|
The positive views of the German idealist philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) are notoriously difficult, and his epistemology is not susceptible of adequate summary within the scope of this article. Some of his criticisms of earlier epistemological views should be mentioned, however, since they helped to bring the modern era in philosophy to a close.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, engraving by Lazarus Gottlieb Sichling.
Courtesy Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig, Portrait Collection 21/32
In his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Hegel criticized traditional empiricist epistemology for assuming that at least some of the sensory content of experience is simply “given” to the mind and apprehended directly as it is, without the mediation of concepts. According to Hegel, there is no such thing as direct apprehension, or unmediated knowledge. Although Kant also held that empirical knowledge necessarily involves concepts (as well as the mentally contributed forms of space and time), he nevertheless attributed too large a role to the given, according to Hegel.
Another mistake of earlier epistemological theories—both empiricist and rationalist—is the assumption that knowledge entails a kind of “correspondence” between belief and reality. The search for such a correspondence is logically absurd, Hegel argued, since every such search must end with some belief about whether the correspondence holds, in which case one has not advanced beyond belief. In other words, it is impossible to compare beliefs with reality, because the experience of reality is always mediated by beliefs. One cannot step outside belief altogether. For Hegel, the Kantian distinction between the phenomena of experience and the unknowable thing-in-itself is an instance of that absurdity.
A.P. MartinichContemporary philosophy
Contemporary philosophy begins in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Much of what sets it off from modern philosophy is its explicit criticism of the modern tradition and sometimes its apparent indifference to it. There are two basic strains of contemporary philosophy: Continental philosophy, which is the philosophical style of western European philosophers, and analytic philosophy (also called Anglo-American philosophy), which includes the work of many European philosophers who immigrated to Britain, the United States, and Australia shortly before World War II.
Continental epistemology
In epistemology, Continental philosophers during the first quarter of the 20th century were preoccupied with the problem of overcoming the apparent gap between the knower and the known. If human beings have access only to their own ideas of the world and not to the world itself, how can there be knowledge at all?
The German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) thought that the standard epistemological theories of his day lacked insight because they did not focus on objects of knowledge as they are actually experienced by human beings. To emphasize that reorientation of thinking, he adopted the slogan, “To the things themselves.” Philosophers needed to recover a sense of what is given in experience itself, and that could be accomplished only through a careful description of experiential phenomena. Thus, Husserl called his philosophy “phenomenology,” which was to begin as a purely descriptive science and only later to ascend to a theoretical, or “transcendental,” one.
Edmund Husserl, c. 1930.
Archiv für Kunst und Geschichte, Berlin
According to Husserl, the philosophies of Descartes and Kant presupposed a gap between the aspiring knower and what is known, one that made claims to knowledge of the external world dubious and in need of justification. Those presuppositions violated Husserl’s belief that philosophy, as the most fundamental science, should be free of presuppositions. Thus, he held that it is illegitimate to assume that there is a problem about our knowledge of the external world prior to conducting a completely presuppositionless investigation of the matter. The device that Husserl used to remove such presuppositions was the epochē (Greek: “withholding” or “suspension”), originally a principle of ancient Greek Skepticism but in Husserl’s philosophy a technique of “bracketing,” or removing from consideration, not only all traditional philosophical theories but also all commonsensical beliefs so that pure phenomenological description can proceed.
The epochē was just one of a series of so-called transcendental reductions that Husserl proposed in order to ensure that he was not presupposing anything. One of those reductions supposedly gave one access to “the transcendental ego,” or “pure consciousness.” Although one might expect phenomenology then to describe the experience or contents of this ego, Husserl instead aimed at “eidetic reduction”—that is, the discovery of the essences of various sorts of ideas, such as redness, surface, or relation. All of those moves were part of Husserl’s project of discovering a perfect methodology for philosophy, one that would ensure absolute certainty.
Husserl’s transcendental ego seemed very much like the Cartesian mind that thinks of a world but has neither direct access to nor certainty of it. Accordingly, Husserl attempted, in Cartesian Meditations (1931), to overcome the apparent gap between the ego and the world—the very thing he had set out to destroy or to bypass in earlier works. Because the transcendental ego seems to be the only genuinely existent consciousness, Husserl also was faced with the task of overcoming the problem of solipsism.
Many of Husserl’s followers, including his most famous student, Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), recognized that something had gone radically wrong with the original direction of phenomenology. According to Heidegger’s diagnosis, the root of the problem was Husserl’s assumption that there is an “Archimedean point” of human knowledge. But there is no such ego detached from the world and filled with ideas or representations, according to Heidegger. In Being and Time (1927), Heidegger returned to the original formulation of the phenomenological project as a return to the things themselves. Thus, in Heidegger’s approach, all transcendental reductions are abandoned. What he claimed to discover is that human beings are inherently world-bound. The world does not need to be derived; it is presupposed by human experience. In their prereflective experience, humans inhabit a sociocultural environment in which the primordial kind of cognition is practical and communal, not theoretical or individual (“egoistic”). Human beings interact with the things of their everyday world (Lebenswelt) as a workman interacts with his tools; they hardly ever approach the world as a philosopher or scientist would. The theoretical knowledge of a philosopher is a derivative and specialized form of cognition, and the major mistake of epistemology from Descartes to Kant to Husserl was to treat philosophical knowledge as a paradigm of all knowledge.
Martin Heidegger.
Camera Press/Globe Photos
Notwithstanding Heidegger’s insistence that a human being is something that inhabits a world, he marked out human reality as ontologically special. He called that reality Dasein—the being, apart from all others, which is “present” to the world. Thus, as in Husserl’s phenomenology, a cognitive being takes pride of place in Heidegger’s philosophy.
In France the principal representative of phenomenology in the mid-20th century was Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61). Merleau-Ponty rejected Husserl’s bracketing of the world, arguing that human experience of the world is primary, a view he encapsulated in the phrase “the primacy of perception.” He furthermore held that dualistic analyses of knowledge, best exemplified by traditional Cartesian mind-body dualism, are inadequate. In fact, in his view, no conceptualization of the world can be complete. Because human cognitive experience requires a body and the body a position in space, human experience is necessarily perspectival and thus incomplete. Although humans experience a material being as a multidimensional object, part of the object always exceeds their cognitive grasp just because of their limited perspective. In Phenomenology of Perception (1945), Merleau-Ponty developed those ideas, along with a detailed attack on the sense-datum theory (see below Perception and knowledge).
The epistemological views of Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) are similar in some respects to those of Merleau-Ponty. Both philosophers rejected Husserl’s transcendental reductions and both thought of human reality as “being-in-the-world,” but Sartre’s views have Cartesian elements that were anathema to Merleau-Ponty. Sartre distinguished between two basic kinds of being. Being-in-itself (en soi) is the inert and determinate world of nonhuman existence. Over and against it is being-for-itself (pour soi), which is the pure consciousness that defines human reality.