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One curious aspect of the enterprise of the Phe-nomenology is that it seeks to understand a process that is completed by the fact that it is understood. The goal of all history is that mind should come to understand itself as the only ultimate reality. When is that understanding first achieved? By Hegel him-self in the Phenomenology'. If Hegel is to be believed, the closing pages of his masterpiece are no mere description of the culmination of everything that has happened since finite minds were first created: they are that culmination.
In the light of Hegel's belief that all finite minds share in a greater underlying reality, we can appre-ciate why he should have believed in the possibility of a form of society that transcended all conflicts between the individual and the collective, and was truly free while at the same time in no sense anar-chic. We can also see why this belief should have made it possible for Hegel's ideas to lead some of his successors, Marx among them, to a similarly misplaced optimism about the possibility of avoid-ing such conflicts. For while Marx claimed to have rejected the 'mysticism' in which Hegel enveloped his system, Marx never freed himself from the con-viction that history is tending toward a final desti-nation in which there will be complete harmony between the interests of the individual and the common interests of the community. That is why he believed that communism would be a condi-tion in which everyone freely advanced the com-mon interests of all.

PHILOSOPHY OF THE END OF XIX - XX CENTURY.

MARXIST PHILOSOPHY. The idea of a Marxist philos-ophy is, at first sight, paradoxical. Marx himself was originally a student of philosophy but soon came to talk of abolishing philosophy: the coming of a socialist society would render philosophy (like reli-gion) redundant. It is, nevertheless, clear that Marx and his followers appropriated much of the philos-ophy of (at least) Aristotle, the materialism of the Enlightenment, and Hegelian dialectics. It is equally dear that when Marx talked of the abolition of philosophy, he meant that, in so far as philosophy posed ideal principles or essences, it would lose its "I function after a socialist revolution which embod-ied these essences in socio-economic reality. It is far from clear that Marx's historical materialism con-tradicts or supersedes philosophy as such. The cen-tury and more that has elapsed since Marx's death has been a largely fruitless search by his followers to establish a distinctively Marxist philosophy. Since the authoritarian Communist regimes established in Marx's name did not encourage philosophical enterprise, their demise is unlikely to have much effect on the future of Marxist philosophy.
Although Marx himself had apparently dispar-aged philosophy, after his death and with the revo-lution still a long way off, the "footnotes to Plato' had to be dealt with and the growing membership of Marxist parties required a "philosophy" in the sense of a coherent system of principles giving a total explanation of the universe. Given the cultur-al climate of the late nineteenth century, this had to be couched in scientific - and even positivist - terms. Although the later Marx certainly had traces of such attitudes in his work, it was given systemat-ic form by Engels and culminated in thephilosophy of dialectical materialism propagated by Commu-nist orthodoxy.
Engels proclaimed the Marxian dialectic to be 'the science of the general laws of motion and deve-lopment of nature, human society, and thought'. More specifically, the most important of these were the laws of the transformation of quantity into quality, of the interpretation of opposites, and of the negation of the negation. Engels thought these laws to be operative in a nature that was objectively given and independent of the human mind. Thus the world of nature and the world of human history were two separate fields of study - whereas for Marx one of the central aspects of his dialectic had consisted precisely in the interaction of human beings and their surroundings, a view stemming from Hegel. Engels did indeed claim to be simply applying Hegel's dialectic, and, in a sense, Hegel also saw a dialectic in nature but it was still subject to the universal mediation of human consciousness. The concept of matter as some kind ofmateriaprima is entirely foreign to Marx.
For many interpreters of Marx's thought, however, the publication of his early writings around 1930 marked a decisive turning-point. These writings, particularly the Economic and Philosophicsl Manuscripts, revealed a very different Marx from both the rather arid economist of Kautsky and the dialectical materialist of Soviet dogma. Marx appeared to be a philosopher, a humanist not only with a devastating account of the alienation of rnan in capitalist society but with a rich and varied account of the potential latent in every individual waiting to be realized under communism. This enthusiasm for the early Marx was helped by thepioneering writings of Georg Lukacs, who redis-covered in full Marx's debt to Hegel and put con-cepts such as alienation and reification at the centre of his interpretation. This tradition has been embodied most systematically in the work of the Frankfurt School, where 'critical' theorists such as Adorno, Marcuse, and Habermas have aimed to restore a philosophical dimension to Marxism. Retaining an enviable confidence in the power of human rationality, these theorists have developed a series of concepts intended to go beyond Marx in interpreting the changes that have taken place in the world since his death. These consist mainly in adding the dimension of social psychology to Marx's work, and emphasizing the basic proposi-tion that if society is increasingly under the control of technocrats, then any purely empirical approach to social reality must end up as a defence of that control.
In sharp contrast to the evidently Hegelian and humanist elements present in the Marxism of the Frankfurt School, the Marxist philosophy evolved by Althusser and his disciples in the early 1960s attempted to purge Marxism of any such ele-ments. Taking advantage of the current prestige of structuralistlinguistics, psychology, and anthro-pology, it was the aim of Althusser to 'rehabili-tate' Marx as a structuralist before his time. Thus Althusser continued the Stalinist division of an early pre-Marxist Marx and a later scientific Marx - though with a conceptual sophistication quite foreign to the previous versions of this view. Roughly speaking, structuralism is the view that the key to the understanding of a social system is the structural relationship of its parts - the way these parts are related by the regulative principle of the system. And Althusser's search for a timeless rationality reminiscent of Comte (for whom Marx himself had no time) involved the banishment of both history and philosophy. When applied to Marx, this involved cutting his work into two sep-arate conceptual structures with the dividing-point around 1845. Any reading of Marx as a humanist, a Hegelian, or a historicist must (since these ideas are clearly contained in his early works) be rejected. Since it has become increasing-ly implausible to claim (particularly after the pub-lication of the Grundrisse) that there are no humanist or Hegelian elements in the later Marx, a real Marx has been uncovered who employs a Methodology - never clearly defined - almost totally at variance with concepts that he actually employs.
More recently, there have been attempts to rethink many aspects of Marxism through the medium of rational choice theory. This approach, exemphfied in the writings has come to be known as analytical Marxism. Central to it is a methodological individualism which borrows concepts and techniques from game theory and contemporary eco-nomics. Particularly when combined with analytical philosophy, this can yield a highly rigorous discussion. But the conceptual framework is so much at variance with the Marxist tradition that it is not surprising that the theses of the analytical Marxist school are highly revisionary. And the same is true of Marxist attempts to come to terms with the rise of new social movements, particular-ly those inspired with an ecological or feminist perspective.
The most striking fact about the relation between Marxism and philosophy, in the West at least, is how eclectic Marxists have been in their attitude to philosophy. Marxists have usually tried to articulate their ideas through whatever hap-pened to be the current dominant philosophy. The revival of interest in Hegel between the wars, cou-pled with the influence of Freud, was decisive for the formulations of the Frankfurt School; the post-war vogue for existentialism led to all sorts of New Left variations on Marxism with a human face, of which Sartre's later work is only the most promi-nent example; the subsequent prestige of struc-turalism in the 1960s and 1970s led to the arcanely theoretical Marxism of Althusser and his Sisciples; while the rational choice Marxism of more. recent years is evidently an effort to come to terms with some of the dominant concepts of the Reagan-Thatcher years.
The inevitable tension in all the above app-roaches lies in the fact that all the philosophies they invoke are the product of bourgeois soci-eties - the very societies that Marxism is dedicated to superseding. This tension is only exacerbated by the tendency of western Marxists to become more theoretical and more philosophical with the decreasing prospect of success for Marxist practical activity. The migration of Marxism into the universities has necessarily undercut the unity of theory and practice so central to the outlook of Marx himself. For him, all philosophy (like all reli-gion) is ultimately idealist and mystificatory. Holding that 'the dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question', Marx looked forward to a society which would abolish the division between mental and manual work - which he saw as the root cause of all philosophical mystification. Such a society would be intelligible to its mem-bers, since the social relationships in it would be transparent, and would not require philosophical mediation.
The history of Marxist thought has thus been characterized by a strong ambivalence towards the viability of the philosophical enterprise. The result has been the invisibility of a distinctively Marxist philosophy: Marxism has been eclectic in its borrowings from 'bourgeois' philosophy. These borrowings have been extremely fruitful, particu-larly in the realm of social theory. Indeed here, as elsewhere, Marxism has proved at its strongest as a critique of philosophy rather than in adumbrating a plausible alternative.
POSITIVISM. A movement akin to empiricism and naturalism introduced towards the middle of the nineteenth century by Comte, the French sociol-ogist (to use a term he himself invented), with the social reformer Saint-Simon as a forerunner, whom he served as secretary in his youth. What is distinctive about positivism in its original form is its attempt to describe the history of human thought as evolving through certain definite stages, which Comte called the religious, the metaphysical, and the scientific. Of these the last was the most pro-ductive and valuable, though the earlier ones had their value too and were not to be simply dismissed as primitive and useless; indeed Comte himself, towards the end of his life, thought it necessary to introduce a sort of 'religion of humanity'. Posi-tivism fitted in well with the evolutionary ten-dencies of the age. It was both descriptive'- and normative, describing how human thought had in fact evolved and prescribing norms for how our thinking, including thinking about human thought itself, should proceed. In this respect it could be said to link the eighteenth-century doctrines of inevitable progress to theevolutionary ethics of later in the nineteenth century, which saw our duty as that of furthering a process that was going on anyway, though positivism was more concerned with prescribing methods of thought than ethical norms. This emphasis on furthering the inevitable, if perhaps little else, it shared with Marxism, though a later version of positivism was to be the subject of a vigorous attack in Lenin's Materialism and Empiric-Criticism (Moscow, 1908). In the form Comte gave it, positivism was rather fond of categories and hierarchies, though these were seen not as static and cut off from each other, but as dynamic and developing along a certain path, so that positivism emphasized the unity of the sciences. Not only did human thought itself develop through the three stages mentioned above, but the sciences form a natural hierarchy in terms of method and subject-matter, ranging from astronomy through physics and the biological sci-ences to the human science of sociology. They also developed historically in this order, though of course without the earlier ones being superseded by the later ones so that they disappeared. (Math-ematics stood rather outside this scheme, being presupposed by it.) It is not surprising then that the emphasis fell on the newest stage, the science of humanity, with the growing realization that human beings, at least in the mass, were suitable objects for scientific study, a realization which led the emphasis fell on the newest stage, the science of humanity, with the growing realization that human beings, at least in the mass, were suitable objects for scientific study, a realization which led the emphasis fell on the newest stage, the science of humanity, with the growing realization that human beings, at least in the mass, were suitable objects for scientific study, a realization which lednot, it was thought, appeal to what cannot be observed, on pain ofreintroducing metaphysics. This means that things like atoms and electrons should not be treated as real but unobservable entities, but as devices which help the scientist to give the simplest unifying description of phenomena and make accurate predictions, rather as the square root of minus one is usually treated by mathematicians and physicists as a convenient device which does not correspond to anything real, even in the sense in which numbers might be real, but is distin-guished from the 'real' numbers by being called 'imaginary'.

This approach (instrumentalism) was especially pursued by Mach, who used it also in denying a place in proper scientific descriptions to physical objects, which cannot strictly be observed, he thought. Positivism here has obvious affinities with the empiricism of earlier philosophers, espe-cially, so far as philosophy of science goes, with Berkeley, who also anticipated Mach in rejecting Newton's attempt to prove the existence of absolute space by observing the behaviour of the surface of the water in a bucket as it started and stopped rotating. Berkeley (in his De Motit, or Of Motion) and Mach argued that the deformation of the surface might occur because the rotation was relative to the framework provided by the fixed stars rather than to that provided by an absolute space; Mach in fact thought that it was not just rel-ative to, but caused by, this relation to the fixed stars.
Mach, with other philosophers of science of an anti-metaphysical bent, notably Duhem and, a lit-tle later, Poincare, was writing towards the end of the nineteenth century. The trend continued, but in the twentieth century the emphasis shifted very much towards logic and language, resulting in Logical Positivism, the form usually referred to when the word 'positivism' is used by itself in a twentieth-century context, at any rate when that context is philosophical rather than scientific. Con-cerning science, the emphasis was then on the unity of the sciences, especially their reducibilityto physics (Reductionism) In science today 'posi-tivism' refers especially to the unity of the natural and social sciences, but in philosophy is less used. Logical Positivism has been sublimated into anti-realism, and reductionism in the sense of the attempt to reduce all sciences to physics has been largely abandoned (Realism and anti-realism). But the appeal to science in matters concerning the mind remains vigorous, and both here and in anti-realism the spirit of positivism still flourishes in phi-losophy, though it is far from being unchallenged, and it is open to dispute how far it can be called dominant.
Legal positivism shares something of the spirit and motivation of positivism in the general sense, and originated at about the same time, but in fact has developed rather independently.
NEO-THOMISM. 'Neo-Thomism' is an imprecise term applied since the nineteenth century to diverse authors, doctrines, procedures, and topics that have or claim to have some relation to the thought of Thomas Aquinas. Its origin is usually located in Pope Leo XIII's letter (1879). The letter urges Catholic philosophers to demonstrate the existence and attributes of God and to combat the speculative and practical errors of modem philosophy by reappropriating the teachings of the major Christian writers from the European Middle Ages. Leo picks out as chief among these writers Thomas Aquinas, who is sup-posed to have unified in his teaching thebest of patristic and medieval theology did mobilize large-scale ecclesiastical support for a new Thomism, its programme had been worked out in Catholic educational circles during the previous four decades. For example, a number of thinkers in or about the Jesuits' Roman and Ger-man Colleges began in the 1840s and 1850s to advocate a systematic Thomism as the only philo-sophically adequate alternative to various modem empiricisms and idealisms. Among these think-ers were Matteo Liberatore and Joseph Kleutgen. If Liberatore represents the Italian side of the new movement, with its combative sense of philosoph-ical system, Kleutgen brought to Rome from Mini-ster and Fribourg an attention to the historical context for medieval thought, ratified and institutionalized the labour of these and similar teachers.
Of course, by the date of neo-Thomism was already beginning to break up into camps. These camps were partly determined by institutional arrangement and partly by avowed task or purpose. So, for example, the different reli-gious orders maintained separate educational systems and tended to teach rather different ver-sions of Thomism. Some orders were also con-cerned to promote their own medieval authors asalternatives to Thomas. The Franciscans regu-larly espoused Bonaventure or Scotus, while a few Jesuits taught from Suarez. Again, neo-Thomisrn from its inception was both exegetical and con-structive or polemical. If it wanted to be considered Thomism, it had to ground itself in a historicallysensitive reading of Thomas. If it wanted to be a neo-Thomism, it had to extract from Thomas prin-ciples or arguments useful in dispute with modem philosophies. By the early decades of this century there were neo-Thomists who were principally known as able interpreters of medieval thought and neo-Thomists who were principally known as builders of 'Thomistic' systems and debaters of niodem doctrines. The interpreters would include Martin Grabmann, Pierre Mandonnet, and Mau-rice De Wulf; the builders and debaters, Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange and Desire Mercier. Some neo-Thomists, most famously Etienne Gilson, were able to do both.
The principal neo-Thomists tend to be classified by their attachment to some particular theme or preoccupation. One persistent theme has been the engagement with epistemological questions raised by Kant and the neo-Kantians. This kind of neo-Thomism, called 'transcendental Thomism', is associated with Joseph Marechal and Karl Rahner. A different kind of transcendental analysis, more driven by the concerns of experimental science, is offered in the Thomist writings of Bernard J. F. Lonergan. Another class of neo-Thomists is associ-ated with questions in metaphysics and chiefly with expounding the Thomist doctrine about being. Writers put into this class include Gilson and Jacques Maritain. But these classifica-tions are at best a preliminary guide to complex authors, each of whom wrote on a wide range of philosophical topics. The Roman Catholic Church's institutional sup-port for neo-Thomism was much weakend during and after the second Vatican Council. Since then, neo-Thrmism has tended to become largely historical and to be submerged in the study of the history of medieval philosophy.
PRAGMATISM. The characteristic idea of philo-sophical pragmatism is that efficacy in practical application - the issue of which works out most effectively - somehow provides a standard for the determination of truth in the case of statements, rightness in the case of actions, and value in the case of appraisals. However, it is the first of these contexts, the epistemic concern for meaning and truth, that has historically been the most promi-nent.
Pragmatism as a philosophical doctrine traces back to the Academic Sceptics in classical antiqui-ty. Denying the possibility of achieving authentic knowledge (episteme) regarding the real truth, they taught that we must make do with plausible infor-mation adequate to the needs of prac-tice. Kant's stipulation contingent belief, which yet forms the ground for the effective employment of means to certain actions, I entitle pragmatic belief was also influ-ential for the development of the doctrine. Anoth-er formative step was Schopenhauer's insistence that the intellect is universally subordinate to the will, a line of thought that was elaborated by sever-al German neo-Kantian thinkers, including Hans Vaihinger and Georg Simmel, who stressed the controlling dominance of practical over theoretical reason. Moral utilitarianism, with its tests of the rightness of modes of action in terms of their capacity to provide the greatest good of the great-est number was yet another step in the develop-ment of pragmatic thought. For it too invokes much the same utility-maximization model, and there is a deep structural analogy between the (act-utilitarian) contention that an action is right if its consequences redound to "the greatest good of the greatest number", and the thesis-orientated version of a pragmatic theory of truth-holding that an empirical claim is correct if its acceptance is maxi-mally benefit-producing.
However, pragmatism as a determinate philo-sophical doctrine descends from the work of Charles Sanders Peirce. For him, pragmatism was primarily a theory of meaning, with the meaning of any concept that has application in the real world inhering in the relations that link experiential con-ditions of application with observable results. But by the "practical consequences' of the acceptance of an idea or a contention, Peirce meant the conse-quences for experimental practice - 'experimental effects' or "observational results' - so that for him the meaning of a proposition is determined by the essentially positivist criterion of its experiential con-sequences in strictly observational terms. And, mov-ing beyond this, Peirce also taught that pragmatic effectiveness constitutes a quality control monitor of human cognition - though here again the prac-tice issue is that of scientific praxis and the standard of efficacy pivoting on the issue of specifically pre-dictive success. Peirce developed his pragmatism in opposition to idealism, seeing that the test of applicative success can lead mere theorizing to stub its toe on the hard rock of reality. But his successors softened up the doctrine, until with present day 'pragmatists' the efficacy of ideas consists in their mere adoption by the community rather than in the success that the community may (or may not) encounter as it puts those ideas into practice.
Although Peirce developed pragmatism into a substantial philosophical theory, it was William James who put it on the intellectual map in his enormously influential Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (New York, 1907). However, James changed (and - as Peirce himself saw it - ruined) Peircean pragmatism. For where Peirce saw in pragmatism a road to impersonal and objective standards, James gave it a personalized and subjectivized twist. With James, it was the per-sonal (and potentially idiosyncratic) idea of efficacy and success held by particular people that provided the pragmatic crux, and not an abstracted commu-nity of ideally rational agents. For him, pragmatic efficacy and applicative success did not relate to an impersonalized community of scientists but to a diversified plurality offlesh-and-blood individuals. Truth for James is accordingly what reality impels and compels human individuals to believe; it is a matter of "what pays by way ofbelief in the course of human activity within the circumambient envi-ronment and its acquisition is an invention rather than a revelation. With James, the tenability of a thesis is determined in terms of its experiential con-sequences in a far wider than merely observational sense-a sense that embraces the affective sector as well.
John Dewey, like Peirce before him, saw inquiry as a self-corrective process whose procedures andnorms must be evaluated and revised in the light of subsequent experience. But Dewey regarded this reworking as a social and communal process pro-ceeding in the light of values that are not (as with Peirce) connected specifically to science (namely, prediction and experimental control), but rather values that are more broadly rooted in the psychic disposition of ordinary people at large - the moral and aesthetic dimension now being specifically included. Peirce's pragmatism is scientifically elitist, James's is psychologically personalistic, Dewey's is democratically populist.
Pragmatism had a mixed reception in Europe. In Italy Giovanni Papini and Giovanni Vailati espoused the doctrine and turned it into a party platform for Italian philosophers of science. In Britain F. C. S. Schiller was an enthusiastic follower ofWilliam James, while F. P. Ramsey and A.J. Ayer endorsed pivotal aspects of Peirce's thought. Among continental participants, Rudolf Camap also put pragmatic ideas to work on issues of logic and philosophy of language, and Hans Reichen-bach reinforced Peirce's statistical and probabilistic approach to the methodology and prolification of induction. However, the reception of pragmatism by other philosophers was by nomeans universally favourable. F. H. Bradley objected to the subordi-nation of cognition to practice because of the inher-ent incompleteness of all merely practical interests. G. E. Moore criticized William James's identifica-tion of true beliefs with useful ones - among other reasons because utility is changeable over time. Bertrand Russell objected that beliefs can be useful but yet plainly false. And various continental philosophers have disapprovingly seen in pragma-tism's concern for practical efficacy - for 'success' and 'paying off' - the expression of characteristi-cally American social attitudes: crass materialism and naive democratism. Pragmatism was thus looked down upon as a quintessentially American philosophy - a philosophical expression of the American go-getter spirit with its success-orient-ated ideology and a manifestation of a populist repugnance to the long-established ideological tendencies of European philosophy (epistemologi-cal rationalism versus empiricism, ontological materialism versus idealism, etc.). (Americans, de Tocqueville wrote, seek to echapperd I'esprit de systems.)
However, Americans by no means had a monopoly on practice-orientated philosophizing. Karl Marx's ideas regarding the role of practice and its relation to theory have had a vast subsequent influence (some of it upon otherwise emphatically non-Marxist thinkers such as Max Scheler). Impor-tant recent developments of praxis-orientated phi-losophy within a neo-Marxist frame of reference are represented by Tadeusz Kotarbiriski in Poland andJurgen Habermas in Germany. Kotarbiriski has endeavoured to put the theory of praxis on a systematic basis within a special discipline he desig-nates as praxiology. Habermas has pursued the concept of praxis deeply into the domain of the sociological implications of technology.
Be this as it may, pragmatism has met with a widely favourable reception in the USA, and has never since Peirce's day lacked dedicated advo-cates there. At Harvard in the next generation after James, C.I. Lewis was concerned to apply pragma-tism to the validation of logical systems. He focused upon (and in his own work sought to develop) the idea of alternative systems of logic among which one must draw on guides of prag-matic utility. And for all his differences with Lewis, W. V. Quine continued his emphasis on the prag-matic dimension of choice among alternative theo-retical systems. Richard Rorty has endeavoured to renovate John Dewey's rejection of abstract logical and conceptual rigidities for the flexibilities of expediency in practice. Nicholas Rescher's 'meth-odological pragmatism' sought to return pragma-tism to its Peircian roots by giving the doctrine a specifically methodological turn. After all, any

After all, any-thing methodological - a tool, procedure, instru-mentality, programme, or policy of action, etc. - is best validated in terms of its ability to achieve the purposes at issue, its success at accomplishing its appropriate task. And since the rational espousal of a factual truth must be governed by some appropri-ate methodology of substantiation, it follows that even the factual domain can be viewed in such a light that practical reason becomes basic to the the-oretical.
One overarching fact pervades these diver-gences in the development of pragmatism: that the doctrine can be seen either as a validation of objectively cogent standards or as a subverter of them. There is a pragmatism of the right, a Peir-cian or objective pragmatism of "What works impersonally' - though proving efficient and ef-fective for the realization of some appropriate purpose in an altogether person-indifferent way ('successful prediction", 'control over nature', 'efficacy in need fulfillment'). And there is a prag-matism of the left, aJamesian or subjective prag-matism of 'What works for X" in proving efficient and effective for the realization of a particular per-son's (or group's) wishes and desires. The objec-tive pragmatists stand in the tradition of Peirce and include F. P. Ramsey, C. I. Lewis, Rudolf Carnap; the subjective pragmatists stand in the tradi-tion of William James and include F. C. S. Schiller and Richard Rorty. (John Dewey straddles the fence by going for an social interpersonalism that stops short ofimpersonalism.) Looking at James, Peirce saw subjective pragmatism as a corruption and degradation of the pragmatic enterprise, since its approach is not a venture in validating objective standards but in deconstructing them to dissolve standards as such into the variegated vagaries of idiosyncratic positions and individual inclinations. And this is how objective pragmatists view the matter down to the present day - this writer included.
EXISTENTIALISM. 'Existentialism' is a loose term for the reaction, led by Kierkegaard, against the abstract rationalism of Hegel's philosophy. As against Hegel's conception of "absolute conscious-ness' within which all oppositions are supposedly reconciled, Kierkegaard insisted on the irreducibility of the subjective, personal dimension ofhuman life. He characterized this in terms of the perspec-tive of the "existing individual', and it is from this special use of the term 'existence' (Existem in both Danish and German) to describe a distinctively human mode of being that existentialism gets its name. Kierkegaard's successors include the Ger-man philosophers Heidegger and Jaspers and the French philosophers Sartre and Marcel (who actually coined the term 'existentialism'). I shall concentrate here only on aspects of the works of Heidegger and Sartre in addition to those of Kierkegaard.
Kierkegaard rejected the claim, which he took (perhaps unfairly) to be Hegel's, that we can look forward to a time when the different interests and concerns of people can be satisfied through their comprehension within an all-embracing objective understanding of the universe. For, according to Kierkegaard, no such synthesis can do justice to an individual's concern for their own life; hence, he argues, even though Kantian epistemology cor-rectly implies that we should recognize that our own subjective perceptions are just the manifesta-tion of our objective situation in the world, we cannot similarly resolve ethical questions by sub-jecting our moral consciousness to an imperson-al deliberative perspective. For ethical questions essentially concern ourselves; in asking ourselves how we are to lead our lives, we deceive oursel-ves if we pretend that the adoption of an objective, impersonalunderstanding of our situation will by itself provide an answer.
Kierkegaard takes it that this relationship between ethics and subjectivity is a two-way rela-tionship. Not only are ethical questions essentially first-person, the "real subject' is also "the ethically existing subject', as he puts it. He also holds, how-ever, that we should not think of our existence as 'real subjects' as a feature of our lives which we can just take for granted (comparable, say, to our embodiment). Instead (and here he remains to some degree Hegelian) he thinks that it is an aspect of our lives that needs to be developed if we are to achieve our full potential as individuals; the fact of our 'existence' implies that we cannot avoid first-person practical questions, but we may well lack a coherent conception of ourselves by reference to which we can begin to answer them. How, then, is such a conception to be acquired? How is one to become an individual'? Not, certainly, by acquir-ing more knowledge of the world. Instead we have to engage the will: it is by making choices and com-mitments (such as marriage) which enable us to develop long-term interests that we give our lives an ethical structure. When Kierkegaard writes that it is impossible to exist without passion', he means that it is only by entering into engagements whose late canarouse the passions that we gain a sense of our own identity and in that way become an "exist-ing individual'.
Nothing so far explicitly implies that in becom-4ig such an individual one becomes a virtuous one. But Kierkegaard takes it that the good life for a Person is one that fulfils the requirement that thatperson live as an individual. The basic idea here is that one is able to make sense of one's life as a whole only through personal conduct and relation-ships with others which manifest the virtues. This may not seem persuasive. In Kierkegaard's case, however, this thesis is presented in the context of the further belief that no one can create a life for themselves which will survive the vicissitudes of fortune without making 'the leap of faith', a per-sonal commitment to the kind of life lived by Jesus Christ, i.e. without becoming 'Christlike'. What stands behind this belief is the experience of variously translated as 'dread' or 'anxi-ety'. Kierkegaard's claim is both that this experi-ence reveals to us the unsatisfactory nature of a life that depends on the contingencies of success or human love, and that we are thereby motivated to commit ourselves to an 'ethico-religious' life which offers a salvation that is not dependent upon such contingencies because it rests upon a relation-ship with God.
Heidegger follows Kierkegaard in using the term Existenz to describe the mode of being that is distinctive of human life, and he explicitly contrasts this mode of being with that of the everyday objects wiich we categorize in terms of their use and that ofthose objects which we think of as altogether independent of us. Heidegger also holds that the distinctive feature of human existence arises from the irreducibiliry of the practical concern we each face concerning our lives: for each of us 'our own being is an issue', and the way in which we face up to this issue deter-mines the nature of our existence. There is no fixed human essence which gives a structure to human life that is independent of the engagements and goals which, by giving us a sense of our own practi-cal identity, fill out our existence.
Where Heidegger differs from Kierkegaard is in assigning this 'existential' thesis an absolutely fun-damental role in general metaphysics. He main-tains that the answer to the question of being in general is to be found by a line of inquiry which commences with an inquiry into the "existential" constitution of Dasein, i.e. human life. Since, as we have seen, Dasein's existence involves a practical concern for itself, it is not surprising that a meta-physics which builds out from this has many simi-larities with pragmatism. So when Heidegger proceeds to develop his account of Dasein's 'exis-tence' as 'being-in-the-world', he makes it clear that our fundamental mode of being-in-the-world is action (rather than, say, contemplative percep-tion), and that we basically understand the world in terms of the categories which enter into the expla-nation of our actions. So, for example, although Heidegger endorses Kant's claim that spatiality is an essential element of our experience of the world, he argues that we should not think of this spatiality in terms of the space of physical theory (as Kant did); instead, we should think of it as the 'existential space' of everyday life, that spatiality which is conceived in essentially egocentric and practical terms.
Heidegger's 'existential pragmatism' goes bey-ond Kierkegaard's existentialism, and in other re-spects, too, he modifies important aspects of Kierkegaard's conception of existence. Where Kierkegaard linked the 'passionate' nature of human existence directly to the will, to the sub-ject's chosen commitments, Heidegger argues that our emotions characteristically reflect cares and concerns that we have not chosen, since they arise from involvements which we just find ourselves 'thrown' into (e.g. our country, our family, and, more fundamentally, those aspects of our world which simply record our everyday needs). Heideg-ger then argues that these involvements provide an essential background for the practical undertakings of everyday life whereby we seek to meet our needs and answer the demands that arise from our unchosen involvements. So although these practical undertakings manifest an existential con-cern with the world, Heidegger argues that they do not arise from the will if that is conceived in terms of the self-conscious adoption of a project. Thus Heidegger's account of the existential structure of human life is basically worked out at an un-self-conscious level, which is also fundamental to the conception of the "lived world' implied by his existential pragmatism.
Heidegger does not of course deny that there is a level of self-conscious
deliberation and decision, and it is in the context of this feature of human life that
he employs his distinction between 'inau-thenticity" and 'authenticity'. Heidegger'
s dis-cussion here looks back to Kierkegaard's thesis that it is an achievement to
become an individ-ual, and he deliberately invokes religious termi-nology to
describe his position, though without Kierkegaard's explicit invocation of
religious faith. The basic idea is that those whose under-standing of themselves
is not informed by a grasp of the true nature of their individual existence, who
think of themselves, say, as just complicated animals, are said to have only an
inauthentic exis-tence; whereas those who have internalized the truth of
Heidegger's conception of their existence and are able to conduct their lives in
accordance with it are said to have attained authenticity. According to
Heidegger, we always start out with an inauthentic conception of ourselves,
since our pre-reflective involvements with the world and others lead us to
think of ourselves as not signifi-cantly different from them. What then
motivates us to become authentic is the experience of Angst, which
Heidegger interprets as an awareness of the precariousness of a life whose
goals and values are not understood as arising from the structure of one's
own existence. Angst, therefore, recalls us to ourselves, and by making the
existential struc-ture of our life available to us, helps to bring us to an authentic
recognition of our freedom. Heideg-ger connects this experience of Angst with
one's attitude to one's own death: this attitude is typically one of Angst, and
because a correct understanding of death as the end of one's exis-tence reveals
to us the structure of our own existence, an authentic life is 'an impassioned
freedom towards death'.
Heidegger's existentialism is essentially meta-physical. He even denies
that the authentic-inauthentic distinction has any ethical content, although his
actual language betrays him here. Sartre, by contrast, explicitly presents
existential-ism as an ethical doctrine. He largely takes his exis-tentialist starting-
point from Heidegger, except that where Heidegger clearly separates human
existence from the exercise of choice, Sartre refor-mulates the position as one
in which the role of choice in human life is absolutely fundamental. He argues
that we choose our emotions as much as any other aspect of our life, and that
the basic goals of our lives cohere around a fundamental project which is itself
the product of an "original choice'- a choice which, since it provides us with all
the motivations we have, must itself be unmodvated, or 'absurd'.
This unattractive line of thought goes back to Kant. In Kant's case the implied threat of ethi-cal nihilism is supposed to be averted by the requirements of the categorical imperative. Sartre's ethical theory is basically similar: alth-ough he celebrates the "absurdity" of existentialist freedom, he actually only commends those exer-cises of this freedom which manifest respect for the freedom of others. It is not clear what basis Sartre's existentialism can offer for this value-judgement, but it looks as though he holds both that the existentialist's values must meet the requirement that they be the values of someone whose life is, in Heidegger's sense, authentic, and that authenticity can only be attained within community which practises mutual respect. This leads to the principle Sartre endorses, but it should be noted that the price Sartre has had to pay in order to provide some social content to his existentialist ethic is an important qualification of the emphasis on the situation of the isolated individual which is so prominent in Kierkegaard"s writings.
Sartre was the last significant existendauw philosopher. But existentialism lives on, primarily in attempts to combine the basic structure of Heidegger's metaphysics with other, less theoretical doctrines: thus we still have "existential Marxism" "existential sociology", "existential psychoanalysis", "existential theology', and so on. The general feature of these hybrids is an emphasis on the irredicibility of the perspective of human agents, whose activities, emotions, and thoughts, it supposed, are to be understood in terms of their aspiration to "become an individual', as Kierke-gaard would have put it.
RUSSIAN PHILOSOPHY. Though a significant force in Russian history, Russian philosophy did not begin until the reign of Catherine the Great (1762-96), when Enlightenment ideas began to fil-ter into Russia. Thereafter philosophy flourished not as an academic discipline, but in the intelli-gentsia's passionate debates about the liberation of humanity and the destiny of Russia, conducted in Political and religious writings