Philosophy, lit, etc.: Hegel

Showing posts with label Hegel. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 9, 2018

Hegel in Canada

I've been reading up on the history of Canadian philosophy. Anglo-Canadian academic philosophy was strongly influenced by British, particularly Scots, Hegelians. In 1994, John Burbidge published 'Hegel in Canada', a short piece in which he documented Hegel's influence in Canada via John Watson (among others), a student of Edward Caird's who taught at Queen's University (Kingston, Ontario). According to Burbidge, Watson influenced the training of Presbyterian clergy at Queen's. Here's another item on Hegel and Canada; it's by sociologist David MacGregor.

A new collection of papers, Hegel and Canada (ed. Susan Dodd & Neil G. Robertson), will be released in 2018 by the University of Toronto Press.

In his paper on Watson's influence at Queen's, Burbidge quoted a line about 'seeing life clearly and seeing it whole'. He says that he had often heard these words during his Canadian upbringing, and he takes the phrase to be an especially apt characterization of an idealist outlook. (Update [Jan. 1, 2019]: 'The true is the whole' [Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, 'Preface', trans. Terry Pinkard, sec. 20 -- that last link is to the older trans. by J. B. Baillie].)

I have the impression that I've heard the line before but can't recall the context. A similar line was used by Charles Prestwich Scott, an editor (and owner) of the Manchester Guardian. Scott had said that 'the function of a good newspaper and therefore of a good journalist is to see life steady and see it whole'. Stephen C. Bandy pointed out that essentially the same phrase was earlier used by Matthew Arnold in his poem 'To a friend' (1849), where Arnold wrote of one who 'saw life steadily and saw it whole'. H. G. Wells used similar wording in a discussion of Gissing in 1897. Probably, though, it was Hamilton Wright Mabie who's responsible for the line's currency in Canada and for its association with idealism (in a loose, popular sense of that label). While largely forgotten now, Mabie published widely in popular American magazines. In his 'Interpretation of Idealism' (1896), Mabie valorized the idealist's attempt 'to see life clearly and to see it whole', by which he meant not just grasping given 'facts' (or data) but understanding them in context, or in relation to a larger whole.

Finally, one of the British idealists who moved to Canada was Rupert Clendon Lodge (1886-1961). He was influenced mainly by Bosanquet's version of idealism. Lodge won Oxford's John Locke Scholarship in Mental Philosophy and taught at the University of Manchester before leaving England. He was visiting Germany on a scholarship when WWI began. He had to leave in a hurry. After fleeing Germany, he taught at the University of Minnesota. He bounced around between there and the University of Alberta before settling in at the University of Manitoba (in Winnipeg) in 1920, where he was appointed Professor of Logic and History of Philosophy and headed the philosophy department for almost thirty years. I've started a public page on Lodge at Ancestry.com.

Tuesday, March 15, 2016

More about French philosophy's reception of German philosophy after WWI

After WWI, British and French students were awash in the anti-German sentiments of their respective cultures. But French philosophy students were exposed to the corrective influence of the two-Germanies model. Even if that influence was diminished in the post-War years, French students (and established philosophers) were subjected to another corrective influence. To wit, in the 1920s the French professorate was more diverse than that of the UK in at least one crucial respect: it included a number of very able philosophers who had been educated by German philosophy professors shortly before the War, and the former philosophers maintained their engagement with the latter group after the War. Some of the professors in the former group were from Alsace-Lorraine, a territory that belonged to Germany before the War and to France afterwards. Most of them, though, were refugees who had fled the 1917 revolution in Russia. The influence of these figures is particularly striking when one examines how Husserl re-surfaced in French philosophy after WWI.

While there had been some French publications about Husserl before the War, there wasn't much about him in the post-War French literature until 1926, when a French translation of Lev Shestov's 'Memento Mori' appeared in Révue Philosophique. This critique of Husserl drew a reply from Jean Héring, an Alsatian professor in the Faculty of Protestant Theology at the University of Strasbourg.

Héring received most of his education when his Alsatian homeland was part of Germany. He had studied with Husserl in Göttingen (in 1909). With the shift of borders at the end of the War, he became a French citizen. Shestov was born, raised, and educated in Tsarist Russia and fled to France in 1920. He later became a professor of Russian at the University of Paris. Shestov is said to have initiated the invitation for Husserl to lecture in Paris in 1929.

Another influential Russian figure is Alexandre Koyré, a historian and philosopher of science. He, too, had studied with Husserl before the War. After Husserl disapproved of Koyré's research direction, Koyré moved to Paris to continue his education. Koyré fought in the Russian army during the War and then returned to Paris, where he completed his education and taught in the Department of Religious Studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. Koyré helped with the translation into French of Husserl's 1929 Paris lectures. (Along with a younger Russian, Alexandre Kojève, Koyré would also help French philosophers to improve their understanding of Hegel.)

There was a third Russian emigré who helped to raise Husserl's profile in France between the wars: the sociologist Georges Gurvitch, who (like Koyré) had received part of his education in German universities. At the Sorbonne between 1928 and 1930, Gurvitch lectured on recent German philosophy, focusing on phenomenology (esp. that of Max Scheler). ^{(Ethan Kleinberg, Generation Existential: Heidegger's Philosophy in France, 1927–1961 [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007], pp. 27-28)} These lectures formed the basis of his book Les tendances actuelles de la philosophie allemande, ^{(Paris: Vrin, 1930)} which presented the ideas of Husserl, Lask, Scheler, and Heidegger.

Another figure who helped to disseminate knowledge of Husserl in France between the wars was Bernard Groethuysen, a German author who, both before and after the War, divided his time between Germany and France. In Germany, he taught philosophy and history courses. In France, he worked as an editor and essayist.

In the 1920s, Paris had one of the largest populations of Russian refugees. Many of these Russians had received at least part of their post-secondary education in Germany. While few (perhaps none) of the above-named Russian philosophers were employed by French philosophy departments, they were employed by other academic departments in French universities. I don't know of any comparable minority group in the British universities of the day that had both the ability and opportunity to counteract biases against contemporary German academic philosophy. (Isaiah Berlin received his education in the UK, and Wittgenstein had relatively little acquaintance with the German philosophy professors of his time.) It is especially instructive to compare the French engagement with Husserl in the '20s with the chilly reception of Husserl's 1922 lectures in London.

Sunday, March 6, 2016

Why French philosophy wasn't as anti-German as British philosophy

After World War I, British philosophy, and not French philosophy, followed a trend of diminished engagement with its German counterpart. What accounts for this difference between the British and French philosophers?

First, note that by the early years of the 20^th Century, France had already experienced extreme antipathy towards the Kaiserreich in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War. Following that war, academic philosophers in France arrived at a framework that warranted continued engagement with some German philosophy.

In developing a clearer sense of the relations between French and German philosophy in the late 19^thand early 20^thcenturies, I have found very helpful Martha Hanna's book, The Mobilization of Intellect (Harvard University Press, 1996). According to Hanna, French intellectuals developed a 'two-Germanies' hypothesis after the Franco-Prussian War. They distinguished between the good, high-culture Germany (which ended roughly with Kant) and the bad, militaristic Germany (which began with Hegel).^{(Hanna, Mobilization of the Intellect, p. 9)} In the 1870s, French scholars began to devote more time to studying Kant. In fact, French neo-Kantianism began to grow shortly after France's loss to Prussia and reached its height in the 1890s.^{(Hanna, Mobilization of the Intellect, p. 35)}

In France, neo-Kantianism was one strand in French philosophy's turn from scientism.^(Ibid.) Another strand, which came to prominence in French right-wing, Roman Catholic circles during the early years of the 20^th Century, was stridently anti-German and regarded German scholars as uncreative technicians who were embroiled in scientism. Hanna describes the activities of this French, conservative school of thought during the War, including the work of Jacques Maritain and Victor Giraud.^{(Hanna, Mobilization of the Intellect, pp. 184-9)} In an essay that Giraud published in 1917, he characterizes 'scientisme' as 'that gross doctrine held by half-scientists or half-philosophers which has come to us from Germany and which consists in making positive science the only type of knowledge and the only rule of action.' ^{(Giraud, 'French Civilisation', in The French Miracle and French Civilisation: Two Essays, trans. H. P. Thieme and W. A. McLaughlin [Ann Arbor, MI: The Ann Arbor Press, 1917], p. 71; first published in French in 1917)}

So, in French academic circles during the early years of the 20^th Century, any general bias against German philosophy was associated with a conservative, religious orientation, one which had already been disavowed by many secular philosophers. In contrast to the French right, these secular French philosophers (esp. the neo-Kantians) had endorsed a two-Germanies model in the decades before WWI, and this model encouraged the continuing engagement with some German philosophers, especially those who worked in a Kantian vein and who repudiated what the French called 'scientisme'. This might help to explain why Husserl, for instance, enjoyed a favorable reception in post-War Paris. (Husserl lectured in Paris on Feb. 23 and 25, 1929. His lectures in London in 1922 were not so well received.)

British Germanophiles could only dream of inhabiting such a congenial environment. Some of them (e.g., John Muirhead) propounded their own 'two-Germanies' doctrine during the War and its immediate aftermath. Their approach placed Hegel on the safe, good-German side of the boundary and may have been undermined by the fact that its French counterpart had positioned Hegel as a villain.^{(Hanna, Mobilization of the Intellect, p. 9, p. 23)}

Such differences might explain why, as Stuart Wallace says, the post-War years saw 'nothing in Britain to compare with Julien Benda's scathing postwar critique, La Trahison des Clercs (1927)'. ^{(Wallace, War and the Image of Germany: British Academics, 1914-1918
[Edinburgh: John Donald, 1988], p. v)} The target of Benda's critique was the anti-German propaganda that French professors had produced during the War. Wallace adds that while similar reckonings with 'the national chauvinism of professors' appeared in Germany (Hans Wehburg's Wider den Anruf der 93! [1920]) and in the USA (H. L. Mencken's articles), no British authors produced a similar repudiation of their own nation's professorial propaganda.

Sunday, January 25, 2015

'Scientism' 13 - Charlton on the difference between positivism & scientism

Thirteenth in a series of sixteen posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15 & 16).

The relation between the phrases 'positivism' and 'scientism' is ambiguous. Some use 'scientism' as a synonym for 'positivism' (see Leszek Kolakowski's uses in The Alienation of Reason [1968]; e.g., p. 160 and pp. 177-8). Others take positivism to be a proper subset of scientism (my preferred use). Still others take the two groups to be disjoint.

An example of this latter use can be found in D. G. Charlton's admirable book Positivist Thought in France during the Second Empire, 1852-1870. (Oxford University Press, 1959) Charlton reserves 'positivism' for the view of those positivists who remained true to the anti-metaphysical tenets of that philosophy and who did not pretend to draw ethical results from science (or from reason). 'Scientism' then refers (for Charlton) to distortions of positivism that erect ethical or metaphysical doctrines (e.g., materialism) on a putatively scientific basis (Charlton 1959, p. 2; cf. p. 224). Charlton's use of 'scientism' is clarified by this line about Claude Bernard: 'He rejects the claim of scientism that science alone can offer a new ethic of life and reorder civilization'. (Charlton 1959, p. 81)

Chapters 3-7 of Charlton's book distinguish between, on the one hand, those authors who stayed true to positivist epistemology by remaining agnostic about metaphysics and ethics (and much else) and, on the other hand, those who betrayed positivism by laying claim to knowledge beyond what was verifiable, thereby lapsing into scientism. By Charlton's lights, only Bernard and Émile Littré were true positivists while Comte, himself, Ernest Renan, and Hippolyte Taine had unwittingly forsaken positivism for scientism. Here's an interesting remark that Charlton makes about Taine:

He illustrates with especial clarity one of the most significant distortions of positivism in the mid-nineteenth century, a distortion arising from the intermingling of German idealism and Anglo-French positivism. The addition of Hegel and positivism produces scientism: this is the equation demonstrated in the philosophies of Taine and Renan alike. (Charlton, Positivist Thought in France during the Second Empire [Oxford University Press, 1959], p. 154)

I quote this intriguing passage but, won't delve into it here.

Charlton's use of 'scientism' connects with what I said in the final paragraph of post 11. Indeed, much of Charlton's book is devoted to 'catching out' supposed positivists in moments of betrayal.

In short, for Charlton, since science is silent on metaphysics, ethics, etc., positivism urges silence on such matters.* 'Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent' (though I don't mean to say Wittgenstein was a positivist). For Charlton, scientism won't shut up about the 'whereof'.

*The nature of this urging is unclear. It's normative, so, by positivist standards, it isn't based on scientific method, which itself consists of normative claims....Though perhaps at that point they rely only on hypothetical imperatives.

Thursday, November 14, 2013

Extraordinary philosophy links

Erik Desmazieres' illustration for Borges' 'Library of Babel'

Source of above image.

From Philosopher's Zone, 'We need to talk about Hegel' -- Joe Gelonesi talks to Paul Redding about Hegel.

On John Stuart Mill's annotations of Emerson's Essays:

When Mill turned to the Essays themselves, there was a good deal of marking up in the margins – which confirms that a passage caught his attention – and frequent asides, many of them simply a damning word or two .... If ‘sense’ was present, the more heavily annotated essays suggest that Mill thought ‘nonsense’ prevailed.

On BBC Radio 4's In Our Time, Melvyn Bragg talks to David Wootton, Michael Moriarty, and Michela Massimi about Pascal.

From the same source, Mel Bragg, Stephen Mulhall, Ray Monk, and Julia Tanney on ordinary language philosophy.

Ever the Leibnizian, Borges countenanced extraordinary language philosophy:

There was also hope that the fundamental mysteries of mankind -- the origin of the Library and of time -- might be revealed. In all likelihood those profound mysteries can indeed be explained in words; if the language of the philosophers is not sufficient, then the multiform Library must surely have produced the extraordinary language that is required, together with the words and grammar of that language. (Jorge Luis Borges, 'The Library of Babel')