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Western Philosophy
Plato, Selected Dialogues [427-347
BC]
Plato is not only the most important Western philosopher (with the possible
exception of Aristotle), he is by far the greatest writer. Even if you don’t
care for his philosophy, his dialogues
are brilliantly composed and often quite lively and dramatic.
Most of them feature Plato’s
teacher Socrates. Socrates saw himself as a gadfly whose function was to provoke people to
self-awareness. In Plato’s dialogues he makes his points not by stating them,
but by questioning the people he is talking with in such a way that they
themselves are led to come to the conclusion he is getting at. He claimed not to
be the inventor of a philosophical system, but merely a “midwife” who helped
others become aware of what they already knew (a notion somewhat reminiscent of
the situationists’ notion of the role of radical theory).
I suggest the following five dialogues: The Apology (Socrates’s
defense before the Athenian tribunal that condemned him to death for blaspheming
the traditional gods and “corrupting the youth”); Crito and Phaedo
(which present his conversations with his followers just before his execution);
The Symposium (a dinner-party discussion about the nature of love, ending
when Socrates strolls off in the early morning hours after having drunk everyone
else under the table); and The Republic. The latter presents what Plato
considered to be the ideal social organization. You are unlikely to agree with
him, but in the process he raises a wide range of questions regarding what
would be the ideal society, what constitutes “the good life,” what are
appropriate forms of education, etc.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
[ca. 325
BC]
Aristotle is drier than Plato, in part because most of his works that
survive seem to be more in the nature of lecture notes than finished
compositions. But he is also more systematic and more down-to-earth, going into
practical ramifications that remain rather vague in Plato.
His Poetics, which is primarily about the Greek tragedies, is too
short to do justice to the topic (perhaps it literally was just lecture notes).
His Ethics (usually referred to as the Nicomachean Ethics to
distinguish it from another Aristotelian ethical treatise) is a much more fully developed and
fleshed out work. In considering what the good life consists of, Aristotle
presents the “great-souled man” as a model. Such a man follows a sort of
golden mean in which the virtues are characterized by moderation, as opposed to
vices at either extreme (e.g. courage versus cowardice on the one hand and
foolhardiness on the other). In contrast to the Christian “guilt culture,”
which tends to see virtue as anxious avoidance of sin and supernatural
punishment, Aristotle has a more neutral and matter-of-fact tone, seeing virtue
as desirable for its own sake and stressing practical guidelines and habits that
tend to promote it.
Mortimer Adler’s Aristotle for Everybody is a good general
introduction.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
[ca. 175
AD]
Personal self-examinations and reflections of a rather untypical Roman
emperor, who attempted to model his life on the principles of Stoicism.
Countless people over the ages have turned to this modest little book for
consolation and inspiration.
The best translation is by Maxwell Staniforth (Penguin).
There is a huge gap here between Aurelius and Hegel. I haven’t read any
Medieval philosophy except Augustine and Aquinas, neither of which I care for.
What little I know of Spinoza seems intriguing, but I can’t
say that I understood much of
his Ethics (maybe I’ll tackle it again one of these days). Many of the
subsequent philosophers I’ve read do not seem all that relevant. For example,
the “epistemological problem” that Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant and
many others have been so concerned about (How can we know for sure what is
really real?) seems to me to be a phony issue, one that is dissolved in
practice rather than solved through reasoning. “The epistemological problem
arose as in Europe and America human relationships became increasingly abstract,
and the relation of men to their work became more remote. Six men who have
worked together to build a boat or a house with their own hands do not doubt its
existence” (Rexroth). I realize that Descartes’s practice of beginning by
doubting everything played a salutary role in undermining old orthodoxies and
laying the foundation of modern science, and that Locke had an important
influence on the thinkers of the French and American revolutions; but in both
cases their contributions seem to me to be pretty banal and obvious now. The
same goes for Voltaire and the other French philosophes: “We cannot
overrate the debt of gratitude which we owe to these thinkers. For a thousand
years Europe had been a prey to intolerant, intolerable visionaries. The common
sense of the eighteenth century . . . acted on the world like a bath of moral
cleansing. . . . But if men cannot live on bread alone, still less can they do
so on disinfectants” (Whitehead).
If you are interested, the works by Russell and Adler listed at the end of
this section may serve as introductions to these and other philosophers I’ve
left out.
G.W.F. Hegel [1770-1831]
Hegel is a hard nut to crack, but important to anyone who wishes to engage in
the dialectical type of radical practice initiated by Marx and further developed
by the situationists. (If you are not trying to engage in that sort of practice,
there is no great need for you to tackle him, though you might want to read his
Philosophy of History just to get a general sense of what he’s like.)
There are no “royal roads” to understanding him. I myself do not pretend to
have more than a little elementary practical understanding. Just a few points:
Commentaries and other secondary readings are almost essential. Hegel was a
profound thinker, but he was not a clear writer.
He is not without his moments of foolishness. For example, following the
discovery of the seventh planet, Uranus, Hegel declared that astronomers were
wasting their time searching for an eighth planet because his philosophy had
proved that there must be precisely seven. This is the sort of thing that
critics like Bertrand Russell have such an easy time making fun of.
Despite such asininities, Hegel’s works are full of illuminating insights
on all sorts of topics. But what is most important for radical purposes is his
dialectical method. This method, which Alexander Herzen called “the algebra of
revolution,” cuts through traditional logic, revealing the dynamic manner in
which things interact, how they divide, merge, grow, decay and are transformed,
even into their opposites. It is here that positivist-rationalist thinkers like
Russell miss the point, just as academic spectators fail to grasp Debord’s use
of the same method in The Society of the Spectacle.
(See Debord’s remarks on Hegel at the beginning of
Chapter 4 of that book.)
This being the case, a relatively crude, pragmatic tack may be appropriate.
Don’t worry too much about understanding Hegel’s entire system; just explore it,
seeing what you might be able to glean for immediate use. You may notice that a
sentence in which he criticizes some simplistic philosophical tendency could,
with the change of a word or two, be applied to some similarly simplistic
current political ideology. I’ve occasionally done this in a leaflet or a
pamphlet. As an added benefit, I’ve found that when I go back to Hegel after
using him in this way I understand him better.
The Philosophy of History is perhaps the best place to start. The fact
that Hegel is dealing with concrete historical events helps you to see how his ideas
play out in practice. The only translation of the complete work is rather old
and based on an outdated German edition,
but there is a good modern translation of the Introduction, published under the title
Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction (trans.
H.B. Nisbet).
The Philosophy of Right has the advantage of having been analyzed in
detail by Marx (Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right”).
If you are at home in the history of literature and art, you might try
Hegel’s Aesthetics. The two-volume edition under that name (trans. T.M.
Knox) is a better translation than the old version entitled The Philosophy of
the Fine Arts. Henry Paolucci has edited two useful volumes of selections: Hegel on
Tragedy and Hegel on the Arts.
More difficult, but very rich, is The Phenomenology of
Spirit. The edition with that title (trans. A.V. Miller) contains a good
commentary by J.N. Findlay and is a better translation than the old version
entitled The Phenomenology of Mind. Alexandre Kojève’s
Introduction to the Reading of Hegel discusses selected chapters of the
Phenomenology, notably the dialectic between master and slave. Walter
Kaufmann’s Hegel: Texts and Commentary contains an annotated translation
of the Preface.
Other useful general commentaries include
Walter T. Stace’s The Philosophy of Hegel, Herbert
Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, Jean Hyppolite’s Studies
on Marx and Hegel, C.L.R. James’s Notes on
Dialectics,
J.N. Findlay’s Hegel: A Re-examination, and Walter Kaufmann’s Hegel: A
Reinterpretation.
Ludwig Feuerbach, The Fiery Brook: Selected Writings
[1804-1872]
A good selection by this important transitional figure, who developed from
Hegel’s idealism to a materialistic humanistic philosophy. This advance helped
Marx and Engels take the next step: criticizing the passive character of
Feuerbach’s humanism in favor of a more active and dialectical perspective. (See
The German Ideology (Part I), Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach”
and Engels’s Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy.)
Friedrich Nietzsche [1844-1900]
Read Nietzsche as a challenge, not as an authority. Many of his ideas are
dubious, but he’s one of the greatest of all thought-provokers.
The Portable Nietzsche includes his magnum opus,
Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Other important works are The Birth of Tragedy, The
Genealogy of Morals, Beyond Good and Evil, Daybreak, and The Gay Science.
Ecce Homo is his own very egotistical commentary on himself and his
writings. The Will to Power is a posthumous hodgepodge of unpublished notes which
can less confidently be considered to represent his thought.
Walter Kaufmann’s Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist is
probably still the best general study. If nothing else, it refutes the gross
distortions to which Nietzsche’s thought has been subjected. (Previously, he was
unjustly linked to Nazism and anti-Semitism; in more recent decades he has been
enlisted as the supposed ancestor of all sorts of academic hot air, from
Heidegger to the postmodernists.)
Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World
[1925]
This is an extremely pithy and illuminating examination of the implications
of the scientific worldview as it has evolved over the last four centuries.
Whitehead sees the world as an infinitely interrelated network of “events” or
“processes” rather than as the separate entities assumed by traditional
science (at least until the advent of relativity and quantum physics). His
“philosophy of organism” has points in common with Taoism and Avatamsaka
Buddhism.
This does not mean they are the same thing. The trendy books claiming that
modern physics verifies Oriental mysticism are mostly superficial and
unreliable. If you want an explanation of the merits and limits of science by
someone who knows what he’s talking about, read Science and the Modern World.
Some parts, especially toward the latter half, are rather abstract and
difficult, but you can skim them if necessary and still get a lot out of the
remainder.
Another good Whitehead book, Adventures of Ideas, deals with more
social and cultural issues. Here again some of the more abstract
“philosophical” chapters are rather difficult, but the rest of the book is
fairly accessible. Even more accessible is Dialogues of Alfred North
Whitehead (ed. Lucien Price), a series of informal conversations ranging
over all sorts of topics.
Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy [1945]
This book gives a convenient overview of the major philosophers and
philosophical currents, though you should keep in mind that Russell has his own
biases and blind spots. He covered the same ground in somewhat more popular form
in Wisdom of the West: A Historical Survey of Western Philosophy in Its
Social and Political Setting.
Russell’s collections of essays (e.g. Unpopular Essays and In
Praise of Idleness) are generally quite readable, as is his three-volume
Autobiography.
Mortimer Adler, The Syntopicon
[1952/1990]
This is the two-volume “Index of Ideas” to the Great Books of the
Western World set (discussed in the “Books on Books”
section). Adler’s introductory essays on 102 basic ideas
(e.g. Chance, Emotion, Evolution, God, Government, Happiness, History, Idea,
Infinity, Justice, Knowledge, Liberty, Love, Mind, Nature, Revolution, Space,
Time, Truth, World) constitute a remarkable achievement — concisely and lucidly
summing up the issues and the viewpoints of Western writers and thinkers from
the ancient Greeks to the twentieth century.
Find the second edition (1990) if you can.
Section from Gateway to the Vast Realms: Recommended
Readings from Literature to Revolution, by Ken Knabb (2004).
No copyright.
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