As nature is reborn, the narrator implies,
so is he.
Conclusion: In the final chapter, Thoreau
criticizes conformity: "If a man does not keep pace with his companions,
perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the
music which he hears, however measured or far away", By doing so, men may find happiness and self-fulfillment.
I do not say that John or Jonathan
will realize all this; but such is the character of that morrow which
mere lapse of time can never make to dawn. The light which puts out our
eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There
is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.
Themes
Memorial with a replica of Thoreau's cabin near Walden
The site of Thoreau's cabin marked by a cairn in 1908
Walden is a difficult book
to read for three reasons: First, it was written in an older prose,
which uses surgically precise language, extended, allegorical metaphors,
long and complex paragraphs and sentences, and vivid, detailed, and
insightful descriptions. Thoreau does not hesitate to use metaphors,
allusions, understatement, hyperbole, personification, irony, satire,
metonymy, synecdoche, and oxymorons, and he can shift from a scientific
to a transcendental point of view in mid-sentence. Second, its logic is
based on a different understanding of life, quite contrary to what most
people would call common sense. Ironically, this logic is based on what
most people say they believe. Thoreau, recognizing this, fills Walden
with sarcasm, paradoxes, and double entendres. He likes to tease,
challenge, and even fool his readers. And third, quite often any words
would be inadequate at expressing many of Thoreau's non-verbal insights
into truth. Thoreau must use non-literal language to express these
notions, and the reader must reach out to understand.
Walden emphasizes the importance of solitude, contemplation,
and closeness to nature in transcending the "desperate" existence that,
he argues, is the lot of most people. The book is not a traditional
autobiography, but combines autobiography with a social critique of
contemporary Western culture's consumerist and materialist attitudes and
its distance from and destruction of nature.
Thoreau's proximity to Concord society and his admiration for classical
literature suggest that the book is not simply a criticism of society,
but also an attempt to engage creatively with the better aspects of
contemporary culture. There are signs of ambiguity, or an attempt to see
an alternative side of something common. Some of the major themes that
are present within the text are:
Self-reliance: Thoreau constantly refuses to be in "need"
of the companionship of others. Though he realizes its significance and
importance, he thinks it unnecessary to always be in search for it.
Self-reliance, to him, is economic and social and is a principle that in
terms of financial and interpersonal relations is more valuable than
anything. To Thoreau, self-reliance can be both spiritual as well as
economic. Self-reliance was a key tenet of Transcendentalism, famously
expressed in Emerson's essay "Self-Reliance".
Simplicity: Simplicity seems to be Thoreau's model for life.
Throughout the book, Thoreau constantly seeks to simplify his lifestyle:
he patches his clothes rather than buy new ones, he minimizes his
consumer activity, and relies on leisure time and on himself for
everything.
Progress: In a world where everyone and everything is eager
to advance in terms of progress, Thoreau finds it stubborn and skeptical
to think that any outward improvement of life can bring inner peace and
contentment.
The need for spiritual awakening: Spiritual awakening is the
way to find and realize the truths of life which are often buried under
the mounds of daily affairs. Thoreau holds the spiritual awakening to be
a quintessential component of life. It is the source from which all of
the other themes flow.
Man as part of nature
Nature and its reflection of human emotions
The state as unjust and corrupt
Meditation: Thoreau was an avid meditator and often spoke about the benefits of meditating.
Patience: Thoreau realizes that the methods he tries to employ at Walden Pond will not be instituted in the near future. He does not like compromise, so he must wait for change to occur. He does not go into isolation in the woods of Massachusetts for over 2 years for his own benefit. Thoreau wants to transform the world around him, but understands that it will take time.
Style and analysis
Walden
has been the subject of many scholarly articles. Book reviewers,
critics, scholars, and many more have published literature on Thoreau's Walden.
Thoreau carefully recounts his time in the woods through his writing in Walden.
Critics have thoroughly analyzed the different writing styles that
Thoreau uses. Critic Nicholas Bagnall writes that Thoreau's observations
of nature are “lyrical” and “exact". Another critic, Henry Golemba, asserts that the writing style of Walden is very natural. Thoreau employs many styles of writing where his words are both intricate and simple at the same time. His word choice conveys a certain mood. For instance, when Thoreau describes the silence of nature, the reader may feel that serene moment as well. Thoreau continues to connect back to nature throughout the book because he wants to depict what he experienced and what he saw.
Many scholars have compared Thoreau to fellow transcendentalist writer Ralph Waldo Emerson. Although Thoreau was 14 years younger than Emerson, lots of his writing was influenced by him.
Critic John Brooks Moore examined the relationship between Thoreau and
Emerson and the effects it had on their respective works. Moore claims that Thoreau did not simply mimic Emerson's work, but he was actually the more dominant one in the relationship.
Of course, Thoreau has learned from Emerson and some "Emersonism” can
be found in his works, but Thoreau definitely put his own stamp on his
work.
Scholars have recognized Walden’s use of Biblical allusions. Such allusions are useful tools to convince readers because the Bible is seen as a principal book of truth.
According to scholar Judith Saunders, the signature Biblical allusion
identified in the book is, “Walden was dead and is alive again.” This is almost verbatim from Luke 15.11-32. Thoreau is personifying Walden Pond to further the story relevant to the Bible. He compares the process of death and rebirth of the pond to self-transformation in humans.
Walden enjoyed some success upon its release, but still took five years to sell 2,000 copies, and then went out of print until Thoreau's death in 1862.
Despite its slow beginnings, later critics have praised it as an
American classic that explores natural simplicity, harmony, and beauty.
The American poet Robert Frost wrote of Thoreau, "In one book ... he surpasses everything we have had in America".
It is often assumed that critics initially ignored Walden,
and that those who reviewed the book were evenly split or slightly more
negative than positive in their assessment of it. But, researchers have
shown that Walden actually was "more favorably and widely received by Thoreau's contemporaries than hitherto suspected". Of the 66 initial reviews that have been found so far, 46 "were strongly favorable".
Some reviews were rather superficial, merely recommending the book or
predicting its success with the public; others were more lengthy,
detailed, and nuanced with both positive and negative comments. Positive
comments included praise for Thoreau's independence, practicality,
wisdom, "manly simplicity",
and fearlessness. Less than three weeks after the book's publication,
Thoreau's mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson proclaimed, "All American kind are
delighted with Walden as far as they have dared to say."
On the other hand, the terms "quaint" or "eccentric" appeared in over half of the book's initial reviews. Other terms critical of Thoreau included selfish, strange, impractical, privileged (or "manor born"), and misanthropic. One review compared and contrasted Thoreau's form of living to communism, probably not in the sense of Marxism, but instead of communal living or religious communism.
While valuing freedom from possessions, Thoreau was not communal in the
sense of practicing sharing or of embracing community. So, communism
"is better than our hermit's method of getting rid of encumbrance".
In contrast to Thoreau's "manly simplicity", nearly twenty years after Thoreau's death Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson
judged Thoreau's endorsement of living alone in natural simplicity,
apart from modern society, to be a mark of effeminacy, calling it
"womanish solicitude; for there is something unmanly, something almost
dastardly" about the lifestyle. Poet John Greenleaf Whittier criticized what he perceived as the message in Walden that man should lower himself to the level of a woodchuck and walk on four legs. He said: "Thoreau's Walden is a capital reading, but very wicked and heathenish ... After all, for me, I prefer walking on two legs". Author Edward Abbey criticized Thoreau's ideas and experiences at Walden in detail throughout his response to Walden called "Down the River with Thoreau", written in 1980.
Today, despite these criticisms, Walden stands as one of America's most celebrated works of literature. John Updike wrote of Walden, "A century and a half after its publication, Walden
has become such a totem of the back-to-nature, preservationist,
anti-business, civil-disobedience mindset, and Thoreau so vivid a
protester, so perfect a crank and hermit saint, that the book risks
being as revered and unread as the Bible." The American psychologist B. F. Skinner wrote that he carried a copy of Walden with him in his youth, and eventually wrote Walden Two in 1945, a fictional utopia about 1,000 members who live together in a Thoreau-inspired community.
Kathryn Schulz has accused Thoreau of hypocrisy, misanthropy and being sanctimonious based on his writings in Walden, although this criticism has been perceived as highly selective.
American philosophy is the activity, corpus, and tradition of philosophers affiliated with the United States. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
notes that while it lacks a "core of defining features, American
Philosophy can nevertheless be seen as both reflecting and shaping
collective American identity over the history of the nation."
Thinkers such as John Winthrop
emphasized the public life over the private. Holding that the former
takes precedence over the latter, while other writers, such as Roger Williams (co-founder of Rhode Island) held that religious tolerance was more integral than trying to achieve religious homogeneity in a community.
18th century
18th-century American philosophy may be broken into two halves, the first half being marked by the theology of Reformed PuritanCalvinism influenced by the Great Awakening as well as Enlightenment natural philosophy, and the second by the native moral philosophy of the American Enlightenment taught in American colleges. They were used "in the tumultuous years of the 1750s and 1770s" to "forge a new intellectual culture for the United states", which led to the American incarnation of the European Enlightenment that is associated with the political thought of the Founding Fathers.
The 18th century saw the introduction of Francis Bacon and the Enlightenment philosophers Descartes, Newton, Locke, Wollaston, and Berkeley to Colonial British America. Two native-born Americans, Samuel Johnson and Jonathan Edwards,
were first influenced by these philosophers; they then adapted and
extended their Enlightenment ideas to develop their own American
theology and philosophy. Both were originally ordained Puritan
Congregationalist ministers who embraced much of the new learning of the
Enlightenment. Both were Yale educated and Berkeley influenced idealists who became influential college presidents. Both were influential in the development of American political philosophy and the works of the Founding Fathers. But Edwards based his reformed Puritan theology on Calvinist doctrine, while Johnson converted to the Anglican episcopal religion (the Church of England), then based his new American moral philosophy on William Wollaston's Natural Religion. Late in the century, Scottish innate or common sense realism
replaced the native schools of these two rivals in the college
philosophy curricula of American colleges; it would remain the dominant
philosophy in American academia up to the Civil War.
The first 100 years or so of college education in the American
Colonies were dominated in New England by the Puritan theology of William Ames and "the sixteenth-century logical methods of Petrus Ramus." Then in 1714, a donation of 800 books from England, collected by Colonial AgentJeremiah Dummer, arrived at Yale. They contained what became known as "The New Learning", including "the works of Locke, Descartes, Newton, Boyle, and Shakespeare", and other Enlightenment era authors not known to the tutors and graduates of Puritan Yale and Harvard colleges. They were first opened and studied by an eighteen-year-old graduate student from Guilford, Connecticut, the young American Samuel Johnson, who had also just found and read Lord Francis Bacon's Advancement of Learning. Johnson wrote in his Autobiography,
"All this was like a flood of day to his low state of mind" and that
"he found himself like one at once emerging out of the glimmer of
twilight into the full sunshine of open day."
He now considered what he had learned at Yale "nothing but the
scholastic cobwebs of a few little English and Dutch systems that would
hardly now be taken up in the street."
Johnson was appointed tutor at Yale in 1716. He began to teach the Enlightenment curriculum there, and thus began the American Enlightenment.
One of his students for a brief time was a fifteen-year-old Jonathan
Edwards. "These two brilliant Yale students of those years, each of whom
was to become a noted thinker and college president, exposed the
fundamental nature of the problem" of the "incongruities between the old
learning and the new." But each had a quite different view on the issues of predestination versus freewill, original sin versus the pursuit of happiness though practicing virtue, and the education of children.
Jonathan Edwards is considered to be "America's most important and original philosophical theologian." Noted for his energetic sermons, such as "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" (which is said to have begun the First Great Awakening), Edwards emphasized "the absolute sovereignty of God and the beauty of God's holiness." Working to unite Christian Platonism with an empiricistepistemology, with the aid of Newtonian physics, Edwards was deeply influenced by George Berkeley,
himself an empiricist, and Edwards derived his importance of the
immaterial for the creation of human experience from Bishop Berkeley.
The non-material mind consists of understanding and will, and it
is understanding, interpreted in a Newtonian framework, that leads to
Edwards' fundamental metaphysical category of Resistance. Whatever
features an object may have, it has these properties because the object
resists. Resistance itself is the exertion of God's power, and it can be
seen in Newton's laws of motion,
where an object is "unwilling" to change its current state of motion;
an object at rest will remain at rest and an object in motion will
remain in motion.
Though Edwards reformed Puritan theology using Enlightenment
ideas from natural philosophy, and Locke, Newton, and Berkeley, he
remained a Calvinist and hard determinist. Jonathan Edwards also rejected the freedom of the will,
saying that "we can do as we please, but we cannot please as we
please." According to Edwards, neither good works nor self-originating
faith lead to salvation, but rather it is the unconditional grace of God
which stands as the sole arbiter of human fortune.
Enlightenment
While
the 17th- and early 18th-century American philosophical tradition was
decidedly marked by religious themes and the Reformation reason of
Ramus, the 18th century saw more reliance on science and the new learning of the Age of Enlightenment, along with an idealist belief in the perfectibility of human beings through teaching ethics and moral philosophy, laissez-faireeconomics, and a new focus on political matters.
Samuel Johnson has been called "The Founder of American Philosophy" and the "first important philosopher in colonial America and author of the first philosophy textbook published there".
He was interested not only in philosophy and theology, but in theories
of education, and in knowledge classification schemes, which he used to
write encyclopedias, develop college curricula, and create library classification systems.
Johnson was a proponent of the view that "the essence of true religion is morality", and believed that "the problem of denominationalism"
could be solved by teaching a non-denominational common moral
philosophy acceptable to all religions. So he crafted one. Johnson's
moral philosophy was influenced by Descartes and Locke, but more
directly by William Wollaston's Religion of Nature Delineated
and the idealist philosopher of George Berkeley, with whom Johnson
studied while Berkeley was in Rhode Island between 1729 and 1731.
Johnson strongly rejected Calvin's doctrine of Predestination and
believed that people were autonomous moral agents endowed with freewill
and Lockean natural rights. His fusion philosophy of Natural Religion and Idealism, which has been called "American Practical Idealism", was developed as a series of college textbooks in seven editions between 1731 and 1754. These works, and his dialogue Raphael, or The Genius of the English America, written at the time of the Stamp Act crisis, go beyond his Wollaston and Berkeley influences; Raphael includes sections on economics, psychology, the teaching of children, and political philosophy.
Although the Declaration of Independence does contain
references to the Creator, the God of Nature, Divine Providence, and the
Supreme Judge of the World, the Founding Fathers were not exclusively theistic. Some professed personal concepts of deism, as was characteristic of other European Enlightenment thinkers, such as Maximilien Robespierre, François-Marie Arouet (better known by his pen name, Voltaire), and Rousseau. However, an investigation of 106 contributors to the Declaration of Independence
between September 5, 1774, and July 4, 1776, found that only two men
(Franklin and Jefferson), both American Practical Idealists in their
moral philosophy, might be called quasi-deists or non-denominational
Christians;
all the others were publicly members of denominational Christian
churches. Even Franklin professed the need for a "public religion"
and would attend various churches from time to time. Jefferson was
vestryman at the evangelical Calvinistical Reformed Church of Charlottesville, Virginia, a church he himself founded and named in 1777,
suggesting that at this time of life he was rather strongly affiliated
with a denomination and that the influence of Whitefield and Edwards
reached even into Virginia. But the founders who studied or embraced
Johnson, Franklin, and Smith's non-denominational moral philosophy were
at least influenced by the deistic tendencies of Wollaston's Natural
Religion, as evidenced by "the Laws of Nature, and Nature's God" and
"the pursuit of Happiness" in the Declaration.
An alternate moral philosophy to the domestic American Practical
Idealism, called variously Scottish Innate Sense moral philosophy (by
Jefferson), Scottish Commonsense Philosophy, or Scottish common sense realism, was introduced into American Colleges in 1768 by John Witherspoon, a Scottish immigrant and educator who was invited to be President of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University). He was a Presbyterian minister and a delegate who joined the Continental Congress just days before the Declaration was debated. His moral philosophy was based on the work of the Scottish philosopher Francis Hutcheson, who also influenced John Adams.
When President Witherspoon arrived at the College of New Jersey in
1768, he expanded its natural philosophy offerings, purged the Berkeley
adherents from the faculty, including Jonathan Edwards, Jr., and taught his own Hutcheson-influenced form of Scottish innate sense moral philosophy. Some revisionist commentators, including Garry Wills' Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, claimed in the 1970s that this imported Scottish philosophy was the basis for the founding documents of America. However, other historians have questioned this assertion. Ronald Hamowy published a critique of Garry Wills's Inventing America,
concluding that "the moment [Wills's] statements are subjected to
scrutiny, they appear a mass of confusions, uneducated guesses, and
blatant errors of fact." Another investigation of all of the contributors to the United States Declaration of Independence suggests that only Jonathan Witherspoon and John Adams embraced the imported Scottish morality.
While Scottish innate sense realism would in the decades after the
Revolution become the dominate moral philosophy in classrooms of
American academia for almost 100 years, it was not a strong influence at the time of the Declaration was crafted.
Johnson's American Practical Idealism and Edwards' Reform Puritan
Calvinism were far stronger influences on the men of the Continental
Congress and on the Declaration.
Thomas Paine, the English intellectual, pamphleteer, and revolutionary who wrote Common Sense and Rights of Man was an influential promoter of Enlightenment political ideas in America, though he was not a philosopher. Common Sense, which has been described as "the most incendiary and popular pamphlet of the entire revolutionary era", provides justification for the American revolution and independence from the British Crown. Though popular in 1776, historian Pauline Maier cautions that, "Paine's influence was more modest than he claimed and than his more enthusiastic admirers assume."
In summary, "in the middle eighteenth century," it was "the
collegians who studied" the ideas of the new learning and moral
philosophy taught in the Colonial colleges who "created new documents of
American nationhood."
It was the generation of "Founding Grandfathers", men such as
President Samuel Johnson, President Jonathan Edwards, President Thomas
Clap, Benjamin Franklin, and Provost William Smith, who "first created
the idealistic moral philosophy of 'the pursuit of Happiness', and then
taught it in American colleges to the generation of men who would become
the Founding Fathers."
19th century
The 19th century saw the rise of Romanticism in America. The American incarnation of Romanticism was transcendentalism
and it stands as a major American innovation. The 19th century also saw
the rise of the school of pragmatism, along with a smaller, Hegelian philosophical movement led by George Holmes Howison that was focused in St. Louis, though the influence of American pragmatism far outstripped that of the small Hegelian movement.
Transcendentalism in the United States was marked by an emphasis on subjective experience, and can be viewed as a reaction against modernism and intellectualism in general and the mechanistic, reductionistic worldview in particular. Transcendentalism is marked by the holistic
belief in an ideal spiritual state that 'transcends' the physical and
empirical, and this perfect state can only be attained by one's own
intuition and personal reflection, as opposed to either industrial
progress and scientific advancement or the principles and prescriptions
of traditional, organized religion. The most notable transcendentalist
writers include Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller.
The transcendentalist writers all desired a deep return to nature,
and believed that real, true knowledge is intuitive and personal and
arises out of personal immersion and reflection in nature, as opposed to
scientific knowledge that is the result of empirical sense experience.
Things such as scientific tools, political institutions, and the
conventional rules of morality as dictated by traditional religion need
to be transcended. This is found in Henry David Thoreau's Walden; or, Life in the Woods where transcendence is achieved through immersion in nature and the distancing of oneself from society.
Darwin's biological theory was also integrated into the social and political philosophies of English thinker Herbert Spencer and American philosopher William Graham Sumner. Herbert Spencer, who coined the oft-misattributed term "survival of the fittest,"
believed that societies were in a struggle for survival, and that
groups within society are where they are because of some level of
fitness. This struggle is beneficial to human kind, as in the long run
the weak will be weeded out and only the strong will survive. This
position is often referred to as Social Darwinism, though it is distinct from the eugenics movements with which social darwinism is often associated. The laissez-faire beliefs of Sumner and Spencer do not advocate coercive breeding to achieve a planned outcome.
Sumner, much influenced by Spencer, believed along with the industrialist Andrew Carnegie
that the social implication of the fact of the struggle for survival is
that laissez-faire capitalism is the natural political-economic system
and is the one that will lead to the greatest amount of well-being.
William Sumner, in addition to his advocacy of free markets, also
espoused anti-imperialism (having been credited with coining the term "ethnocentrism"), and advocated for the gold standard.
Pragmatism
Perhaps the most influential school of thought that is uniquely American is pragmatism. It began in the late nineteenth century in the United States with Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey.
Pragmatism begins with the idea that belief is that upon which one is
willing to act. It holds that a proposition's meaning is the consequent
form of conduct or practice that would be implied by accepting the
proposition as true.
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce, an American pragmatist, logician, mathematician, philosopher, and scientist
In "The Fixation of Belief" Peirce argues for the superiority of the scientific method
in settling belief on theoretical questions. In "How to Make Our Ideas
Clear" Peirce argued for pragmatism as summed up in that which he later
called the pragmatic maxim:
"Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings,
we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception
of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object". Peirce
emphasized that a conception is general, such that its meaning is not a
set of actual, definite effects themselves. Instead the conception of an
object is equated to a conception of that object's effects to a general
extent of their conceivable implications for informed practice. Those
conceivable practical implications are the conception's meaning.
The maxim is intended to help fruitfully clarify confusions
caused, for example, by distinctions that make formal but not practical
differences. Traditionally one analyzes an idea into parts (his example:
a definition of truth as a sign's correspondence to its object). To
that needful but confined step, the maxim adds a further and
practice-oriented step (his example: a definition of truth as sufficient
investigation's destined end).
It is the heart of his pragmatism as a method of experimentational mental reflection
arriving at conceptions in terms of conceivable confirmatory and
disconfirmatory circumstances—a method hospitable to the formation of
explanatory hypotheses, and conducive to the use and improvement of
verification.
Typical of Peirce is his concern with inference to explanatory
hypotheses as outside the usual foundational alternative between
deductivist rationalism and inductivist empiricism, though he himself
was a mathematician of logic and a founder of statistics.
James, along with Peirce,
saw pragmatism as embodying familiar attitudes elaborated into a
radical new philosophical method of clarifying ideas and thereby
resolving dilemmas. In his 1910 Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, James paraphrased Peirce's pragmatic maxim as follows:
[T]he tangible fact at the root of
all our thought-distinctions, however subtle, is that there is no one of
them so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of
practice. To attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object,
then, we need only consider what conceivable effects of a practical kind
the object may involve — what sensations we are to expect from it, and
what reactions we must prepare.
He then went on to characterize pragmatism as promoting not only a
method of clarifying ideas but also as endorsing a particular theory of
truth. Peirce rejected this latter move by James, preferring to describe
the pragmatic maxim only as a maxim of logic and pragmatism as a
methodological stance, explicitly denying that it was a substantive
doctrine or theory about anything, truth or otherwise.
James is also known for his radical empiricism
which holds that relations between objects are as real as the objects
themselves. James was also a pluralist in that he believed that there
may actually be multiple correct accounts of truth. He rejected the correspondence theory of truth
and instead held that truth involves a belief, facts about the world,
other background beliefs, and future consequences of those beliefs.
Later in his life James would also come to adopt neutral monism, the view that the ultimate reality is of one kind, and is neither mental nor physical.
John Dewey
John Dewey
(1859–1952), while still engaging in the lofty academic philosophical
work of James and Peirce before him, also wrote extensively on political
and social matters, and his presence in the public sphere was much
greater than his pragmatist predecessors. In addition to being one of
the founding members of pragmatism, John Dewey was one of the founders
of functional psychology and was a leading figure of the progressive movement in U.S. schooling during the first half of the 20th century.
Dewey argued against the individualism of classical liberalism,
asserting that social institutions are not "means for obtaining
something for individuals. They are means for creating individuals."
He held that individuals are not things that should be accommodated by
social institutions, instead, social institutions are prior to and shape
the individuals. These social arrangements are a means of creating
individuals and promoting individual freedom.
Dewey is well known for his work in the applied philosophy of the philosophy of education.
Dewey's philosophy of education is one where children learn by doing.
Dewey believed that schooling was unnecessarily long and formal, and
that children would be better suited to learn by engaging in real-life
activities. For example, in math, students could learn by figuring out
proportions in cooking or seeing how long it would take to travel
distances with certain modes of transportation.
Pragmatism, which began in the 19th century in America, by the
beginning of the 20th century began to be accompanied by other
philosophical schools of thought, and was eventually eclipsed by them,
though only temporarily. The 20th century saw the emergence of process
philosophy, itself influenced by the scientific world-view and Albert Einstein's theory of relativity. The middle of the 20th century was witness to the increase in popularity of the philosophy of language and analytic philosophy in America. Existentialism and phenomenology,
while very popular in Europe in the 20th century, never achieved the
level of popularity in America as they did in continental Europe.
Rejection of idealism
Pragmatism continued its influence into the 20th century, and Spanish-born philosopher George Santayana was one of the leading proponents of pragmatism and realism in this period. He held that idealism was an outright contradiction and rejection of common sense.
He held that, if something must be certain in order to be knowledge,
then it seems no knowledge may be possible, and the result will be skepticism. According to Santayana, knowledge involved a sort of faith, which he termed "animal faith".
In his book Scepticism and Animal Faith
he asserts that knowledge is not the result of reasoning. Instead,
knowledge is what is required in order to act and successfully engage
with the world. As a naturalist, Santayana was a harsh critic of epistemological foundationalism.
The explanation of events in the natural world is within the realm of
science, while the meaning and value of this action should be studied by
philosophers. Santayana was accompanied in the intellectual climate of
'common sense' philosophy by the thinkers of the New Realism movement, such as Ralph Barton Perry.
Santayana was at one point aligned with early 20th-century American proponents of critical realism—such as Roy Wood Sellars—who were also critics of idealism, but Sellars later concluded that Santayana and Charles Augustus Strong were closer to new realism in their emphasis on veridical perception, whereas Sellars and Arthur O. Lovejoy and James Bissett Pratt
were more properly counted among the critical realists who emphasized
"the distinction between intuition and denotative characterization".
Process philosophy
Process philosophy embraces the Einsteinian world-view, and its main proponents include Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne. The core belief of process philosophy is the claim that events and processes are the principal ontological categories. Whitehead asserted in his book The Concept of Nature
that the things in nature, what he referred to as "concresences" are a
conjunction of events that maintain a permanence of character. Process
philosophy is Heraclitan in the sense that a fundamental ontological category is change. Charles Hartshorne was also responsible for developing the process philosophy of Whitehead into process theology.
The middle of the 20th century was the beginning of the dominance of analytic philosophy in America. Analytic philosophy, prior to its arrival in America, had begun in Europe with the work of Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the logical positivists. According to logical positivism, the truths of logic and mathematics are tautologies, and those of science are empirically verifiable.
Any other claim, including the claims of ethics, aesthetics, theology,
metaphysics, and ontology, are meaningless (this theory is called verificationism). With the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party,
many positivists fled Germany to Britain and America, and this helped
reinforce the dominance of analytic philosophy in the United States in
subsequent years.
W.V.O. Quine,
while not a logical positivist, shared their view that philosophy
should stand shoulder to shoulder with science in its pursuit of
intellectual clarity and understanding of the world. He criticized the
logical positivists and the analytic/synthetic distinction of knowledge in his essay "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" and advocated for his "web of belief," which is a coherentist
theory of justification. In Quine's epistemology, since no experiences
occur in isolation, there is actually a holistic approach to knowledge
where every belief or experience is intertwined with the whole. Quine is
also famous for inventing the term "gavagai" as part of his theory of
the indeterminacy of translation.
Saul Kripke, a student of Quine at Harvard,
has profoundly influenced analytic philosophy. Kripke was ranked among
the top ten most important philosophers of the past 200 years in a poll
conducted by Brian Leiter (Leiter Reports: a Philosophy Blog; open access poll) Kripke is best known for four contributions to philosophy: (1) Kripke semantics for modal and related logics, published in several essays beginning while he was still in his teens. (2) His 1970 Princeton lectures Naming and Necessity (published in 1972 and 1980), that significantly restructured the philosophy of language and, as some have put it, "made metaphysics respectable again". (3) His interpretation of the philosophy of Wittgenstein. (4) His theory of truth. He has also made important contributions to set theory.
David Kellogg Lewis, another student of Quine at Harvard, was ranked as one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century in a poll conducted by Brian Leiter (open access poll). He is well known for his controversial advocacy of modal realism, the position which holds that there is an infinite number of concrete and causally isolated possible worlds, of which ours is one. These possible worlds arise in the field of modal logic.
Thomas Kuhn was an important philosopher and writer who worked extensively in the fields of the history of science and the philosophy of science. He is famous for writing The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, one of the most cited academic works of all time. The book argues that science proceeds through different paradigms
as scientists find new puzzles to solve. There follows a widespread
struggle to find answers to questions, and a shift in world views
occurs, which is referred to by Kuhn as a paradigm shift. The work is considered a milestone in the sociology of knowledge.
The analytic philosophers troubled themselves with the abstract and
the conceptual, and American philosophy did not fully return to social
and political concerns (that dominated American philosophy at the time
of the founding of the United States) until the 1970s.
The return to political and social concerns included the popularity of works of Ayn Rand, who promoted ethical egoism (the praxis of the belief system she called Objectivism) in her novels, The Fountainhead in 1943 and Atlas Shrugged in 1957. These two novels gave birth to the Objectivist movement and would influence a small group of students called The Collective, one of whom was a young Alan Greenspan, a self-described libertarian who would become Chairman of the Federal Reserve.
Objectivism holds that there is an objective external reality that can
be known with reason, that human beings should act in accordance with
their own rational self-interest, and that the proper form of economic
organization is laissez-faire capitalism. Some academic philosophers have been highly critical of the quality and intellectual rigor of Rand's work, but she remains a popular, albeit controversial, figure within the American libertarian movement.
In 1971 John Rawls published his book A Theory of Justice. The book puts forth Rawls' view of justice as fairness, a version of social contract theory. Rawls employs a conceptual mechanism called the veil of ignorance to outline his idea of the original position. In Rawls' philosophy, the original position is the correlate to the Hobbesianstate of nature.
While in the original position, persons are said to be behind the veil
of ignorance, which makes these persons unaware of their individual
characteristics and their place in society, such as their race,
religion, wealth, etc. The principles of justice are chosen by rational
persons while in this original position. The two principles of justice
are the equal liberty principle and the principle which governs the
distribution of social and economic inequalities. From this, Rawls
argues for a system of distributive justice
in accordance with the Difference Principle, which says that all social
and economic inequalities must be to the greatest benefit of the least
advantaged.
Viewing Rawls as promoting excessive government control and rights violations, libertarianRobert Nozick published Anarchy, State, and Utopia in 1974. The book advocates for a minimal state
and defends the liberty of the individual. He argues that the role of
government should be limited to "police protection, national defense,
and the administration of courts of law, with all other tasks commonly
performed by modern governments – education, social insurance, welfare,
and so forth – taken over by religious bodies, charities, and other
private institutions operating in a free market."
Nozick asserts his view of the entitlement theory
of justice, which says that if everyone in society has acquired their
holdings in accordance with the principles of acquisition, transfer, and
rectification, then any pattern of allocation, no matter how unequal
the distribution may be, is just. The entitlement theory of justice
holds that the "justice of a distribution is indeed determined by
certain historical circumstances (contrary to end-state theories), but
it has nothing to do with fitting any pattern guaranteeing that those
who worked the hardest or are most deserving have the most shares."
Alasdair MacIntyre, while he was born and educated in the United Kingdom, has spent around forty years living and working in the United States. He is responsible for the resurgence of interest in virtue ethics, a moral theory first propounded by the ancient Greek philosopherAristotle. A prominent Thomist
political philosopher, he holds that "modern philosophy and modern life
are characterized by the absence of any coherent moral code, and that
the vast majority of individuals living in this world lack a meaningful
sense of purpose in their lives and also lack any genuine community". He recommends a return to genuine political communities where individuals can properly acquire their virtues.
The popular mind was taken with Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. This was accompanied by other feminist philosophers, such as Alicia Ostriker and Adrienne Rich.
These philosophers critiqued basic assumptions and values like
objectivity and what they believe to be masculine approaches to ethics,
such as rights-based political theories. They maintained there is no
such thing as a value-neutral inquiry and they sought to analyze the
social dimensions of philosophical issues.
In the early 21st century, embodied cognition has gained strength as a theory of mind-body-world integration. Philosophers such as Shaun Gallagher and Alva Noë, together with British philosophers such as Andy Clark defend this view, seeing it as a natural development of pragmatism, and of the thinking of Kant, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty among others.
.jpg)
