Dewey, Sartre and Wittgenstein

John Dewey [1859 - 1952] is undoubtedly one of the truly outstanding American philosophers. Dewey lived through an era of unrelenting, rapid, and staggering changes. There was a seeming endless sequence of wars from the American Civil War to the Second World War interspersed with major upheavals such as the Great Depression. Changes in the realm of intellect were no less dramatic, the world witnessed the emergence of Darwin's theory of evolution, Marx's communism, Freud's theory of psychoanalysis, Einstein's theory of relativity, the Quantum Theory, and a host of radical transformations in the arts. There was a veritable succession of revolutions in conceptions of our selves, in conceptions of the nature of society, and in conceptions of the nature of the physical world. Technologically, the changes were no less breathtaking. The first viable light-bulb was developed when Dewey was already 20 years old, the motor car when he was 26, the first rudimentary flying machines when he was 44, and he witnessed the development of radio, film and television. The atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima when he was 86. From there not even being an electric light bulb before Dewey was 20 to the airborne delivery of a devastating atomic bomb is a mere 66 years, and he lived through it all and beyond. The combined political, social, intellectual, industrial, and technological changes of such number and magnitude cannot help but create acute and pressing problems. This dramatically changing background makes Dewey's pragmatic and highly practical orientation and his repeated insistence that philosophy must deal with urgent current problems more intelligible, and indeed he acknowledges as much himself. Dewey had an extraordinarily broad range of philosophical interests. He wrote on logic, scientific methodology, ethics, aesthetics, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of religion, social philosophy, political philosophy, and philosophy of education. But he had a special interest in education and was sufficiently concerned to integrate his own theory and practice to set up his own school. He was a voluminous public commentator on the great issues of his day. His reputation was so great, particularly in the area of education, that he was hired by a number of governments to advise on the running of their education systems. As I see it, there is an intellectual vigour and penetration in his approach which continues to make for highly rewarding reading, but the breadth of his interests makes it difficult to furnish a fair account of his philosophy in a brief span. The major formative influences on Dewey's philosophy were the German Idealist philosopher Hegel from whom he derived a sense of unity and a distrust of hard and fast intellectual divisions: the American pragmatists Charles Peirce and William James from whom he derived the conviction that thinking and theorising that was not merely idle and empty must be grounded in practice or action or experience: and George Mead the sociologist who influenced him on the conception of the individual as socially constructed. Dewey is most commonly referred to as a Pragmatist; at times he refers to himself as an empirical naturalist, or a naturalistic empiricist, and even a naturalistic humanism. His philosophy has been characterised as instrumentalism on the one hand and experimentalism on the other. In philosophy, Dewey was a radical. He argued that the whole way in which philosophy had been conducted was erroneous and a total reconstruction of philosophy was in order. This reconstruction would require the total abandonment of what he variously called 'vain' and 'sterile' metaphysics, 'idle' and 'sterile' epistemology, and traditional moral theorising that sought to arrive at universal moral principles or universally binding ends. For Dewey, there are no serious questions of existence beyond those that can be resolved by the application of the experimental method of the sciences and those parts of philosophy that sought to deal with them, such as metaphysics, are dated and done for. Dewey was enormously impressed with the development and advances of the physical and biological sciences of his day, and he was especially interested in the methods they used to secure those results, and he took these to be methods which could be justified in terms of their outcome in action. He could find no comparable development and advance in philosophy, and he put this down to the failure of philosophy to embrace the kind of methodology that science had embraced. Indeed he thought that the adoption of such methods was vital if any progress was to be made on moral, social, educational and political issues - the issues that most directly affected the whole community.

Dewey saw harmful and insupportable dualisms wherever he looked. The dichotomies between subject and object, appearance and reality, phenomena and noumena, experience and nature, natural and supernatural, inner and outer, public and private, thought and action, knowledge and action, will and action, mind and body, physical and mental, self and not-self, theory and practice, means and ends, fact and value, real and ideal, education and life, art and life, school and society, the interests of the pupil and the requirements of the curriculum, liberal education and vocational education, traditional education and progressive education, the needs of the individual and the needs of society, and other similar dichotomies were all either false or highly problematic dichotomies to Dewey. The sheer number of the dichotomies or dualisms that Dewey has difficulties with may invite suspicion, but there is an important over all vision, and a coherent position behind this apparently wholesale condemnation of dichotomies and dualisms. It turns out that we are not faced with exactly the same error repeated again and again, but different errors that need to be and are dealt with in different ways. I detect in Dewey three main responses to the dualisms he finds problematic: outright rejection, retention with reinterpretation, and replacement with some more appropriate distinction. Let me illustrate these briefly [a] Outright rejection. One example is the distinction between the natural and the supernatural. Here nothing in reality actually corresponds to the distinction. The only reliable methods of enquiry that there are completely undermine any ground for belief in a supernatural realm, and the only intellectually fitting response is to reject such a conception entirely. This is a dualism that is wholly unacceptable. But I should add that for Dewey that this did not automatically lead to a total rejection of religion. Certainly, whatever supernaturalism religion contains needs to be rigorously rejected and excluded, but in so far as religious experience is a genuine component of experience, it adds a dimension to life that it is important to cultivate. This experience may involve a sense of wholeness, a sense of community, and a commitment to ideals, but these can all be understood in purely naturalistic terms. [b] Retention with reinterpretation. One example is the distinction between mind and body. Something in reality does correspond to the distinction, but what that is has become subject to misconception an misinterpretation, but the distinction can be retained provided that it is correctly interpreted. For Dewey, to interpret the distinction metaphysically as referring to two separate, self-contained, self-sufficient entities, each radically different in their own natures leads to well known problems of how they could possibly be related or how the could possibly originate. A proper naturalistic account of the mind and naturalistic interpretation of the distinction can be given which bypasses such problems. [c] Replacement with some more appropriate distinction. One example is the distinction between means and ends. There is something in experience to which the distinction is applied, but the distinction embodies an erroneous way of conceiving matters. The implication is that 'ends' can be final values and 'means' cannot. For Dewey there is no real distinction here. Anything that has been called an end can be a means and anything that has been called a means can be an end. The distinction implies that what have been called 'ends' can intelligibly be assigned a value independently of the means used to attain it, and Dewey denies that this is possible. In some cases, the distinction can be positively harmful and lead to an unwarranted devaluation of the things that have been called means, and a fruitless search for things to count as final values. The reinterpretation of the distinction will not suffice, it need to be replaced with something more effective and appropriate. Dewey's term is 'end in view'' which relates the conception directly to human action. Let me turn to his major substantive views. The primacy of action. What is different, what is distinctive or new in Dewey's philosophy? The answer to this question requires some background setting. It is common to date the beginning of modern philosophy with Descartes. For Descartes, the most fundamental question was 'What do I really know?' There is an implication here that knowing is what is most important to being human, and the justice of this charge is reinforced by the positive conception of being human that Descartes arrives at. It is the mind that is the overridingly important to being human and the mind is something that essentially thinks, the mind is something whose function essentially is to know or to be aware. If we turn to Kant, the issue of how is knowledge possible is clearly central to his philosophical projects, and although he does deal with moral action and aesthetic appreciation the attention is less concentrated and comprehensive and is in any event pervaded by the presupposition that the central issues are concerned with knowledge, and how certain kinds of judgement are possible. Once again, the impression is strong that knowing is what is essential to being human. In so far as epistemology has been a dominant preoccupation of modern philosophy to that extent it reflects this presupposition that a human being is essentially

a knowing being, the chief problem of philosophy being to determine the nature and extent of that knowledge. The assumption is that when knowing is sorted out, action will take care of itself. The view implies that for human beings, action is secondary, derivative, dependent and ultimately less important. The mind must first think, judge, or know, and then formulate a plan of action and implement it. The essentially human part is the preceding thought, the conscious deciding, the mental formulation of the plan, the rest is the mere movement of meat. Here, action is something produced by thought, is secondary to thought, and can only be understood in relation to prior thought. Dewey's conception is diametrically opposed to this. For Dewey, human beings are essentially beings that act and are acted upon. The background is Darwinian and naturalistic. We are fundamentally organisms faced by the demands of organisms to secure the conditions of their continued existence and ward off imminent threats. For organic life, action to secure its continued existence has to be its number one priority. Human beings are no more exempt from this iron law than any other life form. This means that, whatever we may become, at root and ground, action is central to our being. Nor does this of itself immediately involve mind any more significant way than action immediately involves mind in the case of the amoeba, the ant, and the antelope. The primacy of action fills a double role in Dewey's thinking, one is explanatory and the other is justificatory. On the one hand, it is the demands of action that explain the nature of thought and the mental. For Dewey, if our needs and desires were all automatically met, thought and the mental would have no useful purpose to serve. As organisms, it is only when our goals are frustrated, it is only when the situation is so confused, indeterminate, problematic, and unclear as to not permit the immediate pressing on to a successful conclusion that thought is required. The very reason why thought exists is as an aid to successful action. The mental is not there to passively register an antecedently patterned reality for its own sake, it is there as a positive aid to action. Dewey's philosophy has been characterised as instrumentalism, and what has just been said conveys some of the sense of this. Human thinking exists ultimately only to aid action. The mental has no autonomous aim, goal, or function of its own. On the other hand, it is the outcomes in action that justify the acceptability of thoughts, theories, or methods. In short, thoughts are required by action and justified by their outcome in action. Whether a theory is to be accepted will ultimately have to be decided by its outcomes in action, but by the very same token, the use of methods of inquiry, logics, principles of reasoning and the like can only be justified by their contribution to successful action. Of course, this implies a certain conception of truth or what is to count as truth. This is the notorious pragmatic theory of truth which equates truth with utility, and which every beginner in philosophy believes it to be within their power to refute. One version of the argument goes as follows: suppose that I believe that I am the reincarnation of Alexander the Great, suppose that this belief has an entirely positive effect on my actions, that is, my actions would not have succeeded if I had not had this belief, and no other belief would have contributed to the success of my actions to an equal degree. This situation is certainly conceivable and arguably credible. Equating truth with utility, the upshot is that it is true that I am the reincarnation of Alexander the Great. But the conclusion immediately strikes us as absurd, and objections rapidly crowd in. Surely, there may be some other explanation for the positive contribution that the belief makes to my action apart from its being true. Intuitively, we feel that the deeply held false conviction that I am Alexander the Great may be just as capable of furnishing a positive boost to my actions. Another unwelcome consequence of this conception is that dozens of people, indeed any number of persons, could simultaneously be the reincarnations of Alexander the Great. This is all absurd. If this is Dewey's conception of truth we are fully warranted in rejecting it and harbouring real suspicions about his other views. But this is not Dewey's conception of truth, and given the prevalence of misinterpretations of it, he goes out of his way to set the record straight. To quote him directly: Again when truth is defined as utility, it is often thought to mean utility for some purely personal end, some profit upon which a particular individual has set his heart. So repulsive is a conception of truth which makes it a mere tool of private ambition and aggrandizement, that the wonder is that critics have attributed such a notion to sane men. As a matter of fact, truth as utility means service in making just that contribution to reorganization in experience that the idea or theory claims to be able to make. The usefulness of a road is not measured by the degree in which it lends itself to the purposes of the highwayman. It is measured by whether it actually functions as a road, as a means of easy and effective

public transportation and communication. And so with the serviceableness of an idea or hypothesis as a measure of its truth. The utility at issue in relation to truth is simply not an individualised, personalised or subjectivised utility, and the apparently easy objection collapses. What remains is certainly more formidable and challenging and has far reaching implications, even for philosophy itself. But before we get to that, successful action will of course have to occur in experience in some way or other if we are to take any account of it, and this leads naturally to the issue of Dewey's conception of experience. The centrality of experience. Perhaps where Dewey is at greatest variance with traditional empiricists is in his conception of experience. To understand Dewey here we need to give up our preconceptions, and be prepared to look at the issue in an entirely new light. In particular, we need to temporarily suspend the belief that experience is inherently subjective, private, and occurring in a separate mental realm. Dewey regards an organism and its environment - and this includes the human organism and its environment - as in some sense a unity. He was inclined to say that an organism did not so much live in an environment as live by means of an environment. Experience is a transaction that involves both the environment and the human organism. Experience is not passive reception, experience does not consist of or is constructed out of sensory 'atoms' or 'sense-data'. In its primal character, experience is not structured in terms of subject and object, inner and outer, mental and non-mental, self and not-self, it embraces without differentiation both organism and environment. There is no prior or independent existence of subject and object, these are but partial features in an ongoing unity. The very notion of a thing, the very notion of a thought are in some way distilled out of a unitary experience. Subject and object are distinctions drawn by reflection on something that is an active unity, they do not represent metaphysically significant divisions in reality themselves. So called 'inner' states are not a fixed given, but emerge in a process of development that involves language in an essential way. Let me quote Dewey directly: When the introspectionist thinks he has withdrawn into a wholly private realm of events disparate in kind from other events, made out of mental stuff, he is only turning his attention to his own soliloquy. And soliloquy is the product and reflex of converse with others; social communication is not an effect of soliloquy. If we had not talked with others and they with us, we should never talk to and with ourselves. Because of converse, social give and take, various organic attitudes become an assemblage of persons engaged in converse, conferring with another, exchanging distinctive experiences, listening to one another, overhearing unwelcome remarks, accusing and excusing. He adds in summary at the end of this paragraph, 'Thus mind emerges', and continues the theme in a later passage: Personality, selfhood, subjectivity are eventual functions that emerge with complexly organized interactions, organic and social. Personal individuality has its basis and conditions in simpler events. Thus, subject and object, mind and matter, inner and outer, self and not-self mark distinctions, but they do not designate a metaphysical divide. In so far as they mark genuine distinctions, they mark distinctions that can be explained and understood in naturalistic terms. When it comes to the experience we actually encounter, we find something continuous and continually changing, embracing beginnings, continuations and endings, already laden with and inseparable from thoughts, meanings, and current and future possibilities. Our experience has an ineliminably social aspect to it. Beings that can report on their experiences are beings that have arisen in and out of social interaction. The self is not pre-formed, inherently complete, self-contained, self-sufficient, self-sustaining, or ontologically independent and ontologically prior to the relations it enters into with other selves. The self is something developed out of the interactions both organic and social. But there never is any point at which this development, or at least the potential for development actually ceases. Society. This account of experience and the origin and nature of the self has many important consequences for life, society, education, the arts, and much more. Let me briefly flesh out some of these consequences in a general way, and also indicate how rapidly the conception impacts on substantive public policy. Dewey was a

vigorous defender of democracy, and it fits naturally with his conception of the individual. Society needs to be arranged so as to maximise the growth and development of all individuals. To quote his own words: Democracy has many meanings, but if it has a moral meaning, it is found in resolving that the supreme test of all political institutions and industrial arrangements shall be the contribution they make to the allaround growth of every member of society. But this account of the nature of individuals has its own implications in relation to certain oppositions that are sometimes supposed to exist between individuals and society. For one, there are no individuals independently of society that can be brought together to form society. Just as there can be no society without individuals, there can be no individuals without society. Thus, such oppositions as the interest of the individual and the interest of society are artificial and unsustainable when considered in general terms. Let me quote Dewey again: The long-time controversy between rights and duties, law and freedom is another version of the strife between Individual and Society as fixed concepts. Freedom for an individual means growth, ready change when modification is required. It signifies an active process, that of release of capacity from whatever hems it in. But since society can develop only as new resources are put at its disposal, it is absurd to suppose that freedom has a positive significance for individuality but negative meaning for social interests. Society is strong, forceful, stable against accident only when all its members can function to the limit of their capacity. An individual is dependent for growth and development on society, but a worthwhile society itself is dependent on growing and developing individuals. If any group of individuals is excluded from this process of growth and development, then the whole society is adversely affected through being deprived of the stimulus to growth and development that would have been furnished by their growth and development. To give a concrete illustration, the tragedy of unemployment is not just that it severely limits the growth and development of the unemployed, it adversely affects the growth and development of the remainder of society through depriving them of the positive interaction that they would otherwise have if the unemployed had been fully growing, developing, and participating persons. Education. Turning to education, Dewey does not regard education as merely a means to an end. His general conception of the nature and formation of the self or individual and the nature of society plays a fundamental role in his rejecting education as a means where the end is conceived of as participation in adult life. For Dewey, all of life is education. Life is growing and developing, education is growing and developing - living and learning are inseparable. Formal education or schooling, is only just the earlier phase of a process that continues throughout life. To apply to education, this false dichotomy of means and ends is a mistake, and is itself in turn the generator of further false dichotomies. Dewey's views are incompatible with the conception of the pupil as a passive container to be filled with an inert subject matter. Let me quote him directly again: Now "preparation" is a treacherous idea. In a certain sense every experience should do something to prepare a person for later experiences of a deeper and more expansive quality. That is the very meaning of growth, continuity and reconstruction of experience. But it is a mistake to suppose that the mere acquisition of a certain amount of arithmetic, geography, history, etc., which is taught and studied because it may be useful at some time in the future, has this effect, and it is a mistake to suppose that acquisition of skills in reading and figuring will automatically constitute preparation for their right and effective use under conditions very unlike those in which they are acquired. Nor does failure in preparation end at this point. Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only the particular thing he is studying at the time. Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes, of likes and dislikes, may be and often is much more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography and history that is learned. For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future. The most important attitude that can be formed is that of desire to go on learning. If impetus in this direction is weakened instead of intensified, something much more than a mere lack in preparation takes place. The pupil is actually robbed of native capacities which otherwise would enable him to cope with the circumstances that he meets in the course of his life.

What, then, is the true meaning of preparation in the educational scheme? In the first place, it means that a person, young or old, gets out of his present experience all that there is in it for him at the time at which he has it. When preparation is made the controlling end, then the potentialities of the present are sacrificed to a suppositious future. When this happens, the actual preparation for the future is missed or distorted. The ideal of using the present simply to get ready for the future contradicts itself. It omits, and even shuts out, the very conditions by which a person can be prepared for his future. We always live at the time we live and not some other time, and only by extracting at each present time the full meaning of each present experience are we prepared for doing the same thing in the future. This is the only preparation which in the long run amounts to anything. What the pupil learns must be fully integrated in the life of a growing, developing and participating being. If Dewey is right, then the current trend towards treating education more and more like a commodity with a fixed price, to be made available only to those that are willing and able to pay for it, is a trend that sets us on a badly misguided path. Conclusion. Let me bring these considerations to a close. I have tried to give a sense that there is a coherent vision and positions behind Dewey's difficulties with so many dualisms and dichotomies. There are some important ones that I have not dealt with. For example, for Dewey, there is no important distinction to be drawn between facts and values, and he believes that values can be accounted for in purely naturalistic terms. This belief imbues him with an enormous enthusiasm for the application of experimental methods in the areas of values. Whether this is plausible or feasible I will leave to another time. Jean-Paul Sartre [1905 - 1980] was undoubtedly the foremost Existentialist philosopher, but he was not just a philosopher. He was the dominant French intellectual of his era, and noted as a novelist, playwright, literary commentator, political commentator, political activist, and more. In time, he grew dissatisfied with Existentialism and embraced a version of Marxism, but he did seek to temper some of the rigidity in Marxism with elements of Existentialism. Sartre was born in Paris. His father was a naval officer who died when Sartre was little more than a year old. He met Simone de Beauvoir while both were studying philosophy, and they became lovers and lifelong companions. She was also a formidable philosopher, novelist, and feminist. Sartre was taken with the potential of phenomenology as a way of doing philosophy, and spent an academic year (1933-34) in Berlin studying with Husserl the founder of phenomenology. His major philosophical work is Being and Nothingness which was begun in 1940 when he was a prisoner of war. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964 but refused to accept on the grounds that a writer ought to be known by his works and not by his awards. Never content to be a mere bystander, he was continually involved in radical politics at both a national and international level. It is said that when he died 50,000 people accompanied the body to the grave. The Starting Point. Sartre begins his philosophy from the standpoint of individual consciousness. The most fundamental distinction for Sartre is the distinction between those things that are conscious, and those things that are not. Human beings are conscious, the things around them are not. He calls conscious being, being for itself and mere non-conscious things, being in itself. A part of his account of non-conscious things, of what being in itself means is that mere things just are, mere things just exist. They are just what they are: there is a kind of completeness, a givenness, a determinateness, and self-sufficiency to them. A part of his account of conscious beings, of what being for itself means is that it is not something that just is, it is not something that just exists. Conscious beings are not just what they are: there is a kind of incompleteness, an emptiness, an indeterminateness, and insufficiency to them. One way to explain the difference is that being in itself lacks nothing for its existence, while being for itself lacks almost every thing for its existence. Being for itself strives to overcome this lack, this incompleteness, this emptiness, this indeterminateness, this insufficiency. Existence precedes Essence. The most important and best known formula encapsulating the basic core of Sartre's existentialism is that Existence precedes Essence. It is important to note that this is not a general proposition that applies to all things: it applies specifically to human beings - to conscious beings, and points to what makes human beings different from other things. For Sartre, things other than human beings have a determinate nature, a definable nature, an essence, a completeness in their own right. For example, if we take a particular bread knife, it has a definite shape, a definite size, a definite sharpness. What it is - a bread knife determines its function, and this in turn means that it can be assessed in terms of how good it is. Part of being a good bread knife will be that the bread does not disintegrate when it is cut. Similar points hold for animals and plants; they too have determinate natures, definable natures, essences, a completeness in their own right; they

too can be assessed in terms of how good they are as an example of their kind, and such assessments simply derive from the kind that they are. An eagle that cannot fly is defective as an eagle; a whale that cannot swim is defective as a whale; a tree whose roots are no longer capable of absorbing nutrients from the soil is defective as a tree. In short, all these things have an essence; they have essential characteristics which make them what they are and determine whether they are good examples of their kind. When Sartre claims that for human beings - that is conscious beings - existence precedes essence, the key point is that human beings do not from the beginning have a determinate nature, a definable nature, an essence, a completeness in their own right. Initially, a conscious being has no nature or essence. Initially, a conscious being is something formless, indeterminate, incomplete, an emptiness, an absence of specific features - a nothingness. But also, from the beginning a conscious being is a being with an impetus to be something determinate, to be something definite, to be more than an emptiness, to be something complete in its own right. There is a strong connection between this account of human beings and Sartre's atheism. His atheism is not simply an external add on here. It is in part because there is no God that human beings are the way they are. If there were a God, then human beings would be the creations of this God, and would thus have a nature or essence imposed on them by God. But since there is no God, this cannot be a source for a determinate nature or essence for human beings. But let me return to the central point. This initial ontological condition of the absence of any specific nature imposes a task on human beings: human beings have to make themselves. Human beings are literally nothing until they make themselves, until they make something of themselves. We all need a fundamental project to be something, to make something of ourselves. In short, you are nothing until you make yourself something. This raises the issue of freedom, and the issue of whether we are actually free to make ourselves. For Sartre, we are completely free to make ourselves. There are two factors to consider here: what goes on inside us and what takes place in the world outside us. To begin with what goes on inside us: The fact that we as conscious beings are formless, indeterminate, incomplete, an emptiness, an absence of specific features - a nothingness means that there is literally nothing within us to hinder or restrict our choices or actions. As far as we ourselves are concerned, we are entirely free to make of ourselves what we choose. There is nothing inside us to limit our choices in any way whatever. It is worth noting here that Sartre did not believe in a Freudian unconscious that in some way limits and controls us, or shapes our choices in ways that we are not aware of. He thought that the idea of such an unconscious was contradictory and incoherent. In any event, considered from within we are entirely free. Absurdity or Contingency. When we turn our attention to the world without, the situation is slightly more complicated. Sartre is famous for the view that reality is absurd. There are a number of things meant by this. For one, it means that nothing in the world is necessary; nothing has to be the way that it is; everything in the world is entirely contingent. For another, it means a complete denial of the principle of sufficient reason in any form. To highlight this, take Leibniz, for him, for every fact there is a reason why it is so and not otherwise; in short, there is an explanation for every fact. Spinoza is more extreme, for him, for every fact there is a reason not merely why it is so, but why it must be so; in short, there is a necessary explanation for every fact. In saying that reality is absurd, Sartre is rejecting all versions of the principle of sufficient reason. When we strip reality of our human interpretations, when we strip reality of our own linguistic overlay, reality just is, it just is without rhyme or reason either in its parts or in the whole. This is a part of what it means to say that reality is absurd, but there are other ways of bringing out further what it means. One important point is that reality as such is entirely meaningless and entirely value free. There is no point in it or to it of any kind. Sartre thinks that when we strip reality of our habitual interpretations and linguistic overlay and confront concrete reality directly in the raw, then we will experience nausea. But the important issue here is how all this impinges on human freedom. The absence of necessity in the world means that the world cannot, so to speak, force itself upon us. It cannot force us to choose what we do not want to choose. It cannot force us to be what we do not want to be. Just as there are no internal necessities to limit our choice, so also there are no external necessities to limit our choice. To take a more specific aspect, my past does not necessitate how I now am or how I am going to be, and this follows not merely from the fact that there are no necessities in reality, but also from a more specific analysis that there is a kind of ontological void that separates

my present self from the past and makes it impossible for my past to determine my present. Thus it seems that considered from within and considered from without human beings are entirely free. There is one qualification that needs to be dealt with. It will be objected that there are some facts that are simply brute facts that impose limits on us whether one likes it or not. For example, that you are six feet tall or that you have brown eyes or that you have the parents that you do have are brute facts that you have no control over, and that constitute a limitation to your freedom. Sartre accepts that there are such brute facts - facticity he calls it - but denies that they constitute any fundamental limitation on human freedom. The key point is that while we all have to operate within a framework of brute facts, what we make of them is entirely up to us. For example, Sartre's father died when Sartre was about one year old, obviously Sartre has no control over that fact, but what he makes of such a fact is entirely up to him. It is up to him whether he chooses it as an excuse and feels sorry for himself, or looks at it as a challenge to make something of himself. Thus Sartre accepts that there is a framework of brute facts, but it in no way coerces or inner being or our choices, and leaves us free to make of the framework itself whatever we will. Value and Meaning. The upshot is that we are confronted with a radical freedom. It is entirely up to us to make ourselves. But more needs to be said about the situation that confronts us. A key point is that there are literally no values until the individual makes choices. It is the individual choosing that makes something value. Value is totally dependent on choice. To what degree there is any value in your life will depend entirely on your own choice. If we shift our vocabulary and speak in terms of meaning, the same point holds. There is only any meaning in the world or in our lives to the extent that we give meaning to the world and our lives. Again we give this meaning through our choices. There is no other way of giving meaning to the world except through our own choices. Meaning cannot come from outside: there is no God to impose meaning, and the world is inherently meaningless. Thus if there is to be any value for us, if there is to be any meaning for us, then it is entirely up to us and our choices. To use another form of words, we are individually totally responsible for the value and meaning that there is in our lives. We need to create a valuable and meaningful life by our choices the way that an artist creates a work of art. However, there is one very important difference between the artist and a person constructing their life. An artist can opt to ceases creating artworks while continuing living, but for Sartre there is no way that an individual can cease to make choices. To be alive means that you are unavoidably constantly making choices. Life and choice cannot be separated. One cannot live and not choose. This position is the source of one of Sartre's famous sayings that we are condemned to be free. Anguish. Sartre thinks that once we recognise our own radical freedom, once we recognise the awesome responsibility that it is totally up to us individually whether there is any value or meaning in our lives, then we will experience anguish. Anguish is the natural response to the recognition of our radical freedom and total responsibility. Sartre thinks that to escape this anguish people will try to evade the recognition of their radical freedom and total responsibility; people will try to hide their true condition from themselves. Sartre calls this evasion bad faith. Bad faith is a refusal to face the reality of your own total freedom and responsibility. The characteristic sign of bad faith is making excuses for oneself, of claiming that you had no real choice, of claiming that circumstances forced you to do what you did. One more light hearted example of this tendency is when people say that the devil made them do. It is not usually meant seriously, but it does usually indicate a degree of not wanting to shoulder one's responsibility fully. But let us turn to more realistic contemporary examples. For Sartre, those people who seek to excuse their failure in life because they were sexually abused as children, or because their parents were poor, or because they were not sent to the right schools, or because they lived in the wrong neighbourhood, or because they belong to the wrong race, and so on, are all showing bad faith. It is a hiding from themselves that what they make of their sexual abuse, or poverty, or schooling, and the like depends entirely on themselves. The proof is that there are those that have been sexually abused, those that have been poor, those who have not had a first rate education who have not allowed this to ruin their lives. Sartre's formula here was: there are no excuses. You have total responsibility for what you make of your life. There are many other ways of showing bad faith such as hiding behind social roles such as waiter, policeman, teacher, lawyer where freedom and responsibility are again in some measure evaded by claiming that one's position necessarily requires us to act in certain ways.

Authenticity. To live life authentically, to live life without bad faith is to fully recognise at every moment that we are free, that it is entirely up to us, that we must take full and complete responsibility for who we are and what we are, that the value and meaning in our lives depends solely on us and not on other persons and other things. For Sartre, to live authentically we all need a fundamental project, a basic plan to create a valuable and meaningful life through our choices. One way of putting this is that the most basic task confronting everyone is to become a self for which there is value and meaning, and the only way in which such a self can be created is through the choices that you make. Put in another way, your fundamental task is to be the creator of your own nature. There is no real self prior to choice, you create yourself through choice. Sartre thinks that there is a sense in which we aspire to be God, for we aspire to be the creators of our own nature. But this is a task that can in principle never be completed and we are condemned to labour at it to the end. This is a highly individual centred philosophy and it raises the question of how Sartre envisioned individuals relations to other persons. Other People. Sartre took a very negative view about the place and role of other persons in one's life. You are aware that other people are aware of you, and you realise that while you see them as mere items in your world, you are reduced to the status of mere items in their world. While for Sartre to become aware that one is a conscious being is impossible without becoming aware that there are other conscious beings, other conscious beings constitute a threat to one's own self definition. One way to look at it is this: I am at the centre of my own world and other people are arranged in various positions around the centre. But other persons are at the centre of their world, and in their world I am not at the centre. There is thus an inherent, deadly, and unavoidable conflict between individuals. Another individual seeks to rob me of the meaning I assign to my self, by assigning a different meaning to me than I do myself, and this is exactly what I do to others, I assign a different meaning to them than they assign to themselves. Nor does the conflict end here. Any interpretation of the world that differs from my own detracts from and threatens my own interpretation. Since it is my interpretation of the world that are an essential part of giving meaning to the world and hence giving meaning to my own life, other people and their interpretations are a constant challenge and threat to my own interpretation. It is important to note that the conflict occurs at a very basic level, that of conscious beings seeking to give meaning to their own existence and the world they encounter. His views about the essentially unsatisfactory and conflicting relations between individuals is well summarised in another of his well known sayings from his play No Exit: Hell is other people. The position here once again reinforces the central contention that it is entirely up to the individual to create a meaningful and valuable life; in this quest, no help from other persons is to be expected nor can it be relied on. Death. Sartre's views on death are worth noting here. He did not think that an individual's own death could in any way be meaningful for an individual. As far as an individual is concerned, his or her own death is utterly meaningless; it is where meaning ends, and absolutely nothing can be done by the individual to give it any kind of meaning. Death constitutes the end of all meaning for an individual and thus death cannot be meaningful for an individual. But there is a further twist of the knife here. While one's own death cannot in any way be made meaningful by oneself or to oneself, those that remain when one dies, can define the meaning of one's death as they choose. This constitutes the ultimate triumph of the other person, in that they can now uncontestedly assign whatever meaning they wish to one's life and death. Even in death one cannot fully escape the deleterious impact of other persons. The recognition of this is another factor souring relations between individuals. Later Views. Sartre became dissatisfied with his Existentialism and embraced Marxism. But this was not a case of completely abandoning Existentialism and completely accepting Marxism. He came to think that the radical individualism that is the hallmark of Existentialism could not do justice to important social and political issues, and this was one of the factors that impelled him towards Marxism. But at the same time, he could not accept the utterly insignificant position accorded to individuals in Marxism, and sought to modify Marxism by according a more important role to individuals. But perhaps the most significant shift in his thinking concerns the scope of human freedom. As we have seen, in his early views, he thinks of human freedom as virtually unlimited. No other philosopher has embraced a more radical or extensive conception of freedom than the early Sartre. But in his later years, he came to think that human beings are far less free. He became to think of the self as largely produced by social, economic, and political forces. Human beings internalised their socio-political environments, and while they have the power to add something novel and individual, it is, in proportion to the forces that are operating on them, relatively small. We do not have the time to assess whether it is the earlier or the later

philosophy which is closer to the truth, but it is surely fair to say that the later views are less challenging and gripping than the earlier ones. Ludwig Wittgenstein [1889 - 1951] has undoubtedly been one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. He was born into an extremely wealthy family in Vienna. He was the youngest of eight children, having four brothers and three sisters. All four of his brothers committed suicide. For a brief period Wittgenstein attended the same school in Linz as Adolf Hitler but they were not in the same class and no closer connection is known. Wittgenstein went on to study engineering in Berlin. His interest in engineering led him to study in Manchester in England. While working on the properties of propellers, he became interested in the philosophy of mathematics, and became acquainted with the work of Bertrand Russell, and went to Cambridge to study with him. By 1913 he felt he needed a break and commenced living a reclusive life in Norway. This was interrupted by the Second World War, and Wittgenstein enlisted in the Austrian Army and participated in active combat. During this period he commenced his first published work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus which he finished as a prisoner of war. After the war he worked for a number of years as a primary school teacher in Austria. When this ultimately proved unsatisfactory he moved back to Cambridge University to teach philosophy. He was appointed as Professor of Philosophy there in 1939. At one stage he conceived the idea of living as a peasant in Russia. He learned Russian and briefly moved to Russia, but was rapidly disillusioned and moved back to Cambridge. He was a charismatic and inspiring teacher with a unique approach to teaching. He died of cancer in 1951. From a bird's eye point of view, Wittgenstein's greatest influence was undoubtedly to bring language to centre stage in philosophical considerations, to the point where many philosophers now see philosophical issues as inseparably linked to issues of language. Wittgenstein's preoccupations with language a plainly evident in all his work. Let me begin with his earliest work. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The Tractatus is a relatively short work, but it is highly condensed and not at all easy to unravel. It deals fairly directly and in a tightly integrated way with issues of language, logic, and metaphysics, but somewhat puzzlingly Wittgenstein claimed that the ultimate point was to say something about ethics. The metaphysical stance that it represents is called Logical Atomism, in broad terms, it is a doctrine that Bertrand Russell also subscribed to but with more of an epistemological twist than Wittgenstein gives it. The basic idea is that reality is to be understood as consisting of elementary states of affairs that are logically independent of each other. There are no necessary connections between states of affairs. The fundamental, the most basic propositions of language describe these elementary states of affairs. All the other propositions of language must ultimately be a able to be reduced to such elementary or atomic propositions. For those that have done some formal logic, the thesis is more precisely that all propositions other than elementary propositions must be truth functions of elementary propositions. This means that the truth value of the complex proposition must be uniquely determined by the truth values of the elementary propositions that it is reduced to. If there are propositions that cannot be reduced to elementary propositions then they are meaningless. The fundamental project then is to understand the relationship between the elementary state of affairs and the elementary propositions. It is here that Wittgenstein advances the so called Picture Theory of Meaning. The basic idea is this: an elementary proposition is a picture of an elementary state of affairs. But this does not get us very far, and immediately invites an explanation of just how an elementary proposition can picture an elementary state of affairs. To proceed more has to be said both about elementary states of affairs and elementary propositions. In a position highly reminiscent of Leibniz, Wittgenstein maintains that there must be simples, and that elementary states of affairs are agglomerations of simples. On the other side, elementary propositions are a concatenation of names. Each name in the proposition is the name of a simple. Indeed the claim is made if there were no simples for the basic names to name, then there could be no meaningful proposition, so that the existence of simples is a necessary condition for language being meaningful. Thus the world divides itself into simples prior to and independently of human language and cognition The fundamental semantic relation is that of naming and it is a relation that obtains between the names in an elementary proposition and the simples in an elementary state of affairs. But this is not quite enough yet. The very same simples can be arranged in different ways, these would be different elementary states of affairs and propositions must be able to express the difference. The way that this is done is that the different arrangement of simples in the state of affairs is matched by a different arrangement of names in the elementary proposition. For example, suppose that a, b, and c are simples and are arranged in a elementary state of affairs as follows, abc.

If A, B, and C are the names of these simples, the elementary proposition would be, ABC. On the other hand, if the state of affairs changes to bca, then the proposition articulating this state of affairs is BCA. There are thus two elements to meaning here: first, there are the names, and second, there is the arrangement of the names. Both are required for the proposition to be able articulate the specific state of affairs. One way of putting what is going on here this. What enables an elementary proposition to picture an elementary state of affairs is that the names in the proposition are arranged in the same way as the simples are arranged in the state of affairs. A number of alternative formulations are available here. An elementary proposition articulates an elementary state of affairs if the form of the proposition is the same as the form of the state of affairs. An elementary proposition articulates an elementary state of affairs if the proposition is structurally isomorphic to the state of affairs. There are several points to note here. [1] This single theory is meant to account for ALL language. [2] There is no essential role here for the language user. Meaning is strictly a relation between a linguistic item and something in the world. [3] It may not be immediately obvious, but there are some very strong and paradoxical implications in this account for about the limits of meaningful language, and thus also the limits of meaningful philosophy. Let me briefly take up this last point. Suppose we take all of the propositions that make up the text of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus itself. A fair number of them state the relation that exists between language and the world. But these high level generalisation are not elementary propositions, nor can they be reduced to elementary propositions. For example, a proposition such as, An elementary proposition is isomorphic with an elementary state of affairs is not itself an elementary proposition nor is it reducible to any number of elementary propositions. In short, given the theory of meaning that was being put forward in the Tractatus, the propositions which articulate that theory of meaning must themselves be meaningless. This was something Wittgenstein fully recognised, and he maintained in the Tractatus itself that the propositions that articulated his theory of meaning where like a ladder which had to be thrown away once you climbed up it. But this really is quite unsatisfactory. If the propositions which articulated Wittgenstein's theory of meaning were themselves meaningless, then he did not have a theory of meaning, and there was no ladder either to climb or to throw away. On the other hand, if the propositions that articulate his theory of meaning were themselves meaningful, then they themselves constitute a counter example to the theory they are advocating, that is the theory is self-refuting. Talk about throwing away the ladder you climb up with is all very imaginative, but it does not really help to resolve the underlying paradox. Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein gradually became totally dissatisfied with the account of language that he put forward in the Tractatus, and the early parts of his other most important work the Philosophical Investigations contain a sustained assault on the theory of language and associated metaphysics developed in the Tractatus. Incidentally the Philosophical Investigations were published two years after Wittgenstein's death, but he had himself selected and ordered the remarks in the first two thirds of the work, the rest is a scissors and paste job by editors from his notebooks, as are most of the other works that are attributed to him. In any event, in the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein rejects the Picture Theory of Meaning; he rejects the notion that naming is the fundamental semantic relation, and that it is required for an adequate account of meaning in language; he rejects the idea that in part propositions have their meaning because they share a structure with states of affairs. Further, he rejects the idea that reality divides into simples independently and prior to language and cognition. Indeed, in the Philosophical Investigations the divisions and differences we attribute to the world are argued to be at least in part the products of language use. We do not first see a detailed reality and then describe it in language, rather the way we use language, our linguistic practices, in part determine the way we see the world. These are all negative points about language, and they invite an articulation of what the new positive theory of language is. But to get to this point, there is still one major negative point to be dealt with. Wittgenstein thinks

that it has simply been taken for granted by philosophers - including himself in the Tractatus - that both the most basic and the most pervasive function of language is to describe the world, that the most basic and pervasive function of language is simply to state how things are. In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein argues that this assumption is wrong. The descriptive or fact stating use of language is neither basic nor pervasive, and that to focus on it inevitably distorts thinking about language. He argues that when we focus on what language actually does, then we find an extraordinary array of different things. For example, we can order some one to do something: open the door! This is not a description or statement of fact. We can ask a question: is the door open? This is not a description or statement of fact. We can beg: please give me a dollar for a cup of coffee. We can plead: please don't hit me. We can threaten: I will hit you if you do not keep quiet. We can console: there, there, it will all work out in the end. We can express frustration: damn! We can warn: look out! We can promise: I will get the essay to you by five o'clock. We can express admiration: when Lockett kicks goal number 1300, we can say: you beauty! This is not a description or statement of fact. We can wonder: I wonder if the new millennium will be any better than the old one. We can curse: may swine defecate on the graves of your ancestors. We can attract attention: hey you there, and so on. None of these are descriptive or fact stating uses of language, and although I have given a fair list it by no means exhausts the non-descriptive, non-fact-stating uses of language. An account of meaning geared to descriptive and fact stating language could not account for meaning in the examples given above. These observations lead Wittgenstein to propose what has been called the Use Theory of Meaning. Wittgenstein's own metaphor is a useful way of introducing the basic idea. He invites us to think of language as a tool box. A tool box contains hammers, saws, screw drivers, chisels, planes, tape measures, spirit levels, and the like. The point is that each tool has a specific function: the things that you can do with a hammer and a saw are quite different. In the same way, the things that you can do with one bit of language are quite different from what you can do with another bit of language as my previous examples illustrate. More contentious claims enter at this point. In an important sense, there cannot be a general theory of meaning which articulates what is common to all uses of language, just as there cannot be a general theory of the function of tools. Even if we were to discover that there was something in common between hammers, saws, screw drivers, chisels, planes, tape measures, spirit levels, and the like, it would not enable us to understand hammers better or understand saws better and so on. If you want to understand hammers, you need to attend closely to hammers. Similarly, if you want to understand how a bit of language functions, it is no good looking to general theories of language, you need to attend closely to how that bit of language works. Indeed Wittgenstein argued that when careful attention is paid to how the different bits of language work, it emerges that there is in fact nothing common to all language use. There are many language games, but there are no universal and common characteristics in the use of language. These reflections led him to introduce the notion of family resemblance concepts. The common presumption about concepts and general terms in language was that if one word applied to many things there must be something in common to all the things to which it applied. This seems to work well in such cases as triangle for example, there is something common and peculiar to everything that is called a triangle. But argues Wittgenstein, if we attend carefully to some terms, we will find that there is nothing common and peculiar to all the instances to which it applies. If we look at the term game for example, there are ball games, card games, board games, team games, children's games, word games, the Olympic games, and so on. Wittgenstein argues that while there are similarities between various games there is no single or set of characteristics that are common and peculiar to all of them. Games resemble each other the way that members of a family resemble each other, hence the term family resemblance concepts. Wittgenstein thinks that language itself is a family resemblance concept. There is nothing common and peculiar to all uses of language, so that a general theory of meaning which shows what is common and peculiar to all language use is not possible. As noted before, the only way to proceed in philosophy is to focus on particular uses of language, and here it is particularly important not to blindly assume that the descriptive or fact stating is central or pervasive. In the Philosophical Investigations he was particularly concerned with how the language of mental terms such as knowing, thinking, sensing, feeling, understanding, intending and so on operate. The general upshot of these investigations is that it is only rarely that such terms are used for purely descriptive or fact stating purposes. In particular he was concerned to argue that such terms do not describe or state facts about a private realm of the mental present only to the subject and totally hidden from everyone else. Our language of mental terms is a publicly understood language, and it could not be publicly understood if it referred

to purely private items. This consideration leads to the famous private language argument, but it is important to note that it constitutes only a part of Wittgenstein's case. Private Language Argument. The private language argument is difficult to assess, but there is an intrigue and a novelty in it that makes it at least worth mentioning. It is an argument that centres on the nature of language and the conditions that are required to make a language work. It is directed at proving that mental phenomena could not be private. The argument is related to an intriguing puzzle. The puzzle is this: if I say that I have a pain, and you say that you have a pain, and pains are private objects, then how can you or I know that we mean the same thing by pain. One version of the argument [1] Language requires rules. [2] Rules require consistent application. [3] Consistent application requires that misapplications are detectable. [4] In the case of private objects, consistent application and detection of misapplications depends on memory alone. [5] If memory cannot be checked, memory cannot be relied on, and hence, there is no way of knowing that the rules are consistently applied. Put another way, if the objects being described are private, then there is absolutely no way of telling whether the language is being consistently and correctly applied or whether it is being incorrectly applied. [6] But a language in which correct application cannot be distinguished from incorrect application is no language at all. The argument then proceeds as follows. [7] We have an intelligible language for talking about the mind, if mental items were private we would not have an intelligible language for talking about them. [8] Conclusion, our language about the mind does not apply to private items. But the interpretation of this conclusion requires caution. There is one sense in which things can go on in one's mind that others are not aware of. One can silently think about things. But for Wittgenstein, this is only possible because we have first learned a public language, and silent thinking to oneself is a monologue in a public language. Indeed for Wittgenstein, no thought is possible without language, and this of course means a public language. Many philosophers have taken Wittgenstein's assault on the privacy of the mental as conclusive, and as decisively refuting the philosophical positions of Descartes, Locke, Hume, Berkeley, and others like them who think that the privately mental is what we have to begin with. This is a situation that I find somewhat surprising, because the private language argument is very complex; there have been many attempts to articulate it, and I have not seen a single version of the private language argument that does not have a host of question marks hanging over it. But let me press on. The Nature of Philosophy. Wittgenstein believed that the new views about language that he had come to in the Philosophical Investigations had profound implications for the nature of philosophy. He thought that this new view of language implied that there could be no specifically philosophical theories, no specifically philosophical propositions, no specifically philosophical claims or theses. His view now was that all so called philosophical problems arose out of the misuse of language in some way. Once the misuse was identified by careful attention to the details of how the bit of language concerned worked, the problem would be dissolved. Indeed to advance a theory in philosophy already meant that one was in a linguistic muddle that needed to be resolve. Wittgenstein influence many philosophers in the English speaking world, and this led to an identifiable way of doing

philosophy, so called Ordinary Language Philosophy which as the name indicates sought to settle philosophical issues by appeal to the details of how the relevant bit of ordinary language operates. Philosophy of Mathematics. Besides Wittgenstein's investigations of the language of mental terms, he also turned his attention to mathematics. At the time he was considering these issues there were three basically different views about the nature of mathematical propositions. [1] That they described a realm of timeless and spaceless Platonic entities - which is where the numbers are on this view. [2] That the propositions of mathematics are high level empirical generalisations - a view adopted by J. S. Mill. [3] That the propositions of mathematics were essentially trivial and all were reducible to identity statements. Wittgenstein differed with all of these views, and argued that mathematics was essentially a human construct, and claimed that a careful investigation of the way we used mathematical language revealed this to be so. Philosophy of Religion. Disagreements are not disagreements over 'facts' but over forms of life. Those who claim that there is an afterlife and those who claim that there is no afterlife are not disagreeing about an objective state of affairs in the world, but are instead expressing different attitudes towards life.